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Mathematics

‘The Dance of Number’ Is the Way Forward for Teaching Mathematics in the Classical Christian Tradition

By Terence Gillespie August 13, 2019

I’ve been pouring over James Nickel’s work for the past two months and began vetting his new math curriculum three weeks ago. Since the first four books of his “Dance of Number” arrived I’ve been exploring its structure and going through the lessons. It wasn’t long before deciding it will be the centerpiece of the math education for our boys. I’ll explain why and also present an argument for the title of this article: Nickel’s curriculum is the way forward for teaching mathematics in the classical Christian tradition.

Not Your Father’s Math Textbooks, Please!

My relationship with math textbooks has been no love affair. Whether mathematicians can’t write or clarity is anathema to the profits of their publishers, the words in my books were as clear as mud. That mud trained me to skip right to the examples in the solutions manual (often written by someone else and purchased separately.) Whoever wrote the solutions manual couldn’t play games; they had to list the steps of the derivations. Whatever concepts I managed to grasp were incidental to the derivation steps in the solution manuals.

My “learning process” was devoid of historical context and practical application. Some of the science — made possible by the math — seeped into physics class. However, the only thing beautiful in the whole experience was a GPA that made it possible to get a job.

The Beauty of Math, Revealed

In contrast, Nickel teaches math thoroughly and takes pains to reveal the logic behind the concepts. Math is presented alongside the science, history, theology, and practical applications related to the lesson; and the integration is seamless.

None of the leading contenders for the precalculus stages of mathematics even attempt to do what Nickel has done.

I want our boys to have that keen sense of number you sometimes see in carpenters and engineers. The best way to do that is to provide context, application, and meaning to each building block. James Nickel has done this in beautiful sequence. I’m as excited to teach my sons as to relearn mathematics, myself!

The Way Forward

With the perspective imparted this summer by a slow read of David Hick’s “Norms & Nobility”¹ it seems no risk at all to support Nickel’s curriculum as “The Way Forward.” I also thank Andrew Kern for his distillations of the many terms surrounding the pursuit of Classical Education.²

Hicks defines a classical education as “a spirit of inquiry and a form of instruction concerned with the development of style through language and of conscience through myth.”¹ These are penetrating words but require the context of Hick’s book to unpack and grasp fully.

On the other hand, Kern’s definition is a one-stop-shop:

“A Christian Classical Education is the cultivation of wisdom and virtue by nourishing the soul on truth, goodness, and beauty by means of the seven liberal arts and the four sciences so that, in Christ, the student is enabled to know, glorify, and enjoy God.”²

The Argument for “The Dance…”

On the jacket cover of “The Dance of Number,” Nickel makes lofty promises. He claims his curriculum:

“Teaches mastery of number sense and algebraic syntax.”
- It does. The student also learns how to use an abacus and an improved version of Stoddard’s speed math (having already mastered the abstracts of number.)
“Integrates math themes with history, science, and personalities.”
- It plainly does.
“Coordinates beauty, truth, and goodness with rigor and heuristics.”
- In a math curriculum? Yep.
“Structures mathematics as an interconnected framework, and explores the dynamic interrelatedness of Arithmetic, Algebra, Geometry, Trigonometry, and Science.”
- This is one of Nickel’s passions. He laments of so many students beginning Algebra before mastering Arithmetic. The error is compounded by attempting geometry and trig before learning Algebra. Problem solved in “The Dance …”.
“Brings to light the multiplicities of the perichoretic nature of creation and mathematics.”
- Perichoretic refers to the mutual indwelling nature of the Trinity and is the word that inspired the curriculum’s title. In “Mathematics: Is God Silent?” Nickel traces how impasses in mathematics were overcome by the Christian revelation of the Trinitarian nature of reality. The distinction between Creator and Created — when widely accepted — broke the Platonic spell and paved the way for the technological achievements of the middle-ages (which were anything but “Dark.”)

In short, Nickel’s “Dance” does what no other on the market does; and the classical integration (or interpenetration as James might say) is seamless.

Flipping the Argument

Has any math curriculum you know of even attempted to do what Nickel’s has done?

How do the accomplishments, listed above, compare with the math curriculum deployed at your classical school?

A Whole New World

Do western students know how to use an Abacus? Why not? And what’s the harm in teaching Stoddard’s “Speed Mathematics” (which Nickel further streamlines with Vedic methods) as long as the student has a firm grasp of the fundamentals? These and a seemingly endless stream of surprises are in store for the student. Nickel draws from his 40-year teaching experience and 1400 volume library to show the student the context of the mathematical insights that shape our lives and unify our impression of the Divine Creator.

Nickel’s approach to teaching mathematics can impart that intuitive sense of number you sometimes see in carpenters and engineers. That’s not to say that mathematics is any less abstract than it always has been. But Nickel explicitly reveals its poetry and the stunning natural beauty upholding “The Dance.”

Those with a gift for math will be lit up at the beginning of their study like never before possible. Those less gifted can learn at rest, knowing that a logical and inspiring presentation is in store.

Thoughts on Implementation

This is not an assign-and-forget curriculum; it’ a “hands-on” journey for Teacher and Student to embark on, jointly.

The curriculum is recommended to start at age 12 (through 16). Therefore, a bridge is needed for younger students. Our 11-year-old is ready though we’ll be going through each lesson in tandem.

Nickel recommends the student read through each lesson with the teacher joining in when the student begins the exercises. The lessons are quite accessible but also what one might expect from a curriculum integrating mathematics with history, theology, science, and the beauty of practical applications: Deep with a capital ‘D’.

Until our youngest is ready for “The Dance of Number” we’ll be using Math U See. However, since dad is going through “The Dance …”, in advance, I’ll be able to verbally fill in gaps per Nickel’s framework.

Conclusion

Nickel seems to have used Kern’s definition of a Classical Christian Education as a specification. More surprisingly, his curriculum delivers on that specification. What do you do with something like this and whose first paragraph defines the word “Elohim”?

You’re reading my answer: adopt it as the centerpiece of the mathematics curriculum for your school and tell everyone you know about it!

James Nickel has given us the way forward in Mathematics! For imparting the subject in the classical tradition, there’s not even a close second out there to this monumental achievement.

David Hicks, Norms & Nobility, a Treatise on Education, University Press of America, 1999 ↩
Andrew Kern, Circe Institute’s “Definition of Terms.” ↩

Bank

The Origins of the Deep State in North America

By Guest Post May 10, 2019

by Matthew Ehret

“Two systems are before the world; the one looks to increasing the proportion of persons and of capital engaged in trade and transportation, and therefore to diminishing the proportion engaged in producing commodities with which to trade, with necessarily diminished return to the labor of all; while the other looks to increasing the proportion engaged in the work of production, and diminishing that engaged in trade and transportation, with increased return to all, giving to the laborer good wages, and to the owner of capital good profits… One looks towards universal war; the other towards universal peace. One is the English system; the other we may be proud to call the American system, for it is the only one ever devised the tendency of which was that of elevating while equalizing the condition of man throughout the world.”

-Henry C. Carey (Lincoln’s advisor), Harmony of Interests, 1856

The British Hand Behind the Deep State Today

With the election of Donald Trump in November 2016, it has become apparent for that America isn’t what many thought it was.

Suddenly, for the first time since the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963, there was no longer one America but rather two opposing forces within America itself, and the question was raised “which is the real America and what is it that Trump was re-activating?”

Here was a political leader who wasn’t from the technocratic establishment, and who campaigned to work with Russia and China, end regime change wars, reverse the nation-killing effects of NAFTA, reviving the JFK-era space mission and even discussed restoring Glass Steagall.

