Telling Tales?

What are we to make of Livy's stories about the Roman past? The historian was fond of sprinkling his history with tales of what Romans had done. In the first chapters of his work, discussing the invasion by Rome of its ancestral city Alba Longa, Livy discusses a famous episode involving two sets of brothers. The Romans and Albans were about to plunge into war when the leader of the Albans, Mettius, proposed that they both elect three champions to fight for each city and against each other- victory in the fight would give that city the spoils. The three brothers Horatii volunteered for Rome, whereas it was the Curatii brothers who fought for Alba. Two of the Horatii were killed, but the last managed to slay the Curatii and thus Rome conquered Alba. On his return with the army from the field, Horatius came across his sister outside Rome- she had been engaged to one of the Curatii and seeing her fiance's bloodstained cloak on the shoulder of her brother, she burst into tears. Horatius drew his sword and plunged it into her chest- killing her instantly. He was put on trial immediatly and the King, Tullius Hostilius, gave the right of deciding his punishment to the citizens who voted that he be symbolically punished with performing a ritual observance (that Livy tells us his family had been performing down to Livy's day) but he be let off the horendous punishment for treason that awaited him.

So much the story that Livy tells. It is piquant if nothing else and most readers would find it exciting. But there is more going on here than meets the eye. Firstly its right for us as modern readers to ask whether this could have happened and whether it happened the way that Livy says it did. Its worth stating to begin with that we must be cautious- Livy presumably did not have written records that this had happened. What he did have was the family recollection- and my guess is that this was a family story. Whether it links to the events in the civic history of Rome- the conquest of Alba, the right of the people to decide the punishment in cases of treason- is a separate matter and my guess is that the fabulous story became attached to these events- rather than that it actually happened as Livy tells us. But there probably is something here at the root of this story- possibly quite different from described in Livy's account. Families in clan based societies tend to preserve memories of family dishonour and blood feud down the generations- they tend to keep these stories particularly if they are tied to a peculiar family religious ritual. This particular story involves both the honour of the Horatii (the sister weeping for a non-Roman, the brother committing sorricide) and a religious ritual that was peculiar to them: it seems like just the thing that they might have passed down, exaggerated and transferred to great public events though it might be, my guess is that there is a kernel of truth here.

That ultimately tells us something about the value of Livy's history to us as historians looking back on ancient Rome. His history is the end of a game of Chinese whispers- he tells us the records of early Rome were destroyed- and his historical sources go back scarcely a couple of centuries. But family traditions, stories and fables- even songs that we do not know about- often preserve things where histories are not written. If we say that Livy is not completely accurate- and we can never guarentee that everything described in the early parts of his history happened- we cannot say that his history was a work of fiction (he obviously researched) nor can we say more importantly that it had no connection to the times it described. Livy's history is a limited but useful source- and in stories like that about the Horatii we may be getting a glimpse of primitive Roman society- and just as importantly we are getting a glimpse of what a Roman family wanted to remember about that society. That tells us something about the family and its concerns. It demonstrates their desire to fix private history to public history- and also the fact that they remembered this story demonstrates their piety and an interesting sexual and civic politics- which saw the tears of a young woman for her dead fiance as a threat to the masculine state and civic order.

A threat that had to be met with violence and ultimately murder- murder that the state acquiesced in whilst sacrafices expiated the wrath of the furies.

Of Kings and Constitutions

So far the journey Livy has taken us upon has seen a perfection of Kingship emerge- on the one hand the King as a charismatic ruler, on the other the King as religious and moral leader, on the one hand the King as general, on the other the King as priest. We now need to come to another aspect of Kingship- the King as the creator of constitutions. Livy describes in fine detail the way that Servius Tullius, the King after Lucius Tarquin and the penultimate King of Rome, created the Senate and the concept of the popular vote. Popular votes were used before- Livy describes them being used for judicial reasons by Tullius Hostilius (I.26). But before he can describe the revolution that will bring down the Republic- he needs to provide an account of how the senate and the Roman people developed an appetite for politics and an awareness that they might be involved in it. So how did that happen? And what did the King, Servius Tullius, gain that he gave up his sole hold upon political power?

