NYT book review podcast on Ayn Rand
Marko Amnell
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/01/books/review/Kirsch-t.html?_r=1&ref=global-home
scroll down to the "audio" box on left hand side of page
Stratum101
> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/01/books/review/Kirsch-t.html?_r=1&ref...
>
> scroll down to the "audio" box on left hand side of page
Interesting, Marko. I listened to Anne Heller's interview. Hadn't
heard of her or her new bio of Rand until I read the
NY Times article.
She has Ayn Rand pegged. Says that Rand wrote
in a wooden style with precision. The picture of Rand on her
front of her book reminds me of an old landlady in Silverlake,
a colorful neighborhood on the east side of Hollywood
district in L.A. Early one Saturday morning, I remember
her yelling, "Ya' in there?" and rapping loudly on my
door. I opened up to find a boozy smelling woman
with a cigarette hanging out of her mouth who wanted
me to meet her niece, who she intimated, was hot.
Even in '65, when I read _Atlas Shrugged_ (and
for a few years, was a Randite), I was disturbed by
the length of John Galt's tirade. I was at the
University of Texas in Austin and could hear
Cuba on AM radio at night where Fidel Castro
gave marathon speeches at staged press
conferences. But it was in the early 1970s
when Rand attempted to prescribe what followers
should not read that I'd had it up to here
with the old bag. I had subscribed to _The
Objectivist_ for several years until it
ceased publication, but knew nothing
until many years later about her
and Branden's affair.
She seemed fascinating to a 20-year-old,
but now she was infantile to a
64-year-old remembering when he
had been 20.
Marko Amnell
I posted the link with you in mind, Jim.
I thought you might still be lurking in this
mostly dead newsgroup.
I've never read Ayn Rand, but the enormous
influence of her ideas on American culture make
her interesting. I knew Greenspan was an admirer
but it's disburbing to realize just how much
he was influenced by Rand. Anne Heller says
he tried to downplay the full extent of that
influence once he became Chairman of the Fed.
It's disturbing, of course, because of the
worldwide financial crisis Greenspan's policies
helped to cause.
After having grown up in North America, I have
been away for so long now, and so many changes
have taken place (9/11, George W Bush, Fox News,
Obama, etc) that the continent seems as alien to
me as, well, America was to Kafka who never
visited the United States but nevertheless
wrote his first novel _Amerika_ about it. My
distance from contemporary American culture
was made evident to me when I recently started
to watch Conan O'Brian and David Letterman's
talk shows via the Internet. When I watched him
in the 1980s, Letterman was young and hip and
throwing random objects from a six-story tower.
Now he is respectable (except for the affairs
with young female employees) with greying hair
and has Obama as a guest. Twenty years have
rolled by and the United States is a different
country, a country I no longer really understand.
The extent of my estrangement from the whole
North American mindset was also brought home
to me by the conversations I've recently had
with a woman who has taught at MIT for many years.
OK, MIT is hardly typical of America, but talking
to her I realized that American politics and
culture have become purely abstract subjects
to me -- at a personal, existential level they
are meaningless. Life Kafka, I see Amerika
through the eyes of a European.
Stratum101
> The extent of my estrangement from the whole
> North American mindset was also brought home
> to me by the conversations I've recently had
> with a woman who has taught at MIT for many years.
> OK, MIT is hardly typical of America, but talking
> to her I realized that American politics and
> culture have become purely abstract subjects
> to me -- at a personal, existential level they
> are meaningless. Life Kafka, I see Amerika
> through the eyes of a European.- Hide quoted text -
>
When you're alone and reading in a public place,
say a casual, self-service eatery like McDonald's,
do people interrupt you to ask what you're
reading? Or worse, try to engage you
in conversation about *what* you're
reading?
It's a common occurrence in Texas, a place
of uncommonly gregarious residents some of
whom possess more money than brains
and it's one of the few things that brings
out my neuroses.
The social rule in Texas is that two strangers
passing each other must speak rather than
merely acknowledging each other with
eye contact and a nod. I'm from California,
where the rule is, a nod is all that's required
unless a large spider is crawling up the other
guy's side. (Except for the wolf
spider, there are no large spiders in
coastal California.) It's about the same in touristy
parts of Europe partly no doubt for the same
reason it applies in California. California
is an extremely diverse region
where the odds are that strangers
don't speak the same language.
In my experience, Los Angeles, San Francisco,
London and Paris are all places where
strangers are not spontaneously
chatty. Nor am I.
Marko Amnell
"Stratum101" <j.co...@cross-comp.com> wrote:
> When you're alone and reading in a public place,
> say a casual, self-service eatery like McDonald's,
> do people interrupt you to ask what you're
> reading? Or worse, try to engage you
> in conversation about *what* you're
> reading?
No, but when I'm reading certain kinds of
books in a coffee shop, other patrons will
surreptitiously glance at the cover of the
book I'm reading. Women did this a lot when
I was reading _Sex and Sensuality in the
Ancient World_ by Giulia Sissa, but I
thought that was a good thing...
It's actually a very interesting book. I had
always thought that Foucault's emphasis on
homosexuality in the ancient world was
overdone, and influenced by his own sexual
orientation. Sissa shows that heterosexuality
was indeed central in ancient Greece and Rome.
Don Phillipson
news:3a8c5b49-61e2-46a6...@m38g2000yqd.googlegroups.com...
> When you're alone and reading in a public place,
> say a casual, self-service eatery like McDonald's,
> do people interrupt you to ask what you're
> reading? Or worse, try to engage you
> in conversation about *what* you're
> reading?
Why read or eat in "casual, self-service eateries like
McDonald's"? Is there nowhere else?
--
Don Phillipson
Carlsbad Springs
(Ottawa, Canada)
Patok
> "Stratum101" <j.co...@cross-comp.com> wrote in message
> news:3a8c5b49-61e2-46a6...@m38g2000yqd.googlegroups.com...
>
>> When you're alone and reading in a public place,
>> say a casual, self-service eatery like McDonald's,
>> do people interrupt you to ask what you're
>> reading? Or worse, try to engage you
>> in conversation about *what* you're
>> reading?
>
> Why read or eat in "casual, self-service eateries like
> McDonald's"? Is there nowhere else?
Because it is cheaper? And because there's no annoying waiters
bothering you?
--
You'd be crazy to e-mail me with the crazy. But leave the div alone.
Stratum101
> "Stratum101" <j.coll...@cross-comp.com> wrote:
> > When you're alone and reading in a public place,
> > say a casual, self-service eatery like McDonald's,
> > do people interrupt you to ask what you're
> > reading? Or worse, try to engage you
> > in conversation about *what* you're
> > reading?
>
> No, but when I'm reading certain kinds of
> books in a coffee shop, other patrons will
> surreptitiously glance at the cover of the
> book I'm reading. Women did this a lot when
> I was reading _Sex and Sensuality in the
> Ancient World_ by Giulia Sissa, but I
> thought that was a good thing...
Suh, Ah'm in Texiss where they leave
the ancients' sex lives in the tomb
alongside the ancient.
Actually, I've browsed it in a Borders store.
And I met the author a couple of years ago at
a Mensa thing in L.A. She taught at USC
or UCLA and at the time said she was writing
what would turn out to be the referenced
book.
> It's actually a very interesting book. I had
> always thought that Foucault's emphasis on
> homosexuality in the ancient world was
> overdone, and influenced by his own sexual
> orientation. Sissa shows that heterosexuality
> was indeed central in ancient Greece and Rome.
Well, I've heard his pendulum compared to
some dude's swaying phallus while
he sits astride his significant other.
Hmm. I'll have to work *that* into a
Dallas conversation. Maybe the next
time I'm interrupted at McDonald's...
Stratum101
> "Stratum101" <j.coll...@cross-comp.com> wrote in message
Because I sometimes walk 2-1/2 mi
to one for a bad breakfast. The nearest
Tim Horton's is too far from here to
walk.
Stratum101
> "Marko Amnell" <marko.amn...@kolumbus.fi> writes:
> > "Stratum101" <j.coll...@cross-comp.com> wrote:
>
> > > When you're alone and reading in a public place, say a casual,
> > > self-service eatery like McDonald's, do people interrupt you to
> > > ask what you're reading? Or worse, try to engage you in
> > > conversation about *what* you're reading?
>
> > No, but when I'm reading certain kinds of books in a coffee shop,
> > other patrons will surreptitiously glance at the cover of the book
> > I'm reading. Women did this a lot when I was reading _Sex and
> > Sensuality in the Ancient World_ by Giulia Sissa, but I thought that
> > was a good thing...
>
> reading. Don't the McDonald's in Texas have drive-thru windows for
> those who want to read privately?
If I'm going to eat a bad breakfast, I *work* for it by walking there.
It's a 5-mile round trip to the nearest McDonald's. About the
same distance to Walmart which also has a McDonald's.
> I'm currently reading two books on legal history:
>
> Yochanan Muffs, _Love and Joy: Law, Language and Religion in Ancient
> Israel_, and
>
> Harold Berman, _Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal
> Tradition_.
>
> The former has a bright pink cover with the words "Love & Joy" in big
> letters, and a floral-pattern border. Looks really gay, but hey, I'm
> comfortable with my masculinity so I'm not afraid to read it in
> public.
Anyone named Muffs was probably called Muffy in childhood.
> So far only one person asked me about it, an old lady who it
> turns out had studied linguistics (ancient Near East) at Hebrew
> University, so we had an interesting conversation.
Well, I'm a natural for old Hebrew-speaking ladies. It used
to be that they wanted me to meet their daughters. Now they
try to fix me up with their widowed mothers.
> The book is a
> collection of papers. Muffs confirms, in passing, an interesting
> tangential fact that I've seen pointed out by others: ancient Near
> Eastern legal codes (presumably some in the Bible as well) were often
> quite different from law as it was actually practiced, as seen in
> contracts and other documents; the legal codes were to some extent
> utopian visions which weren't expected to be followed in real life.
>
> The second book is actually more interesting, at least from the Intro
> and the first part of Chapter One. It's one of those Big Books.
> Summarizing: The West began in 1075!
I haven't read anything exciting. I did read Michael Korda's
admirable 700-page biography of Eisenhower which spends
over half of that on World War II, that is, the U.S. phase
of World War II (he goes from colonel in 1941 to 5-star
general in 1944), and a single chapter on his two-term
presidency. I plan to read Stephen Ambrose's version
in a week or two which concentrates on his presidency.
I'll be the most informed person in this state, which
isn't too well read, on the most progressive president
of his party since Teddy Roosevelt. And after a searing
summer in Dallas, I cannot object to a cold war.
Bring on the frosties!
I close with a question which has vexed me since the
1960s:
How ya' gonna keep 'em down on the farm
after they've seen Fort Worth?
Marko Amnell
"The Other" <ot...@address.invalid> wrote in message
lyskcw9...@circe.aeaea...
> I'm currently reading two books on legal history:
>
> Yochanan Muffs, _Love and Joy: Law, Language and Religion
> in Ancient
> Israel_, and
>
> Harold Berman, _Law and Revolution: The Formation of the
> Western Legal
> Tradition_.
