Review- Dangerfield, “The Strange Death of Liberal England”

July 27, 2019 Peter BerardLeave a comment

George Dangerfield, “The Strange Death of Liberal England, 1910-1914” (1935) – This is one of those classics of popular history that bob up on superlative lists and in the used book market every now and again. Dangerfield was editor at Vanity Fair when this was written, and it makes sense when you read it. Its question is an interesting one- how did the Liberal party go from a dominant force in British politics for centuries to an also-ran remainder in the early twentieth century? Dangerfield frames his answer around three “great rebellions” that started up around 1910, as the Liberals were riding high, and were only interrupted by the outbreak of World War I. These were a Tory rebellion against normal parliamentary procedure complete with threats of violence if parliament instituted Home Rule in Ireland; the women’s rebellion, meaning the campaigns of the suffragettes; and the worker’s rebellion, an outbreak of strikes and lockouts that roiled the country at the time.

It’s a Vanity Fair view of history in that it views the whole thing through the lens of personalities. This works comparatively well in terms of the parliamentary wrangling between Liberals and Tories, where it was really down to a few personalities. It got a lot less so once the Tories began appealing to Ulster unionism, and the framing is still more inadequate when dealing with the suffragettes and the labor movement. Dangerfield insists on reading the suffragette movement through the psychology of the Pankhurst family, never mind that ideological differences made a huge difference even within that family unit, as Sylvia became more socialist and her mother and sister did not. Roughly the same is true for the labor movement and figures like Jim Larkin, though there’s a little more attention paid to ideas like syndicalism, mostly as a noxious infection from abroad. Inevitably, the psychology he reads on to these movements is of the abnormal kind. While he stresses that he doesn’t disagree with, say, women’s suffrage or other progressive notions, he still depicts anyone working towards them as unbalanced. He lingers luridly on outbreaks of collective fury, like strike violence and the suffragette’s window-smashing campaign.

Dangerfield maintains ironic distance from liberalism. But he sees the arrangements that surrounded liberalism in the nineteenth century — relative quiet from the lower orders, politics as a game between gentlemen, etc. — as preconditions for a sane, sensible politics. This of course has gone completely out the window when he was writing on the thirties. I don’t think it’s laziness that led Dangerfield to personify and psychologize the movements the way he did (though it’s a lot easier writing about prominent personalities than to try to get a grip on who makes up a movement). I think it’s a natural outgrowth of an ideological tendency to dismiss the actors in mass movements as an unknowing, undifferentiated mob. In short, social movements deserve social history, not warmed over great-man (or great-scary-woman, like in his version of the suffragettes) stuff. **’

Review- Constable and Valenzuela, “A Nation of Enemies”

July 23, 2019 Peter BerardLeave a comment

Pamela Constable and Arturo Valenzuela, “A Nation of Enemies: Chile Under Pinochet” (1991) – Constable and Valenzuela come perilously close to “both-sidesing” the Chilean dictatorship in this, still one of the principal popular works on the Pinochet regime. They clearly disdain the regime. But they do this “more in sadness than in anger” thing towards the regime’s critics and predecessors where they make it seem like their actions made a horrifying reactionary dictatorship inevitable. You hear a lot about how mad Chilean housewives (of a certain class status, anyway) were about lines for cooking oil and about the fecklessness of the revolutionary groups running around both Allende and Pinochet’s Chile. They even manage to get some digs in at the mothers of disappeared dissidents who protested the regime, talking about how they liked the attention, as opposed to the majority of the mothers!

