31 July and 3 Augst

Tuesday 31st

Last week, I wrote a few lines about the anti-democratic thrust of neoliberalism. The neoliberal program endeavors to take certain economic options — principally the popular expropriation of foreigners’ property — off the local menu, using global institutions such as the World Trade Organization to enforce its safeguards. This enforcement, so far at least, makes no recourse to the violence of military solutions. Rather, it imposes economic sanctions that make non-compliance uncomfortable at best. It does nothing to prevent nations from committing political suicide, as Venezuela has done and as Britain is in danger of doing. But suicide is pretty much the only expression of democratic sovereignty that neoliberalism allows.

I am unsympathetic to neoliberal objectives. For one thing, I believe, with Jane Jacobs, that local economies have to learn how to do their own growing. Simply importing capital investments is sterile, because local workers, no matter how well treated, learn little or nothing about doing business, and are therefore helpless when capital moves on to more lucrative venues. I also believe that trade between cities ought to be weighted in favor of short distances. I’m sure that you’ve heard that tale about the Scottish salmon that is sent in freezer containers to Asian processing plants for slicing and then returned to Scotland for sale. I believe that it’s true, but even if it’s an urban legend it’s repugnant, an example of something that shouldn’t happen. Finally, I regard the tendency of liberal economics to encourage the proliferation of rentiers as a weakness requiring counteractive vigilance.

But I was thinking yesterday that the mechanics of neoliberalism might provide the only solution to the problem of environmental degradation. Again, it’s a matter of taking certain economic options off the menu. But instead of xenos expropriation, the principal no-no of climate globalism would be consumer recklessness. Consumers are reckless when they insist on access to goods whose low prices are made possible by the exploitation of natural resources and disregard for the unpleasant side-effects of manufacturing processes. The American belief that ground beef ought to be affordable by almost everyone — not just available, but available at an every day price — is a particularly blatant instance of consumer recklessness. I daresay that the nation’s political system is incapable of confronting it, much less of curbing it. Sadly, American exceptionalism has already demonstrated our disinclination to subscribe to international environmental conventions.

I’m just about to finish reading a biography of Lord Palmerston, by James Chambers. Palmerston crowned his very long career as a statesman, principally in the Foreign Office, by becoming the first Liberal prime minister. Nevertheless, he remained steadfastly opposed to any expansion of the electoral franchise that would include uneducated voters without property. In his view, universal franchise in France merely resulted in the election of a tyrant, Louis Bonaparte. Liberal democrats have long since decided that, the risk of tyrants notwithstanding, every sane adult must be presumed to be smart enough to cast an intelligent vote. I often wonder if anyone today is really smart enough to vote. The implications of every choice are so often either bewildering or invisible. Somebody must decide what to do, but I wish that we were better at asking the right questions.

***

Friday 3rd

Is “category mistake” the term? Not really, but it certainly sounds apt. Regardless of their attitudes toward the President’s policies, pundits and their audiences discuss his Administration in political terms, looking for the political outcomes of institutional rearrangements. But this sort of talk is of no interest to his fans. Perhaps it never has been, to the fans or the foes of any president. But Trump’s fans are no longer pretending to evaluate their man in political terms. They judge him as an entertainer. I think that we all have to admit that he is indeed very entertaining, however gruesome the show is for those who aren’t amused. It’s a waste of time to regard him as a political figure. Trump may be a political zero (or worse), but it is meaningless to point this out, or to expect the observation to usher Trump off the stage.

There are many kinds of entertainment, but it seems to me that Trump owes his success to a mastery of the forms of entertainment that have replaced, in many parts of America, what used to recognized as religion. American religion used to be noted for its rejection of the entertaining qualities of high-church, old-world, mainly Catholic services. Even American Catholics have learned to live without them. But whether or not God is dead, Hell is certainly on the fritz. Now that the threat of hellfire is no longer a prod to virtue, austerity has given way to simplicity. Now that Americans have gotten used to being entertained wherever they go, rituals have been replaced by rallies. And in the age of the smart phone, a rally can be attended by masses of people who don’t leave the house.