A clue to what he chose to represent can be witnessed in his defense of the “American System” when he said “this is the system our Founders wanted. Our greatest American leaders — including George Washington, Hamilton, Jackson, Lincoln — they all agreed that for America to be a strong nation it must also be a great manufacturing nation.”

Soon, it became apparent that this Deep State structure mobilized to stop the re-emergence of the American System was not even American as many had supposed, but rather of a purely British Imperial pedigree and was even caught working against British nationalists such as Jeremy Corbyn. It finally came to light that the British Empire had never gone away after WWII, but had evoked a powerful sleight of hand after FDR’s untimely death in 1945.

How did this happen? By what means and motives did this Deep State arise? Was it always there or were there key moments in history that give us clarity into its origins and how it took over both America and other nations alike?

By approaching history shaped by a battle between British and American systems of social order (which represents much more than merely British or American nations per se), a “master key” to unlock the secrets of Britain’s takeover of America (and Europe) can be found by exploring the strange case of Canada.

What is this “strange partly British/partly American monarchy of the Americas”? At the best of times, it was uplifted by the best constitutional traditions of America cited by Donald Trump above, and at the worst of times, it was a platform to spread British intrigues upon the world exemplified by the Montreal-based assassinations of American System leaders Abraham Lincoln in 1865 and John F. Kennedy in 1963. Today those intrigues are led by such Rhodes Scholars as Chrystia Freeland and the modern Round Table movement of Ben Rowswell who have together played leading roles in the overthrow of Venezuela, the protection of fascists in Ukraine and advance of NATO against Russia and China.

The time has come to drag some skeletons out of the closet.

Lincoln’s American System Goes Global

Canada’s struggle for existence as a sovereign nation has been caught between two opposing views of mankind represented by the British and American System of social organization. As the great economist Henry C. Carey laid out while he was advancing the policy of Abraham Lincoln, the American System was designed to become a global system operating amongst sovereign nations for the progress and mutual benefit of each and all. By the end of the 19^th century, American System thinking was resonating with statesmen and patriots in all corners of the globe who were fed up with the ancient imperial system of British Free Trade that had always strived to maintain a world divided and monopolized. This view for a post-colonial world was exemplified by Lincoln-ally and first Governor of Colorado William Gilpin who described a world united by railways across all continents centered around the Bering Strait rail connection. This was outlined in his widely read 1890 “The Cosmopolitan Railway”.

Although British propagandists had made every attempt to keep the illusion of the sacredness of the British System alive in the minds of its subjects, the undeniable increase of quality of life, and creative thought expressed by the American System everywhere it was applied become too strong to ignore… especially within colonies such as Canada that had long suffered a fragmented, and underdeveloped identity as the price paid for loyalty to the British Empire.

In Germany, the American System-inspired Zollverein (customs union) had not only unified a divided nation but elevated it to a level of productive power and sovereignty which had outpaced the monopoly power of the British East India Company. In Japan, American engineers helped assemble trains funded by a national banking system, and protective tariff during the Meiji Restoration.

In Russia, American System follower Sergei Witte, Transport Minister and close advisor to Czar Alexander II, revolutionized the Russian economy with the American made trains that rolled across the Trans-Siberian Railway. Under the influence of Witte and other American System allies Czar Nicholas II endorsed the Bering Strait rail connection in 1905, though a tragic turn of fate sabotaged it from unfolding.

Not even the Ottoman Empire remained untouched by the inspiration for progress, as the Berlin to Baghdad Railway was begun with the intention of unleashing a bold program of modernization of southwest Asia.

The American System Touches the Canadian Mind

In Canada, admirers of Lincoln and Henry C. Carey found their spokesman in the great American System statesman Isaac Buchanan (1). Buchanan rose to his highest position of political office in the Dominion of Canada when in April 1864, the new MacDonald-Taché Ministry appointed him the President of the Executive Council. This put him in firm opposition to the Imperial agenda of George Brown, and the later Prime Minister John A. Macdonald, of whom he and all patriotic co-thinkers counted as bitter enemies to Canada’s independence and progress. The policy which Buchanan advocated as he rose to higher prominence was outlined in his December 1863 speech:

“The adoption by England for herself of this transcendental principle [Free Trade] has all but lost the Colonies, and her madly attempting to make it the principle of the British Empire would entirely alienate the Colonies. Though pretending to unusual intelligence, the Manchester Schools are, as a class, as void of knowledge of the world as of patriotic principle… As a necessary consequence of the legislation of England, Canada will require England to assent to the establishment of two things: 1^st, an American Zollverein [aka: Customs Union]. 2^nd: Canada to be made neutral territory in time of any war between England and the United States”. (2)

While the customs union modeled on the Zollverein program of American System economist Friedrich List in Germany laid out by Buchanan, was temporarily defeated during the operation known as the Articles of Confederation in 1867, the potential for its re-emergence returned in 1896 with the election of Wilfrid Laurier, Canada’s next Prime Minister. By 1911, the customs union policy advanced by Laurier, who was a devout admirer of Abraham Lincoln, finally came to fruition. Laurier long recognized that Canada’s interests did not reside in the anti-American program of MacDonald which simply tied Canada into greater dependence towards the mother country, but rather with the interests of its southern neighbour. His Reciprocity program proposed to lower protective tariffs with the USA primarily on agriculture, but with the intention to electrify and industrialize Canada, a nation which Laurier saw as supporting 60 million people within two decades. With the collaboration of his close advisors, Adam Shortt, Oscar Skelton and later William Lyon Mackenzie King, Laurier navigated the minefield of his British enemies active throughout the Canadian landscape in the form of the Masonic “Orange Order” of Ontario, and later, the insidious Round Table movement.

While Laurier’s attempts to actualize a true Reciprocity Treaty of 1911 that involved free trade among North American economies united under a protective tariff against British dumping of cheap goods, it would not last, as every resource available to the British run Orange Order and Round Table were activated to ensure the Reciprocity’s final defeat and the downfall of Laurier’s Liberal government and its replacement by the Conservative government of Sir Robert Borden in its stead.(3) Laurier described the situation in Canada after this event:

“Canada is now governed by a junta sitting at London, known as “The Round Table”, with ramifications in Toronto, in Winnipeg, in Victoria, with Tories and Grits receiving their ideas from London and insidiously forcing them on their respective parties.” (4)

Two years before Laurier uttered this warning, the founder of the Round Table movement, Lord Milner wrote to one of his co-conspirators laying out the strategic danger faced by Buchanan and Laurier’s program with America:

“As between the three possibilities of the future: 1. Closer Imperial Union, 2. Union with the U.S. and 3. Independence, I believe definitely that No. 2 is the real danger. I do not think the Canadians themselves are aware of it… they are wonderfully immature in political reflection on the big issues, and hardly realize how powerful the influences are…” (5)

Without understanding either the existential struggle between the two opposing systems related above, or the creation of the Round Table movement by a new breed of British Imperialist as a response to Lincoln’s international victory in the face of the total bankruptcy of the British Empire at the turn of the last century, then no Canadian could honestly ever make sense of what has shaped his or her cultural and political landscape. It is the purpose of this present report to shed a clear light upon some of the principal actors on this stage of universal history with the hope that the reader’s powers of insight may be strengthened such that those necessary powers of judgment required to lead both Canada and the world out of our current plunge into a new dark age may yet occur.