Livy provides an explanation and an answer. From the earliest days, Rome was involved in warfare. Whether in the age of Romulus, where he implies personal charisma would win the Romans battles, to the age of Ancus, war had been a way of life for the Romans. In the reign of Lucius Tarquin- he had proposed the extension of Rome's cavalry forces and had partially succeeded in expanding the armies of the new city (I. 36). His successor obviously thought that this small progress needed reinforicing. Rome needed an army. Unsurprisingly, Servius turned immediatly to his own citizens in order to provide that force. He organised them into tribes- 12 at the beggining- and compelled those tribes to produce both resources and military forces for him- indeed Livy suggests that the name tribe derives from the Latin for tribute. The Roman census which began at this point was for Livy a compulsary activity.

But Servius had to give up something in order to gain this, he gave up to the population and the senate the power to vote on proposals. We can already see a theme of Roman history about to develop- in that Servius deliberately set up the electoral system so that the richest would decide for the poorest- the tribes voted in order of wealth and the highest classes could thus decide the fate of the poorest. Livy imagines that there was a sort of manhood suffrage before this (I. 43), a kind of primitive democracy- but what this did was establish the organisation of the Republic- an organisation which endured down to Livy's day- and thus established a permanent basis for power outside the royal house. Livy is offering us here a model of transition- from a dictatorship of plebiscite to a monarchy of legal form. The first sees a kind of primitive equality, the second raises the aristocracy above the rest of the population. But he also more interestingly provides us the mechanism that explains the change- the exchange between the King and his new complicated society is that for his willingness to entertain the wishes of his subjects, they allow him to regulate their complicated society. By placing property institutionally inside the law, he acquires the right to both regulate and tax it. By placing men's wishes at the heart of political debate, he acquires the ability to dispose them upon the battlefields of Italy. His successor accused him of using the census to tax and to find men for war: Tarquin Superbus argued that Servius was motivated not by an unusual royal generosity but by the creation of new powers for the King through the creation of new rights for others. The Senate were joined thus by a people- and by a people disposed according to property.

We do not know if this was the actual sequence by which a republic was slowly created. What we can know is that this is a plausible way that such republics are created. The great representative institutions being formed and strengthened because they fortified the power of the King. The other side of the coin is the argument that citizenship is linked to being a soldier- an argument found in Livy's greatest interpreter, Machiavelli, for example. That argument dominated thinking about Republicanism right up until the Scots formulated the notion of commercial citizenship- something which marks our world as modern is that we are fellow citizens of David Hume and Adam Smith, not of Titus Livius and Nicollo Machiavelli.

The Establishment of the Priesthood of Jupiter

He [Numa, Rome's second King] foresaw that in a martial community like Rome future Kings were likely to resemble Romulus rather than himself and to be often, in consequence, away from home on active service, and for that reason he appointed a priest of Jupiter on a permanent basis, marking the importance of the office by the grant of special robes and the use of the royal cural chair. This step ensured that the religious duties attached to the royal office should never be allowed to lapse (Livy I.20)

This passage from Livy's first volume- slightly before the discussion of Ancus Martius that occupied my last post- refines it. Livy describes one of the key reforms of Numa- the institution of a priesthood of Jupiter- and in doing so what he brings up is the notion of what in his eyes early Roman Kingship actually was. Part of the role of the King for Livy is the 'religious duties' that attach to the person of the King. A priest might maintain their authority through the use of a royal chair- a King needed a deputy in religious matters for when he was away from the throne. It is an interesting reflection- because what it reminds us of is a feature of the Roman state right up until the time of Livy and beyond. Religious and political power have been split in Europe since the days of the early medieval papacy- but in the Roman state they were not. The priest was another magistrate- this goes back through the Republic where the Pontifex maximus (chief priest) was a political officer as well and aristocrats held priestly roles and kept rituals going- Livy later discusses one such ritual that reminded Romans of the patriotism of the Horatii (I.26) and such rituals emphasized the continuity of the Roman state and the important role that various families had played in it. (We shall think about the Horatian tradition later because it is interesting in its own right.)