Similarly, the Republican Party has succumbed to a hatred of politics. The only thing that gives Republican politicians any pleasure is winning elections. They’ll do anything to win elections, not so that they can exercise legislative power but so that they can prevent its being exercised at all. A dynamic legislature confutes the belief that entertainment is the only thing that matters. Republicans may not be capable of being entertaining themselves, certainly not as a body, but they’re making sure that the spotlight rarely wavers from the White House.

The question is whether national political life can be revived without having to be recreated from the ground up.

Bon week-end à tous!

24, 25, and 26 July

Tuesday 24th

Last night, I finished reading Jane Jacobs’s The Economy of Cities for the first time.

I had paused in the middle of re-reading her Cities and the Wealth of Nations when it finally struck me, what ought to have been obvious much sooner, that Cities is the second half of a two-volume treatise on urban economies. I read it, when it came out in 1984, in all ignorance of this fact; I hadn’t even read The Death and Life of Great American Cities (though I’d heard of that one). I learned so much from Cities, most of all the possibility of a humanist economics, that what I missed from not having read the first book might only have gotten in the way of my burgeoning grasp of something I’d never given much thought to (political economy) — had, that is, I read The Economy of Cities in 1984 as well.

Reading The Economy of Cities now, nearly fifty years after its appearance in 1969, my first reaction was an explosion of rage. Why was I not taught this book in school? It was unbearably mortifying to know that I had been holding forth on all manner of subjects for half a century without being aware of, among other nuggets, Jacobs’s brilliant hypothesis that agriculture originated in cities, not in the countryside! Ignorance of such an elemental insight threatened to invalidate every notion that I’d ever had.

When I simmered down, though, I saw that there were a few things that I would have missed way back then, no matter how forcibly Jacobs tried to express them. The less important of these blockages would have involved the singularity of the Industrial Revolution, which initiated all of the urban activity that Jacobs talks about, aside from those Stone-Age speculations about agriculture. Fifty years ago, it was easy to imagine that the Industrial Revolution was going to go on indefinitely. Even Jacobs, in her final pages, suggests that this might not be the case, but I’m not sure that I’d have taken the hint. The more important issue is one that, although she certainly describes it, she never identifies, and that is chaos.

Chaos is really nothing but unpredictability. When everything is unpredictable, life of any kind cannot be sustained, but a healthy economy requires a kind of organized unpredictability that continually refreshes the world of work. It’s important to state right away that we don’t know how to create or manage such organized unpredictability; at present, we can only appreciate it in retrospect. Unpredictable successes might be imagined as trains that go off the rails, only instead of heaving into disorder, these very special trains create new rails. Jacobs tells many interesting stories involving such felicity, and my  favorite is the one about Ida Rosenthal, the inventor of the brassiere. As a New York dressmaker, Rosenthal was unhappy with the fit of her clothes on her customers, so she designed an undergarment to improve it. But the thing about the invention of the brassiere is not that Rosenthal came up with it but that she decided to devote her working life to it. She stopped making dresses and started Maidenform, manufacturing brassieres first in New Jersey and then in West Virginia.

Another dressmaker might have been prompted, by the same dissatisfaction that motivated Ida Rosenthal, to invent the brassiere, but then that dressmaker might also have simply gone on doing what Rosenthal did at first: she simply gave brassieres to her customers. We might, were we privy to all the ins and outs of the current state of dressmaking in 1920, have been able to foresee something like the brassiere, but we should never have been able to predict that its inventor would decide to change careers, to give up cutting and sewing individual gowns in order to take up the mass production, cut and sewn by “workers,” of a single product.

The only thing that we can be sure of is that unpredictable successes are undertaken almost exclusively by the self-employed — or by those who are in a position to become what Jacobs calls “breakaways.” Another fine instance of creative chaos is provided by the young engineer in Southern California who left Douglas Aircraft after the war to start up a business manufacturing furnaces. The furnace idea turned out to be a bust, so the engineer took up sliding glass doors, a novelty for which there was a market in booming Los Angeles. There is no way that Douglas Aircraft would have sponsored the research and development, and then the manufacture, of sliding glass doors. The customers of Douglas Aircraft were not looking for sliding glass doors. Only stand-alone producers can decide, as Ida Rosenthal did, to change their customers.