Here are some of the books I've been reading recently:
Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National
Socialism 1933-1944, by Franz Neumann
(Neumann talks quite a bit about Carl Schmitt in this book,
by the way)
Economics:
The Misbehavior of Markets, by Benoit Mandelbrot and Richard
Hudson
(I've discussed this book in a separate thread)
Madoff: The Man who Stole $65 Billion, by Erin Arvedlund
Military history:
The Six Day War 1967: Sinai, by Simon Dunstan
The Yom Kippur War 1973: The Golan Heights, by Simon Dunstan
Spartacus and the Slave War 73-71 BC, by Nic Fields
The Mannerheim Line 1920-39: Finnish Fortifications of the
Winter War, by Bair Irincheev
Mathematics:
Applications of Automata Theory and Algebra, by John Rhodes
(also known as the "Wild Book", originally written in 1969,
circulated privately, but only published this year for the
first time)
The Concept of a Riemann Surface, by Hermann Weyl
Naming Infinity, by Loren Graham and Jean-Michel Kantor
(also discussed in a separate thread)
The Unfinished Game: Pascal, Fermat and the Seventeeth
Century Letter that Made the Modern World, by Keith Devlin
(about the invention of probability theory)
The Monty Hall Problem, by Jason Rosenhouse
As someone who watches movies on the Internet,
I was interested in this comment by Rosenhouse:
"... do you remember that 1966 Alfred Hitchcock movie
Torn Curtain, the one where physicist Paul Newman goes
to Leipzig in an attempt to elicit certain German military
secrets? Remember the scene where Newman starts
writing equations on a chalkboard, only to have an impatient
East German scientist, disgusted by the primitive state of
American physics, cut him off and finish the equations
for him? Well, we don't do that. We don't finish east
other's
equations. And that scene in Good Will Hunting where
emotionally troubled math genius Matt Damon and Fields
Medalist Stellan Skarsg�rd high-five each other after
successfully performing some feat of elementary algebra?
We don't do that either. And don't even get me started on
Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park or Russell Crowe in
A Beautiful Mind."
This comment got me thinking: What other movies feature
mathematicians or scientists behaving in ways that are not
true to life? Apart from several movies with mad scientists
(Dr Phibes, The Revenge of Doctor X, etc.) I couldn't
immediately think of any more.
Marko Amnell
"Marko Amnell" <marko....@kolumbus.fi> kirjoitti
viestiss�:7laodmF...@mid.individual.net...
>
> Here are some of the books I've been reading recently:
> [...]
Also John Reed's _Ten Days that Shook the World_,
prompted by watching the movie Reds again...
M J Carley
>This comment got me thinking: What other movies feature
>mathematicians or scientists behaving in ways that are not true to
>life? Apart from several movies with mad scientists (Dr Phibes, The
>Revenge of Doctor X, etc.) I couldn't immediately think of any more.
Any movie where an engineer refers to a `plane' rather than to an
`aircraft'.
--
Si deve tornare alle basi: Marx ed i Clash.
Michael Carley: http://people.bath.ac.uk/ensmjc/
Marko Amnell
>
> I close with a question which has vexed me since the
> 1960s:
>
> How ya' gonna keep 'em down on the farm
> after they've seen Fort Worth?
And here is a question which has vexed me since I read it
a few years ago. It concerns my favourite Texan writer
Robert E. Howard. It is from an essay by Stephen Jones
included as an afterword in the collection of Conan stories
entitled The Conan Chronicles in the Fantasy Masterworks
series. Jones writes that:
"E. Hoffman Price was one of the few writers and fellow
correspondents who actually visited Howard. [...]
Hoffman also discovered that there was a darker side
to Howard whilst his host was driving Hoffman and his
new wife, Wanda, to the nearby town of Brownwood
for a shopping and sightseeing trip. 'Suddenly, he took
his foot off the throttle, cocked his head, idled down.
We were approaching a clump of vegetation which was
near the roadside. He reached across us, and to the
side pocket. He took out a pistol, sized up the terrain,
put the weapon back again, and resumed speed. He
explained, in a matter-of-fact tone, 'I have a lot of
enemies, everyone has around here. Wasn't that I
figured we were running into anything but I had to
make sure.'
"Some time later Howard confided to Novalyne
Price Ellis that a man with as many enemies as he
had needed to be careful. 'Anybody who is not your
friend is your enemy,' he explained pleasantly to her."
(Vol 1, pp. 536f)
This must have been in the 1920s (or possibly the
early 1930s) in the small oil-boom town of
Cross Plains, in Callahan County, Texas. Now, my
question is: Howard says that "I have a lot of
enemies, everyone has around here." Was does
this refer to? Was it typical of small town life in
Texas in the 1920s that everyone had many enemies?
Was this some kind of leftover from the Wild West
era? Was it typical of oil-boom towns? Was it
typical of Callahan County for some reason? Or was
Howard exaggerating, and it was not true that
everyone had many enemies? It was just REH
who for some reason had many enemies.
Marko Amnell
"Marko Amnell" <marko....@kolumbus.fi> wrote in message
7laodmF...@mid.individual.net...
> Applications of Automata Theory and Algebra, by John
> Rhodes
> (also known as the "Wild Book", originally written in
> 1969,
> circulated privately, but only published this year for the
> first time)
I just noticed that there is a wikipedia page about the
theory developed in this book.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krohn%E2%80%93Rhodes_theory
The reason it is called the "Wild Book", by the way, is
because Rhodes thinks his theory can be applied
to a very wide array of topics, much wider than
is usually considered in applied mathematics.
"Included are treatments of topics such as models of time as
algebra via semigroup theory; evolution-complexity relations
applicable to both ontogeny and evolution; an approach to
classification of biological reactions and pathways; the
relationships among coordinate systems, symmetry, and
conservation principles in physics; discussion of
"punctuated equilibrium" (prior to Stephen Jay Gould);
games; and applications to psychology, psychoanalysis,
epistemology, and the purpose of life."
Marko Amnell
> "Marko Amnell" <marko.amn...@kolumbus.fi> writes:
>
> > Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National
> > Socialism 1933-1944, by Franz Neumann
> > (Neumann talks quite a bit about Carl Schmitt in this book,
> > by the way)
>
> Israel_. I posted a review (verdict: mixed) on this newsgroup.
> Michael Neumann is one of the best commentators on Israel you'll read
> anywhere (he's passionately anti-Israel). You can find his columns at
> Counterpunch.
>
> So, what's Franz Neumann got to say about Schmitt?
Well, lots of things. Broadly speaking, Schmitt and Neumann
represent the Conservative and Social Democratic positions,
respectively, in early 20th century German legal theory.
Max Weber would represent the Liberal position. Personally,
I would describe Schmitt more as a Reactionary in the
tradition of Joseph de Maistre and Juan Donoso Cortés.
Anyway, given this basic opposition, Neumann criticizes
Schmitt's arguments in areas such as the effort to "break
the fetters of the Versailles Treaty." He identifies Schmitt as
the leading National Socialist voice in the use of arguments
from international law to "revise" the Versailles Treaty, i.e.
Germany must be allowed to re-arm, militarise the Rhineland,
occupy Danzig and the Corridor, etc. Neumann thinks the
arguments are spurious, based on tricks, and wipe out
the boundary between ethics and law (which he thinks
should be maintained). Neumann sees a spurious
extension of the notion of equality (pp. 152f):
"The leading voice in the Nationalist Socialist revisionist chorus
is Carl Schmitt. [...] Not man but the community is placed in
the center of the system. Since the essence of the community
is to prevent one member from prevailing over another, and
since international society is a community, the argument runs,
international inequality violates the essence of international law.
The trick and sham of the argument is the word equality.
There can be no quarrel with the argument that by their very
sovereignty all states are equals. International law could not
exist without recognising this principle, provided equality
is understood as a juristic category. In the same way, equality
of all men in our legal system means legal equality, that is,
the illegality of slavery and so forth. The National Socialists,
however, do not stop with this formal principle. For them,
equality also means the right of each state to adequate
living space. It has all sorts of moral and political implications.
Carl Schmitt enumerates a whole catalogue of rights, such
as the eternal right to existence, self-determination, defense,
and so on."
Nevertheless, Neumann and Schmitt share certain assumptions,
such as that the State is the supreme and ultimate embodiment
of politics and sovereignty (Weber shares this assumption too).
Like Schmitt, Neumann spends much time discussing the
essential role of the political leader. Neumann also accepts
the basic points of Schmitt's critique of the Weiman Republic.
The Weimar Constitution, he agrees, leads to a lack of
ability to make decisions, whereby a tendency toward hollow
compromises leads to the postponement of decision-making.
Neumann also discusses Schmitt's rejection of the parliamentary
system.
> Is it about
> Schmitt's Nazi period, or about his other writings too? By the way, I
> read Schmitt's book on the symbol of leviathan (1938). After the war
> Schmitt said that it contained an esoteric protest against the Nazi
> regime, and I think the book supports his claim.
>
> > As someone who watches movies on the Internet,
> > I was interested in this comment by Rosenhouse:
>
> > "... do you remember that 1966 Alfred Hitchcock movie Torn Curtain,
> > the one where physicist Paul Newman goes to Leipzig in an attempt to
> > elicit certain German military secrets? Remember the scene where
> > Newman starts writing equations on a chalkboard, only to have an
> > impatient East German scientist, disgusted by the primitive state of
> > American physics, cut him off and finish the equations for him?
> > Well, we don't do that. We don't finish each other's equations. ...
>
> In my experience, mathematicians are usually polite when they're
> talking about math. If someone's giving a talk and you think he made
> a mistake somewhere, you say, "Excuse me, I don't understand how you
> got...". He'll then either explain how it follows, in which case you
> haven't lost face, or he'll start explaining and then begin to see
> there's a problem. If you're giving a talk and some knowledgeable
> person asks you that, you're probably in trouble.
>
> The exception, as usual, is Israel. At some interdisciplinary
> colloquium during a talk by Robert Aumann (who later won a Nobel
> Prize) which included lots of non-mathematicians in the audience (it
> was on that "Bible codes" thing in the 1990s), I saw a good Israeli
> mathematician stand up in the audience during a discussion, walk to
> the blackboard, and say impatiently, "No, all these questions are
> irrelevant! What matters is..." He was perfectly correct,
> but...Israeli.
OK, but the scene in the movie Torn Curtain described by
Rosenhouse does not take place at a public event. It is a
private encounter between two rocket scientists in the office
of the East German scientist. Paul Newman plays the American
rocket scientist who has pretended to defect to East Germany
in order to gain access to the research of his East German
colleague. His intention in the scene is to provoke his
Communist colleague into accidentally revealing his secrets
about rocket design. Although he knows very little, Newman
pretends to know more and writes some complicated
equations on the blackboard. The East German rocket
scientist is flabbergasted and says that if a rocket were
built according to those equations it would crash. So he
erases certain terms in the equations and replaces them
with the correct terms. At that point Newman has learned
what he needs and leaves, in fact fleeing the country,
although the East German rocket scientist, realizing how
he has been duped, tries to prevent him from leaving
the building. So, the scene does not take place at a public
event, and also it is not just about correcting another
scientist, but actually erasing parts of the equation
and, as Rosenhouse says, finishing the other person's
equation. If you watch the scene and think about the
equations a bit, it seems very unlikely that just replacing
one term with another would work. It seems like you would
have to write a whole new equation instead. In other
words, the erasing and replacing part just seems
unrealistic in terms of the math.
