Harvard University Press Blog

Cicadas Cicadas Cicadas

2013-05-15T11:15:25-04:00

It’s just about cicada time here on the East Coast, when millions (billions?) of these strange, noisy creatures will make their way up through the dirt, looking for love. They’ve been waiting down there in wingless nymph form, feeding on the dilute sap of plant roots while they undergo the longest juvenile developmental period of any insect. When the ground reaches 64 degrees and they emerge, outnumbering humans hundreds-to-one and nearly deafening us for our troubles, well, it’s gonna get a bit freaky. Not for nothing did the colonists at Plymouth in 1634 dub them locusts, despite little resemblance to the Biblical grasshoppers.

As entomologist May Berenbaum assures, though, there’s nothing to worry about. “It’s not like these hordes of cicadas suck blood or zombify people,” she says. It’s just such mistaken attribution of outlandish abilities that inspired Berenbaum’s “modern bestiary,” The Earwig’s Tail. She’d come to realize, she writes in the book’s Preface, that “the majority of the most bandied-about insect facts familiar to the general public aren’t facts at all.” In The Earwig’s Tail she takes on twenty-six of “the most firmly entrenched modern mythical insects,” and, in many cases, leaves us with an even more fantastic truth.

When she gets to cicadas, Berenbaum turns to politics and Washington D.C., where the emergence of “Brood X” (the various populations of cicadas run on different schedules and are given roman numeral names) coincides with a presidential election every sixty-eight years, most recently in 2004.

Here’s Berenbaum:

First to take metaphorical advantage of the infestation was the Republican National Committee. On May 14, 2004, at the height of the emergence, 700,000 registered Republicans received an email attachment from the Republican National Committee. A narrator intoned, “Every 17 years, cicadas emerge, morph out of their shell, and change their appearance. The shells they leave behind are the only evidence they were here. Like a cicada, Senator Kerry would like to shed his Senate career and morph into a fiscal conservative, a centrist Democrat opposed to taxes, strong on defense . . . But, he leaves his record behind . . . when the cicadas emerge, they make a lot of noise. But they always revert to form, before disappearing again.” The voiceover accompanies a time-lapse film of a cicada eclosing and expanding its wings and ends with an animated cicada morphing into John Kerry.

The Kerry campaign’s retort? “Maybe, if given another 17 years, President Bush could create a job in Ohio.” Cicada burn.

Cicadas also had a cameo in presidential politics in 1902, Berenbaum reports, when President Theodore Roosevelt “was practically drowned out while trying to give a Memorial Day speech defending national policy to impose ‘orderly freedom’ in the Philippines.” The experience of inundation seems not to have adversely affected his feelings on colonialism.

We’ll wait to see what metaphors are made of this coming return.

The Fracturing of the American Corporate Elite

2013-05-10T10:56:03-04:00

Like many Americans, Mark Mizruchi had grown increasingly distressed by the state of our politics. He was unhappy with the gridlock in Washington, the inability to accomplish even the most routine tasks of government, and the intransigence of those who have managed to hold the nation hostage to their extreme views. In trying to understand the problem’s roots, Mizruchi came to see the issue as a lack of national leadership from a group that had previously played a major and constructive role in developing solutions to new problems and keeping American politics mostly centric: the leaders of large American corporations. His goal in The Fracturing of the American Corporate Elite, new this month, is to explain how this relatively cohesive group emerged, what sustained it, how it declined, and the consequences of its demise. In the book excerpt and video below, he outlines his argument.

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I argue that the leaders of the largest American corporations, to whom I refer as the American corporate elite, once played an important role in addressing, if not resolving, the needs of the larger society. Since the 1970s, the members of this group have largely abandoned their concern with issues beyond those of their individual firms. This abandonment, I suggest, is one of the primary causes of the economic, political, and social disarray that American society has experienced in the twenty-first century. In earlier decades, the United States had a corporate elite that, however imperfect, was willing to see beyond the short-term interests of the firms that its members directed. Today this is no longer the case. The corporate elite that exists today is a disorganized, largely ineffectual group. Paradoxically, I argue, individual American corporations have more political power in the early twenty-first century than at any time since the 1920s. As a group, they are fragmented, however. Unlike their predecessors in earlier decades, they are either unwilling or unable to mount any systematic approach to addressing even the problems of their own community, let alone those of the larger society.

In this book I examine the rise and fall of the American corporate elite, from its pinnacle in the 1945–1973 period, through its period of turmoil and transition in the 1970s and 1980s, to its present state, in which the group is only a shadow of its former self. I argue that the decline of this elite is a significant source of the current crisis of American democracy and a major cause of the predicament in which the twenty-first-century United States finds itself.