For every success story, though, there are at least a few, and possibly dozens, of failures. To say that trial and error do not guarantee eventual success is to indulge in cruel understatement. Trial and error lead nowhere without help from the Mercury of chaos, whom we call luck. Meanwhile, who is to pay for all the effort that, while arguably not absolutely wasted, fails to make a sale?

Now, as we all know, Jane Jacobs hated planners. But The Economy of Cities is itself, at least implicitly, a blueprint. If you want your city to have a robust economy, it says, then here’s what you need. And what you need, although Jacobs quite understandably doesn’t emphasize it, is a lot of money thrown out the window. Who’s going to sign up to be in charge of that department? Who wants to play VC to breakaways that are only going to break down? How do we plan for innovation in a world where, when most trains run off the rails, nothing but disaster ensues?

Fifty years ago, none of these questions would have occurred to me. I’d have imagined instead a world in which, thanks to the discovery of the right scientific secrets, everyone would be Ida Rosenthal.

***

Wednesday 25th

There’s a big piece about Brexit in the current issue of The New Yorker, by Sam Knight. Having assiduously followed the Times‘s account of this slow-motion disaster, which still seems to me to be much worse than anything happening in the United States, and having been tipped from the start by what has turned out to be a spot-on analysis of Theresa May’s political character, published by David Runciman in the LRB a few months after she took office, I was not surprised by anything new in Knight’s resume. But Knight did capture a comment, made by “a senior EU official” in response to the resignations of Boris Johnson and others that followed May’s Chequers ultimatum on 6 July.

“It’s a moment that should have happened two years ago,” the official said, of May’s late attempt to soften Brexit. But the official stressed that the E.U. still would not accept her plan, which aims somewhere in between a free-trade deal and the more integrated ties of the E.E.A. nations. “The point of departure for the U.K. is ‘We are exceptional,’ ” the official said, sighing. “They don’t understand.”

Perhaps it was always going to be a problem for the former seat of empire, the ruler of the planet’s oceans and the overseer of its international compacts to see itself as no more than the equal of neighbors to whom for centuries it condescended. Knight captured another, even pithier comment, this one made by Kristian Jensen, Denmark’s Finance Minister. According to Jensen, there are two types of nations in Europe: small nations, and nations that don’t yet realize that they are small. Great Britain, which during my lifetime has staggered from the imperial metropole to the den mother of a ceremonial association of former colonies whose half-siblings have little use for each other, to the frequently mortified junior partner of a “special relationship” with the United States, often behaves like a reduced gentlewoman who insists on privileges she can no longer afford.

The purpose of Brexit, seen in the best light, is to restore total sovereignty to the UK. Easier said, it turns out, than done! Those who voted for it doubtless assumed that interfering Continental regulations were all contained in a book that could be binned. They had no idea of the “acquis,” the extensive interpenetration of those regulations into hundreds of English statutes, such that nobody can now tell the domestic from the foreign — because, as a matter of law, there is no difference! From the start, it ought to have been obvious that the only way to achieve Brexit’s goals was from within the EU.

The Brexit campaign, as everybody understands now, was a dog’s breakfast of Leave’s grotesque misrepresentations of facts and figures fermented by Remain’s criminal complacency; as with Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, there will probably always be many who believe that the winners always intended to lose. As such, the vote ought to be stamped invalid. The referendum itself was engendered by such deep cynicism that there ought to be no talk of a second try. Parliament ought simply to direct the Prime Minister to proceed to Brussels on bended knee to beg that the Article 50 filing be rescinded. Then, and only then, can the twenty-eight members of the European Union take up the issue that bothers all of their populations: Has the EU gone too far? Or, as I put it, are France and Germany too big? What a difference it would make if Berlin and Paris ceded their authority to the constituent states and regions of the Union’s principal founders!