On the one hand, some of this is useful corrective in an effort to make sense of what’s become a scare story on the left and increasingly an inspiration on the right (never thought I’d live to see the day when American reactionaries were so desperate as to model themselves after Latin American sleazeballs, but ok). The Allende regime and those around them made avoidable mistakes, though the authors emphasize the mistakes of harshness or incompetence versus the fatal mistakes of leniency towards the coup-plotting elements in the military. The bravado of the revolutionary groups like the MIR did little other than provoke- they were incapable of doing much more than harass the military regime once the coup began. Though the communist party paramilitaries damn near got Pinochet, and I’m not convinced by the authors’ assertion it wouldn’t have done any good if they had…

If there’s a lesson here… well, who’s to say there is one? There’s a certain portion of the population that’s going to hate and fear any amount of power going into the hands of people traditionally beneath them, no matter how peacefully and democratically. Those people are going to be disproportionately powerful, and in the case of Chile (and certain other American democracies) is probably big enough you can’t just deal with them militarily. In short, the left needs a practical politics to manage these things, not just a visionary politics of where we are headed. Here, the Allende people actually seemed to have some good ideas, but… when the CIA is actively undermining your economy and stirring up the basal hatreds of the bourgeoisie, experimenting with computer-aided economic planning isn’t going to help with that…

I don’t know. This book provoked many thoughts and feelings that I’ve yet to sort out entirely but it’s been a while since I read it so I felt compelled to review before I forgot about it. It’s all very well and good for a journalist from the Times and an academic State employee to be smug about pure, nonideological “people power” in the early 1990s but I’m not convinced that’s what actually got rid of Pinochet — and damn sure not convinced it brought him to justice — and I’m still less convinced it’s what’s needed now. Anyway… it’s a reasonably informative book but I think we need a new and updated standard. If nothing else it’s been twenty-five years. Anyone have anything to recommend? ***

Review- Brunner, “Stand On Zanzibar”

July 17, 2019 Peter BerardLeave a comment

John Brunner, “Stand On Zanzibar” (1968) – I’ve heard it argued that the “New Wave” of science fiction that came about in the 1960s and 1970s is better in theory than in practice- that it was a nice idea that didn’t produce all that many works that stand the test of time. I’m agnostic about that: I’d need to read more to find out, though Dhalgren stands up pretty well. As for Stand On Zanzibar… well, one of the things that people seem to evaluate when seeing whether or not a scifi book “holds up” is predictive ability. On that score, Stand On Zanzibar does pretty well for a 1968 book talking about 2010. People “dial up” computers to get information (no GUI, but what can you expect). Genetic engineering is a thing: more of a thing than in real 2010, or at least in different directions. This volume gets it right that people are a lot less fixated on space fifty years on from the Apollo missions than a lot of people in the midst of space race enthusiasm thought they might. People still have very earthly concerns, in Stand On Zanzibar.

It is very late sixties in a lot of ways. Sexual politics is one- a lot of male fecklessness disguised as sexual liberation. More prominently, its Club-of-Rome style concern with overpopulation, the idea that seven billion people would be a problem due to overcrowding (and not, say, climate change). Brunner makes use of cut-up techniques, interspersing the action of the novel with “context” chapters showing what’s going on in the way-out happening world of 2010, and it’s all grim stuff involving megacorps and baby-farming. They also, unfortunately, involve the rantings of a sociologist proclaimed by the author as a genius, who dispenses edgy bromides about people being animals in dated-hip language. Don’t proclaim the characters who dispense your extraneous thoughts on the world as geniuses, authors (Robert Anton Wilson was another one for this). It doesn’t work.

The plot also doesn’t work particularly well. A megacorp is hired to take over an African country and make it a paying concern. Much of what kept me reading was curiosity: would Brunner (a Brit, fwiw) go full neocolonial and see this is as a good or workable idea? He comes close, but a weird biochemical deus ex machina gums up the works. A secret agent tries to uncover the truth about genetic engineering in a militant Indonesia-ish country. The two plots converge, sort of, at the end. There’s some interesting stuff here, but ultimately the edgy posturing and lack of substance grates. I’m curious about Brunner’s other “Club of Rome” novels, but mostly for historical purposes. **’

Review- Trollope, “Phineas Redux”

July 14, 2019 Peter BerardLeave a comment

Anthony Trollope, “Phineas Redux” (1873) – The British reading public must have been clamoring for more of that Phineas Finn character from one of Trollope’s previous Victorian novels of manners and institutions, because he delivered nearly six hundred fresh pages on the Irish sometimes-parliamentarian a few years later. This is the fourth book in the Palliser series, where Trollope explores the intersection between social life and parliamentary politics, in settings split between the capital and various country estates.

