Robert Darnton. The Revolutionary Temper. Paris 1748-1789.

      

      Harvard doyen Robert Darnton's book about seething unrest leading to the French Revolution is quite a good reading. Political, economic and administrative realities of the French society serve only as a frame to describe the changes in public opinion, his specialty. 

    The picture of the French society he describes in his book -- without expounding on that -- hints at the causes of the French Revolution as incompatible divergences of the political elites. And these were four: the court, the (upper) clergy, the executive -- the ministers and the Parliaments. Each had its sets of publicists to support their positions. Incongruously, but consistent with American academic tradition, Darnton describes these medieval institutions as democracy in action. But he honestly shows that they were largely defenders of entrenched interests of the urban upper classes. Even in one case -- the absolution of the Jansenists -- in which Parliaments were seemingly on the side of the freedom of the press and consciousness, they were defending Jansenism. But it became a superstition long ago, contrasting with a "more enlightened" views of the upper clergy. 

     At the same time, Gallican Church, or at least her upper echelons were more and more entrenched in their Ultramontanism and complete inflexibility, first and foremost, with respect to their own taxation. 

      The most progressive part of the elite were the ministries but they were hamstrung by the court intrigues and the laziness and indecision of the both kings, Louis XV and Louis XVI. Because of the parochial interests of the Parliaments they had to introduce reforms by "tyrannical" (compared with the French Revolution -- ha-ha) methods. 

     The weakness of Darnton's book -- henceforth it cannot replace the classics of De Tocqueville "The Old Regime and the Revolution" and Edgar Faure's "La disgrace de Turgot" -- that all the problems are sorted out from the point of view of Parisian educated middle class. The ones that could afford to pay 9 livres for a literary pamphlet and subscribe to the "Gazette de Leyde" -- his favorite broadsheet source and the barometer of the public opinion.  

Emma Southon. A Rome of One's Own: The Forgotten Women of the Roman Empire.

   This is an odd work of a Christian Feminism. Modern wokeism tinged it with replacement of slaves by the "enslaved people", though I cannot figure out why the latter is better than the former. Furthermore, "enslaved" does not indicate whether they were enslaved during their lifetimes, or were born as slaves. 

    But the book only proves the point that Hellenistic, including Roman, women played no role in state politics. Few exceptions only underline the message. If we exclude semi-legendary women of the Kingly Rome, like Tarpeia and Queen Tanaquil in her book, the only women who actively participated in big political decisions were Severan, i.e. Syrian/Balkan women: Julia Domna, Julia Maesa and Julia Mamaea described by Southon in one of the chapters. A Christian princess Galla Placidia, in another chapter, played a great role in Rome's final demise but this was because of her decision to side with Goths against her Empire. If one adds to them a treacherous, murderous last wife of Augustus, Empress Livia, or so she is shown in "I, Claudius", the list will be over. 

    So the outrageous remark of one of the 1960s professors that delivering a lecture course on Roman women will be like delivering a course on Roman dogs does not seem so outlandish after all. Women, Roman, or otherwise, Etruscan, British, etc. played a great role in the life of the Roman society, which Dr. Southon shows quite clearly -- with the ample use of obscenities and remarks on the English popular culture, which I cannot understand -- but their political influence was negligible. 

William Burns for "Foreign Policy"

 The magazine "Communist" in the Soviet times, despite a visible thickness and demagoguery of its articles, performed a very important function. Through it, the Party and Government leadership as well as a few highly-placed propagandists explained and inculcated current policies of the Party and Government to the masses of its functionaries. Without teeth-crunching studies of the "Communist" articles during special workshops and Party meetings, the functionaries would be left without a guiding light on a frequently changing and, sometimes, contradictory Party policies. 

    Currently, the Washington blob, uses "Foreign Policy" for essentially the same purposes. But the pronouncements, which can easily emerge from large and empty heads of Blinken and Nuland, look really odd when coming from William J. Burns, the only remaining foreign policy whiz in Biden administration. Basically, it affirms the triumph of Bushism-Bidenism: a complete merger of the foreign and military-intelligence policies with no place for diplomatic conflict resolution and/or mutually beneficial economic cooperation. 

    In his article, Burns advocates a complete destruction of Russian Federation and the reduction of China to semi-colonial status, as the implicit goals of American foreign policy. It is hard to imagine many Russians or Chinese agree with that agenda or not employing every resource to forestall this conclusion. In fact, since the first enlargement of NATO into Eastern Europe in 1998, the American polity was steadily degrading into something very much resembling a traditional Eastern European or Latin American society. We now have domination of the moneyed elite, political parties, which do not recognize the legitimacy of each other and freely appropriating any instrument including secret police methods to displace the opponent, kangaroo courts, judging entirely on their political persuasion and ignoring the law, universal surveillance by the police, etc. etc. So the unrestrained imperialism of the neocons was hurtful to the majority of the US population. 

(To be continued) 

David Graeber, David Wengrow. The Dawn of Everything.

 In a book of a such overwhelming ambition there have to be problems. And there was no lack of criticism poured on Graeber and Wengrow. Yet, there is no doubt that untimely deceased Graeber was the mind of the first magnitude. His wonderful "Bullshit Jobs" exposed the fragility of the modern civilization with unparalleled alacrity. 

 The main thesis of Graeber and Wengrow is that the modern nation-state was not an inevitable product of the development of civilization. Furthermore, the last 500 years when this form of organization became dominant is a small blip on the overall history of humanity. 