Beyond that, Europe must put a great deal more effort into creating a future in which non-Europeans are happy to remain where they are. The unsavory aftermath of colonialism must be cleared away. In other words, Europe will have to turn its back on global neoliberalism with a firmness that makes American persistence even more embarrassing than it already is. It is time to stop exploiting and “developing” the less fortunate economies of the world, and instead to help them grow flourishing markets of their own — and on their own terms.

***

Thursday 26th

Having finally pushed my way through the final chapter of Quinn Slobodian’s Globalists, after letting the book settle at the bottom of the pile for a dangerously extended hiatus, I’m considering whether or not it makes sense to continue my meditations on the word “liberal.” The word signifies too many different things, some of them good, some of them almost vile. Actually vile, as Domenico Losurdo makes clear in the pages of Liberalism that critique the staunch liberal case for slavery.

A word about Globalists: it was one of those books that leave me at sea. I could never tell from the text itself what Slobodian made of the theories that he was summarizing; only in the introductory material does he suggest that his book is an act of atonement for not participating in the Seattle manifestations of 1999. I looked in vain for a description of “ordoliberalism.” The term “cybernetic” was never quite properly grounded: what exactly did it mean to Hayek and his friends? Slobodian makes explicit the more recent neoliberals’ allegiance to property rights and corresponding opposition to democracy (that is, to democratically instigated expropriations), but he never comments on it. Whatever he might think of it, though, I did not find that this particular res simply spoke for itself. And, while it would have taken him on a tangent, how could he resist the hypocrisy of neoliberals such as Richard Perle and Douglas Feith, who claimed to be passionately committed to democracy in Iraq, when what they really wanted was a régime that would protect the property rights of foreign investors?

I also think that Slobodian might have invested some effort in explaining the imperial origins of neoliberalism. Imperial globalism was a peculiar and manifestly impermanent blend of developed economies and territories of commodity extraction. The goal of developing former colonies into actual competitors with the former centers of empire was never sincere, which is why it has never succeeded.

If neoliberalism is antagonistic to democracy, then, what about just plain liberalism?

The relationship between neoliberals and colonial populations is not quite the same thing as that between liberals and peasant populations, but there are certainly similarities, if ultimately the outcomes were different. (Until recently, that is.) If neoliberalism is a mutation of liberalism caused by imperial and post-imperial conditions, it is also true that liberalism itself was deformed by the Industrial Revolution. The origins of liberalism do not lie in democratic impulses.

The first liberals were grandees who intended to put a stop to royal caprice. After the liberal triumph of 1689 in England, the monarch was no longer free to interfere with private property — which, at the time, meant the private property of great landowners and merchants. (The property of middling people, such as it was, was protected by local customs with which the crown had long since ceased to interfere, a quiescence which has done much to give England its reputation for precocious democracy.) Among the property rights of these grandees was felt to lie the right to an orderly government, and as I have written earlier, it was established, in the decades following the Glorious Revolution, that the king could take the advice of anyone he liked, so long as that person were the chosen leader of Parliament, with a strong preference for the elected leader of the House of Commons. In the Eighteenth Century, the liberal dispensation of British politics, which is still in force, began to flourish.

With the Industrial Revolution, however, the nation was confronted by a new phenomenon. As grandees put their property to work in the development of factories and the like, they drew forth from the countryside a population of peasants who had never owned much of anything, and who therefore had little or nothing for the law to protect. These peasants did not, to say the least, vote; they quite literally counted for nothing. The idea that every human being owns his or her own body, and that, in parallel to the grandee’s expectation of orderly government, anyone might claim of the body politic a minimum of human decencies, in the way of food, clothing, shelter, and access to a better life — that, in short, the truly liberal state must liberate each and every person — citizen! — from any condition suggestive of bondage — took a long time to develop. The oppression of workers in the new factories might be universally deplored as cruel, but it was not for a while regarded as necessarily illiberal.

I think it safe to say, though, that liberal democracy, as it grew through the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, not only greatly extended the protection of property rights but augmented the range of property protected. Professional credentials, for example, became “as safe as houses.” Home ownership, perhaps not a very good idea in itself, made a mini-grandee of anyone who could afford it — and it was made very affordable. Unfortunately, the growth of liberal democracy was repeatedly defeated wherever it came into conflict with pre-existing racial bigotries. Eventually, liberal leaders would create a social crisis whose measure still remains to be taken when they committed their governments, in response to Communist equalitarianism, to overruling racist exclusions. That is how “liberal” became a term of abuse.