>
> > This comment got me thinking: What other movies feature
> > mathematicians or scientists behaving in ways that are not true to
> > life? Apart from several movies with mad scientists (Dr Phibes, The
> > Revenge of Doctor X, etc.) I couldn't immediately think of any more.
>
> Pretty much any 1950s sci-fi movie, where the scientist battles the
> radioactive monster and gets the beautiful girl.
OK, but how about movies not about mad scientists or scientists
as highly unlikely action heroes?
Stratum101
> "Stratum101" <j.coll...@cross-comp.com> wrote in message
>
I know nothing about Robert E. Howard
except seeing his name mentioned among "short
story writers from the Southwest" or something
like that. (I object to calling Texas "the
Southwest" but I've already registered this
point.)
Some Texas writers who come to mind
are Larry McMurtry, William Sydney Porter,
Kinky Friedman, J. Frank Dobie, Bill Broyles, Molly
Ivins, Frank Tolbert ... the list ain't short, and the
land inspires writing as an art form. If I tell you Texas
is underrated, you'll understand only
because you have lived in North America.
But Gott im Himmel, the weather stinks.
I could do as well in the Dakotas or in that
medium size subarctic city just north of
Pembina where your fellow Finns have dug
into where it's even colder than in the
old country.
Speaking of the Nordic countries,
I'm two-thirds through _England Made
Me_ by Graham Greene which is about
conniving Brits in Stockholm in the
mid-30s. It's funny. Peripatetic yet
coherent, like Greene.
Marko Amnell
[...]
> I know nothing about Robert E. Howard
> except seeing his name mentioned among "short
> story writers from the Southwest" or something
> like that. (I object to calling Texas "the
> Southwest" but I've already registered this
> point.)
Right before his suicide, Howard started to
write short stories about the real history
of Texas, and some critics said that had he
lived, he might have matured into an important
writer on the history of the region. I like his
fantasy stories because he describes battles
and in a very realistic (and gory) way. Well,
I read a lot of military history so that makes
sense, I guess. REH also wrote many short
stories about the Wild West. Hollywood
is making a movie about his Salomon Kane
character (a 16th century puritan hero, maybe
his most interesting creation), which will be
released next year, I think.
[...]
> Speaking of the Nordic countries,
> I'm two-thirds through _England Made
> Me_ by Graham Greene which is about
> conniving Brits in Stockholm in the
> mid-30s. It's funny. Peripatetic yet
> coherent, like Greene.
I've read it. It's also about the sordid reality
of corruption beneath the veneer of
Social Democratic bliss. The character
Krogh is based on the infamous Swedish
financier Krueger, a sort of 1930s Bernie
Madoff who shot himself in Paris when
his financial empire crashed.
Stratum101
> "Stratum101" <j.coll...@cross-comp.com> wrote in message
>
> > Speaking of the Nordic countries,
> > I'm two-thirds through _England Made
> > Me_ by Graham Greene which is about
> > conniving Brits in Stockholm in the
> > mid-30s. It's funny. Peripatetic yet
> > coherent, like Greene.
>
> I've read it. It's also about the sordid reality
> of corruption beneath the veneer of
> Social Democratic bliss. The character
> Krogh is based on the infamous Swedish
> financier Krueger, a sort of 1930s Bernie
> Madoff who shot himself in Paris when
> his financial empire crashed.
Ivar Kreuger, the Match King.
It was made into a 1973 film (I've never
seen it) and Krogh, Kreuger's character
in the novel, was transformed into a German
industrialist of the Third Reich era, but
anti-Nazi. Who needs Graham Greene's
neutralist watered down (read "Swedish")
villain?
It was a British film, but you'd think
only Hollywood would think of making
a roman-a-clef ahistoric. In the remake,
we'll make the characters Swedish
expats living in England ("Sweden
Made Me") and the villain
can be Jeremy Irons.
Marko Amnell
"The Other" <ot...@address.invalid> wrote in message
> Marko Amnell <marko....@kolumbus.fi> writes:
>
>> ... [Neumann] identifies Schmitt as the leading National
> citing. I
> assume it's from the Nazi period and not earlier.
Yes, Neumann is citing Schmitt's writings from the Nazi
period. He gives references in the endnotes. Let me quote
a bit more from _Behemoth_ (p. 153):
"Perhaps Germany should have been allowed to rearm,
militarize the Rhineland, and occupy the Corridor and
Danzig. That is not the question. To justify these acts by
international law makes law a mere prostitute of
politics.
"The argument unquestionably has a popular appeal.
It duped the civilized world quite successfully. The
National Socialist propaganda machine knew how
to get the writings of its international lawyers into
respectable foreign periodicals. That helped. Their
trick of excluding Soviet Russia from the international
community helped too. They maintained that membership
in the international community requires homogeneity,
a number of common features and beliefs."
The endnote (number 56) for the above passage reads:
Carl Schmitt, "Sowjet-Union und Genfer V�ｿｽlkerbund,"
in V�ｿｽlkerbund und V�ｿｽlkkerrecht, 1934, 1935 (1), p. 263.
So here Neumann argues that Schmitt subordinates
legal arguments to political motives, i.e. he mixes
law with politics (and ethics).
Then on page 154 Neumann turns to the subject of
the "just war" and specifically Attorney-General
Robert H. Jackson's views concerning it:
"Mr. Jackson attacked those who have 'not caught up
with this century which, by its League of Nations Covenant
with sanctions against aggressors, the Kellogg-Briand
treaty for renunciation of war as an instrument of
policy, and Argentine Anti-War treaty, swept away
the nineteenth-century basis for contending that all
wars are alike and all warriors entitled to like treatment.
Neutrals must assist those nations who are fighting
to ward off aggression--a just war. In the same vein,
there is a considerable body of literature holding that
neutrals may discriminate against any nation violating
the Kellogg-Briand pact. [...]
"This new theory, especially in the Jackson formulation,
ought to be quite acceptable to German philosophy
of law. Yet they attack it, invoking the oldest and most
rationalistic arguments in existence. The same Carl
Schmitt who invented 'thinking in concrete words,'
to replace abstract, rationalistic thought, has devoted
many articles to combating the new theory of war
and neutrality. He denies the distinction between just
and unjust wars, and that neutrality can be 'halved'."
The endnote (number 62) for the above passage reads:
Carl Schmitt, "Das neue Vae Neutris," in V�ｿｽlkerbund
und V�ｿｽlkkerrecht, 1937-8 (4), pp. 633-8;
_Die Wendung zum diskriminierenden Kriegsbegriff_,
Munich, 1938.
So here Neumann accuses Schmitt of inconsistency,
of abandoning the link between law and ethics when
it leads to conclusions that he doesn't like. Instead of
accepting the notion of a "just war", he reverts to
traditional legal arguments that exclude ethics.
Then on page 156 Neumann addresses the
"Germanic Monroe Doctrine.":
"With the coming of the present war, however, a
completely new pattern of international law has
been developed: the Germanic Monroe Doctrine.
Geopolitics and international law have been joined.
"The 'large space' theory need not necessarily
bring about a tranformation of accepted international
law. If one holds that states are the sole subjects
of international relations, it does not matter whether
subjects are small- or large-space states, whether
they give themselves the fancy title of Reich or
remain content with mere 'state'. That is still the view
of many German international lawyers. But the
dominant school has abandoned both traditional
concepts, state and international law. One writer
[namely Carl Schmitt] posed the problem this way:
'If the development really tends toward large spaces,
is "international law" then that concerned with the
relation between the large spaces or is it the law
of the free people living in one common large space?"
The endnote (number 69) for the above passage
reads: Carl Schmitt, "Raum und Grossraum in
V�ｿｽlkerrecht," in Zeitschrift f�ｿｽr V�ｿｽlkerrecht,
1940 (24), pp. 145-79, p. 145.
Neuman then goes on to say:
"The very framing of the question reveals the basic
motive. It not only stamps Poles, Czechs, Dutch,
Belgians, and Jews as 'free' people, but it also
justifies the hierarchy of races within the German
realm by a body of rules, called international
law but in fact nothing other than the law governing
the empire."
So, while you are right that Schmitt does not
"justify the concept of Lebensraum", Neumann
does accuse him of turning "international law"
into the rules that are to govern the Nazi empire
of conquest in Europe.
Then a bit further on the same page (156) Neumann
writes:
"The trend toward large spaces, conceived by
Ratzel merely as a geographical phenomenon,
now becomes an historico-political process.
Large-space economics precedes large-space
politics. Large spaces have been made mandatory,
it is argued, by the trustification, monopolization,
electrification, and rationalization of German
industry. The integrating function of technology
is not seen within the framework of a program
of territorial division of labor but within a
program of territorial expansion great enough
to absorb the products of the economic giants.
The intrinsic connection between a monopolistic
economy and territorial conquest stands fully
revealed.
"Traditional international law is condemned
as the creation of Jews and as a cloak for
British imperialism. Space must become the
primary basis of international order-- ..."
[The endnote (number 73) for the above passage
reads: Carl Schmitt, V�ｿｽlkerrechtliche
Grossraumordnung mit Interventionsverbot f�ｿｽr
raumfremde M�ｿｽchte, Berlin, Vienna, 1939,
pp. 12, 13.]
[The quote continues] "... -- in other words, a
return of regionalist ideas. It is National Socialist
regionalism against the universalist international
law of British imperialism and interventionism.
'Behind the facade of general norms (of international
law) lies, in reality, the system of Anglo-Saxon
world imperialism.' Universalism works on the
assumption that the equality of all this is implied
in the very notion of sovereignty. Since states no
longer stand in the center of international law,
the ideas of state sovereingty and state equality
must fall. Universalism must be replaced by
thinking in 'concrete orders' and the most concrete
of all orders existing is the grossdeutsche Reich.
Steding's book comes close to this conception,
and, though it has found few other echoes in
Germany, the National Socialist international
lawyers have given it much attention."
The endnote (number 75) for the above passage
reads: Carl Schmitt, "Der Reichsbegriff im
Volkerrecht," in Deutsches Rechts, 1939,
pp. 341.4. Carl Schmitt, "Neutralit�ｿｽt und
Neutralisierung. Zu Christoph Steding ..."
in Deutsche Rechtswissenschaft, 1939 (4),
pp. 97-118.
Franz Neumann portrays Carl Schmitt as a leading
National Socialist international lawyer, who is
busily dismantling the traditional notion of
international law which Schmitt sees as the creation
of Jews and a cloak for British imperialism.
This outdated international law is to be replaced
by a new international law which is designed
to manage the Nazi empire of conquest in
Europe. In particular, the territorial expansion
of Germany is justified as necessary to absorb
the surplus produced by monopolistic Nazi
industry. The need for the absorption of
surplus produced by monopolistic industry
is familiar, for example, from the neo-Marxian
economic analysis in _Monopoly Capital_
(1966) by Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy, although
similar underconsumption theories already
existed within the Marxian tradition in the 1930s,
such as the theories of the Polish economist
Michal Kalecki. As Neumann writes:
"The integrating function of technology
is not seen within the framework of a program
of territorial division of labor but within a
program of territorial expansion great enough
to absorb the products of the economic giants.