    The mainstream progression of the history of human civilization accepted by the Western historians is strangely similar to the concept proposed by Friedrich Engels, the main collaborator of Karl Marx, and enshrined in bronze by Stalin (actually, by his court historians). With world popularity of Yuval Harari, it is unassailable. Namely, once their were hunter-gatherer (forager, in more modern terminology) societies build on a more or less uniform template. At some point, some of them progressed to chiefdoms, started agriculture and cities. Agricultural society beget hierarchies in the form of the rulers and the ruled and widespread enslavement. First civilizations were built by the slave labor. There were two main forms of the developed statehood--slave-owning Empires of the West--Hellenistic and Roman--and the "oriental despotism" based on the uniform conscription of the labor force by the state. 

  After the fall of the Roman Empire, the Germanic states formed in its wake, reworked its slave owning system into something called "feudalism". At the sunset of the Middle Ages, the national monarchies began to form, which started to transform into nation states and so it went till the "End of History" declared by Fukuyama after the Cold War. 

    Not only this scheme was Eurocentric but also it omitted the societies, in which the majority of the human race lived most of the time. In fact, after the falls of the Roman, Parthian Empires, India's Guptas and China Han dynasties, their former populations were somehow organized, and their organization was not identical to the previous, only on a smaller scale. Nomadic peoples populated all Eurasia from east of Hungary to the north of Korean border. Native American societies were a completely different story altogether. 

    The main "discovery" of Graeber--still contested--was that prehistoric societies had a variety of forms of social organization. Even societies with the same mode of production, fisheries, in case of his studies, had a vastly different template. Northwestern tribes had chieftains, noble hierarchies and enslavement, with little role for women. Northern California tribes were more egalitarian with women playing a significant role (I wonder whether a current difference between California and Alaska politics had anything to do with his vision😏). But altogether this is highly probable that foraging societies had as much difference in their political organization as the modern nation-states. For, if the template was uniform, how it happened that it evolved in so many unrelated social units?

Death of Graeber in the beginning of the COVID epidemic is an unreconcilable blow to the anthropology and humanities in general. 

Chris Impey. Worlds without end: exoplanets, habitability and the future of humanity.

  A very good book in its first half. Contains a lot of useful popular information on exoplanets and how they are discovered and investigated. The second half is dedicated to unrestrained speculation about humans role in the Cosmos. 

Clive Oppenheimer. Mountains of fire: a nothing burger.

 I checked out the book of Professor of Volcanology in Cambridge (sic!) to learn about 1) why volcanoes exist, 2) how they operate, 3) what is their geological function, 4) how they influence biosphere, 5) what instruments scientists use to study volcanoes. All I got was a crummy travelogue. 

P. Zeihan, Disunated nations: the scramble for power in an ungovernable world.

 The endless wars since 2001 bred "security consultants" and "defense contractors" so much so that even the deep pockets of CIA could not feed them all, so they turned to literature. They all subscribe to neocon dogma because they know the hand which feeds them. If fact, no other way of thinking about international affairs survived the onslaught of the "New York Times", WP, CNN and the web censorship by Microsoft and Google. 

Even the title of this book is plagiarized from a number of manuscripts (Sean Byrnes, Suga Chen and onwards to 1957). The chapter about the US is lifted from the opus by Mandelbaum and Zakaria with its (half-right as almost everything Mandelbaum in the new century) assertion that the US de-facto performed the functions of the world government in the field of defense, trade, circulation of currency, etc. etc. and extended it to the XVIII-XIX century UK. First, the model of the "World Government" was successful only because in the other parts of the world another power, the USSR, maintained some semblance of the world order. Equally, Britain could have ruled the world in the XIX century but never Europe (A paraphrase of Metternich's that "I sometimes ruled Europe, but never Austria"). Other powers -- the Ottomans, the Austrians, the Prussians and the Russians did the same in their spheres of influence. I.e. they suppressed local nationalisms, established and kept trade routes, provided protection for the allies and defense from enemies and promulgated uniform legislation and religious observance. 

His most ridiculous conclusion is that China and Russia are spent powers, while he predicts rising of France and Japan. Of France there is no discussion -- for he proposes that it reestablishes its colonial empire and takes over the Suez. 

      For China, 5.2% of the annual GDP growth is proclaimed a "crisis" by the Economist neocons; the same op-eds, who celebrate UK growth in excess of 1% as a triumph of British economic policy. Equally, he pommels on (totally invented) depopulation of Russian Federation, while at the same time oblivious to the fact that Japanese death rate exceeds the birth rate, one of the lowest in the entire world, by almost twice. Japan's population "pyramid" has two peaks -- one at 50 and another at 75, with overwhelming preponderance of population after 50 and experiences monotone fallout below that age.  

    

     

Another nice one-trick pony. Agathe Demarais. Backfire: how sanctions reshape the world against the US interests.

 A one idea tugging along throughout the book is that the sanctions, now only one of two instruments of the US foreign policy, another being war must be better harmonized with the EU, otherwise they would backfire. 

    This view is not surprising given that Demarais was a French foreign service officer in charge of sanctions at the Embassy in Moscow. First, the American sanctions went the way of the Papal excommunications in the Late Middle Ages. Deadly efficient at first, they were applied so speciously and for the obvious benefit of particular papal families that, with time they completely lost their effectiveness being factored in an overall conduct of the European foreign policy. 

But this is important that the subject of "sanctions" (in reality, economic warfare) started to be discussed. In fact, the Peace of Ausburg compact of 1555, appearing well before the birth of the modern nation-state in the aftermath of the Thirty Years War, presumed that the  "obstacles to lawful commerce" might constitute a casus belli. The destruction of the international system undertaken since early 1990s in favor of an unrestrained US domination, threw the international law back nearly 500 years.