Meanwhile, empires came and went, leaving the neoliberal commitment to a globalism in which property rights were “encased,” as Slobodian nicely puts it, or protected from local government interference. Foreign investors were to be granted “xenos rights” that might exceed the property rights of natives. Inevitably, this global arrangement altered the commercial fabric of the developed countries, leading among other things to the familiar phenomenon of job exportation. Workers in the United States found themselves no more protected from globalist currents than workers in Borneo. For reasons not hard to seek, “liberal” became a term of quite different abuse, hurled by people who might well consider themselves the political opponents of those who complained of “liberal politicians.”

A mess, but such, I think, is the state of play.

Bon week-end à tous!

17, 18 and 19 July

Tuesday 17th

While the commentariat is fixated on the arguable treason of President Trump’s response to his meeting with Russian President Putin, I’m bemused by other grounds for this most serious of charges.

The other night, realizing that irritations inflicted upon the characters in a long Mavis Gallant story, “The Pegnitz Junction,” were going to make it difficult for me to get to sleep, I confronted the bookcases and noticed a volume that, hving lost the latest round of musical chairs, was lying horizontal atop a tight row of up-and-down spines. Easy to grasp, it proved equally easy to imagine reading. Its title, The Wrath of Nations: Civilization and the Furies of Nationalism, might not seem very restful, but I knew that its author, William Pfaff, who died a couple of years ago, never wrote anything that wasn’t measured and considered. I read the book when it came out, in 1993. Regular readers will know that nationalism has been much on my mind lately, and it seemed providential that a brisk study of the subject was all but handed to me.

Indeed, Pfaff’s prose soon restored my mind to comfortable temperatures. But the next afternoon, when I continued reading, the substance of Pfaff’s discussion began to disturb me. I was hearing something beneath the explicit text, a meaning of which Pfaff may or may not have been aware. At the end of his second chapter, “Nations and Nationalism,” he quotes “the most eminent of contemporary students of nationalism, the late Hugh Seton-Watson.”

… a nation exists when a significant number of people in a community consider themselves to form a nation, or behave as if they formed one. (58)

Ever since last summer’s clash of demonstrators at Charlottesville, the president has displayed, sometimes ostentatiously, a comfort with groups of Americans whom all previous Postwar presidents have taken care to keep at an official distance, whatever their private sympathies. White supremacists, male supremacists, armed supremacists — extensively overlapping groups of Americans, in short, whom the educated classes have been taught to regard as bigots, and who have therefore been denied a forum on the media that the educated classes control. The president, simply by voicing his interest and support, has thrown a spotlight of encouragement on these people, and, much like Christians in the time of Constantine, they have been given an unprecedented opportunity to assess their own numbers. That they are nationalistic Americans hardly needs saying. But I wonder if the groups against whom they define themselves — Mexicans and Moslems notoriously — are not proxies for those other Americans who do not so define themselves, who, indeed, are too secular to define themselves at all.

These erstwhile bigots — isn’t Trump encouraging them to consider themselves to form the nation of Americans, resolved to throw off the oppression of the established authorities of the United States?

***

Wednesday 18th

Reading on in William Pfaff’s The Wrath of Nations, I came to the late chapter on American nationalism, and read it in the light of an idea that I know I didn’t have twenty-five years ago, and that I didn’t expect Pfaff to have, either. It came from David Nasaw’s Going Out: The Rise and Fall of Public Amusements, a book that appeared about five years after Wrath. I didn’t read Going Out until many years later, but I read enough about it when it was published to absorb what might be its thesis, which is that the exclusion of African-Americans (the descendants of slaves) from amusement parks, theatres and other venues of commercial entertainment made it much easier than it might have been for those who were not excluded, particularly “swarthy” or “dark” immigrants from Mediterranean Europe, to attain genuinely American nationality. In other words, by representing the unacceptable other, blacks served a catalytic role in the making of modern America. It was a very simple test. If you were not black, then you were acceptable — at least at the movies.