Was Livy right- could the origins of this priestly power lie with Numa? One suspects that religion and politics have been married for a long time- but we cannot prove it. Rather I would see this account as less an account of the way that things actually happened- than an account of the way things might have happened. To say such and such began with Numa allows Livy to do two things- he can bring forwards a reason for it happening like that- the absense of the King from Rome justifies the creation of a Royal Priestly office which would continue through the consulate. It also allows him to project that office back into a past so ancient as to be beyond political- it establishes the priesthood as a norm in Roman politics- tied to no one regime (it is not Republican but Royal) and thus to be continued under the Principate- and as something that cannot be questioned. Like 17th Century English lawyers who projected laws about feudal tenure back into the time of King Arthur, the Roman historian was taking a position about the present in projecting the religious arrangements of Rome back into the far past. They may, who knows have been founded much later, but by crediting them to Numa what Livy was doing, even if he was not recounting the facts, was demonstrating that these religious practices should be respected.

They had survived Tarquin and Brutus- they should survive Caesar and Brutus- and even Octavian.

Ancus Martius

Many may have heard of Romulus, fewer of Numa his successor, and some of Tarquin the proud the last King of Rome- but there were four lesser known Kings who deserve rescue from oblivion: Tullius Hostilius, Ancus Martius, Tarquin the elder and Servius Tullius are all interesting characters in the history of Rome, even if the likelihood is that none of them ever existed. The stories told about them are significant because they indicate the way that Romans thought that characteristics of the Republic had evolved- they also give us indications of what the Romans thought was essential about various societal practices and the ways in which Livy, whose history I am of course relying on, thought about the origins of civility and society. We have already seen that the origins of society might lie with the reign of Romulus- the origins of civility lie in the later reigns and run into the Republic. Numa, Livy tells us, gave Rome a 'second beggining' (1.19) based on laws instead of wars. I want to concentrate though for a specific reason upon a later King- Numa's nephew and successor but one- Ancus Martius.

Martius is interesting because he is so little covered. The myth of Martius's rule is evidently not as strong as that of Romulus's or Numa's or Tullius's let alone Lucius Tarquin's. In my translation of Livy it occupies barely four pages- and two of those are given to an interesting subject which is the topic of this post. Martius, according to Livy, brought international law to Rome. The form that this took for Livy was the creation of a rite of war- an envoy performed certain ritual acts at the border, in front of a foreign witness, in a foreign city and if they were not heeded, the Romans then declared again through a ritual act, a spear thrown across the border between the foreign city and Rome. The system of performing these rights is convoluted- and the words used are no doubt crucial to what Livy wants us to see. Livy wants us to see that whereas Numa had provided peace with religious ceremony, Martius provided war with an 'equivalent solemn ceremonial' (1.32). Of course that is what he does- but by doing it he reveals something of the nature of his understanding of international law and thus of the ancient world's understanding of international law.

Livy tells us that now this ceremony is in the hands of the Fetials. The Fetials were a college of priests- significantly revived by Octavian (no accident then that here the King of Rome is given a role as their founder and a religious reformer)- whose responsibility was declaring war. If enemy territory was too far away to throw the spear, in later times they would hurl it into the temple of Bellona, goddess of war. What this demonstrates though is the close tie between international law and religion. Whilst reading Livy's account of Ancus Martius, I couldn't hold myself back from an anachronistic reflection on Locke. In chapter 14 of the Two Treatises, Locke characterises a state of war as a state in which the only appeal is one to heaven- there are no judges but God (or in Livy's case, the Gods). Of course what Livy is pointing out is the origins of the international law of his own time- and this is the fascinating thing- like Locke, he sees the origins of international law as lying in that appeal to heaven. Because the Roman state went to war by appealing precisely to heaven- the Fetial priests would invoke Jupiter and Janus as they declared that Rome was aggrieved and wished to fight. Ancus Martius therefore stands at the beggining for Livy of the concept of international law- and international law begins with an appeal from a King to the King of the Gods.