This one takes an odd turn halfway through. For the first half, the titular Phineas is worried getting elected to parliament (from a newly-enfranchised industrial town) and then worried about getting a cabinet office, while various side characters worry about marriages and hunting arrangements. The big drama appears to be that an old flame’s estranged husband is going crazy towards him. Then, Phineas’s rival Bonteen is murdered in the street, and (circumstantial) evidence points to Phineas Finn! And so we get an extended evidence-and-trial section of the book. Probably the most interesting part is where Trollope puts his opinions on contemporary British public life in the mouth of a brassy old public defender, and insists that midcentury mealy-mouthedness made most verdicts mere business propositions, not real judgments of public morals, etc.

As such, no one (except a few of his enemies) really wants to hang Phineas, but he might hang anyway because of a system no one has in hand. Characteristically for Trollope, it’s willful women who take a hand when Phineas’s fan club of upper echelon ladies produce evidence as to his innocence. He then marries one of them, spurning his old flame (truth be told I rooted for the one he married, the other was kind of morose and annoying), and things go back to Trollope-normal. The joy of Trollope is usually in his cutting analysis of Victorian society and that wasn’t as present here, except for the court system, but it was still basically a fine addition to his synoptic picture of bourgeois British society at the time. ***

Review- Stern, “The Politics of Cultural Despair”

July 12, 2019 Peter BerardLeave a comment

Fritz Stern, “The Politics of Cultural Despair: a Study of the Rise of the Germanic Ideology” (1961) – German-American expat Fritz Stern was among the first to undertake intellectual history as directed at Nazism. In this instance, he looks at three German intellectual figures as precursors of Nazism: Paul de Lagarde, Julius Langbehn, and Arthur Moeller van den Bruck. They were most popular in the 1870s, 1890s, and 1920s, respectively. All three were “of a type;” self-made outsiders from petty bourgeois backgrounds, alienated from a Germany that seemed to be modernizing in all the wrong ways, reactionary but not down with the traditional elite, and scholars rather than organizers. All three embraced a view of history where Germany’s historical mission was as high and mighty as those holding it back — liberals, socialists, and almost inevitably, Jews — were low and ubiquitous. All three attracted big readerships.

You learn a lot about these three and their contexts, and a picture of German intellectual life in the late 19th/early 20th century as promising but with some deep issues emerges. Of course, being a mid-century intellectual, Stern throws himself bodily to protect poor innocent misunderstood Nietzsche, whose sister presumably made him say all that “blond beast” crap, but the picture is still a clear one for all that. It fills in a lot of context for what would come in the 1930s. This helped open doors that figures like George Mosse and other intellectual historians of fascism would walk through.

As the title and subtitle indicate, Stern sees the contributions of these men as twofold: as contributors to a Germanic ideology of romantic racialism and antisemitism, and as both early sufferers from and exponents of “cultural despair,” the idea that society was irredeemable short of (counter-)revolutionary change. Stern puts a lot of chips on cultural despair as an important concept, something that conditioned the German people to undertake extreme measures. In many respects, the emotional reality of this feeling — one gets the feeling Stern is doing some reporting here of something he witnessed while in Germany — is stronger and more relevant than the actual ideological content of what the three thinkers or those they influenced in the Third Reich actually believed.

This is a provocative thesis but I don’t really agree with it. Stern was a much more dab hand with ideological differences than many of his fellow American historians of the postwar consensus decades, but he seems to accept with them that ideology is a kind of sickness that can be explained psychologically or sociologically rather than a set of ideas and practices that deserve to be understood politically. Among other issues, this undermines his writing on his three subjects. They tend to run together, exemplars of a type — feckless intellectuals projecting their fantasies onto a complex reality — rather than individuals with differences and agendas. This is especially clear in the case of Moeller van den Bruck, who had more of a direct political impact than the other two, and was part of a movement, the Conservative Revolutionaries, that involved very serious intellectuals such as Ernst Junger and Carl Schmitt (neither of which are so much as mentioned). You don’t need to agree with or see as rational a given movement in order to try to understand it on its own terms.

