A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People From Being a Burden on Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Publick
Jonathan swift demonstrates the limits of Enlightenment dogma in this masterful and hilarious essay.
To celebrate the bicentennial anniversary of the French Revolution (1989), Robert Darnton was asked by the New York Times to write an essay giving an overview of the French Revolution’s significance. It is a perfect introduction to the subject. The New York Times, however, rejected Darnton’s article because the editors thought it too difficult for their readership. You judge.
Each age, we are often told, rewrites the past in its own image. In the case of the French Revolution, this is an understatement. In the second half of this century the scholarship has seemed to be in a state of almost permanent revolution as historians have taken up one interpretative or methodological approach after another. My main concern in this essay is to draw attention to important developments which have occurred in the scholarship on the Revolution as a whole.
John Dunne signposts main landmarks and current directions in the historiographical debate. (History Today)
Slate: What lies ahead for China politically?
Schiff: I think there will ultimately be more freedom than there is today. Will China ever become a one man, one vote democracy? Hopefully not, for the sake of the Chinese. Doing so has certainly not served our interest. We enjoyed a lot more freedom and prosperity when we were less democratic. In the 19th century we were quite undemocratic in the way government ran, and we benefited from that lack of democracy. But as we became more democratic, we grew less free and therefore less prosperous. If they’re wise, the Chinese won’t follow that example. They’ll try to model their government after what America used to be, before we screwed it up.
Slate: In 2010, there were 180,000 “mass incidents” (protests) reported in China. That’s almost 500 a day. The Communist Party spent $95 billion on “internal security” in 2011, more than it spent on national defense. Aren’t the costs of state capitalism, or of an authoritarian system that makes state capitalism possible, pretty high?
Schiff: People are dissatisfied in this country, too. We’ve got protesters—look at Occupy Wall Street. There is a great deal of inflation in China right now, which frustrates a lot of people. That is the cost of subsidizing the U.S. economy. If the Chinese simply allowed the renminbi to rise, instead of propping up the dollar, then you’d see far less unrest in China; the people would enjoy their prosperity and productivity more.
Methinks Schiff is blind in at least one eye. But you make the call.
Harvard Crimson Book Review: Morrow probes dirty details of White House occupants’ tactics—and sex lives…
He goes to great length to find similarities among the three main characters. Both Kennedy and Nixon had siblings who died young, for example. JFK and Johnson both had voracious sexual appetites—as Morrow reminds us time and time again. Kennedy said he could not sleep without having had sex. While his wife Jacqueline was delivering their first child stillborn, JFK and a fellow senator were entertaining women on a yacht in the Mediterranean.
Johnson too had many affairs, but he stands out more for his trademark crudeness. “[H]e liked to discomfit ‘the Harvards’… by forcing them to confer with him while he sat on the toilet, and he was a lifelong exhibitionist who in college had dubbed his penis ‘Jumbo,’” Morrow relates.
Nixon, like Johnson, had a habit for making those around him uncomfortable. While drinking cocktails with the owners of the Los Angeles Times in 1967, Nixon blurted: “I probably shouldn’t tell this…But…Why did the farmer keep a bucket of shit in his living room?”
The punch line: “Because he wanted to keep the flies out of the kitchen!” A shocked silence ensued. The hostess said: “You’re right, Dick, you shouldn’t have told that.”
The symbols, slogans, ideas and architecture of the Founding Fathers were Classicism and the American Revolution. (History Today)
The philosophe may have laid the egg, but was the bird hatched of a different breed? Maurice Cranston discusses the intellectual origins and development of the French Revolution. (History Today)
For most of the last century, America’s cultural landscape—its fashion, art, music, design, entertainment—changed dramatically every 20 years or so. But these days, even as technological and scientific leaps have continued to revolutionize life, popular style has been stuck on repeat, consuming the past instead of creating the new.
Susan Cole looks at how, though formally excluded from the political process, Athena’s sisters nevertheless made their mark. (History Today)
Social media can’t provide what social change has always required. (Gladwell from New Yorker)
Jon Cook identifies the mix of factors that helps explain the Florentine Renaissance. (History Today)
When Edmund Blackadder memorably lamented, ‘Baldrick, to you the Renaissance was just something that happened to other people’, it was probably the citizens of Florence to whom he was referring. For nowhere else were the ingredients that enabled the Renaissance to flourish – a politically-active citizenry, a vigorous humanist movement and abundant wealth – better blended. It is these ingredients, in Italy in general and in Florence in particular, that are the subject of this essay.
As we move into the next era of American history, , and on how we — and not just George W. Bush — handled them.
We need to reflect on the bizarre sequence of events we’ve experienced since 2000
Economic conditions and social media are making protests more common in China—at a delicate time for the country’s rulers (Economist)
‘Monumentally bad diplomacy, worse strategy, chaotic military organisation and inept generalship’ – Invasion of Afghanistan. Penned as Soviet tanks rolled into Kabul in December 1979. (History Today)
After World War II, West Germany rapidly made the transition from murderous dictatorship to model democracy. Or did it? New documents reveal just how many officials from the Nazi regime found new jobs in Bonn. A surprising number were chosen for senior government positions.
At first the English withstood the Norman attack of 1066. But soonthey succumbed to the invaders, as did their virile language of record. An article by H.R. Loyn. (History Today)
François Hartog on how urban living has coincided with the advocacy of popular rulefrom Plato through to Machiavelli, Rousseau and 20th-century sociologists. (History Today)
Did the system spawn a monster – or a monster the system? Norman Pereira re-evaluates the road to totalitarianism in the Soviet Union after the Revolution, and Stalin’s part in it.