The Round Table Movement: New Racist Breed, Same Racist Species

The Round Table movement served as the intellectual center of the international operations to regain control of the British Empire and took on several incarnations over the 20th century. It worked in tandem with the Coefficients Club, the Fabian Society, and the Rhodes Trust, all of whom witnessed members moving in and out of each other’s ranks. The historian Carrol Quigley, of Georgetown University wrote of this cabal in his posthumously published “Anglo-American Establishment” (6):

“This organization has been able to conceal its existence quite successfully, and many of its most influential members, satisfied to possess the reality rather than the appearance of power, are unknown even to close students of British history. This is the more surprising when we learn that one of the chief methods by which this Group works has been through propaganda.

It plotted the Jameson Raid of 1895; it caused the Boer War of 1899-1902; it set up and controls the Rhodes Trust; it created the Union of South Africa in 1906-1910; it established the South African periodical The State in 1908; it founded the British Empire periodical The Round Table in 1910, and this remains the mouthpiece of the Group; it has been the most powerful single influence in All Souls, Balliol, and New Colleges at Oxford for more than a generation; it has controlled The Times for more than fifty years, with the exception of the three years 1919-1922, it publicized the idea of and the name “British Commonwealth of Nations” in the period 1908-1918, it was the chief influence in Lloyd George’s war administration in 1917-1919 and dominated the British delegation to the Peace Conference of 1919; it had a great deal to do with the formation and management of the League of Nations and of the system of mandates; it founded the Royal Institute of International Affairs in 1919 and still controls it; it was one of the chief influences on British policy toward Ireland, Palestine, and India in the period 1917-1945; it was a very important influence on the policy of appeasement of Germany during the years 1920-1940; and it controlled and still controls, to a very considerable extent, the sources and the writing of the history of British Imperial and foreign policy since the Boer War.” (7)

To understand the pedigree of the Round Table movement as it was “officially” unveiled in 1910 as the ideological shaper of the policies and paradigm of the new “managerial class” of international imperialists dedicated to the salvation of the British Empire under an “Imperial Federation”, it would be necessary to go back a few decades prior, to 1873-74. It was in this year that a young Canadian named George Parkin lectured at Oxford on the subject imperial union as the sacred duty of all Anglo Saxons to advance. Parkin is popularly heralded by Oxford historians as “the man who shifted the mind of England”.

1873-1902 Empire on the Verge of Collapse: Re-organize or Perish

During this same period, a grouping of Imperial intellectuals known as the “X Club” (f. 1865) centering on Thomas Huxley, Matthew Arnold, Herbert Spencer, and Joseph Hooker were assigned the responsibility to overhaul the British Empire’s controlling ideological structures that had proven themselves worn out. Each would specialize in various branches of the sciences and would all promote gradualist interpretations of change to counteract explanations which required creative leaps. This program was applied with the intention of 1) saving the collapsing empire and 2) establishing the foundation of a new scientific religion based upon Charles Darwin’s highly materialistic model of Natural Selection as the explanation for the evolution and differentiation of new species.

As X Club co-founder Herbert Spencer went on to elaborate the system of “social Darwinism” as the logical outgrowth of Darwin’s system into human affairs, the intention behind the propagation of the Darwinian program was never “the enlightenment liberalism in battle against the ignorant dogmas of religion”, as it is so often recounted by popular historians of science. Rather, the “revolution in science” initiated by the X Club was merely the re-packaging of an idea as old as Babylon: The control of the masses by a system of oligarchical rule, simply under a new type of “scientific dictatorship”. But how, when the demonstration of creative reason’s power to elevate humanity’s conditions of life by encouraging new discoveries and applied technologies, as promoted by the American System of Political Economy, would the world now accept the conditions of mental and political enslavement demanded by the imperialist in a fixed system struggle for diminishing returns?

This was the challenge upon which young Oxford men would set their creative energies using the “scientific” reasoning established by Thomas Huxley’s X Club and for the service of the ruling oligarchical families of Europe. George Parkin like all young Oxford men at this time was highly influenced by this network’s ideas and used them to justify the “natural scientific inevitability” of the hegemony of the strong over the weak. In this case, the Anglo Saxon master race dominating the inferior peoples of the earth. This message could be seen in his 1892 work Imperial Federation: “Nations take long to grow, but there are periods when, as in the long-delayed flowering of certain plants, or in the crystallization of chemical solutions, new forms are taken with extreme rapidity. There are the strongest reasons for believing that the British nation has such a period immediately before it. The necessity for the creation of a body of sound public opinion upon the relations to each other of the various parts of the Empire is therefore urgent.” (8)

In elaborating upon the danger of the British System’s collapse in light of nationalist movements following the American System model, Parkin went on to ask: “Has our capacity for political organization reached its utmost limit? For the British people, this is the question of questions. In the whole range of possible political variations in the future, there is no issue of such far-reaching significance, not merely for our own people but for the world at large, as the question whether the British Empire shall remain a political unit… or yielding to disintegrating forces shall allow the stream of the national life to be parted into many separate channels.” (9)

One of Parkin’s Oxford contemporaries was Alfred Milner, a character who plays a vicious role in our drama as the catalyzer behind the formation of the Round Table Movement. Milner credited Parkin with giving his life direction from that point on (10). It was during 1876 that another contemporary of Milner and Parkin, named Cecil Rhodes left Oxford in order to make a fortune on a cotton plantation in South Africa. All three characters were also highly influenced by John Ruskin, the leader of the “artistic” branch of British Intelligence led by the “Pre-Raphaelite Society”.

The proceeds of Rhodes’ cotton fortune were multiplied many times by ventures into the diamond industry of South Africa, allowing him to rise to gargantuan heights of political power and wealth, peaking with his appointment as Prime Minister of Cape Town and Founder of Rhodesia. The current London-centered mineral cartels Rio Tinto, De Beers, and Lonrho now pillaging Africa, as well as the legacy of Apartheid which has stained so much of South Africa’s history are among two aspects of the scarring legacy Rhodes has passed down to present times.

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Amish

What Inmates, the Amish, and Imperial Chinese Law Teach Us About Relying on the State

By Guest Post April 23, 2019

by Michael Huemer

David Friedman’s _Legal Systems Very Different from Ours_ explores the costs and benefits of various legal systems across time.

Legal Systems Very Different from Ours is the latest book by the libertarian economist David Friedman, with a single chapter each contributed by Peter Leeson (on the law of pirates) and David Skarbek (on the law of prison inmates). It describes 13 different legal or quasi-legal systems from a variety of places and times. No modern nation-state is found among these systems, and some readers may decline to count some of the systems as genuine legal systems at all.

This would be particularly true of the “embedded” legal systems—those adopted by a sub-group within a larger society that has its own, government-made law. Pirates, prisoners, gypsies, and the Amish are all subject to traditional governmental law, whether or not they respect it, yet each group also has or had its own code of conduct and methods for enforcing it, which sometimes conflict with the state-made law of the wider society.

All of the systems in the book are nevertheless recognizably law-like. That is, all are systems of socially enforced rules of conduct designed to mitigate and manage human conflict. The book’s other examples include imperial Chinese law, Jewish law, Islamic law, saga-period Icelandic law, Somali law, early Irish law, the law of the Plains Indians (Comanche, Kiowa, and Cheyenne), 18th century English law, and ancient Athenian law.

Readers familiar with Friedman’s political views may be expecting a defense of an anarcho-capitalist legal system, yet, for better or worse, he holds back on that score

In general, Friedman handles normative questions with a very light hand. At the outset, he lets readers know that all the systems to be considered deserve to be taken seriously, as all are the work of adults no less intelligent than those who designed the modern American legal system. I confess that at certain points, I found it difficult to take some of these “very different” systems seriously as systems of justice. Under imperial Chinese law, for example, “If beating a child resulted in his death and there was no excuse for the beating, the punishment was one year of penal servitude. … There was no punishment for a reasonable beating of a disobedient son that resulted in death.” (Emphasis mine.) Reading that, I am inclined to doubt not the intelligence but the moral decency of the people who designed such law. But Friedman describes such seeming outrages dispassionately, without the moralism some of us might be tempted to indulge.