The intrinsic connection between a monopolistic
economy and territorial conquest stands fully
revealed." So again, you are right that Schmitt
does not explicitly "justify the concept of
Lebensraum" but Neumann accuses him of
doing something perhaps more insidious.
The Nazi territorial conquests are justified as
necessary to counteract the tendency to
underconsumption caused by the concentration
of industry in late capitalism. The conquests
bring new markets that can absorb the economic
surplus that otherwise could not be absorbed
and would lead to an economic depression.
> Reading this
> paragraph carefully, though, you see that it's the
> National
> Socialists, not Schmitt, who are said to claim a right to
> Lebensraum.
> The "whole catalog" of putative state rights claimed by
> Schmitt seems
> a lot less controversial: existence, self-determination,
> and defense.
> I think Schmitt always denied that his writings could be
> interpreted
> to justify the concept of Lebensraum, and I don't think
> any serious
> scholars claim that they can be, but I might be wrong.
[...]
Marko Amnell
> "Marko Amnell" <marko.amn...@kolumbus.fi> writes:
> > gives references in the endnotes. Let me quote a bit more from
> > _Behemoth_ (p. 153):
>
> > "Perhaps Germany should have been allowed to rearm, militarize the
> > Rhineland, and occupy the Corridor and Danzig. That is not the
> > question. To justify these acts by international law makes law a
> > mere prostitute of politics.
> > "The argument unquestionably has a popular appeal.
> > It duped the civilized world quite successfully. The National
> > Socialist propaganda machine knew how to get the writings of its
> > international lawyers into respectable foreign periodicals. That
> > helped. Their trick of excluding Soviet Russia from the
> > international community helped too. They maintained that membership
> > in the international community requires homogeneity, a number of
> > common features and beliefs."
>
> the works cited, but some of the ideas are developed at length in
> Schmitt's later _The Nomos of the Earth_, which I have read.
I have not read _The Nomos of the Earth_ so I can't really
respond to your comments about it. The only works of Schmitt
I've read are _The Concept of the Political_ and
_Political Theology_.
> This necessary "homogeneity", at least in _Nomos_, refers to a common
> legal tradition, common economic systems (private property, as opposed
> to the USSR), etc. As usual, Schmitt looks at it historically: the
> concrete, existing order wasn't built on some abstract, universal
> norms. Rather, the norms were inseparable from all these "background"
> elements. The old world order defended by Schmitt was just that, a
> world order, but it was oriented toward a Europe that was homogeneous
> in the sense of bourgeois, Christian, etc. The fundamental
> disconnection of order and orientation, which came about when that
> European orientation was destroyed, is what Schmitt defines as
> nihilism. The reductio ad absurdum is the UN in our time, where the
> ridiculously-named "international community" comprises the US, Iran,
> Sudan, North Korea, Sweden, Zimbabwe, etc.
This seems to reinforce the judgement that Schmitt was a
Conservative (or as I'd prefer to say, a Reactionary)
not a National Socialist. He emphasized the importance
of tradition, whereas the Nazis were true revolutionaries
who wanted to overthrow the traditional order. Schmitt
seems to have adjusted very well to the new Nazi order,
however, and applied and developed his ideas to
support the grand Nazi strategies.
> > So here Neumann argues that Schmitt subordinates legal arguments to
> > political motives, i.e. he mixes law with politics (and ethics).
>
> Schmitt always had an ax to grind, before, during, and after the Nazi
> period.
True. It's good to keep in mind that Neumann also
had a big ax to grind. He is not an unbiased commentator
on Schmitt. On the contrary, he is a committed Social
Democratic political activist writing during World War II
about his hated enemy, the Nazis.
> > Then on page 154 Neumann turns to the subject of the "just war" and
> > specifically Attorney-General Robert H. Jackson's views concerning
> > it:
>
> > "Mr. Jackson attacked those who have 'not caught up with this
> > century which, by its League of Nations Covenant with sanctions
> > against aggressors, the Kellogg-Briand treaty for renunciation of
> > war as an instrument of policy, and Argentine Anti-War treaty, swept
> > away the nineteenth-century basis for contending that all wars are
> > alike and all warriors entitled to like treatment. Neutrals must
> > assist those nations who are fighting to ward off aggression--a just
> > war. In the same vein, there is a considerable body of literature
> > holding that neutrals may discriminate against any nation violating
> > the Kellogg-Briand pact. [...]
> > "This new theory, especially in the Jackson formulation,
> > ought to be quite acceptable to German philosophy of law. Yet they
> > attack it, invoking the oldest and most rationalistic arguments in
> > existence. The same Carl Schmitt who invented 'thinking in concrete
> > words,' to replace abstract, rationalistic thought, has devoted many
> > articles to combating the new theory of war and neutrality. He
> > denies the distinction between just and unjust wars, and that
> > neutrality can be 'halved'."
>
> All I can do is compare this to _Nomos_, which was published after the
> war. Again, Schmitt is defending the modern (pre-20th-century) order
> where war was "bracketed" and humanized by separating the legal
> question of jus ad bellum from the religious and moral questions of
> justice. Thus, war was treated as analogous to a duel, where the
> enemy was legitimate, rather than a criminal or enemy of God who must
> be annihilated, and where neutrality was a respectable and even
> praiseworthy position. It's interesting that Neumann accuses Schmitt
> of rationalism, because Schmitt himself praised this "bracketing" of
> war as a great achievement of modern *rationalism*, using exactly
> those words.
>
> > So here Neumann accuses Schmitt of inconsistency, of abandoning the
> > link between law and ethics when it leads to conclusions that he
> > doesn't like. Instead of accepting the notion of a "just war", he
> > reverts to traditional legal arguments that exclude ethics.
>
> The writings I've read have been very consistent. Schmitt defends the
> "jus publicum Europaeum", the world order existing from about the 16th
> or 17th century till the end of the 19th century.
I think that Neumann's criticism here is rather weak.
Just because Schmitt politicizes legal arguments does
not mean that he therefore needs to accept *all* legal
arguments that appeal to ethics, such as the notion
of a "just war."
> > Then on page 156 Neumann addresses the "Germanic Monroe Doctrine.":
>
> > "With the coming of the present war, however, a completely new
> > pattern of international law has been developed: the Germanic Monroe
> > Doctrine. Geopolitics and international law have been joined.
> > "The 'large space' theory need not necessarily
> > bring about a tranformation of accepted international law. If one
> > holds that states are the sole subjects of international relations,
> > it does not matter whether subjects are small- or large-space
> > states, whether they give themselves the fancy title of Reich or
> > remain content with mere 'state'. That is still the view of many
> > German international lawyers. But the dominant school has abandoned
> > both traditional concepts, state and international law. One writer
> > [namely Carl Schmitt] posed the problem this way: 'If the
> > development really tends toward large spaces, is "international law"
> > then that concerned with the relation between the large spaces or is
> > it the law of the free people living in one common large space?"
> > The endnote (number 69) for the above passage reads: Carl Schmitt,
> > "Raum und Grossraum in Völkerrecht," in Zeitschrift für Völkerrecht,
> > 1940 (24), pp. 145-79, p. 145. Neuman then goes on to say: "The
> > very framing of the question reveals the basic motive. It not only
> > stamps Poles, Czechs, Dutch, Belgians, and Jews as 'free' people,
> > but it also justifies the hierarchy of races within the German realm
> > by a body of rules, called international law but in fact nothing
> > other than the law governing the empire."
>
> > So, while you are right that Schmitt does not "justify the concept
> > of Lebensraum", Neumann does accuse him of turning "international
> > law" into the rules that are to govern the Nazi empire of conquest
> > in Europe.
>
> I wouldn't be surprised if Schmitt did use his "descriptive" theory to
> justify German expansion, despite his denials. I don't know the
> literature. But if that's so, it's interesting that Schmitt continued
> to develop his Grossraum theory for years even after the war.
Yes, it's a bit odd that he was able to apply the same ideas
so easily to both Nazi Germany and the postwar order.
One analogy that comes to mind is the fact that the idea
for the European Central Bank originated in Nazi Germany.
Like the European Union, the Nazis needed to design
common institutions for a pan-European Grossraum.
> > Then a bit further on the same page (156) Neumann writes:
>
> [...]
>
> > [Schmitt's quote?] 'Behind the facade of general norms (of
> > international law) lies, in reality, the system of Anglo-Saxon
> > world imperialism.'
Yes, that is a direct quote from Schmitt. I did not include
the endnote (number 72) here because the note is just
"Ibid, p. 147" in other words the quote is on page 147 of
the article referred to in endnote 69: "Raum und Grossraum
in Völkerrecht," in Zeitschrift für Völkerrecht, 1940 (24).
The parentheses are actually square brackets in the text
of the book, so the words "[of international law]" were
inserted by Neumann. I changed them to parentheses
to avoid giving the impression it was my own note.
> > Universalism works on the assumption that the equality
> > of all this is implied in the very notion of sovereignty. Since
> > states no longer stand in the center of international law, the ideas
> > of state sovereingty and state equality must fall. Universalism must
> > be replaced by thinking in 'concrete orders' and the most concrete
> > of all orders existing is the grossdeutsche Reich. Steding's book
> > comes close to this conception, and, though it has found few other
> > echoes in Germany, the National Socialist international lawyers have
> > given it much attention."
>
> Schmitt agreed with critics on the left that interstate economic and
> cultural domination eroded true sovereignty. Since the international
> order based on sovereign states was disappearing, not just de jure but
> de facto as well, in the 20th century, public law needed to reflect
> that reality. Schmitt of course mourned the loss of the order based
> on sovereign states more than anyone. Again, his approach is
> historical: you can't abstract norms from a concrete order, especially
> a dead one, and apply them universally. I don't doubt that he used
> this analysis to justify German actions in WW2. That doesn't
> discredit the analysis itself though.
Yes, but the fact that these ideas were apparently developed
to justify Nazi conquests during World War II does throw a
different light on them. Or did he start developing these ideas
before 1933?
I went through all the endnotes to _Behemoth_ and although
Schmitt is discussed here and there throughout the book,
and his importance is emphasised, there are direct
references to his writings in only two other sections.
The first is at the very beginning of the book where
Neumann discusses Schmitt's criticism of the ineffectual
decision-making processes of the Weimar Republic and
Schmitt's rejection of parliamentarism. The works cited are:
Die geistesgeschichtliche Lage des modernen
Parlementarismus, 1926
Der Hüter des Verfassung, 1931
Der Begriff des Politischen, 1932
So, Neumann does cite Schmitt's writings from before the
Nazi period, but there is nothing here that would suggest
that Schmitt was a Nazi before 1933. He joined the Nazi
Party in 1933 (in the same month as Martin Heidegger).
The second section with direct references is near
the end of the book and the references are more
directly relevant to the issue of the relationship
between Schmitt's decisionism and the Nazi system.
Neumann writes on page 447:
"National Socialism completely destroys the generality
of the law and with it the independence of the judiciary
and the prohibition of retroactivity. Legal standards of
conduct acquire greater significance than before because
even the restrictions set up by parliamentary democracy
against the demands of monopoly, insufficient as they
may have been, have been removed. By its very vagueness,
the legal standard of conduct serves to bring pre-National
Socialist positive law into agreement with the demands
of the new rulers. National Socialism postulates the absolute
subjection of the judge to the law, but the standards of
conduct make it possible for him to introduce political
elements even when they conflict with positive law.