All the same, the book is pretty good, well-written and with clear points, even when I disagree with them. Stern’s priors are clear- admirer of “real” German culture and foe of the ideological fervor, left and right, that would have loomed so large as he came of age during the Weimar period. And he’s not all the way wrong, especially with the terror of modernity that he saw gripping not just Germany at the end of the nineteenth century, but much of the western world. Moreover, it doesn’t seem like we’ve seen the last of something that looks an awful lot like Stern’s “cultural despair” rearing its head with the sense of thwarted greatness and petty malice that sweeps the land. ****

Review- Weber, “Peasants Into Frenchmen”

July 7, 2019 Peter BerardLeave a comment

Eugen Weber, “Peasants Into Frenchmen: the Modernization of Rural France, 1870-1914” (1976) – More like “PISSANTS into Frenchmen,” am I right?! No, I am not. The peasantry had a pretty rough row to hoe (literally and figuratively) in the nineteenth century. Moreover, and more of a problem for the French government, the life of the peasantry — depending on how you counted, something like half the country — was very poorly incorporated into the official and unofficial institutions of the country at large. In 1870, only a little more than half even spoke French. Again, this depends on some fuzzy numbers and how you count things, but many many rural French spoke either another language altogether (Breton, Basque, German, Flemish, etc) or a local patois. The government, such as it was in rural areas, was seen as something to avoid, tax collectors, gendarmes, and army recruiters (this would continue through our period — the peasants had a point — but get better from a governmental point of view). Most peasant kids had a few months of school and then were off to the farm. Most towns were “self-sufficient,” doing a little bit of trade for cash but otherwise largely living off their own produce. This sounds nice until you realize that means “always on the edge of hunger” and having to eat and wear crappy versions of what other places in the country could produce for cheaper. All in all, the unified France we’re used to thinking of had not come into existence, but it had by 1914, Weber argues- and the experience of the war sealed it.

What changed between 1870 and 1914? Weber was a liberal modernization theory guy, more sophisticated than many but still a great believer in the idea that things progress in an orderly fashion from “traditional” to “modern,” i.e. resembling consumer society in the mid-20th century US. Where others telling a similar story emphasize cultural changes brought on by schools, mass culture, etc., Weber puts a lot of emphasis on roads and railroads. There was a massive rural construction campaign once the Third Republic got on its feet in the late 1870s, and this cracked open the rural isolation that prevailed in the French countryside. You could think of it like the “market revolution” American historians identified in the Jacksonian period, where all of a sudden it made more economical sense for peasants to produce more for the market than for themselves. This had numerous spin-off effects, from wine country becoming wine country (from every area making and drinking its own wine, no matter how shitty) to peasants relying on their school-aged children to read the official, French language, documents they now needed to make use of in their expanded economic activity. If the schools were important, this could only be because peasants were prosperous enough to keep their kids in school for a few years instead of a few months. Similarly, the roads allowed government authorities better access to villages, the draft (reduced to only two years, so less of a death sentence than before) could reach further, etc. etc.

Weber clearly did massive amounts of research into the life of rural France for this book, and it shows. He provides numerous, sometimes dozens it seems, of examples of every dynamic he points to and provides an almost encyclopedic view of French rural life by doing so. It’s impossible not to get bogged down a little in that level of detail but he writes in a sprightly, straightforward fashion that makes it lighter than it might otherwise be. Weber depicts the peasantry as more or less happy with the changes that were wrought, though one wonders if they’d be so happy if they knew this state of affairs helped feed their sons into the meatgrinder of the war… still, better nutrition, health, and education are pretty huge deals when they make such sudden quantum leaps as they did in France’s case. All in all, a monumental work both in the good sense and the bad (i.e. long and somewhat tedious) sense. ****

Review- Denning, “The Cultural Front”

July 5, 2019 Peter BerardLeave a comment

Michael Denning, “The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century” (1997) – More like the “be-laboring… of the point!” Just kidding- this book is pretty long and detailed but I wouldn’t call it belabored. It describes the titular “cultural front,” the loose coalition of artists — writers, filmmakers, painters, photographers, etc. — who attached themselves to the Popular Front in the 1930s and who had an outsized effect on American culture.