In making this claim, I do not want to imply that the corporate elite of the postwar period was uniformly altruistic or public spirited. On the contrary, business leaders during that age were strongly protective of their interests, as they have been in every historical era. Nor am I suggesting that postwar America was a society that we should attempt to emulate in every respect. Social and cultural norms have become far less oppressive since that time. Our society today is far more tolerant and accepting of difference than it was half a century ago. Innovation, especially in the area of information technology, has improved peoples’ lives in many, albeit not all, respects. Consumer products in general are more plentiful and less expensive than in earlier years. There is no returning to the past, nor should this be an ideal to pursue. Yet for all its problems, the postwar United States had a number of qualities that are lacking today: an expanding economy with a high level of upward mobility, declining inequality, a relatively high level of security, a well-functioning political system, and a widespread belief that problems were solvable. And underpinning these forces was a corporate elite that provided a degree of leadership and vision that are not in evidence today.

In the postwar period, a small segment of leaders emerged in the American business community. This was not the first time that American business leaders had organized. In the early 1900s, a group of business leaders formed the National Civic Federation, in which they developed a series of suggestions for dealing with some of the deleterious consequences of the rise of corporate capitalism at the turn of the twentieth century. The postwar effort to address major national concerns was equally serious. The leaders of this group sat atop the largest firms and held positions in multiple organizations, which allowed them to see the world from a relatively cosmopolitan perspective. This breadth led these elites to exhibit a moderate approach to politics that included limited acceptance of both labor unions and government regulation. They participated actively in policy-making organizations, such as the CED [Committee for Economic Development], and they played a significant role in formulating ideas that were later adopted as national policy, in both Republican and Democratic administrations. These people were not liberals. Like the heads of smaller firms, they too were largely opposed to organized labor and had major reservations about government intervention in the economy. The heads of the leading firms tended to hold a more pragmatic approach toward strategy, however. They also believed that it was in their long-term interest to have a well-functioning society.

Three forces, I argue, contributed to the moderate, pragmatic approach adopted by the postwar corporate elite: a relatively active and highly legitimate state, a well-organized and relatively powerful labor movement, and the financial community, which served as a source of interfirm consensus. The state provided regulation of the economy through its taxing and spending policies, its provision of welfare expenditures (which helped it create effective demand for the products of American industry), and its regulation of business with agencies such as the Federal Trade Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission. Because of the enormous success that the American economy experienced during the postwar period, a Keynesian consensus emerged among national political leaders and economic policy makers. The corporate elite largely accepted this consensus. The labor movement provided a series of constraints on firms’ actions as well as benefits for the firms. The unions’ industry-wide presence in core sectors of the economy helped maintain a relatively stable price structure, which prevented destructive competition. Union leaders also worked with corporations to ensure that more radical elements within their ranks were kept at bay. Management assisted in this effort by agreeing to provide relatively high wages and benefits in exchange for labor peace, an agreement that has been referred to as the postwar “capital-labor accord.” The banks, meanwhile, because of their concern with the economy as a whole, played a role in mediating disputes across sectors. Bank boards of directors became meeting places for the chief executives of leading nonfinancial corporations, which helped to generate and maintain a broad consensus on issues of business-wide concern. The banks also occasionally played a role in disciplining individual capitalists who engaged in erratic or deviant behavior.

This situation prevailed from the mid-1940s until the early 1970s. Although this period was characterized by significant social turmoil, it was also a time of sustained economic growth, the expansion of the middle class, and an increasing level of economic equality. The relative strength and legitimacy of both organized labor and the state was not only a consequence of the moderate orientation of the corporate elite. These institutions, along with the financial community, also acted as constraints on business, compelling them to maintain their accommodationist perspective. Corporate leaders fought with unions and government during this period, sometimes fiercely, but they accepted the existence and permanence of these institutions, deciding it was better to work with them than to mount a full-scale assault. This approach was reflected in the attitudes of the corporate elite. By 1971, a majority of top corporate executives expressed support for both Keynesian deficit spending and the idea that the government should step in to provide full employment if the private economy was incapable of doing so.

This system began to unravel during the 1970s. High government spending levels, the emergence of foreign competition, and the energy crisis of 1973 created an unprecedented combination of high inflation and unemployment, which called into question the Keynesian economic orthodoxy of the time. The aftermath of Vietnam and Watergate created a legitimacy crisis among major American institutions, including business. The emergence of new regulatory agencies, most notably the Environmental Protection Agency and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which were instituted over the opposition of many corporations, turned many businesses against regulation.

As a result of these crises, corporate elites saw business as embattled, and vulnerable. In response, they mounted a counteroffensive, a full-scale mobilization in which corporations, large and small, found an increasingly unified voice. Business organizations, including the newly formed Business Roundtable, began to attack government regulation. They also became increasingly aggressive in fighting unions. By the time of Ronald Reagan’s election as president, labor was already in significant retreat, and after Reagan’s inauguration in 1981, regulations were more loosely enforced.

As we moved into the 1980s, however, a paradox became evident. Corporate interests had been extremely successful in weakening the labor movement and thwarting government regulation. In winning this war, however, it became apparent that organized collective action within the business community was no longer necessary. As a result, the corporate elite began to fragment. This fragmentation was hastened by the decline of commercial banks, a group whose boards of directors had served as meeting places for the heads of the leading nonfinancial corporations. As the banks dropped from the center of the corporate network, the cohesiveness of the elite began to decline as well. Companies began to go their own way, increasingly pursuing relatively minor firm and industry-specific issues, as exemplified by the Tax Reform Act of 1986, in which a plethora of individual and small groups of firms lobbied separately for specific provisions to the law. By the late 1980s, the relatively cohesive, relatively pragmatic character of the American corporate elite had begun to disappear. The corporate elite had, ironically, been “killed” by its own success.