'The principles of National Socialism are immediately
and exclusively valid for the application and administration
of general standards of conduct through the judge,
attorney, or teacher of law.'
The endnote (number 73) for the above passage reads:
Carl Schmitt, Fünf Leitsätze für die Rechtspraxis,
Berlin (Rule 4).
Neumann continues:
"The judge has been reduced to the status of a police
official."
And further down the page Neumann writes:
"Since law is identical with the will of the Leader,
since the Leader can send political opponents
to their death without any judicial procedures,
and since such an act is glorified as the highest
realization of justice, ..."
The endnote (number 76) here reads:
Carl Schmitt, "Der Führer schützt das Recht,"
in Deutsche Juristenzeitung, 1934 (29), p. 945.
So here we have evidence that as soon as the
Nazis seized power, Schmitt embraced the Führer
as the embodiment of his decisionist political
philosophy of sovereignty, familiar from his most
well-known and influential book _The Concept of
the Political_. The sovereign is defined as the
one who decides and his decision is absolute.
The quote above continues:
"... we can no longer speak of a specific character
of law. Law is now a technical means for the
achivement of specific political aims. It is merely
the command of the sovereign. To this extent, the
juristic theory of the fascist state is decisionism.
Law is merely an arcanum dominationis, a means
for the stabilization of power.
"The juristic ideology of the National Socialist
state is very different from this analysis, of course.
It takes the form of institutionalism, or, as Carl
Schmitt and other calls it, a 'concrete order and
structure [or community] thought.'
The comment in brackets is Neumann's and the
endnote (number 77) reads:
"Universally accepted. See Schmitt, Über die drei
Arten des rechtswissenschaftlichen Denkens,
Hamburg, 1934."
The final quote from Schmitt is on page 451:
"The National Socialists avoid the word
institutionalism, primarily 'in order to maintain
a distance from Neo-Thomism.'
[The endnote (number 83) here reads:
Schmitt, Ueber die ..., p. 57.]
Stratum101
> Naming Infinity, by Loren Graham and Jean-Michel Kantor
> (also discussed in a separate thread)
_Naming Infinity: A True Story of Religious Mysticism and
Mathematical Creativity_.
Heh. I just read it in August. (I didn't see your earlier
mention of it.) It sort of reminds me of working in
Dallas where fundy Prot churches with
New England spires are more numerous than
Super Walmarts and theology students
who know their Cantor congregate at Starbucks
to argue whose aleph is bigger.
Marko Amnell
"The Other" <ot...@address.invalid> wrote in message
> I glanced at your latest post but don't have time
> to reply right now. I'll reply in a couple days.
Hey, no problem. Reply whenever you have the time.
One thing I noticed just now is this note at the beginning
of the 2009 edition: "_Behemoth_ was first published
in 1942 and is here reprinted by arrangement with
Michael Neumann." Michael Neumann is obviously his
son -- you mentioned his book _The Case Against Israel_.
Another fact about _Behemoth_ you may or may not be aware
of is that Raul Hilberg completed his PhD under Franz
Neumann's direction at Columbia University, and Hilberg's
doctoral dissertation, completed in 1955 and inspired by
_Behemoth_, became _The Destruction of the European Jews_,
the seminal work that emerged as the foundational text for
the study of the Holocaust.
Marko Amnell
I studied axiomatic set theory sometime during
the last millennium. The textbook for the first
course I took was Kenneth Kunen's _Set Theory:
An Introduction to Indepedence Proofs_. Then
I went on to study Quine's New Foundations
set theory. My original subjects in university
were math and physics, which I studied at
University of Toronto. I became interested in
mathematical logic and axiomatic set theory
when I returned to Finland from Canada, maybe
because of the promiment logicians I met at the
Philosophy Department, such as Georg Henrik
von Wright (Wittgenstein's friend, the executor
of his Nachlass and his successor at Cambridge
University). Von Wright has now passed away.
He was best known for his work in modal logic.
The other famous logician I met was Jaakko
Hintikka. I have pretty much lost interest in both
physics and logic. My main interest in mathematics
has shifted to number theory.
Peter Woit (one of the most prominent critics of
string theory) mentioned the book _Naming Infinity_
on his blog "Not Even Wrong", one of the dozen
or so math blogs I read.
"The Mathematics and Religion panel is associated
with something more serious, a talk by Loren Graham
on his book Naming Infinity. It's a book I read earlier
this year, but don't think I ever got around to writing
about here on the blog. I wasn't completely convinced
by some of the claims it makes about the relation
between religious practices and the work of certain
Russian mathematicians. The story it tells about the
religious sect of "Name Worshipers" and the history
it recounts of one part of the Russian mathematical
community are quite fascinating."
I wish he would have elaborated on which claims
he was not completely convinced by.
Stratum101
> "The Mathematics and Religion panel is associated
> with something more serious, a talk by Loren Graham
> on his book Naming Infinity. It's a book I read earlier
> this year, but don't think I ever got around to writing
> about here on the blog. I wasn't completely convinced
> by some of the claims it makes about the relation
> between religious practices and the work of certain
> Russian mathematicians. The story it tells about the
> religious sect of "Name Worshipers" and the history
> it recounts of one part of the Russian mathematical
> community are quite fascinating."
Look at that tree of personages in _Naming
Infinity_. The principals like Gel'fand
(who died a month ago in his mid-90s)
and Kolmogorov all figured prominently
in Functional Analysis which was a big
deal for me in the early 1970s when I
was designing signal waveforms.
I liked Izzy Gel'fand. He was, no pun,
a polymath interested in the theory
of everything. He finally emigrated
to the USA in the mid or late 1980s during
Glasnost, i.e., between Chernobyl
and the opening of the Berlin Wall.
Kolmogorov also died in the late
1980s in Moscow.
Stratum101
> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/01/books/review/Kirsch-t.html?_r=1&ref...
>
> scroll down to the "audio" box on left hand side of page
Anne Heller, author of _Ayn Rand and the World She Made_ and
Jennifer Burns, author of _Goddess of the Market and the
American Right_ are on C-SPAN2's Book Weekend, this
weekend. They both made presentations to the Cato
Institute.
Burns's book (which is the new title in this thread)
contrasts "the libertarians", including
Rand, with "the conservatives", meaning Republican
tories. In the 1960s, each sect (sic) disassociated
itself from the other. Rand was more loudly
denounced by Southern Baptist preachers than
by anybody on the left. (But I was living in Dallas,
and probably could hear the Baptists
screaming more loudly than I could
hear the nearly non-existent left.)
Rand eschewed even the common noun
"libertarian" because, as was usual in her
life, she was unable to collaborate with
capital-L Libertarians who gave her hissy
fits. Lawyers for her estate prevented inclusion of
her writing in _The Libertarian Reader_ by
David Boaz of the Cato Institute who was
host of the C-SPAN2 broadcast
referenced above.
Heller is more interested in Rand's literary
style and in her psychology. She observes
that Rand, a man in spirit, married a wife,
the meek, artistic Frank O'Connor, who gave up
a second-rate acting career and horticulture
avocation to support her emotionally. She
supported the two of them financially.
This is how I viewed them, too.
In fact, both books look like rehashes of what
is intimately familiar to me but will be
new to a generation born after 1970.
Marko Amnell
> Marko Amnell <marko.amn...@kolumbus.fi> writes:
> > On Nov 5, 11:04 am, The Other <ot...@address.invalid> wrote:
> >
> > > This necessary "homogeneity", at least in _Nomos_, refers to a
> > > common legal tradition, common economic systems (private property,
> > > as opposed to the USSR), etc. As usual, Schmitt looks at it
> > > historically: the concrete, existing order wasn't built on some
> > > abstract, universal norms. Rather, the norms were inseparable
> > > from all these "background" elements. The old world order defended
> > > by Schmitt was just that, a world order, but it was oriented
> > > toward a Europe that was homogeneous in the sense of bourgeois,
> > > Christian, etc. The fundamental disconnection of order and
> > > orientation, which came about when that European orientation was
> > > destroyed, is what Schmitt defines as nihilism. The reductio ad
> > > absurdum is the UN in our time, where the ridiculously-named
> > > "international community" comprises the US, Iran, Sudan, North
> > > Korea, Sweden, Zimbabwe, etc.
>
> > This seems to reinforce the judgement that Schmitt was a
> > Conservative (or as I'd prefer to say, a Reactionary) not a National
> > Socialist. He emphasized the importance of tradition, whereas the
> > Nazis were true revolutionaries who wanted to overthrow the
> > traditional order. Schmitt seems to have adjusted very well to the
> > new Nazi order, however, and applied and developed his ideas to
> > support the grand Nazi strategies.
>
> any serious scholar claims he was.
Franz Neumann repeatedly calls him a National Socialist,
a leading National Socialist international lawyer, and so on.
The fact remains that he joined the Nazi Party in 1933.
> In the early 1930s he urged the
> President to outlaw the Nazi Party (and also the Communist Party).
> His 1932 book _Legality and Legitimacy_ all but calls for that in so
> many words. He was affiliated with aristocratic Prussian
> conservatives such as Papen and Schleicher, one of whom (I forget
> which) was executed soon after the Nazis came to power.
Fair enough. But one thing that recent research has highlighted
is the extent to which German aristocrats actively supported
the Nazi Party. This support is described in a new book,
_High Society in the Third Reich_ by Fabrice d’Almeida.
Here is a quote from a review of the book by Christopher
Clark in the 9 April 2009 issue of the London Review of
Books (the article is available for free at the LRB website):
"From a sample of 312 families of the old nobility, the Freiburg
historian Stephan Malinowski found 3592 individuals who joined
the Nazi Party, including 962 who did so before the seizure of
power in January 1933. These noble Nazis included members
of the oldest and most distinguished East Elbian families:
the Schwerins supplied 52 party members, the Hardenbergs 27,
the Tresckows 30, and the Schulenburgs 41.
"The very highest-born families, descendants of the ruling
dynasties of the German principalities, were especially
susceptible to the party’s appeal. Duke Ernst August of
Braunschweig (who was married to one of the princesses
of Prussia) was a regular donor to the party and a close
associate of several Nazi leaders (though he never became a
card-carrying Nazi); Duke Carl Eduard von Sachsen-Coburg
und Gotha (a grandson of Queen Victoria, born Prince of
Great Britain and Ireland, and known to his British friends as
Charlie Coburg) joined the party in 1933 and became an
SA-Gruppenführer in 1936. Some princely families flocked
to the party en masse – 14 from the House of Hesse, ten
from the Schaumburg-Lippes, 20 from the Hohenlohes and
so on. In all, it seems that between a third and half of the
eligible members of German princely families joined the party.