So simple! If you were not black, then you were not the child of people who had suffered inhuman degradation. Therefore you would not arouse feelings of defensive hostility in the children of those who had inflicted that degradation. Nor would your white neighbor think of you, reflexively, Thank God I’m not him! You might be strange-looking, and you might speak English poorly, or with a heavy accent, but no one would wonder if you were actually, really human. If you weren’t black, you must be white, and all whites were welcome everywhere.

This is an essential element in the formation of an American nation, one that never quite breaks the surface of Pfaff’s account. It would be tedious to recapitulate his chapter here; perhaps I fear that I wouldn’t do it very well. It is always difficult to describe an absence. Pfaff is certainly aware of the inequities of black status, beginning with “the grotesque standing of three fifths of a free human being” prescribed by the Constitution for census purposes. He sees the Civil War as the event that transformed the citizens of various states into citizens of the United States, but he also mentions the “ignominious” survival of states’ rights rhetoric in the defeated South. What he does not mention is the shabby treatment of blacks elsewhere in the country. Elsewhere in the country, new immigrants (who tended to avoid the South) slipped right in to new American lives, simply on the strength of not being black.

In Nasaw’s book, this is an important but incidental point; Nasaw is primarily interested in the amusements themselves. It would hardly be surprising to find that nobody wants to address the institutionalized inferiority of blacks as a condition precedent to the easygoing homogenization of all other Americans. (Does the involuntary sacrifice never end?) We are willing enough to see that what was done to blacks was wrong. But we prefer to believe that any benefits conferred by this wrong to whites ended with the Civil War. That is not true. In the age of mass immigration that directly followed the war, white Americans had a new use for blacks, and blacks were tied to this new task with much of the bondage of slavery.

It was when that new use was put to an end, officially at least, in the “civil rights era” of the Sixties and Seventies that nationalism became a problem for many Americans, a problem to be ameliorated, if not solved, by waving a lot of flags. Many metaphorical feet were broken after having been caught standing up for the heavy, slamming door of the American War in Vietnam; there has been much limping since. Oblivious of the solvent role formerly played by blacks, but increasingly uncomfortable with economic dislocation, many Americans wondered why they could not return to a world in which cheerfully inclusive white men supported stay-at-home wives. It did not take long to develop a picture in which those who had no desire to make such a return marked themselves as un-American. In this picture, blacks are, quite understandably, all but invisible.

It is essential that this picture become visible to everyone in this country, and now.

***

Thursday 19th

At the other site, I referred to “a particularly vacant edition of the Times.” A little reflection suggested that this is not the newspaper’s fault.

The problem isn’t fake news. It’s no news. There is only the reality television show of the Trump régime’s entertainment cycle. Round and round it goes, and it threatens never to stop.

Events usually have consequences, but not for Donald Trump. This has always been the case. When, way back in 1980, he demolished the Bonwit Teller signage that he had agreed to preserve, there was a lot of moaning and groaning, but moans and groans break no bones. They didn’t then and they haven’t since. Trump’s businesses have undergone multiple bankruptcies. Not a problem! Now the president has unleashed an array of mutually-assured destructive tariffs, which something tells me he is not going to be the one to clean up.

We were ready for Trump, I suppose; we had it coming. Mass shootings, mounting evidence of environmental degradation, increased inequality directly attributable to our hopeless enthrallment to neoliberal ideas about capitalism, systematic social injustice inflicted on Americans of color — the repetitiveness of these stories has taken on that of the Super Bowl for quite some time. What else would happen? Could happen? Even an alien landing would have a hard time puncturing the bubble of our settled narrative tropes. Donald Trump is simply the epitome of our pre-existing inconsequence.

It terrifies me to imagine the violence that might be required to put an end to this pointlessness.

Bon week-end à tous!

10, 11 and 12 July

Tuesday 10th

Quinn Slobodian’s Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism is not a fun read. It’s as well-written as it can be, I suppose; as the history of a line of economic thought, it’s clear even when its subject isn’t. If nothing else, it has pried my attention away from Friedrich Hayek.