Friedman makes no effort to identify the best system, expressing doubt more than once that any such thing exists. He aims only to understand them, identifying some of the important advantages and disadvantages of each before making a few suggestions for reforming our own legal system. There is a faint libertarian theme which might go unnoticed by those unfamiliar with Friedman’s earlier work. Perhaps Friedman was trying to illustrate the feasibility of reducing the legal system’s reliance on the state in favor of private mechanisms; nevertheless, the book covers each legal system in general, rather than focusing solely on the aspects that teach libertarian-friendly lessons.

I believe imperial China was chosen chiefly to illustrate the potential for designing contracts that minimize people’s need to use the court system to resolve disputes. (This was done by relieving each party of duties whose breach would be difficult to prove.) Several systems were seemingly chosen to illustrate the feasibility of private enforcement of court decisions, in contrast with our own system’s entirely government-based enforcement. In saga-period Iceland, for example, courts’ decisions were enforced by private violence. If one party to a dispute disobeyed the court’s decision, that party could be declared an “outlaw” by the court, with the consequence that it would become legal for other members of the society to kill that individual. This eliminates the need for a centralized, governmental police force, albeit in a brutal manner.

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Creativity

8 Things You Don’t Know about Leonardo

By Guest Post April 18, 2019

This year marks the 500th anniversary of Leonardo da Vinci’s death. Widely considered one of the greatest polymaths in human history, Leonardo was an inventor, artist, musician, architect, engineer, anatomist, botanist, geologist, historian, and cartographer.

Though his artistic output was small, Leonardo’s impact was great, reflecting his deep knowledge of the body, his extensive studies of light and the human face, and his sfumato (Italian for “smoky”) technique, which allowed for incredibly lifelike images. Leonardo regarded artists as divine apprentices, writing “We, by our arts, may be called the grandsons of God.”

Twenty-first-century scholars at MIT ranked him the sixth most influential person who ever lived. Like Rembrandt and Michelangelo, he is so renowned that he is known by only his first name. Yet despite his fame, there are things about Leonardo that many people today find surprising.

1. Shady Parentage

Leonardo was born out of wedlock on April 15, 1452. His father, Piero, was a wealthy notary, and his mother, Caterina, was a local peasant girl. Although the circumstances of his birth would place Leonardo at a disadvantage in terms of education and inheritance, biographer Walter Isaacson regards it as a terrific stroke of luck. Rather than being expected to become a notary like his father, Leonardo was instead free to develop the full range of his genius. People surmise that it also imbued him with a special sense of urgency to establish his own identity and prove himself.

2. Physical Beauty

Leonardo created some of the world’s most beautiful works of art, including the “Last Supper” and the “Mona Lisa.” In his own day, he was known as an exceptionally attractive person. One of Leonardo’s biographers describes him as a person of “outstanding physical beauty who displayed infinite grace in everything he did.” A contemporary described him as a “well proportioned, graceful, and good-looking man” who “wore a rose-pink tunic” and had “beautiful curling hair, carefully styled, which came down to the middle of his chest.” Leonardo is thought to have entered into long-term and possibly sexual relationships with two of his pupils, both artists in their own right.

3. From Scraps to Notebooks

One of his best-known notebook drawings is the ‘Vitruvian Man.’ Leonardo da Vinci/Wikimedia Commons

The paintings generally attributed to Leonardo number fewer than 20, while his notebooks contain over 7,000 pages. They’re the best source of knowledge about Leonardo, housed today in locations such as Windsor Castle, the Louvre and the Spanish National Library in Madrid. Their diverse content ranges across drawings—most famously, Vitruvian Man—notes of things he wanted to investigate, scientific and technical diagrams and shopping lists. They comprise perhaps the most remarkable monument to human curiosity and creativity ever produced by a single person. Yet when Leonardo penned them, they were just loose pieces of paper of different types and sizes. His friends bound them into “notebooks” only after his death.

4. Outsider’s Education

As a result of his illegitimacy, Leonardo received a rather rudimentary formal education consisting primarily of business arithmetic. He never attended university and sometimes referred to himself as an “unlettered man.” Yet his lack of formal schooling also freed him from the constraints of tradition, helping to instill in him a determination to question authority and place greater reliance on his own experience than opinions expressed in books. As a result, he became a firsthand observer and experimenter, uninterested in serving as a mouthpiece for the classics.

5. Prolific Procrastinator

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Culture

Leave Confederate Statues Alone

By Guest Post March 14, 2019

by Philip Leigh

In 1965 Texas novelist William Humphrey wrote:

If the Civil War is more alive to the Southerner than the Northerner it is because all of the past is, and this is so because the Southerner has a sense of having been present there himself in the person of one or more of his ancestors. The war filled merely a chapter in his… [family history] … transmitted orally from father to son [as] the proverbs, prophecies, legends, laws, traditions-of-origin, and tales-of-wanderings of his own tribe…. It is this feeling of identity with the dead (who are past) which characterizes and explains the Southerner.

It is with kin, not causes, that the Southerner is linked. Confederate Great-grandfather…is not remembered for his (probably undistinguished) part in the Battle of Bull Run; rather Bull Run is remembered because Great-grandfather was there. For the Southerner, the Civil War is in the family.

Clannishness was, and is, the key to his temperament, and he went off to war to protect not Alabama but only those thirty or forty acres of its sandy hillside, or stiff red clay, which he broke his back tilling, and which was as big a country as his mind could hold.

Statue critics say he fought for slavery. But fewer than 30% of Southern families owned slaves. In truth, according to historian William C. Davis, “The widespread Northern myth that Confederates went to the battlefield to perpetuate slavery is just that, a myth. Their letters and diaries, in the tens of thousands, reveal again and again that they fought because their Southern homeland was invaded. . .”

Few today appreciate the magnitude of their sacrifice. About 300,000 Confederate soldiers died when the region’s population was only nine million. If the United States were to suffer proportional casualties in a war today our losses would total 11 million, which would be twenty-six times greater than our dead in World War II.

Given such oblations, the Confederate soldier’s surviving family members wanted to memorialize them. Memorial Day evolved after Federal occupation troops observed Southern women spreading flowers upon the graves of their husbands, sons, and brothers during the war. A year after the war the ladies of Columbus, Mississippi strewed flowers on the graves of both the Confederate and Union dead in the town’s Friendship Cemetery. Their gesture started a movement that spread and in the North May 30th became selected as National Memorial Day in 1868.

Since the war had impoverished the South, the Southern ladies could do little more than lay down flowers. There was no money for statues and Union veterans opposed permanent Confederate memorials. But when the sons of Confederate veterans eagerly joined the U.S. Army thirty years later to help win the Spanish-American War, the aging Union Civil War soldiers concluded that their former rivals were also Americans, deserving of memorial recognition.

Thus, the twenty years from 1898 to 1918 witnessed the installation of 80% of the signature courthouse square Confederate statues still standing in many Southern towns. During that period the typical surviving Confederate soldier aged from 58 years to 78 years. Memorial placements—North and South—surged between 1911 and 1915 because it was the war’s semi-centennial and the old soldiers were fading away.