As the American scholar Jonathan Petropoulos observed in
his study of the princes of Hessen, if princes had constituted
a profession, ‘they would have rivalled physicians as the
most Nazified in the Third Reich (doctors’ membership
peaked in 1937 at 43 per cent)’"
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n07/christopher-clark/vases-tea-sets-cigars-his-own-watercolours
This enthusiastic support has been downplayed by historians
for a long time for various reasons. To quote Clark again:
"An interest in the relationship between the traditional
elites of German society and the National Socialist movement
developed only quite recently. There are various reasons for
this: the celebration of German military resistance as the
moral foundation stone of the new Federal Republic created
an implicit linkage between high birth and principled opposition
to Nazi criminality; many of the relevant archival sources are
still in the hands of the families and some are less willing than
others to support research; and for a long time it was widely
believed that Nazism was in essence a movement of the
downwardly mobile petite bourgeoisie – shopkeepers, clerks,
tradesmen and minor officials who saw in the movement’s
authoritarian racist politics a promise of rescue from
déclassement and proletarianisation."
So, the fact that Schmitt was "affiliated with aristocratic
Prussian conservatives" in no way suggests that he
would not have supported the Nazi Party. On the
contrary, German aristocrats were among the most
enthusiastic supporters of the Nazis. Postwar
historiography has obscured this important fact
for a long time.
> Schmitt supported a strong "qualitative total" state but opposed
> totalitarianism. It's important to understand that for him the two
> were antithetical. Totalitarianism has (almost?) always been
> implemented by political parties (Nazi, Communist, etc.) which took
> control of what Schmitt would call a weak "quantitative total" state -
> weak by virtue of its being controlled by political parties, i.e., by
> elements of society. ("Society" doesn't just include groups like the
> Rotary Club, it also includes parties like the Nazis, with their own
> militias etc.) In the 1930s there was a conflict within the Nazi
> parties between supporters of a strong state (this included the SA)
> and supporters of a strong Nazi Party. Schmitt was among the former
> faction of course, which lost.
Well, this argument is supported by what is generally taken
to be the main analysis of _Behemoth_: That the Third Reich
was not a monolithic, strong State but a chaotic collection of
competing institutions (Nazi party, Nazi government, Nazi
military high command, Nazi industry) in which constant
power struggles took place between rival organizations.
One might even go as far as to say that Nazi Germany lacked
a modern state altogether. For example, Wikipedia says:
"The thesis is that National Socialist rule is a function of
continuing struggles among power groups united only by
their hatred of the labor movement, and that Nazi Germany
consequently lacks a state in the sense of the modern
political formation oriented to order and predictability."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Leopold_Neumann
Neumann's analysis was highly influential and helped,
for example, to shape the prosecution's case at the
Nuremberg Trials. To quote from Peter Hayes's
introduction to the 2009 edition of _Behemoth_ (pp. 7f):
"Immediately after the war, when Neumann was a member
of the prosecution staff preparing the Nuremberg Trials
of major war criminals, _Behemoth_ stamped both the
conception of the American case and the organization
of its supporting documents. 'Conspiracy' to commit crimes
against peace and humanity was the centerpiece of the
American charges against not only the 22 principal
war criminals brought before the International Military
Tribunal in 1945-1945 but also against the 185 lesser
figures from the Nazi Party, the state bureaucracy,
the armed forces, and industry and banking who were
arraigned before American judges in the twelve Nuremberg
Military Tribunals of 1947-1949. Although this approach
had multiple origins, not least in the Sherman Anti-Trust
Act and the prosecution of mobsters in the United
States, the conspiracy charge also reflected the impact
of Neumann's depiction of Hitler's regime. So did the way
the United States categorized captured German records
for use as evidence in both sets of proceedings. Before
being assigned numbers, relevant papers were sorted
among four groups, each with a distinct prefix that referred
to one of Neumann's quadrumvirate of power structures
(NO = Nazi organization, that is, the party; NG = Nazi
government; NOKW = Nazi Military High Command; and
NI = Nazi industry.)"
Neumann's analysis turns up all over the place in postwar
studies of Nazi Germany. For example, it is a key premise
of _The Order of the Death's Head: The Story of Hitler's SS_
by Heinz Zollin Höhne, which "exposes an organization that
was not directed by some devilishly efficient system but was
the product of accident, inevitability, and the random
convergence of criminals, social climbers, and romantics."
http://www.amazon.com/Order-Deaths-Head-Hitlers-Military/dp/0141390123
> > > The writings I've read have been very consistent. Schmitt defends
> > > the "jus publicum Europaeum", the world order existing from about
> > > the 16th or 17th century till the end of the 19th century.
>
> > I think that Neumann's criticism here is rather weak. Just because
> > Schmitt politicizes legal arguments does not mean that he therefore
> > needs to accept *all* legal arguments that appeal to ethics, such as
> > the notion of a "just war."
>
> Yeah, Neumann was really stretching it there.
>
> > > Schmitt agreed with critics on the left that interstate economic and
> > > cultural domination eroded true sovereignty. Since the international
> > > order based on sovereign states was disappearing, not just de jure but
> > > de facto as well, in the 20th century, public law needed to reflect
> > > that reality. Schmitt of course mourned the loss of the order based
> > > on sovereign states more than anyone. Again, his approach is
> > > historical: you can't abstract norms from a concrete order, especially
> > > a dead one, and apply them universally. I don't doubt that he used
> > > this analysis to justify German actions in WW2. That doesn't
> > > discredit the analysis itself though.
>
> > Yes, but the fact that these ideas were apparently developed to
> > justify Nazi conquests during World War II does throw a different
> > light on them. Or did he start developing these ideas before 1933?
>
> Before 1933.
>
> > And further down the page Neumann writes:
>
> > "Since law is identical with the will of the Leader, since the
> > Leader can send political opponents to their death without any
> > judicial procedures, and since such an act is glorified as the
> > highest realization of justice, ..." The endnote (number 76) here
> > reads: Carl Schmitt, "Der Führer schützt das Recht," in Deutsche
> > Juristenzeitung, 1934 (29), p. 945.
>
> > So here we have evidence that as soon as the Nazis seized power,
> > Schmitt embraced the Führer as the embodiment of his decisionist
> > political philosophy of sovereignty, familiar from his most
> > well-known and influential book _The Concept of the Political_. The
> > sovereign is defined as the one who decides and his decision is
> > absolute.
>
> > The quote above continues: "... we can no longer speak of a specific
> > character of law. Law is now a technical means for the achivement of
> > specific political aims. It is merely the command of the
> > sovereign. To this extent, the juristic theory of the fascist state
> > is decisionism. Law is merely an arcanum dominationis, a means for
> > the stabilization of power.
> > "The juristic ideology of the National Socialist
> > state is very different from this analysis, of course. It takes the
> > form of institutionalism, or, as Carl Schmitt and other calls it, a
> > 'concrete order and structure [or community] thought.'
>
> You forgot, sovereign is he who decides ON THE EXCEPTION.
Yes, sorry about that. I realized I should have said
"about the exceptional case" or something to that effect
as soon as I had posted my response.
> It was
> Schmitt's idea of sovereignty which also justified his call on the
> President to outlaw the Nazi Party in the early 1930s.
>
> Neumann is being tendentious here. I don't think that Schmitt said
> that "law is identical with the will of the Leader [or sovereign]".
> He certainly didn't say it before or after the Nazi period. He said
> the opposite, in fact, in _The Concept of the Political_ and in _The
> Nomos of the Earth_ especially. The sovereign (which in the 20th
> century is usually identified as the people) is in some sense above
> positive law, if sovereignty means anything at all. But Schmitt draws
> attention to the swindle involved when phrases like "the rule of law"
> refer nowadays not to natural, divine, or customary law, but only to
> positive law defined simply as any statutes passed by a legislature or
> whatever. Schmitt consistently *opposed* law as arbitrary command,
> whether by a legislature or by a sovereign. Who wouldn't? Even
> Hobbes and Bodin followed the traditional belief that the sovereign is
> bound by natural and divine law. In Schmitt's opposition to legal
> positivism - a legal philosophy which would seem to legitimize the
> Nazi regime - he was conservative, or reactionary.
Yes, Schmitt was always opposed to legal positivism. Opposition
to legal positivism was widespread in Germany during the interwar
period. Both Franz Neumann and Max Weber also opposed legal
positivism. And Schmitt's arguments against legal positivism were
widely supported during both the Weimar Republic and Nazi periods.
> It's significant what Neumann doesn't say about Schmitt's
> writings. After the war Schmitt claimed that his 1938 _The Leviathan
> in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes_ contained an esoteric protest
> against the Nazi regime. I think that's evident in the text, by any
> reasonably attentive reading.
I agree with your argument. Franz Neumann tries to portray
Schmitt as a committed National Socialist, but this was not true.
He was a Conservative, or as I'd prefer to say, a Reactionary
in the tradition of Joseph de Maistre and Juan Donoso Cortés
and that is the tradition of political thinkers in which Schmitt
is best understood.
English translations of the writings of Donoso Cortés are a bit
hard to find, but see, for example, his "Speech on Dictatorship"
in _Selected Works of Juan Donoso Cortés_ (I have this book)
where he is explicitly compared to Schmitt.
http://www.amazon.com/Selected-Works-Juan-Donoso-Cortes/dp/0313313970
There is also a fair bit of information about him available
online, for example here:
"Juan Donoso Cortés (1809-1853), parliamentary statesman,
diplomat, government minister, royal counselor, theologian, and
political theorist, may not be well known among modern political
philosophers. However, his ideas had an enormous influence
in the spheres of politics and religion in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries. Donoso’s theories were uniquely influential
in shaping the ideological trajectory that began with the reaction
against the Enlightenment and the French Revolution in the
eighteenth century and culminated in the rise of fascism in the
twentieth century. This Spanish Catholic and conservative
thinker was the philosophical heir of Joseph de Maistre, one
of the most prominent reactionary conservative thinkers of the
late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Even though his
life was short and his works few in number, Donoso's contribution
to modern political philosophy and theology cannot be ignored
if we wish to have a more complete understanding of the ideas
and actions that have shaped Europe and the Roman Church
in recent centuries. His most notable idea-the theory on
dictatorship-was Donoso’s most significant and unique
contribution to modern political thought."
Marko Amnell
> I agree with your argument. Franz Neumann tries to portray
> Schmitt as a committed National Socialist, but this was not true.
> He was a Conservative, or as I'd prefer to say, a Reactionary
> in the tradition of Joseph de Maistre and Juan Donoso Cort�s
> and that is the tradition of political thinkers in which Schmitt
> is best understood.
>
> English translations of the writings of Donoso Cort�s are a bit
> hard to find, but see, for example, his "Speech on Dictatorship"
> in _Selected Works of Juan Donoso Cort�s_ (I have this book)
> where he is explicitly compared to Schmitt.
Donoso's influence on Schmitt is also described here:
"In the political arena, Donoso's influence was just as ominous.
His theory of dictatorship and his critique of liberal democratic
parliamentarianism significantly influenced the thinking of the
twentieth century German conservative political theorist Carl Schmitt.
Schmitt figured prominently in the development of the legal principles
and structures of the Nazi r�gime. Schmitt's critique of parliamentary
democracy rests heavily upon arguments first developed by Donoso.
Furthermore, Schmitt's depiction of politics as a constant struggle
of friends against enemies reflects Donoso's quasi-Manich�an view
of politics as a war between Catholic civilization and philosophical
civilization. Donoso's notion of infallible authority resonated in the
Nazi F�hrerprinzip, the Italian fascist principle of Ducismo, and the
principle of Caudillaje of the Franco r�gime in Spain (1936-75)."