Is the Financial Crisis Over?

2013-05-08T10:20:12-04:00

Gérard Duménil and Dominique Lévy are the authors of The Crisis of Neoliberalism, which is new in paperback this spring. The book examines the financial crisis in the context of neoliberal globalization, arguing that repairing our economy will require a dramatic reversal of the free market ethos that’s enveloped most of the world over the past few decades. Below, the authors take stock of the movement toward “recovery” since their book’s original 2011 publication.

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The last quarter of 2008 was a key period in the progress of the current crisis in the United States and Europe. It marked the culmination of the financial component of the crisis, with the failure of major institutions in the United States, the beginning of the “great contraction,” and the export of the crisis worldwide. The trough was reached in the second quarter of 2009, a 4.6 percent fall of GDP in the United States (from the second quarter of 2008 to the second quarter of 2009), and 5.1 percent in the euro zone (from the first quarter of 2008 to the second quarter of 2009). The slow recovery of output that followed is commonly interpreted as the final stage of “the crisis.” This optimistic assessment is, we believe, erroneous.

A first observation is that the recovery was obtained at the cost of dramatic government deficits, 8.6 percent of GDP in the United States (for the third quarter of 2012), much less in the euro zone, but still 4.4 percent. Beginning with the contraction of output, then, the crisis entered a second phase, the “crisis of sovereign debts.” The growth of these debts peaked at 40 percent (annualized rate) in the third quarter of 2008 in the United States, and 18 percent in the third quarter of 2009 in the euro zone. At the end of 2012, in the United States, this growth rate was still larger than 10 percent, much more than the growth rate of GDP.

But the worst of everything is that the distinct paths in the two regions testify to the relationship between the levels of deficits and the levels of growth rates. Only government deficits can support demand levels. In the United States, consumer borrowing (which sustains the consumer spending that drives so much of the economy) is still nearly negligible compared to the average 8.9 percent of GDP it represented between 2003 and 2006, and the rate of default in households’ mortgages did not significantly decline from its peak value. In Europe, government deficits are much lower and a deflationary policy is conducted to further reduce them. Thus, instead of the low growth rates (1.5 percent for 2012) in the United States, the euro zone is entering into recession (-0.9 percent in 2012). Practically the entire zone is affected. Unemployment is soaring and the political situation is deteriorating. Overall, the alternative is between the U.S. model thus far, namely the preservation of (poor) growth rates thanks to record expansion rates of sovereign debts or, the euro model, the contraction of deficits and the new plunge.

At a broader level of analysis, the mistake in the conduct of policies must be sought in the diagnosis concerning the nature of the crisis. The crisis is a “structural crisis,” such as those affecting the course of capitalism about every forty years, namely the late 19th century, the Great Depression, the 1970s, and the crisis of neoliberalism. Its fundamental causes are the strategy of upper classes (large capitalist owners and high managers) to increase their powers and incomes. The main aspects of these new trends are: new forms of management targeted to stock markets, deregulation, financialization, and globalization. Europe followed a similar path. But one must add here the trajectory of disequilibria of the U.S. economy (the growing deficit of foreign trade, the financing of the economy by the rest of the world, and the exploding debt of households).

In the absence of treatment of the causes of the crisis in the old centers, only the stimulation of demand by government deficits is capable of preserving current levels of activity on domestic territory. The bonanza of new technologies during the second half of the 1990s was ephemeral and the green technologies will probably not do the job. The boosting of mortgage loans in the United States after 2000 had disastrous effects, and cannot be repeated. Treating a structural crisis by deficits is possible for a number of years, but these policies cannot be continued if no treatment is given to the underlying causes of the crisis.

On both sides of the Atlantic, the effects of the deflationary spiral will be gradually felt, to the point where labor costs would be so depressed (given the increase of these costs in other regions of the world, like China), that a halt would be put to the haemorrhage of capital toward the rest of the world. This is the unscrupulous neoliberal long-run objective of upper classes. Independently of the cost for popular classes in the old countries of the center and the nature of the new society such trends prepare, there is still a long way to go. And, we hope, the duration and severity of the process will render it unsustainable at some point.

Who Pays the Price for the College Party Scene?

2013-05-06T10:32:04-04:00

After a five-year study of a flagship Midwestern public university, sociologists Elizabeth A. Armstrong and Laura T. Hamilton found that the social and academic infrastructure of the school seemed to prioritize a particular type of affluent, socially oriented student. A “party pathway”—built around an implicit agreement between the university and students to demand little of each other—was impossible to avoid, and for students who couldn’t or wouldn’t join the fun it served as a constant reminder of their place as outsiders. Armstrong and Hamilton’s Paying for the Party: How College Maintains Inequality exposes the unmet obligations and misplaced priorities of public universities whose students leave college with so little to show for it. Below, the authors contrast the experience of thriving on the party pathway with the far more common experience of being failed by it.