Today a vocal minority holds the Confederate soldier in contempt, much like the many Americans who sneered at returning Vietnam veterans in the 1960s and 70s. Amid chants of “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many babies did you kill today?” some civilians insulted the soldiers. Today most Americans old enough to remember cringe with shame when recalling such episodes.

As reported in The New York Times, for example, in 1968 a one-armed vet was accosted at a Colorado college.

Pointing to the missing limb another student asked, “Did you get that in Vietnam?”

The veteran said yes.

“Serves you right,” said the student.

It took years, but eventually, the public abandoned the mockers and gave Vietnam vets due credit thereby underscoring the maxim: “Whoever marries the spirit of this age will find himself a widower in the next.” Thus, we should be aware that decisions to tear down century-old monuments put us at risk for unassuageable remorse in the future. Dishonoring such monuments demeans later generations of American warriors who were inspired by the courage of the Confederate soldier.

Consider, for example, that post-Civil-War Southerners consistently came to our nation’s defense more readily than did other Americans. Presently, 44% of our military are from the South even though it represents just 36% of the nation’s population.

spin was put on their history. In response, George Orwell warned:

The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.
George Orwell

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Business

Why Bastiat Deserves to Be in the Pantheon of Great Economic Theorists

By Guest Post March 8, 2019

By Donald J. Boudreaux

Frédéric Bastiat (1801-50) is known today among economists—if he is known at all—as at best a brilliant polemicist. An economic theorist he most certainly was not—such is the common opinion.

I believe this common opinion to be mistaken. To explain why first requires a discussion of the nature of a theory.

A Theory Is a Story

As I tell students in my Principles of Microeconomics courses, a theory is a story that assists us in making better sense of reality. And a theorist is a storyteller who offers this assistance.

A story that explains the price only of bread is not a proper theory of prices, even if it is highly believable.

Stories, of course, differ in their believability. A story that explains, say, the Industrial Revolution as being the result of new knowledge imparted to us by aliens from another galaxy is completely unbelievable. Some other, more believable story is called for—one, say, that features a change in people’s attitudes toward commerce and innovation.

But for a story to deserve to be called a theory requires that it also be generalizable.

In economics, supply-and-demand analysis is a general account of how prices are formed and change. It’s not a story about the formation of the price of only one item, such as bread. It’s an outline for telling believable stories about the formation of all prices—from the prices of toy planes to those of jumbo jetliners, from the wages earned by motel maids to those earned by Tom Hanks. A story that explains the price only of bread is not a proper theory of prices, even if it is highly believable.

To be generalizable, a story whose creator wishes it to be regarded as a serious theory must make that story abstract. Being abstract, however, makes the story—standing alone—barren. As such, it engenders no understanding of the physical or social world. But it proves itself to be a good theory if, when relevant details of reality are added to it, those of us who encounter this story go, “Aha! Now I understand reality better than I did before!”

The core purpose of all theories is the creation of improved understanding. A theory that does not cause those who hear or read it to go, “Aha!” is worthless.

Bastiat the Theorist

And so we return to Bastiat. He’s one of history’s most brilliant tellers of economic stories. This fact, I’m convinced, justifies calling Bastiat a great economic theorist.

Who can read Bastiat’s satirical portrayal of sunlight as an unfairly low-priced import and not go, “Aha!”

Consider Bastiat’s famous 1843 “Petition of the Manufacturers of Candles.” In this short essay, Bastiat radiantly conveyed economists’ understanding that artificially contrived scarcities make the general population worse off even if they increase the wealth of a small handful of individuals. Who other than the most benighted protectionist can read Bastiat’s satirical portrayal of sunlight as an unfairly low-priced import and not go, “Aha! Of course, inexpensive imports that ‘flood’ into a country no more impoverish that country than does the light sent to us free by the sun!”

Another example is Bastiat’s even-shorter essay “A Negative Railway.” Here Bastiat revealed the flaw in the argument of a gentleman who insisted that if a railroad connecting Paris to Bayonne were forced to have a stop at Bordeaux, the wealth of the French people would be enhanced. The hapless target of Bastiat’s brilliance based his conclusion on the correct observation that forcing trains to stop at Bordeaux would increase the incomes of porters, restaurateurs, and some other people in Bordeaux.

Yet Bastiat didn’t settle for drily noting that, after paying these higher incomes, railways and their passengers would have less money to spend on goods and services offered by suppliers in locations other than Bordeaux. Instead, Bastiat followed the proposal’s logic in a way uniquely revealing: If forcing trains to stop at Bordeaux will increase the total wealth of the people of France, so too will the total wealth of the people of France be increased if trains are obliged to stop also at Angoulême. And if also at Angoulême, then the French will be enriched even further if a third stop is required at Poitiers. And if at Poitiers, then at each and every location between Paris and Bayonne.

Bastiat revealed the proposal to be flawed by showing that, if its logic were sound, the railway that would do the most good for the French people is one that is nothing but a series of stops—a negative railway!

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Bible

How to Read the Bible through Comic Books, and Why It Matters that we do

By Guest Post February 27, 2019

by Zanne Domoney-Lyttle

Comic Books. Graphic Novels. Cartoons. Illustrated Pictures. The ‘Funnies.’ Methods of visual storytelling through sequential art have been around for centuries, yet this mode of narrative-sharing is often looked down upon, branded a lowly form of popular culture that is ‘just for kids’.

The label ‘just for kids’ is derogatory on three levels; firstly, children are inexorable in their ways of combining learning through fun, and that is nothing to be ashamed of. To suggest children’s literature is less important is to devalue the very education systems we pride ourselves on. Secondly, branding comic books as something that only the lower echelons of society can and should access, diminishes the amount of collaborative effort and work it takes to produce the things in the first place.

Thirdly, it does not take into account how comic books are often used as visual aids for learning in higher education institutions, as well as in homes around the world. In fact, you could argue that active modes of learning have frequently centred upon the combination of image with word to get its point across; pictures, as the saying goes, are worth a thousand words.

This is a concept that Bible illustrators have known for a long time. Consider, for example, the Garima Gospels, an illustrated Bible manuscript which dates back to the 5th-century CE. Biblical texts are incredibly difficult to read, understand interpret in some parts, so illustrating biblical texts was seen as a natural way to either clarify Scripture, or potentially fill in the gap between text and understanding. They are a form of visual exegesis if you will.

Post-publication of the Gutenberg Bible in the 15th-century, there was something of an explosion in the number of illustrated Bibles being produced. Ian Green argues that the reason biblical illustrations and illustrated Bibles grew in popularity at this time partly resulted from an increase in demand for visual aids as a well as a return to a more moralistic reading of Scripture, which meant readers wanted increased access to biblical texts.

Biblical illustrations were used either as visual aids to Scripture (for example, Biblia Pauperum which were printed block-books visualising typological narratives from the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament), and as decorative items to adorn the bookshelves of wealthy households. Poorer households were not left out of the picture-Bible trend. For the less-wealthy connoisseur of biblical illustrations, cut-and-paste sheets of biblical imagery were produced.

Wenceslaus Hollar (1607-1677) was one artist who produced such images. Born in Prague, a centre of arts, science and ambition in the early 17th-century, Hollar was a prolific artist who produced over 2,000 pieces of art, mostly in the format of etchings. Subjects varied from geographical and topographical scenes to portraits, fashion, visualizations of ancient and classic figures, and biblical motifs. On the last theme, Hollar produced visual interpretations of the classic stories of the Bible and drew inspiration from major figures such as Abraham, Moses, Jesus, and Paul.