Marko Amnell
Images of some of the authors in this thread...
Franz Neumann
http://www.wbenjamin.org/neumann.jpg
Looking very much the egghead scholar,
seated at a table covered with papers.
Carl Schmitt
http://www.ppl.nl/100years/images/schmitt.jpg
There is an odd bump on the left side of his
forehead. It's there in other photographs too:
http://ls.berkeley.edu/art-hum/framing/vol4/Schmitt%20mid%201933.jpg
http://www.politics.fudan.edu.cn/picture/1294.jpg
I wonder what it might be.
Joseph de Maistre
http://www.sabaudia.org/v2/dossiers/maistre/images/joseph_hd.jpg
Suitably enough for a throne and altar conservative,
a crown and cross hang around his neck, and the books
on the table remind us of his refined literary style. His
expression is haughty, with a touch of cruelty in the lips.
His expression reminds me of Talleyrand in this portrait:
http://tinyurl.com/y9bkf2q
Juan Donoso Cort�s
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f9/JuanDonosoCortes.jpg
The expression, hairstyle, sideburns and collar
all make him look like a Dickens character
(and that is the right era, the 1840s), but the
sash and medals give him a more statesmanlike air.
Max Weber
http://moaciralencarjunior.files.wordpress.com/2009/06/max_weber.jpg
Patok
>
> Carl Schmitt
> http://www.ppl.nl/100years/images/schmitt.jpg
> There is an odd bump on the left side of his
> forehead. It's there in other photographs too:
> http://ls.berkeley.edu/art-hum/framing/vol4/Schmitt%20mid%201933.jpg
> http://www.politics.fudan.edu.cn/picture/1294.jpg
> I wonder what it might be.
The pictures are not really clear enough to tell, but it might be a
lipoma: http://dermnetnz.org/lesions/lipoma.html
I have it in the family (I have too), and that's what it looks
like. True, ours are more pronounced (smaller area for the same
elevation), while his looks more like the result of a bump on the head,
but judging as he has it in many photos, that's most likely it.
--
You'd be crazy to e-mail me with the crazy. But leave the div alone.
Marko Amnell
"Patok" <crazy.d...@gmail.com> wrote in message
hddlvv$pp2$1...@news.eternal-september.org...
What a relief! I was afraid it might have been a bump he
got on the head when Franz Neumann hit him over the head
with a copy of _Behemoth_, or more ominously, the
Jew-Eating-Monster-He-Really-Is struggling to get out
through his cranium.
Marko Amnell
"The Other" <ot...@address.invalid> wrote in message
> So, anyway, Schmitt (a) was a member of the
> Nazi Party who (b) never believed in what we today
> would call Nazism, but (c) nevertheless gave some
> legal support to Nazi policies, yet (d) wrote some
> things in 1938 that could reasonable be read as anti-Nazi.
> Neumann seems to emphasize (a) and (c) while
> ignoring (b) and (d).
>
> Also, in case anyone's reading this and might be misled
> by your talk of the Nuremberg Tribunal, remember that
> he was never charged with anything. After interrogating
> him the American investigators finally declared that there
> was "nothing to de-Nazify" in his case.
>
> Some of his biographers "excuse" his Nazi membership
> by saying that he was anti-Nazi before 1933 and his joining
> the Nazi Party was purely opportunistic. Other people
> (not biographers, as far as I know) say that we really was
> a Nazi through and through. I think the truth is in the middle,
> close to Schmitt's own account. I think he really did believe
> he could influence the direction of Germany between 1933-36,
> based on what he interpreted as basically an invitation to
> do so in 1933. He said that before he was denounced by
> the SS in 1936, he thought he could "give meaning to catchwords".
> I'm sure there was plenty of opportunism, but he also saw the
> Nazis in 1933 as at least amenable to influence. I wonder if
> those who describe his decision as opportunist could imagine
> his opportunistically joining the Communist Party if they
> had won. I sure can't imagine that.
I cannot imagine Schmitt ever joining the Communist Party.
Also, I agree with your summary above of the facts
concerning the question "Was Schmitt a Nazi?"
The question one might ask oneself, however, is
"Why should I read Schmitt?" or "Why should I read
Joseph de Maistre?" or "Why should I read Juan Donoso
Cort�s?" The answers are complicated and subtle
and I hesitate to broach the topic because of how easy
it is to be misunderstood about such sensitive topics,
but I also feel that after discussing Schmitt for so long
here, I should say something.
The importance of reactionary conservative thinkers
like Schmitt, Maistre and Donoso is more than
historical. In other words, one should not read them
just out of curiosity about how extreme the views of
reactionary thinkers were in the past, and to compare
them with less extreme conservative thinkers like, say,
Edmund Burke.
The importance of the reactionary conservative thinkers
is that they state directly and candidly views that
politicians and political commentators will not say
openly today, but may in fact believe. They are open
about their contempt for liberalism and parliamentary
democracy, their belief that repression and violence
are necessary to maintain social order, or indeed,
their anti-Semitism. To be electable, conservative
politicians today all pay lip service to the importance
of liberal freedoms and the parliamentary system,
no one openly defends a need for social repression,
and anti-Semitic or anti-Muslim comments instantly
make a politician unelectable so they are avoided.
But the policies of conservative politicians reveal
that they have not really abandoned all these traditional
reactionary conservative beliefs. The post-9/11
War on Terror led to a curtailment of civil liberties
in the United States, for example. Prominent conservative
politicians will from time to time accidentally blurt
out anti-Semitic or anti-Muslim comments in public
(immediately followed by explanations that their
comments were misunderstood or taken out of context)
which makes one wonder what their true beliefs are.
And if one accepts that the sovereignty of states in
the Third World has been reduced through economic
domination by the main capitalist states, then one
can see the belief that violence and repression are
necessary to maintain social order (within the global
"society") in action in the wars (which are really
like police actions) in Afghanistan and elsewhere
as part of the War on Terror.
So, the importance of Schmitt, Maistre and Donoso
is that their writings help to explain the policies
of conservative politicians today whose actions
are not adequately explained by their public
pronouncements.
I believe in liberalism, for mainly Millian and Popperian
reasons, because I believe that individual freedom,
freedom of thought and expression, lead to the flowering
of civilization, culture, and the arts and sciences. Freedom
of inquiry is the best way to find truth. This belief is in direct
contradiction with the epistemological beliefs of
someone like Donoso, who holds that truth only
comes from revelation from God, and that free inquiry
only leads to confusion. Reading Schmitt, Maistre
and Donoso helps me to understand the dangers to
to liberalism and the freedom of inquiry in conservative
policies today.
But furthermore, reading the reactionary conservative
thinkers like Schmitt, Maistre and Donoso can help
one to understand the limits and contradictions of
liberalism. If one believes in tolerance and freedom
of thought and expression, what is the right response
to those who believe in the violent repression of
freedom of thought and expression? Is the practice of
Islamic extremism to be tolerated within Western societies
given that Islamic fundamentalism is opposed to the
fundamental beliefs of Western liberalism? The West's
confrontation with Islamic extremism is a classic case
of Schmitt's friend/enemy distinction. Liberal political
philosophy has trouble dealing with its own limits.
So here is an example where the reactionary conservative
thinkers can offer a positive contribution to dealing
with political issues today.
And finally, one may ask to what extent Schmitt's
criticism of parliamentary democracy (which owes
a lot to Donoso) is valid today. If, like me, you
believe in parliamentary democracy, then of course
your concern is that the pratice of parliamentary
democracy no longer lives up to the ideal.
Schmitt and Donoso were opposed to the ideal and
the practice of parliamentary democracy. But
their criticisms of parliamentary democracy may
help us to understand why today practice fails to
live up to the ideal. A more troubling thought is
that if indeed you believe that the practice of
parliamentary democracy today fails to be
democratic, and political power today is used to
maintain a global social order built on repression
and violence, to what extent does your own tacit
support of the present political system (even if you
don't vote, you pay taxes) make you complicit in
a social system whose real workings (behind the
facade of liberalism and democracy) are best
described by the reactionary conservatives like
Schmitt, Maistre and Donoso? There is an old
saying in political science that there is a sense
in which totalitarianism reveals the truth about
capitalism and liberal democracy.
Marko Amnell
"The Other" <ot...@address.invalid> wrote in message
> I read Schmitt in particular (and also Hobbes) because
> I'm fascinated by the political situation of the State of Israel.
> Schmitt's writings, from both before and after the war, are
> extremely relevant to Israel's political situation. A lot of
> times I feel like he's writing directly about current events.
I can understand that. Schmitt's writings uncover
the primal nature of politics (the primal distinction
between friends and enemies, the essence of
sovereignty) and he has an uncompromising
style of thought. Israel's very existence in the
Middle East, surrounded by hostile Arab states,
places it in a situation in which it is forced to
confront these primal political realities in a
more direct way than Western countries today.
Marko Amnell
"The Other" <ot...@address.invalid> wrote in message
> Here's a remark by one of Schmitt's interlocutors, Leo Strauss:
>
> I believe I can say, without any exaggeration, that since a very,
> very early time the main theme of my reflections has been what is
> called the `Jewish Question.'
I'm curious. Have you seen the very interesting and well
made BBC documentary "The Power of Nightmares"?
It was produced by Adam Curtis and studies the influence
of Leo Strauss on the neocons, and of Sayyid Qutb on
the Islamic extremists, and draws many interesting
parallels between them. Here is a short blurb:
"Both [the Islamists and Neoconservatives] were idealists
who were born out of the failure of the liberal dream to build
a better world. And both had a very similar explanation for
what caused that failure. These two groups have changed the
world, but not in the way that either intended. Together, they
created today's nightmare vision of a secret, organized evil
that threatens the world. A fantasy that politicians then found
restored their power and authority in a disillusioned age.
And those with the darkest fears became the most powerful."
You can download it for free from the Internet. Just go to that
Swedish website whose name is reminiscent of the Pirates of
the Caribbean movies...
Also, I suppose you already know about Heinrich Meier's
book _Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss: The Hidden Dialogue_?
Definitely worth reading.
Marko Amnell
>
> "The Other" <ot...@address.invalid> wrote in message
> lypr7nk...@circe.aeaea...
>
>> Here's a remark by one of Schmitt's interlocutors, Leo Strauss:
>>
>> I believe I can say, without any exaggeration, that since a very,
>> very early time the main theme of my reflections has been what is
>> called the `Jewish Question.'
>
> I'm curious. Have you seen the very interesting and well
> made BBC documentary "The Power of Nightmares"?
> It was produced by Adam Curtis and studies the influence
> of Leo Strauss on the neocons, and of Sayyid Qutb on
> the Islamic extremists, and draws many interesting
> parallels between them. Here is a short blurb:
>
> "Both [the Islamists and Neoconservatives] were idealists
> who were born out of the failure of the liberal dream to build
> a better world. And both had a very similar explanation for
> what caused that failure. These two groups have changed the
> world, but not in the way that either intended. Together, they
> created today's nightmare vision of a secret, organized evil
> that threatens the world. A fantasy that politicians then found
> restored their power and authority in a disillusioned age.