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Naomi and Karen started college the same year at a mid-tier public university in the Midwest. They lived on the same residence hall floor and shared a taste for partying. Both majored in sports broadcasting. Neither performed well academically, earning GPAs below 3.0. Yet Naomi graduated in four years, moved to New York City, and quickly secured a desirable entry-level job in a media firm. Karen, on the other hand, had changed her major to education, transferred to a regional branch campus, and was struggling to graduate within six years.

In an era of skyrocketing tuition and concern over the value of college, these divergent outcomes matter. In Paying for the Party: How College Maintains Inequality, we trace a dormitory floor of fifty-three women, including Naomi and Karen, from the day they arrived on campus to a year after they were slated to graduate. The women were similar in many respects; however, they came from a wide range of social class backgrounds.

Based on this research we argue that how this university—and many other large state schools—organizes the college experience systematically disadvantages all but the affluent. The university supported a robust “party pathway”—a social and academic infrastructure with a powerful Greek system at its heart, and an array of easy majors on offer. Naomi—an out-of-state student whose father owned a successful business—was well served by the party pathway. Karen—a middle-class woman from in-state—was not.

Naomi and Karen—like one third of the incoming freshman class—were assigned to a “party dorm.” Little partying took place in the heavily-policed residence halls, but party dorms served as a pipeline into the under-aged party scene housed in the Greek system, which both women joined.

Naomi and Karen both partied hard. When asked about the 2.45 GPA she earned one semester, Naomi attributed it to hooking up, going out a lot, and “just being lazy.” Karen started college as an elementary education major. By her sophomore year, Karen’s social life had taken a toll on her grades: “I did really bad in that math class, the first elementary ed math class.” She switched her major from education to sports broadcasting, following the example of an affluent, socially-oriented floormate. Karen explained, “I would have never thought about that. And so I saw hers, and I was like that’s something that I really like…. I could be a sportscaster on ESPN.”

Karen’s experience underscores the allure of “easy majors,” which are associated with a high GPA and low levels of learning. Other examples include communications, fashion, tourism, recreation, and numerous “business-lite” majors. These majors allow students time to socialize. Career success depends largely on traits developed outside the classroom, such as aesthetic taste, appearance, and personality, and class-based resources—including family ties to industry insiders.

The parents of wealthy women on the floor made phone calls to land their children plum internships and jobs in big cities. Naomi’s sister assisted her in securing her unpaid summer internship in New York City in a high profile media firm. Naomi’s parents paid the bills for her summer in the city. Lacking such ties, Karen could not even get an unpaid internship with the Triple-A baseball team near her home. Frustrated and worried about the need to relocate for a job, Karen attempted to return to elementary education. Her low GPA forced a transfer to a regional college in her fourth year. Because sports broadcasting classes did not fulfill any of her requirements, it took her six years to graduate.

For Naomi, the academic side of college was so irrelevant that her parents—to whom she talked every day—discovered her major in the graduation program. She suffered no ill-effects of her low academic effort—as her social savvy, network ties, and internship experiences secured her employment after college. She was well aware that her parents could and would support her indefinitely; indeed, they continued to subsidize her rent in New York City. Naomi exemplifies the student whom the party pathway is set up to serve.

The dominance of the party pathway at MU was bad for Karen. The structure of social and academic life was not a good fit for her needs. Her story is illustrative of just how poorly flagship state schools like MU serve many of their students. Far more women resembled Karen than Naomi. Most students need the skills, credentials, and training that college offers.

While the party pathway has always been a part of large public universities, large cuts to state funding for higher education have exacerbated the problem: schools like this one have been forced to raise tuition and recruit students who can pay—particularly those from out-of-state. To remain solvent, mid-tier publics have become even more attuned to the agendas of the socially oriented offspring of the affluent.

The situation is unlikely to change without greater federal and state funding of higher education. Public institutions that are forced to rely on tuition and alumni donations will increasingly cater to the most affluent of students, at the cost of those whom such institutions are thought to serve—that is, in-state residents of modest means. Lacking a large-scale public reinvestment in postsecondary education, we can expect to see continued growth of the chasm between what the majority of today’s college students need and what most four-year public institutions offer.

A Look Ahead to Fall

2013-05-03T13:19:16-04:00

Okay, it’s only just barely started pretending to be spring here in New England, which means our handsome fall catalog is out and about. It’s a strong list for political and moral philosophy, led off by Martha Nussbaum’s Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice, and Ronald Dworkin’s final book, Religion without God. Howard Eiland and Michael Jennings, who’ve done so much to bring Walter Benjamin’s writings to English-language readers, now offer the first full critical biography of Benjamin in any language. The Falling Sky is the remarkable story of the endangered Brazilian Yanomami people, told by a shaman who’s become their global ambassador. Estelle Freedman documents how America’s changing definition of rape has depended on dynamics of political power and social privilege. John Lukacs gives us A Short History of the Twentieth Century. And that gets us through page nine.

Won’t you have a look?