Hollar produced two cut-and-paste sheets on biblical stories; one on Abraham’s story between Gen. 12-24 (see image below) and one on Jacob and Joseph (Gen. 25-48). Both are unsigned, untitled and undated. Cataloguer of Hollar’s works, Richard Pennington suggests that these prints were most likely produced as cheap, visual aids for the Bible reader, meant to be cut up and stuck in personal Bibles, or to be used as a cheap and alternative way of decorating walls. The format of each image supports this – the grid-like pattern and the annotations to each image shows where to cut, and where to paste.

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History

Why is ‘separation of church and state’ so misquoted?

By Guest Post February 6, 2019

After King Henry VIII broke from Rome in 1534, England began enforcing Anglican religious uniformity. Some wanted to purify the Anglican Church from the inside, being given the name “Puritans.” Others separated themselves completely from the Anglican Church as dissenters. Of those were Thomas Helwys, John Murton and John Smyth, who founded the Baptist faith in England.

Thomas Helwys wrote “A Short Declaration of the Mystery of Iniquity,” 1612, considered the first English book defending the principle of religious liberty: “Queen Mary … had no power over her subjects consciences … neither hath our Lord the King … power over his subjects consciences. … The King is a mortal man, and not God, therefore he hath no power over the mortal soul of his subjects to make laws and ordinances for them and to set spiritual Lords over them. …”

He continued: “If the King’s people be obedient and true subjects, obeying all humane laws made by the King, our Lord the King can require no more: for men’s religion to God is betwixt God and themselves; the King shall not answer for it, neither may the King be judge between God and man.”

Thomas Helwys was arrested and thrown into London’s notorious Newgate Prison, where he died in 1616.

Another Baptist dissenter, John Murton, was locked in Newgate Prison as punishment for spreading politically incorrect religious views. Prisoners were not fed, but instead relied on charity of friends to bring them food, such as bread or bottles of milk.

Roger Williams referred to John Murton in his work, “The Bloody Tenet (Practice) of Persecution for the Cause of Conscience,” 1644: “The author of these arguments against persecution … being committed (a) prisoner to Newgate for the witness of some truths of Jesus … and having not use of pen and ink, wrote these arguments in milk, in sheets of paper brought to him by the woman, his keeper, from a friend in London as the stopples (corks) of his milk bottle. … In such paper, written with milk, nothing will appear; but the way of reading by fire being known to this friend who received the papers, he transcribed and kept together the papers, although the author himself could not correct nor view what himself had written. … It was in milk, tending to soul nourishment, even for babes and sucklings in Christ … the word of truth … testify against … slaughtering each other for their several respective religions and consciences.”

Williams wrote: “Persecution for cause of conscience is most contrary to the doctrine of Christ Jesus the Prince of Peace. … Enforced uniformity is the greatest occasion of civil war, ravishing of conscience, persecution of Christ Jesus in his servants.”

Roger Williams was a contemporary of John Bunyan, who wrote “Pilgrim’s Progress” while in prison for conscience sake. When the government sought to arrest Roger Williams for preaching religious liberty, he fled to Boston, Massachusetts, on Feb. 5, 1631.

To his dismay, Puritans in Massachusetts had begun enforcing Puritan religious uniformity. Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black wrote in Engel v. Vitale, 1962: “When some of the very groups which had most strenuously opposed the established Church of England found themselves sufficiently in control of colonial governments … they passed laws making their own religion the official religion of their respective colonies.”

A controversy raged among inhabitants of Massachusetts, between “a covenant of grace” versus “a covenant of works.” The “covenant of grace” leaders were Sir Henry Vane, Rev. John Cotton, Rev. John Wheelwright, and his sister-in-law, Anne Hutchinson.

Rev. John Wheelwright fled Puritan uniformity in Massachusetts in 1637 and founded Exeter, New Hampshire. Roger Williams was briefly the pastor a church till “notorious disagreements” caused the Massachusetts General Court to censor his religious speech. Upon hearing the sheriff was on his way to arrest him and send him back to England, Williams fled again, in freezing weather, January of 1636. For weeks he traveled alone till he was befriended by the Indians of Narragansett. He founded Providence Plantation, Rhode Island – the first place where the church was not controlled by state.

Roger Williams wrote in 1661: “I having made covenant of peaceable neighborhood with all the Sachems (Chiefs) and natives round about us, and having in a sense of God’s merciful providence unto me in my distress called the place Providence … a shelter for persons distressed of conscience.”

A historical plaque reads: “To the memory of Roger Williams, the Apostle of Soul Liberty, Founder of the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantation.”

The reverse of the plaque reads: “Below this spot then at the water’s edge stood the rock on which according to tradition Roger Williams, an exile for the devotion to the freedom of conscience, landed. 1636.”

In 1638, Roger Williams organized the first Baptist Church in America.

A plaque reads: “The First Baptist Church, Founded by Roger Williams, AD 1638, The Oldest Baptist Church in America, The Oldest Church in this State.”

Physician John Clarke came to Rhode Island and founded another Baptist Church in Newport. Other dissenters arrived in Williams’ Rhode Island Colony, such as William Coddington, Philip Sherman, and Anne Hutchinson. Anne soon left again to settle in the Dutch settlement of the Bronx in New York City, where all her family was scalped and beheaded by raiding Indians in 1643. There was only one survivor, Anne’s nine-year-old daughter Susanna, who was taken captive. After several years, she escaped and married an innkeeper, Samuel Cole. Their descendants included three U.S. presidents.

The Governor of Massachusetts from 1636 to 1637 was Sir Henry Vane, who helped found Harvard. He supported the efforts of Roger Williams. Due to the “covenant of grace” versus “covenant of works” controversy, Governor Sir Henry Vane was not reelected, being replaced by John Winthrop.

In 1639, Sir Henry Vane returned to England where he backed the Puritan Revolution, led by Oliver Cromwell, though he did not support the Rump Parliament which beheaded Charles I.

During the brief English Commonwealth, Vane helped draft for Roger Williams the Patent for Providence Plantation, which was unique in that it did not acknowledge a king, and it guaranteed freedom of religion and conscience. Vane later defended the Patent on behalf of Roger Williams against a competing charter.

Roger William wrote of Vane in April of 1664: “Under God, the great anchor of our ship is Sir Henry Vane … an instrument in the hand of God for procuring this island.”

A statue of Sir Henry Vane is in the Boston Public Library with a plaque that reads: “Sir Henry Vane … An ardent defender of civil liberty and advocate of free thought in religion. He maintained that God, Law, and Parliament were superior to the King.”

The Plantation Agreement at Providence, Sept. 6, 1640, stated: “We agree, as formerly hath been the liberties of the town, so still, to hold forth liberty of conscience.”

The Government of Rhode Island, March 19, 1641, stated: “The Government … in this Island … is a Democracy, or Popular Government; that is to say, It is in the Power of the Body of Freemen orderly assembled.”

Roger Williams responded to Puritan leader John Cotton’s accusations by publishing “The Bloody Tenet (Practice) of Persecution for the Cause of Conscience and Mr. Cotton’s Letter Lately Printed, Examined and Answered in 1644.” In this, Williams first mentioned his now famous phrase, “wall of separation”: “Mr. Cotton … hath not duly considered these following particulars. First, the faithful labors of many witnesses of Jesus Christ, existing in the world, abundantly proving, that the Church of the Jews under the Old Testament in the type and the Church of the Christians under the New Testament in the anti-type, were both separate from the world; and that when they have opened a gap in the hedge, or wall of separation, between the garden of the church and the wilderness of the world, God hath ever broken down the wall itself, removed the candlestick, &c. and made his garden a wilderness, as at this day. And that therefore if He will ever please to restore His garden and paradise again, it must of necessity be walled in peculiarly unto Himself from the world, and that all that shall be saved out of the world are to be transplanted out of the wilderness of the world and added unto His Church or garden … a separation of Holy from unHoly, penitent from impenitent, Godly from unGodly.”