> And those with the darkest fears became the most powerful."
The film has been widely condemned by neocons as a
conspiracy theory. One of the most strident criticisms
was Clive Davis's article "The Power of Bad Television"
in National Review. Here is a quote:
"After seeing a preview tape of the first installment of the
three-part series, I can only say that Jim Geraghty's account -
which was based on a Guardian report - was actually
understated. The opening episode amounts to a ludicrously
one-sided account of the rise of the neocons which manages
to impute all manner of sinister motives to a tight-knit circle
devoted to the teachings of Leo Strauss. In Curtis's world,
it is Strauss, not Osama bin Laden, who is the real evil genius."
http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/davis200410211043.asp
For general information on the film, see e.g. wikipedia:
Marko Amnell
"The Other" <ot...@address.invalid> wrote in message
> I read Schmitt in particular (and also Hobbes) because I'm
> fascinated by the political situation of the State of Israel.
It looks like you're not the only person in Israel
who is reading Hobbes...
"_Leviathan_ is arguably the most influential work of Western
political thought, and one of the most analyzed. Yet the
first full Hebrew translation of Thomas's Hobbes's work
was only published last month."
Marko Amnell
"The Other" <ot...@address.invalid> wrote in message
> "Marko Amnell" <marko....@kolumbus.fi> writes:
>
>> I'm curious. Have you seen the very interesting and well made BBC
>> documentary "The Power of Nightmares"? It was produced by Adam
>> Curtis and studies the influence of Leo Strauss on the neocons, and
>> of Sayyid Qutb on the Islamic extremists, and draws many interesting
>> parallels between them. Here is a short blurb:
>>
>> "Both [the Islamists and Neoconservatives] were idealists who were
>> born out of the failure of the liberal dream to build a better
>> world. And both had a very similar explanation for what caused that
>> failure. These two groups have changed the world, but not in the way
>> that either intended. Together, they created today's nightmare
>> vision of a secret, organized evil that threatens the world. A
>> fantasy that politicians then found restored their power and
>> authority in a disillusioned age. And those with the darkest fears
>> became the most powerful."
>
> watching the BBC.
It's not just a typical BBC documentary. It has been called
"the most important film about the 'war on terrorism' since
the events of September 11" (by The Nation, which was
broadly critical of its contents).
> A lot seems wrong in that paragraph, though. First
> of all, neoconservatism largely changed the world in the exact ways it
> intended. The aggressive Cold War in the 1980s had a lot to do with
> the collapse of the Soviet Union. The neocons weren't the only ones
> behind that, but they were a main force, and that was by far the
> biggest change they were involved in. Other neocon changes: Welfare
> reform significantly reduced the number of people on welfare. The
> "broken windows" approach to policing turned New York City around in
> the 1990s. In politics, the neocons basically took over the
> conservative movement and the Republican Party over the span of a
> decade, in the 1980s, to where some of them bragged that
> neoconservatism had now become just conservatism. Then of course
> there's the disastrous foreign policy after 2001; that undeniably
> changed the world in ways the neocons didn't intend. But that was
> just one of many neocon campaigns.
>
> I think there's some similarity between neoconservatism and Qutb, but
> it shouldn't be overstated. If you remember, the initial
> neoconservative explanation for the liberal failure, i.e., for the
> failure of LBJ's Great Society programs, was the Burkean idea of
> unintended consequences. I doubt if Qutb put anywhere near as much
> emphasis on unintended consequences as the neocons did.
Well, Qutb doesn't talk about unintended consequences in his
best known work _Ma'alim fi-l-Tariq_ (Milestones). Or at least
it is not mentioned in the parts of _Milestones_ I read in an anthology
of writings on Islamic fundamentalism.
> (The irony of
> the neocons' more recent ambitious, Jacobin program to spread
> democracy in the Middle East, with its blithe lack of concern for
> unintended consequences, was noted at the time.) In the late 1960s
> and early 1970s, the neocons did get into the whole culture war thing,
> and their fight against post-bourgeois decadence was in fact similar
> to Qutb's.
That is one of the most interesting aspects of Curtis's film and
is well presented. The documentary is worth seeing even if you
don't agree with Curtis. It's just a well made documentary film.
Television is very rarely this thought-provoking.
> But that was only one of several neocon issues. By the
> 1980s the main culture warriors were in the evangelical right, which
> was by then the neocons' coalition partner.
>
> And what's this secret evil that in the neocon vision threatens the
> world, anyway? Is it jihad? Radical Islam?
The secret evil is Al Qaeda. In the third part of the series
entitled "The Shadows in the Cave" Adam Curtis argues
that there never was a secret global terrorist organisation
named Al Qaeda, but that a myth that it existed was created
after 9/11. To quote from wikipedia:
"The final episode addresses the actual rise of al-Qaeda.
Curtis argues that, after their failed revolutions, bin Laden
and Zawahiri had little or no popular support, let alone a
serious complex organisation of terrorists, and were dependent
upon independent operatives to carry out their new call for jihad.
The film instead argues that in order to prosecute bin Laden in
absentia for the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings, US prosecutors
had to prove he was the head of a criminal organisation responsible
for the bombings. They find a former associate of bin Laden,
Jamal al-Fadl, and pay him to testify that bin Laden was the head
of a massive terrorist organisation called "al-Qaeda". With the
September 11th attacks, Neo-Conservatives in the new Republican
government of George W. Bush use this created concept of an
organisation to justify another crusade against a new evil enemy,
leading to the launch of the War on Terrorism."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_Nightmares
Curtis also claims that there is no evidence that the name
"Al Qaeda" itself was ever used by Islamic extremists
before the 9/11 attacks.
Curtis's argument is not entirely convincing, although he
presents what seems to be credible evidence that aspects
of the Al Qaeda story were made up. One of the people
who has pointed out flaws in the argument is Peter Bergen,
author of _Holy War, Inc.: Inside the Secret World of
Osama bin Laden_. I have read this book.
http://www.amazon.com/Holy-War-Inc-Inside-Secret/dp/0743234952
Quoting the same wikipedia page again:
"Peter Bergen, writing for The Nation, offered a detailed
critique of the film. Bergen wrote that even if al-Qaeda is
not as organised as the Bush Administration stresses, it is
still a very dangerous force due to the fanaticism of its followers
and the resources available to bin Laden. On Curtis's claim
that al-Qaeda was a creation of neo-conservative politicians,
Bergen said: 'This is nonsense. There is substantial evidence
that Al Qaeda was founded in 1988 by bin Laden and a small
group of like-minded militants, and that the group would
mushroom into the secretive, disciplined organisation that
implemented the 9/11 attacks.'"
In his book, Bergen (who interviewed Osama bin Laden
several times) describes in detail how Al Qaeda was founded
in Afghanistan in 1988. I found this to be one of the most
interesting parts of his book, and it seems that Curtis ignored
this evidence.
In addition, it seems to me that since 9/11, Al Qaeda has
expanded geographically as various groups of Islamic
extremists now wish to associate themselves with Osama bin
Laden. There are now groups that call themselves
"Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia" (in Iraq) and "Al Qaeda in
the the Maghrib" (in North Africa). It's not clear how
well connected they are to Osama, presumably still sitting
in his cave in Pakistan, but it is evidence of growth.
Furthermore, certainly the great success of the Taliban
and its Al Qaeda allies in Afghanistan is evidence that
the organisation is alive and well. Barack Obama has
been forced to reconsider his plans to increase the
number of U.S. troops posted to Afghanistan because
the Taliban and Al Qaeda have been so successful in
their attacks on the U.S.-backed government of Afghanistan.
And there is a widespread terror campaign currently
under way in Pakistan by the Taliban (it is not clear
to what extent Al Qaeda is participating in this).
> No neocon claims those
> are secret. Anyway, I agree with the neocons that radical Islam is
> organized (though not monolithic) and that it threatens the Western
> world, especially Western Europe. Lot's of non-neocons would agree.
>
>> Also, I suppose you already know about Heinrich Meier's book _Carl
>> Schmitt and Leo Strauss: The Hidden Dialogue_? Definitely worth
>> reading.
>
> I haven't read it, but it seems well regarded. The only thing I read
> by Strauss was his "Notes on Carl Schmitt's The Concept of the
> Political", which was included in the paperback edition I bought. I
> don't think there's much point in my reading Meier's book if I haven't
> read Strauss.
Well, Strauss is worth reading quite apart from his role as
a possible godfather of the neocon movement. Peter Bergen
claims that Curtis exaggerates this role and that in reality
Albert Wohlstetter was a more important figure in founding
the neoconservative political philosophy. Do you agree with
Bergen about this?
I have not read Leo Strauss widely but I read parts of his
interesting book _Thoughts on Machiavelli_. The first sentence reads:
"We shall not shock anyone, we shall merely expose ourselves to
good-natured or at any rate harmless ridicule, if we profess
ourselves inclined to the old-fashioned and simple opinion
according to which Machiavelli was a teacher of evil."
http://www.amazon.com/Thoughts-Machiavelli-Leo-Strauss/dp/0226777022#noop
Marko Amnell
"The Other" <ot...@address.invalid> wrote in message
> "Marko Amnell" <marko....@kolumbus.fi> writes:
>
>> "The Other" <ot...@address.invalid> wrote in message
>> lyiqdc2...@circe.aeaea...
>> > the whole culture war thing, and their fight against
>> > post-bourgeois decadence was in fact similar to Qutb's.
>>
>> That is one of the most interesting aspects of Curtis's film and is
>> well presented. The documentary is worth seeing even if you don't
>> agree with Curtis. It's just a well made documentary film.
>> Television is very rarely this thought-provoking.
>
> The neocons in the 1970s and Qutb shared a common enemy, American
> post-bourgeois decadence, but the neocons wanted to restore a
> bourgeois, secular-friendly "Judeo-Christian" ethic. Qutb didn't.
> The over-cited example is the 1950s small-town church social that so
> scandalized Qutb with its decadent mixed dancing. But that represents
> exactly the bourgeois culture that the neocons wanted to restore. I
> don't know what Curtis says, but it would be ridiculous to overlook
> the differences between the Islam of Qutb and the American
> "Judeo-Christian" whatever of the neocons.
Well, I would take exception with the phrase "the Islam of Qutb."
There is a lot more to Qutb's philosophy of revolution than just
traditional Muslim faith. For one thing, he was influenced by
European thinkers such as the French eugenicist Alexis Carrel.
Qutb took Carrel's mystical racism in which the world would be
governed by a genetic elite and transformed that into a society
ruled by a religious elite (what Qutb calls the "vanguard"
in _Milestones_). But certainly you are right that Qutb and the
neoconservatives wanted to build very different societies.
Also (and this reinforces your point about the differences
being greater than the similarities), Qutb saw the decadence
of Islamic societies differently than the neocons saw the
decadence of American society. According to Qutb, due to
the influence of Western culture, Islamic societies such as
Egypt had lapsed into a state of jahiliyyah, or ignorance of
divine guidance. Curtis states that this analysis justified the
assassination of leaders (such as Anwar Sadat) who had led
their countries into jahiliyyah, and when that failed to bring
about a revolution, the murder of ordinary citizens who no
longer were true Muslims because they had lapsed into jahiliyyah.