Empire, 2000

2013-05-01T10:06:17-04:00

“Empire is materializing before our very eyes.” So begins Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire, one of the 100 significant works we’ve chosen to highlight as we celebrate our centennial. You can read an excerpt from Empire at our centennial site, and, below, a look back on the book’s reinvigoration of the left by HUP sales representative John Eklund.

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I’ve been representing university press books for fifteen years now and I’ve noticed two kinds of scholarship.

One approach tackles a big subject by nibbling away at the edges, hoping to find the loose strand that will unravel the whole project. Every season we publish many books of this type and I love them for their patient, long-term, sometimes-stealthy style of argument.

But the other kind of book I enjoy selling is the full-blown, frontal assault, big idea book. These are scarcer, but when they happen it’s as if you can feel the unacknowledged givens, our invisible social and political assumptions, shift beneath your feet. Like the writings of Herbert Marcuse in the late sixties, which were anxiously awaited and debated with relish, everyone who cares about social progress has to grapple with books of this sort when they appear. Such a book was the 2000 cri de coeur by an Italian revolutionary and an American scholar, Empire.

A decade before its release, the non-capitalist world collapsed and evaporated. Even committed leftists sat shiva for socialism, and the ideological cheerleaders of global empire gleefully declared the case closed. The triumph of market capitalism seemed complete.

But along came Hardt and Negri to argue that the diffusion of power we’ve come to know as globalization is not necessarily the savior of capital but its gravedigger; that Marx was right, there is a forward momentum to history, and that it arcs toward throwing off oppression; and, perhaps most surprisingly for readers of left criticism accustomed to turgid, joyless polemics, that the rebuilding of a revolutionary movement can be accomplished in a spirit of romance and optimism. In the beautiful final pages of Empire, we are warned “against sadness.”

But wait! What’s really new and big about this argument? Aren’t Hardt & Negri simply riffing on an old and very well known ideology? What’s really being overturned? What’s staler than the assorted leftovers of a failed worldview?

For one thing, to talk about class struggle in the language of Marxism a decade ago was a profoundly novel approach, and a big idea. It still is. It’s a measure of how deeply marginalized Marxist discourse had become that Empire was received with such enthusiasm on the Left, even by critics who tore into aspects of the work. For a good long while it was the book that critics of every political bent had to weigh in on.

For another thing, one of the main threads of the Hardt & Negri argument, which they’ve pursued through two additional volumes, is the need to re-assess and truly understand the changes wrought in the composition of the working-class worldwide. This is a big idea indeed. Twenty-first century capital roams the world crossing national borders at will, while unfettered border-crossing by labor is criminalized. The definition of democracy itself has been twisted to incorporate a regime’s attitude toward allowing corporations free rein. Nationalized ownership of resources is taken as a sign of oppression, private control by foreign owners as freedom.

Hardt & Negri propose an antidote. The key to everything, they argue, is to acknowledge the demise of the industrial working class, and to accurately characterize the new one. As they put it, “the proletariat is not what it used to be, but that does not mean that it has vanished.” Though class struggle is a very old idea, it’s jarring to hear it respectfully invoked as an analytical tool rather than wielded as an epithet. Whether they are right about the nature of the contemporary working class strikes me as one of the most important starting points facing anyone interested in social change. It’s a very big idea.

By now it must be obvious that I sympathize with Hardt & Negri’s overall critique, while not agreeing with (or even understanding) every particular.

When I was a bookseller my mentor David Schwartz used to forbid booksellers from spouting politics to customers. “Let the books you sell do your talking,” he’d say. And that’s been my approach to being a book rep. Harvard University Press has bravely published some remarkable political texts over the years. I cherish my 1958 copy of Trotsky’s Diary in Exile: 1935. But the beauty of working for a press like HUP is that each season’s new offerings run the ideological gamut. There are plenty of titles across the political and economic spectrum. Though some make arguments I would question, I represent them with professionalism and enthusiasm.

But when an editor has the foresight to sign a thrilling utopian manifesto, a challenge to the status quo at a time when a lazy received wisdom is more entrenched than ever, it’s worth celebrating. This was and is a book that I imagine not just pleasing a reader but changing the world, and it’s a special privilege to pitch it. With joy, and without sadness.

Identity Construction and Cultural Madness

2013-04-25T12:08:21-04:00

It sometimes seems as if each day brings a new raft of articles proclaiming yet another biological or genetic explanation for human behavior and activity. To Liah Greenfeld, that barrage is just a new bubble, and in Mind, Modernity, Madness: The Impact of Culture on Human Experience, she does her best to burst it. While not entirely dismissing biological factors in mental illness, Greenfeld argues that the phenomenon that was for a long time called simply “madness”—today’s schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and major depression—is actually a symptom of modernity, an effect of our cultural environment.

To Greenfeld, “madness” is a disease not of the brain but of the mind, of consciousness, which itself is a cultural phenomenon, the product of nationalism, a subject on which Greenfeld has now produced a trilogy. As the cultural framework of modernity, nationalism insists on the dignity, creativity, and equality of man, the value of each human life, and the right and capacity for all to construct their own destinies, to love, and to be happy. Psychotic disease, she argues, is fundamentally a malfunction of the “acting self,” experienced as a loss of the familiar self and as a loss of control over one’s physical and mental activity, a response to the cultural demands of selfhood.