Ten years ago, I don’t think I’d ever heard of Hayek. Maybe fifteen. When I looked into him, I couldn’t figure him out, or pin him down. I still can’t. I even read a book about the Mont Pèlerin Society (Angus Birgin’s The Great Persuasion) and remained mystified. It seems to me that Hayek was an earnest but not very clever man. Dim bulbs don’t cast a lot of light.

What with the fuzziness surrounding the use of “liberalism,” it’s no wonder that I found “neoliberalism” indigestible when it emerged into general commentary about twenty years ago. When journalists spoke of the “neoliberal” supporters for intervention in Iraq, I thought that they were referring to tough-minded, pro-democracy policy makers, most of them Jewish and not fond of Arabs. That their motivation was essentially economic never crossed my mind.

Even until the day before yesterday, I thought that “globalists” were businessmen who dreamed of free markets and the world peace that would ensue if everybody bought the same Nikes and ate the same McDonald’s. I sensed that they dreamed of everyone’s taking home the same pay, too, but I couldn’t believe that American statesmen would ever permit American workers to suffer such impoverishment. Even though that is precisely what they seem to have been doing.

Slobodian has cleaned up all of this sloppy thinking. I now grasp that the slipperiness of “neoliberalism” is attributable to its uncertain regard for democracy; it is certainly not pro-. I see that “globalist” is almost a euphemism: who can be against bringing the people of Earth together? But of course that’s not what neoliberalism is about. Neoliberalism is about securing the property rights of international businesses against the “caprices” of local sovereignties. Its idea of democracy is centered on consumers: one dollar, one vote. I can’t believe I never figured this out for myself, but I am certainly shocked by the extent of neoliberal influence within the Western democracies.

“Democracy” is the whitewash on the sepulchre.

A conspiracy conducted out in the open, by the Heritage Society, the American Enterprise Institute, the US Chamber of Commerce, and so on. I thought these were all just sort of conservative, right-wing organizations. In true liberal élite fashion, I didn’t consider their ideas worthy of consideration. And maybe they’re not. But now I know that they’re expressed in an open code.

***

Wednesday 11th

Of course, reading the thoughts of von Mises, Hayek, and Röpke that are quoted in Globalists reminds me how often I have said the same things, pointing out “the problems of democracy.” A hasty reader might well conclude that I’m a neoliberal myself. But I regard the problems of democracy as challenges: democracy is the important thing. It isn’t for the neoliberals. For them, business is the important thing, and neither democracy nor any other form of government ought to be allowed to interfere with it.

Mind you, they say “capitalism,” not “business.” You don’t have to wonder why. “Business” sounds like the shop around the corner, while “capitalism” brings the Vittorio Emmanuele monument to mind. But capitalism has little to do with most commercial activity.

Why is this not more widely understood? Let me ask another question: why is the history of economy, or the history of economic thought, not on the syllabus? The short answer is this: we’re still too new at these things.

The social sciences, so-called, as we know them were all launched in the middle of the Nineteenth Century. They were all hived off from what prior to 1800 was called “philosophy.” In each new field, methods were devised for replacing Aristotelian rational description with dynamic critical analysis. In chemistry, for example, “fixed air” gave way to “carbon dioxide.” The first term indicated an inadequacy for respiration. The second explained it.

Like the railroad terminals in Paris and London, the new disciplines built their various redoubts: history, social studies, psychology, political theory, economics, and of course all the “hard” sciences. The student of one would never, following his proper course of studies, arrive at another. It took more than a century for interdisciplinary studies to emerge, the history of science being among the first. In fact, the history of ideas — intellectual history — is still somewhat rudimentary. I would attribute this lag to Plato’s grip on many educated minds. There is no room for history in Plato; Plato hates change. If an idea is good today, it will be good a millennium hence. And there are no new ideas. The idea of a history of ideas makes no sense in the Platonic worldview.