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europe

The Southern Critique of Centralization

By Guest Post February 5, 2019

By Donald Livingston

The Southern political tradition, in practice and theory, is one of its most valuable contributions to America and the world. The one constant theme of that tradition from 1776–through Jefferson, Madison, John Taylor, St George Tucker, Abel Upshur, John C. Calhoun, the Nashville Agrarians, Richard Weaver, M. E. Bradford, down to the scholars of the Abbeville Institute–is a systematic critique of centralization. Nothing comparable to it exists elsewhere in America or in Europe.

A criticism of centralization presupposes that decentralization is a good thing. But why is that? The answer is complex and requires viewing what was happened in 1776 from a trans Atlantic perspective. The Declaration of Independence is merely the American version of a conflict that had been going on in Europe since at least the 17th century between the emerging centralized modern state and a revived interest in the classical republican tradition which goes back to the ancient Greeks.

There are four principles to this republican tradition: First, republican government is one in which the people make the laws they live under. But, second, they cannot make just any law. The laws they make must be in accord with a more fundamental law which they do not make but is known by tradition. Third, the task of the republic is to preserve and perfect the character of that inherited tradition. And finally, the republic must be small. It must be small because self-government and rule of law is not possible unless citizens know the character of their rulers directly or through those they trust.

The Greeks created a brilliant civilization that was entirely decentralized. It was composed of 1,500 tiny independent republics strung out from Naples to the Black Sea. Most were under 10,000. One of the largest was Athens with around 200 thousand people. For over two thousand years, up to the French Revolution, republics seldom went beyond 200-300 thousand people, and the great majority were considerably smaller.

In contrast, a modern state is supposed to be large. Thomas Hobbess, published in 1651 the first systematic theory of the modern state. He titled the book “Leviathan,’ a large sea monster. It contains a central government endowed with irresistible and indivisible power over individuals in a territory. Unlike republicanism, it does not require, self-government or tradition. Nor does it require the rule of law since the central authority itself can make law. Its purpose is to contain anarchy by enabling autonomous individuals to pursue their own ends in a condition of enlightened self-interest called “civil association.” Such a regime is compatible with an association of strangers, as in a regime of traffic regulations.

Since the only goal of the modern state is “civil association,” there is no internal limit to its size. In fact, the larger the better because outside the realm of civil association lies anarchy or its ever present threat. The logical extension of this is global government or as close an approximation as possible. Although a modern state may expand in size indefinitely, its territory cannot be divided by secession because if one set of individuals could lawfully secede, so could any other set, and so on within each set, to the unraveling of all government.

Here we have two incompatible models of government. The small classical republic and the indefinitely large modern state. But there is a third model to consider. Medieval civilization was also decentralized, and it was vast in scale. It was a mosaic of thousands of independent and quasi-independent political units: kingdoms, principalities, dukedoms, bishoprics, papal states, republics, free cities, and tens of thousands of titled manors.

The medieval contribution to politics is the idea of a federated polity where various independent political units are held together in a larger realm by compacts and traditional hierarchies. As we will see shortly, it is through the logic of the medieval federation that the Southern tradition sought to bring together the best aspects of the small republic with those of the large modern state.

The modern state system begins in the 17th century with the rise of “absolute monarchies”–‘absolute,’ meaning irresistible and indivisible centralized power. Modern monarchs sought to crush the medieval mosaic of independent social authorities they had inherited into larger and more centralized states. And they were successful.

In the mid-1850s Tocqueville left us a melancholy description of what two centuries of monarchical centralization had done: “The old localized authorities disappear without either revival or replacement, and everywhere the central government succeeds them in the direction of affairs. The whole of Germany, even the whole of Europe … presents the same picture. Everywhere men are leaving behind the liberty of the Middle Ages, not to enter into a modern brand of liberty but to return to the ancient despotism; for centralization is nothing else than an up-to-date version of the administration seen in the Roman Empire.”

But just as absolute monarchy was emerging in the 17th century, demanding a large scale state, there was also a revived interest in classical republicanism which demanded small scale. This latter sparked a Cato-like resistance to modern state consolidation which ran throughout the centralized monarchies of Europe. But one thinker requires special mention, namely Johannes Althusius (1563-1638). He was a German Calvinist philosopher who proposed a federation of small polities in a state larger than the classical republic, but smaller than a European monarchy. He called it a federation of “medium” size–about the size of Switzerland which is half the territory of South Carolina.

To prevent the central government from consolidating the smaller polities into a unitary modern state, Althusius introduces a constitutional right of secession from the federation. If a federation grew too large, it could always be brought back to a republican scale by secession.

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Communism

Watching the World Wake Up From History

By Guest Post January 27, 2019

by Michael J. Kramer

Reviewing “Intellectual Radicalism after 1989: Crisis and Reorientation in the British and the American Left” by Sebastian Berg

For much of the twentieth century, Marxists thought they would be the ones declaring the end of history. Instead, it was a more conservative figure, Francis Fukuyama, who became famous for arguing that the game was up. Worse yet for Marxists, Fukuyama contended that the final destination of the historical dialectic was not a communist state of liberated workers, but rather Western-style capitalism and liberal democracy. This may appear rather quaint given how history has currently led to the Age of Trump and the rise of authoritarian regimes around the world. During the early 1990s, however, the situation looked different. With the fall of the Berlin Wall, the demise of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc, and the Tiananmen protests in China, Fukuyama’s analysis struck a chord. Leftwing radicalism, or any radicalism for that matter, seemed to be dead. The permanent revolution belonged to be bourgeoisie.

The success of Fukayama’s argument, published first in a 1989 essay for The National Interest _and then as the best-selling book _The End of History and the Last Man, _suggests how difficult the years around 1989 were for the left. While a few theorists of radicalism in Britain and the United States thought that the end of the Cold War heralded new opportunities for emancipatory politics, most despaired of what was to become of socialism. “We are in a period of uncertainty and confusion,” Michael Walzer wrote in _Dissent in 1992, “The collapse of communism ought to open new opportunities for the democratic left, but its immediate effect has been to raise questions about many leftist (not only communist) orthodoxies: about the ‘direction’ of history, the role of state planning in the economy, the value and effectiveness of the market, the future of nationalism, and so on” (7). For British political scientist Andrew Gamble, “Nothing quite as cataclysmic, however, has occurred before in the history of Marxism as the collapse of the Soviet Union between 1989 and 1991.” Writing at the end of the 1990s, Gamble thought that “despite the ossification of Marxism as a doctrine in the Soviet Union, and the open repudiation of the Soviet system by Marxists in other parts of the world, the extent to which in the previous seventy years the meaning of Marxism and of socialism had become inextricably bound up with the fate of the Soviet Union had not been fully appreciated” (8).

These quotations open Sebastian Berg’s book Intellectual Radicalism after 1989: Crisis and Reorientation in the British and the American Left. _Written in the dry, analytic, slow-paced style befitting its origins as a German university dissertation, the book nevertheless manages to reveal vividly how uncertain, if not downright bleak, the situation appeared to left-wing intellectuals during the early 1990s. Yet in carefully tracking writing in four magazines—_Dissent _and _Monthly Review _in the United States and, across the Atlantic, _New Left Review _and _Socialist Register _in England—_Berg also documents how even in this period of bewilderment, new ideas, positions, and imaginings of radicalism were also beginning to take shape. Among them, a “post-Marxist” transition to what would become the “anti-globalization” movement would eventually crystallize in the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle. A renewed curiosity about non-statist modes of radical activity in the realms of community and civil society emerged, both within conventional parliamentarian spaces of reformist politics and also out in the streets. This line of thinking would culminate in the Occupy movement of 2011. More abstractly, but just as importantly, intellectual radicals began to reexamine ideas about history itself: what was it, exactly? And how was history still in flux if no longer on the march toward a clear destination?