From Mind, Modernity, Madness:

The reason for the dysfunction of the acting self lies in the malformation of identity. It is possible that the complexity of the original identity problem (the depth and number of inconsistencies in the relationally constituted self) contributes to the complexity of the disease; for instance, in a case of dissatisfaction with one’s nevertheless clearly experienced identity causing depression, and in a case of no clearly experienced identity, combined with numerous competing possibilities, producing schizophrenia. It is modern culture—specifically the presumed equality of all the members of the society, secularism, and choice in self-definition, implied in the national consciousness—that makes the formation of the individual identity difficult. A member of a nation can no longer learn who or what s/he is from the environment. Instead of prescribing to us our identities, as do religious and in principle nonegalitarian cultures, modern culture leaves us free to decide what to be and to make ourselves. It is this cultural laxity that is anomie—the inability of a culture to provide the individuals within it with consistent guidance (already in the beginning of the twentieth century, recognized by Durkheim as the most dangerous problem of modernity). Paradoxically, in effect placed in control over our destiny, we are far more likely to be dissatisfied with it, than would be a person deprived of any such control: not having a choice, such a person would try to do the best with what one has and enjoy it as far as possible. A truly believing person would also feel s/he has no right to find fault with the order of things created by God, much less to try and change it to one’s own liking—one’s situation in life would be perceived as both unchangeable and just. Conversely, the presence of choice, the very ability to imagine oneself in a position different from one currently occupied or that of one’s parents, and the idea that social orders in general are created by people and may be changed make one suspect that one’s current situation is not the best one can have and to strive for a better one. The more choices one has, the less secure one becomes in the choices already made (by one or for one) and making up one’s mind—literally, in the sense of constructing one’s identity—grows increasingly difficult. It is for this reason that the malformation of the mind—quite independent of any disease of the brain—becomes a mark of nations.

“The sooner a society defines itself as a nation,” she continues, “the sooner diseases of the mind appear in it, and the more dedicated it is to the ideals of equality and liberty, the more perfectly the twin principles of nationalism are realized in social, political, and economic institutions, the more widespread they can be expected to be.” (Greenfeld defines the “nation” as a community of equals and as sovereign, and uses the term “nationalism” in this sense, rather than in the popular connotation of xenophobia, which she notes is but an aspect of certain nationalisms.) So, the older and more egalitarian a nation grows, the more severe mental illness we should expect to see, which actually perfectly tracks the history of schizophrenia and manic-depressive illness from its inception in sixteenth-century England, and subsequent spread through Europe and North America, and its application to groups within societies also explains why in all these nations these diseases first and most gravely affect “the strata whose possibilities of self-realization are least limited and whose members face the largest number of choices.” It explains as well why, despite the proliferation of modern pharmaceutical options, the prevalence of mental illness in the United States continues to rise. Madness, Greenfeld writes, is “the other side of the coin, a proof that, as with most things in life, benefits are usually associated with costs.”

Mind, Modernity, Madness—a long, thorough presentation of an argument whose complexity is done little justice here by such brief summary—ends with a surprising note of synergy between Greenfeld’s argument and Gish Jen’s recent Tiger Writing: Art, Culture, and the Interdependent Self. Jen, the daughter of Chinese immigrants, explains her understanding of Western culture as far more focused on individualism, independence, and originality than Asian cultures, which are generally more concerned with context and interdependence. She relates that distinction through her own upbringing, during which she says she “was not encouraged to think of myself as a unique individual, whose uniqueness is really a very important thing. Quite the contrary.”

And here’s Greenfeld:

The inexorable rise of China, which is very much on the American mind today, brings to mind that persistent “anomaly” in the findings of Western epidemiologists, puzzling them since the early days of their profession: the remarkably low rates of the very kind of mental disease that ravages the West in Asia. Fear not: it is not the relative absence of madness that makes China rise (though it will certainly help it not to fall). But this still leaves the question: what makes these, in some cases definitely modern, in all others modernizing with astonishing rapidity, societies, all embracing nationalism and implementing its principles of secularism, egalitarianism, and popular sovereignty at least as successfully as Europe did in the nineteenth century, immune to the modern mental disease? Why don’t the orienting principles of nationalism disorient the Orient? Would monotheism and logic have anything to do with this? Could the root of the problem (not its cause, perhaps, but a necessary condition) lie deeper than nationalism, reaching to the very foundation of our civilization? Even a most tentative answer to this question would be premature at present. But it is clear where I am led by the great forces that form our projects: to a comparative study of civilizations.

Perhaps Jen’s take on Eastern cultures as somehow less demanding of individual identity formation would be a good place to start.

Launch of the Digital Public Library of America

2013-04-18T11:37:30-04:00

The Digital Public Library of America launches today, having gone from concept to concrete more swiftly than anyone could have hoped. As has been envisioned from the beginning, the DPLA is “an open, distributed network of comprehensive online resources that draws on the nation’s living heritage from libraries, universities, archives, and museums in order to educate, inform, and empower everyone in the current and future generations.” The DPLA begins with an already-impressive array of materials, but has even bolder ambitions, along with an encouraging concern with sustainability.