That’s, I think, why there is not much in the way of a history of economics. The field of history history, the kernel of which was the rise and fall of nations, did, on its own, eventually generate an interest in the history of political theory, and the upheavals and catastrophes of the early twentieth-century brought changes in political thinking out into the open. What’s still needed is a history of political economy. It’s precisely owing to the lack of such a history that terms such as “liberal” and “capitalism” are used with such incoherence.

***

Thursday 12th

Over the weekend, I read something about “Europe” that stuck with me. When I went looking for it, I was pretty sure that it was in the Times — and it was, but in Saturday’s paper, not Sunday’s. Max Fisher’s “Borders, Nationalism and the Fight for a Unified Europe” underlines the EU’s most embarrassing weakness. From the start, in 1949, European leaders envisioned a post-nationalist future, but, as Fisher writes,

instead of overcoming that barrier, European leaders pretended it didn’t exist. More damning, they entirely avoided mentioning what Europeans would need to give up: a degree of their deeply felt national identities and hard-won national sovereignty.

In short, pro-European leaders did what paternalistic meritocrats always do: they misled the public with a combination of silence and distraction. They ignored the problem of nationalism, and they promoted economic improvements and the convenience of border-free holiday trips. The recent refugee crisis, coming hard on the heels of a much-resented austerity program, together with the crazy upset of Brexit, have finally outed the supra-national mission of the European Union, and everyone is blushing, not at the emperor’s old clothes, but at having managed to ignore them for nearly seventy years.

Fisher’s phrase, “hard-won national sovereignty,” however, sticks in my craw. It’s not that Fisher is mistaken to assert it, but rather that the idea is so rankly bogus. European nationalism, quite famously, dates from the 1790s, when the French took to singing about their “nation,” which in fact did not exist: most of the people then living in today’s France could not speak standard French — could not, that is, be understood by “Frenchmen” living more than at the distance of few dozen kilometers away. The history of the idea of a French “nation” is not exactly obscure, but it is very ironic, given the outcome: according to proto-racist theories popular among French aristocrats at the beginning of the Eighteenth Century, France’s nobility was German in origin, long ago imported to maintain order among the unruly, semi-barbaric natives, a mongrel bunch. A hundred years later, populist revolutionaries projected the outline of national (racial) unity on this rabble, now known as “the people.” No longer defined by subjection to the deposed king, they were forged into solidarity by their negative identity: they were not blue-bloods.

Then, thanks to Napoleon, the infection was carried throughout Europe. Before the Corsican was even carted off to St Helena, seeds of language-based nationalism were sprouting everywhere. Your speech expressed your race.

It was a terrible idea, but a better one for organizing Europe in the wake of the fall of the French monarchy (which would be echoed almost everywhere in Europe throughout the next one hundred fifty years) does not appear to have been on offer. Because, in Central Europe especially, millions of people were governed by authorities who did not speak their language, nationalism became the antidote to what was now denounced as foreign oppression.

This is not to suggest that, prior to 1789, all men were brothers. At a popular level, almost everybody hated the French, because the French sat right in the middle of Europe and were immensely rich (if also immensely wasteful). Having been defeated in their foolish attempt to conquer most of France, hundreds of years earlier, the English particularly loathed the French. But they also hated the Spanish, their newer rivals in the quest for empire. The French despised the Austrians — marrying an Austrian princess to a future king of France was perhaps the worst mistake in the entire history of French diplomacy. Und so weiter. The prehistoric hostility to folks living on the other side of the hill persisted everywhere. But these tensions were more like the feelings that run among today’s European football fans than the insane hubris that nationalism would spark. Before nationalism, everyone acknowledged the obligation to play by the same rules. After nationalism, the Nazis believed that they played by different rules, not because they were better at the game but because they were too good for it.

We would all be much better off without nationalism, patriotism, and all such swollen sentiments that find no natural expression in ordinary human life. We are all local creatures, with local allegiances, unless we are not, in which case our allegiances are not of a higher, more generalized order but simply vacant.

The real problem in Europe, however, isn’t the centrifugal force of national sovereignty. It’s the condescension of of disingenuous meritocrats. If their experiment in European union fails, it will have been largely their own doing.

Why didn’t they slap down Boris Johnson when they had the chance?

Bon week-end à tous!