Today, rather than communism, it is democratic socialism—the “democratic left” as Michael Walzer called it—that is growing in unexpectedly expansive forms in the United States, particularly after the 2008 financial crisis and in the seemingly endless toll of violence and despair called the War on Terror. The surprising success of the 2016 Bernie Sanders presidential campaign is one indicator of something new afoot. So too, in Britain, the fiery leadership of Jeremy Corbyn has reinvigorated a more left-leaning Labour Party. At the same time, we are in a period of enormous backlash, some of it fostered, ironically, by the very Russian government whose leader, Vladimir Putin, rose to power within the Soviet Union’s security apparatus and then emerged, Phoenix-like, from the ashes of communism’s demise. Most of all, our vexing and traumatic times give the lie to Fukuyama’s prediction. History did not end. In fact, history is very much alive and kicking, in terrifying as well as hopeful ways. A look back to those first uncertain years after 1989 therefore seems worthwhile. What were intellectuals on the left writing in that moment of crisis? And how did their thinking relate to a larger cultural context in which many sang along approvingly with Mike Edwards of the London band Jesus Jones as he sat in front of a television screen “watching the world wake up from history” in the 1991 MTV video for the hit song “Right Here, Right Now,” which quickly becoming something of a soundtrack for the moment?

A number of recent books have, like Berg, begun to address these questions, but they have done so not by directly analyzing intellectuals, but rather by focusing on the realms of popular culture and political economy—and where the two meet. Cultural critic Joshua Clover’s fabulously strange 1989: Bob Dylan Didn’t Have This to Sing About, published in 2009, suggests that a “constellation of changes in pop music around 1989 might be tied to changes in the world at large—that is, might provide ways of thinking about the historical situation of ‘1989’” (7). Listening to grunge, gangsta rap, acid house, and other genres, Clover concludes that music such as Billy Joel’s truly awful “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” released just before the fall of the Berlin Wall, captured “an experience of immutable endlessness, of exploded time and a superfluity of history in the face of which meaningful action is impossible—this is the secret sense of the period in pop music. A feeling, if not a structure” (95). Ultimately, it is the teen pop of the era that best encapsulates the culture of the 1990s: “Teenpop is the dominant’s dominant,” Clover writes, “for the dot-com boom and Pax Americana—the very figure of the endlessly expanding market as celebratory stomping ground for risk-free adolescence…” (104). Brilliantly, even “Fukuyama’s version” of history becomes “more like a pop song” to this cultural critic’s sharp ears. “A formula that seems at once to tell a total story and condense it into a slogan, a logo, an image.” For Clover, “Is that not what the perfect chorus is for—in which ’the end of history’ becomes a hook so catchy and memorable, so improbably pleasing to repeat, that it spins around the globe in a blink?” (8).

Like Clover’s book, Phillip E. Wegner’s Life Between Two Deaths, 1989-2001: US Culture in the Long Nineties, _published in 2009 as well, focuses not only on details of the period drawn from popular culture, but also links them to political economy and asks how history itself was up for grabs during the supposed “end of history” (everybody sing along now!). Wegner, like Clover, takes his intellectual apparatus from cultural studies, and contends that “the 1990s represented a moment of heated debate over the direction of the future, and hence of immense historical possibilities for a global left, possibilities that are now, in the aftermath of the events of September 11, 2001, and the emergent global regime of the so-called war on terror, at risk of being forgotten” (1). Looking to novels and films as his sources more than pop music, Wegner wants to better understand the continuities between the fall of the wall in 1989 and the fall of the Twin Towers in 2001 rather than follow the dominant interpretation of 9/11 as a fundamental rupture from “the way things were.” He concludes that the uncertainty of the “long nineties” is worth revisiting now, particularly for those on the left: as the period just prior to our contemporary moment, it sits in an ambiguous location between the past and the present, and rather than convey “the way it really was,” Wegner seeks to extract its more utopian longings and desires because, he believes, these have the capacity to erupt in a Benjaminian “moment of danger” as a means of “fanning the spark of hope.” In fact those words, from Walter Benjamin’s famous “On the Concept of History” essay, serve as the epigraph for the introductory chapter in _Life Between Two Deaths (1).

These two studies draw upon pop cultural and literary materials to give us a much wider context in which to locate the leftwing magazine writers in Berg’s careful, focused study. In doing so, they reveal the growing distance between the focused orientation of radical intellectuals and the sprawling energies of the larger culture industry in the aftermath of 1989. Clover and Wegner themselves orient their historical thinking to the cultural studies approach of Raymond Williams, Frederic Jameson, Alain Badiou, and, perhaps most of all, Benjamin. The contrast between their adventurously wide-ranging subject matter as well as their theoretical orientation and Berg’s careful intellectual history spadework in examining four small radical journals indicates that odd gaps remain between the fields of cultural studies and intellectual history. Despite the fact that these two fields investigate similar topics, time periods, and methods here, it is almost as if one were watching two ships (of thought) that pass in the night. The historians and the cultural studies scholars both want to know how the history of ideas relate to ideational worlds in richer context; they both are thinking carefully about periodicity and how we organize change and continuity over time; and they both stake their claims in “readings” of artifacts, texts, and other materials. Yet, in the end, they do not meet. While cultural studies scholars such as Clover and Wegner take more risks in querying the uncanny ways in which very different areas of social life (pop culture and political economy) relate to shape the very ways we understand history itself, intellectual historians remain most interested in stabilizing history in order to perceive a certain construction of linearity, relationality, and a more static, organized map of how different levels of social interaction relate to each other. Perhaps, one wonders, these cultural studies scholars might do a bit more contextualization of the linkages between the ephemeral burble of pop and the clanking chains of political realities? And perhaps intellectual historians could use a good dose of the “trippier” approaches to historical inquiry found in cultural studies scholarship. This might especially be the case for trying to make sense of the period after the fall of the Berlin Wall, when, in the historical moment itself, thinkers such as Fukuyama were ready to claim, in eerily pop-song-like tones (as Clover contends), that history had come to an end.

Intellectual historians are, thankfully, taking up this task. There is Andrew Hartman’s A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars, published in 2015, which surveys the culture wars of the 1990s and argues that what binds them together is a debate over “the idea of America” in the aftermath of the tumultuous events of the 1960s, when “new people, new ideas, new norms, and new, if conflicting, articulations of America itself” ruptured the fabric of post-World War II consensus and conformity. So too, James Livingston touches on the culture, politics, and intellectual life of the 1990s his book The World Turned Inside Out: American Thought and Culture at the End of the 20th Century, _published in 2010. Livingston’s book is quirkier than the more well-known _Age of Fracture _by Daniel Rodgers, which came out one year later, however, _The World Turned Inside Out offers what is, in many ways, a more intriguing argument: intellectual life did not merely fragment in the latter half of the twentieth century, Livingston contends, but did so in a particular way—it troubled, and sometimes outright flipped or reversed, the boundaries between insides and outsides, centers of power and margins of powerlessness, the everyday and the epic, the normal and the abnormal, the direct and the mediated, the instinctually felt and the abstractly reasoned, and, perhaps most of all, the 1990s witnessed a breaking down of the line between the internal self and the external world.

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