No individual has been as important to the DPLA’s trajectory as Harvard’s University Librarian (and many-time HUP author) Robert Darnton, who has tracked the project’s progress in a series of articles for the New York Review of Books. In his most recent, he recaps the initiative’s brief history and explains its intentions:

How to think of it? Not as a great edifice topped with a dome and standing on a gigantic database. The DPLA will be a distributed system of electronic content that will make the holdings of public and research libraries, archives, museums, and historical societies available, effortlessly and free of charge, to readers located at every connecting point of the Web. To make it work, we must think big and begin small. At first, the DPLA’s offering will be limited to a rich variety of collections—books, manuscripts, and works of art—that have already been digitized in cultural institutions throughout the country. Around this core it will grow, gradually accumulating material of all kinds until it will function as a national digital library.

Darnton goes on to detail a DPLA-affiliated project that is particularly exciting for us here at the Press:

At one time or other, nearly every student comes in contact with a poem by Emily Dickinson, who probably qualifies as America’s favorite poet. But Dickinson’s poems are especially problematic. Only a few of them, horribly mangled, were published in her lifetime.

As Darnton notes, the manuscript copies of Dickinson’s poems “pose important puzzles, because they contain quirky punctuation, capitalization, spacing, and other touches that have profound implications for their meaning.” The originals, which are held in a few invaluable collections—notably at Amherst College Library, the Boston Public Library, and Harvard’s Houghton Library—have now been digitized and combined with printed editions edited by Thomas H. Johnson in 1955 and by Ralph W. Franklin in 1981, both of which are jewels of HUP’s own catalog. The manuscripts and printed poems will be brought together with a wealth of other supplementary documentation to create an Emily Dickinson Archive. Brigham Young University has also partnered with Amherst College, the BPL, Harvard, HUP, and the DPLA in this project that will greatly expand access to our collective knowledge of one of the country’s great literary icons while also inspiring new scholarship and discourse on her life and work.

The Copley branch of the BPL—the first large free municipal library in the United States—was to host a gala launch for the DPLA today. The Copley library is now at the center of a crime scene, though, directly beside the terrible and tragic Boston Marathon explosions, and so today’s events have been cancelled. In his statement on the cancellation, DPLA Executive Director Dan Cohen called the building of a new library “one of the greatest examples of what humans can do together to extend the light against darkness,” and the site’s launch will proceed today as planned. An even larger event to properly celebrate the creation of the DPLA is now in the works for this fall.

A Theory of Justice, 1971

2013-04-15T10:48:31-04:00

In 1971 Harvard University Press published several books of unusual importance, including E. O. Wilson’s The Insect Societies (his first book with the Press) and the landmark Notable American Women, Volumes 1-3. That year also saw the publication of John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice, one of the most influential works in our history, and one of the 100 significant works we’ve selected to commemorate our centennial. Below, HUP Executive Editor-at-Large Ian Malcolm considers the book’s initial impact and enduring significance.

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John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice has sold well over three hundred thousand copies since its publication in 1971. It’s an astonishing number for any academic book, let alone a 600-page work of abstract and uncompromising philosophy. It’s a rare book, though, that has had such a transformative effect on its field. Reviewers immediately recognised the book as a masterpiece, the most significant work in political philosophy since the nineteenth century, and it has been indispensable reading ever since. Its future looks assured too: in a 2010 poll, philosophers voted Rawls the contemporary most likely to be read in a hundred years. Not bad for a book that Rawls thought would be of interest only to a small circle of colleagues.

When Rawls (1921–2002) wrote the book, political philosophy was in a moribund state. It was dominated by old utilitarian ideas about achieving the greatest good for the greatest number, with Marxism running a distant second. There had been no important systematic works in the field for decades. A Theory of Justice, a comprehensive defence of liberal egalitarianism, galvanized the subject. It did so in part by returning to the social contract tradition that utilitarianism had displaced, a tradition according to which political legitimacy arises from some sort of agreement between governors and the governed. But the book was no mere variation on the tradition, a modest reworking of Locke, Rousseau, or Kant. Rawls drew on the resources of modern analytic philosophy to take, step by careful step, a new approach to the moral foundations of political life, working out the implications of a thought experiment about the kind of society people would design if they had no idea where in that society they would end up. A society designed under such a “veil of ignorance,” he wrote, would guarantee that “each person possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override.” Every person would have the right to as much liberty as is compatible with the liberty of others. Social and economic arrangements would be designed to benefit everyone: inequalities would be acceptable only if they are unavoidable in a system that, overall, raises the conditions of the worst off.

Rawls made this case with exceptional creativity, thoroughness, and with quiet moral conviction. Since 1971, his ideas have inspired hundreds of books and thousands of articles, and his liberal egalitarian perspective has become almost the default in mainstream political philosophy. Reflecting the book’s centrality, Rawls’s Harvard colleague Robert Nozick remarked soon after its publication, “Political philosophers must now either work within Rawls's theory or explain why not.”