Like a lot of big books in American Studies, this one makes a big deal out of excavating lost Americana. I read this book over twenty years after it was published, so Denning’s posture that he’s recovering lost history is somewhat lost on me, but I can see what he means. Critics and artists in the decades after the thirties often pooh-poohed the period as one of stagnant politicization, the following of party lines. The liberals who created the midcentury critical establishment in America specifically snubbed any Popular Front writers who didn’t, at some point, turn on it (as John Dos Passos did) in favor of the less political modernism of the teens and twenties.

Denning argues gamefully both for his subject’s cultural creativity and its relevance. More than following a party line — either the Communist Party or the New Deal Democrats — most of the cultural front (and the Popular Front more generally; their relationship, and both’s relationship to the broader labor left and the New Deal, is foggy here) got involved for fairly straightforward reasons. They saw a coalition dedicated to carrying forward the labor militancy of the depression era, as well as fighting racism and fascism at home and abroad, and went for it. The sort of drama of sectarianism that fixated later critics was just that- mostly a thing for critics. As for relevance, such figures as Dorothea Lange, Billie Holiday, Orson Welles, and Dashiell Hammett were all involved, which on the one hand is a group of heavyweights but on the other hand largely worked in established genres and forms. Still, they and the thousands of other Popular Front cultural workers brought their own sensibility to things which was influential for a long time, and arguably still is.

Denning makes a larger point about the “laboring” of American culture, a movement from the thirties to the end of the fifties that put the concerns and expressions of working class Americans — many of them migrants or children of migrants, either from abroad or internal migration — at the center of culture and politics. I’m not sure about this claim, or rather think it seems a bit big and broad. I could buy it for the period of the CIO’s strength in the thirties and arguably during the war, but after the war, the Cold War and consumerism take over. In all, this is a big book full of fascinating detail (just enough to merit the “belaboring” joke) but that suffers from some overly-ambitious theoretical aims. Still, probably better to aim high. ****

Review- Strugatsky, “Roadside Picnic”

July 1, 2019 Peter BerardLeave a comment

Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, “Roadside Picnic” (1972) (translated from the Russian by Olena Bormashenko) – The site of alien contact with Earth gets all freaky and forbidding in this Soviet scifi tale. It’s the basis of the movie “Stalker” by Andrei Tarkovsky and the source of metaphor in Adam Curtis’s last documentary (which I thought was a little weak tbh). All of them carry a heavy freight of existential dread and confusion.

The main character, Red Schuhart, is a stalker- a guy who goes into the forbidden Zone to seek out artifacts the aliens left behind. No one knows what is up with the Zone or the aliens, who made no meaningful purposeful contact with humanity. The rules work differently in the Zone- the rules of physics, seemingly the rules of cause and effect, and these changes are deadly. The stalkers that go through them are a hard-bitten, cynical breed, similar to hardboiled detectives or mountain men, and Red is no exception. The Zone is reaching out to make life in the surrounding areas unsustainable, but while there’s money to be had and, one suspects, a point to be made, stalkers will stalk.

The plot and characterization isn’t really the point in the Strugatskys’s novel any more than it is in Tarkovsky’s quiet, achingly-paced film. There’s a “one last job” where Red pursues a legendary wish-granting alien orb, but by then we’ve accepted the logic of the Zone- the Zone is the Zone and while one can take precautions, it makes mock of all of man’s attempts to put a system in place in or around it. People, including Adam Curtis, have put various political spins on the Zone, including claiming that it’s a metaphor for our own incomprehensible times. I don’t know about all that, but part of the strength of the Strugatsky’s work is that they create a powerful spacial metaphor for dread and the feeling of unreality. ****’

Too Much Berard

Month: July 2019