Nozick himself is the most famous example of someone who explained “why not,” writing his Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974) as a major critique from the libertarian right. Others have criticized Rawls from socialist or communitarian perspectives, or out of frustration with his abstract methodology—Gerald Cohen, Michael Walzer, Charles Taylor, and Raymond Geuss among the most prominent. Others, friendlier to Rawls’s ideas, have lamented that for all their academic influence they have had no discernible impact on actual politics.

The apparent lack of political influence may have disappointed Rawls. He was a veteran of some of the worst fighting in the Pacific theatre in World War II, a severe critic of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and when he developed his ideas after the war and in the turbulence of the 1960s, one of his aims was to find a way to contain political violence. Indeed, he wrote that it was one of the purposes of political philosophy in general to take the edge off political fanaticism, to help explain why our political institutions, imperfect as they may be, are not entirely arbitrary or uniformly oppressive.

It may be the case, though, that A Theory of Justice has done more practical good than critics suggest. If we haven’t done better (yet) to achieve the kind of society Rawls envisioned, his extraordinary intellectual influence and the generosity of spirit underlying his work have played a part in deflecting us from worse alternatives. And it is certainly no small achievement to have permanently and significantly changed the world of ideas.

Consider the Cuttlefish

2013-04-11T10:29:02-04:00

In the following excerpt from Concealing Coloration in Animals, new this month, Judy Diamond and Alan B. Bond describe the amazingly adaptive camouflage of the cuttlefish.

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Concealment is often at least as much an effect of pattern as of color. Animal coloration usually appears as distinctive markings like the narrow stripes on grassland birds and insects, the spots on jungle cats, the leaf-sized patches of muted color on animals of the forest floor, or the fine mottled speckles on sandpipers and bottom-dwelling fishes. Such patterns echo the texture of the environment, matching the animal’s surroundings in the size and shape of color patches, as well as in the particular hues and intensities of coloration. To envision how pattern contributes to concealment, think of a digital image of an animal against its background. The image is composed of pixels of specified colors, and adjacent pixels that are similar in color will appear to the eye as patches of varying size. How well the animal blends into its surroundings is a function of the match between the color of the patches in the background and those on the animal, but blending in is also affected by the relative sizes of the patches, regardless of their color. Animals process these two kinds of visual information, color and patch size, in separate parts of their nervous system, and the information is subsequently integrated to assess the degree of resemblance to the background.

How animals integrate the information about color and patch size is most impressively illustrated by cuttlefish. Cuttlefish, which are free-swimming relatives of octopus and squid, are masters at generating patterns to match their environment. They have large, complex, sensitive eyes and a sophisticated control system that allows them to rapidly modify the patterns they display. When they detect changes in their surroundings, they can change the arrangement of light and dark patches on their body accordingly. At the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole in Massachusetts, Roger Hanlon studied how cuttlefish create their remarkable patterns. In one experiment, Hanlon and his colleagues placed cuttlefish in transparent aquaria on top of complex backgrounds, such as checkerboards, stripes, or spots. They photographed the cuttlefish to determine how well they matched the background patterns, and they timed how rapidly the animals could change from one pattern to another.

The change was immediate. Hanlon and his team found that cuttlefish use three major body pattern types for camouflage: uniform patterns on backgrounds with little or no contrast; mottled patterns on substrates with small, highly contrasting patches like small checkerboards; and disruptive patterns that break up their outline on substrates with high contrast and long, defined edges, like large checkerboards. In the lab, cuttlefish will camouflage on any substrate, natural or artificial, regardless of whether or not there is a predator in the tank.

Hanlon asked whether the cuttlefish had preferences among background types. To ensure that previous experience had no influence in their choice, the cuttlefish were raised in the lab on backgrounds of a solid color. First, the cuttlefish were placed on a substrate that was half white and half uniform gray. In this case, the animals clearly preferred the darker substrate. When they were presented with soft sand versus sand that had been glued to plastic so the animals could not burrow into it, the cuttlefish preferred the soft sand. When cuttlefish were given a choice of three different artificial backgrounds—uniform gray, small black-and-white checkerboard, and large checkerboard—they showed no preferences, and they still showed no preferences when given three natural backgrounds: sand, small shells, and large shells. Subsequent experiments showed that cuttlefish readily integrate multiple cues from a mixed substrate (like shells of different sizes) producing a mixed camouflage pattern.

Cuttlefish are unusual because they generate their own patterns even on backgrounds they have never encountered before, and they can achieve this with lightning speed. They change their color patterns with organs called chromatophores, bags of pigment with muscle fibers radiating out around them. Each chromatophore contains one type of pigment, either dark brown, orange, or yellow. Because the organ operates with muscular contractions, color change in cuttlefish happens as fast as you can snap your fingers. A similar system occurs in most of the cuttlefish’s relatives, including octopuses and squids. Many fish have pattern-matching capabilities, particularly flounders and other flatfish that inhabit sandy ocean bottoms, but their chromatophores work on a different basis and are significantly slower. No other animal has the versatility or speed of pattern matching as the cuttlefish.