But there is something more to this which I think is interesting. This is a myth. Livy could not have known that this was true- indeed he has already told us that Numa began another ceremony to describe war and peace religiously, by opening and closing the temple of Janus's doors depending on the belligerent status of Rome. Livy though thought it interesting to tell us about both Numa and Martius- and he informs us that both of them died peacefully. I think it is no accident that this is so. What Livy is offering here- and I go back to Octavian's reign to substantiate my point- is a point about social stability in monarchy. Augustus had sought in his reign to reinforce religion- I think what Livy offers in his account of Ancus Martius and Numa is an account of the stability that that might bring. If his account of Romulus is a warning to Augustus, then his account of the two later king is an offer of hope. He is suggesting that to remain in power kings must become servants to ritual- that these customs can solidify and stabilise rule. Its significant that amongst Martius's other acts- Livy says that he founded the first Roman Prison (1.33) - in a sense what Livy is doing is endorsing a program of moral reformation in the 1st century B.C. by describing its effects in the 7th Century B.C.

Livy's career was built on the foundation of civil war- he lived through the wild times when Roman slew Roman. He rejected the Octavianist argument that tyranny could create peace- we have already seen his scepticism about Romulus's ability to do that (another Caesar perhaps!) What we find in Livy's description of Ancus Martius though and of Numa Pompilius is not merely an account of how Roman religious practice began, but an account of the real reason for Roman instability. Pious Kingship succeeded in maintaining stability in a way that violent kingship failed- it was not so much the nature of the government as the nature of its moral reform that mattered. Living at the beggining of the Principate, Livy could agree that the Republic and early Principate were part of a 'process of moral decline'(1.1)- he argued that the society of the Principate was 'in love with death both individually and collectively' but could not prove its trajectory (1.1).

Roman history awaited Tacitus and Suetonius to describe that issue.

Livy's Romulus

Livy's portrait of Romulus raises some interesting questions about the generation of Kingdoms. Livy was writing here about myth- he himself acknowledges the limits of his knowledge at several points- but what it demonstrates is the way that Livy thinks about leadership. Livy's history was written in the years immediatly after the battle of Actium- to which he refers- and the foundation of the Principate by Augustus. The previous hundred years of Roman history were dominated by a series of charismatic generals- Marius, Sulla, Pompey, Caesar, Antony and finally Octavian. What Livy does with his account of Romulus is really give us the account of a personal ability to inspire loyalty. He notes several times the ways in which Romulus was able to inspire loyalty- through for instance the use of augury and ceremony, through the creation of allies- new senators- and the unscrupulous creation of conflict (the mass rape of the Sabine women is one of the most horrifying stories in the ancient world- the Romans raped them according to Livy and then faced them with a dilemma either they could be subject to an honour killing or they could marry their rapists). The point of these stories is that they offer a commentary on what political strategies worked in the creation of a government- unscrupulous charisma sounds like the model followed by the politicians of the late Republican era- the attempt to fortify that system created by violence with law.

Livy though in detailing Romulus's end- where he mentions both the story that he was elevated to heaven in a cloud and the account in which he was torn to pieces by the senate- demonstrates the way in which tyranny's methods can be turned on the tyrant. The senate manufactured- he implies heavily- an account to justify their assacination of the King. They made him a God in order to avoid him as a tyrant- the warning to Augustus in the first book of Livy's history could not be more explicit and the commentary on the Principate more acute. For what Livy demonstrates is that Romulus created peace but also the aspiration to replace and destroy him- the ambition to create legal frameworks to turn tyrants to Kings, or Kings to Republics, is always immediately vulnerable because they must be set up through unscrupulousness- and that unscrupulousness teaches a nation not merely the arts of law, but the arts of treachery and war.

General Idi Amin Dada

A film made in the early seventies followed Idi Amin. The journalist responsible allowed Amin complete control over the message, she added references to Amin's atrocities- but there are only two really. Apart from that this is the film that Amin wanted to make- the way that Amin wanted to present himself to the world. Perhaps the most astonishing thing about it is that this is the way that Amin wanted the world to see him- and that tells you enough about the man- his wounds are visible all the way through the film, his sense of greivance against the British and his complete ignorance of economics and of war. This is a character study- it is not about politics for it is directed by a man who did not understand that he was a vicious tyrant- politics as we have already noted stops at the edge of tyranny. Each tyranny though is governed by the whim and personality of its ruler- the depression of a Tiberius or a Domitian no less than the exuberance of a Nero or Commodus creates a political regime and a particular type of terror.

Amin overrated his own importance in the world- 'the whole worlds are looking at the future of Uganda and General Amin' he says at first- of course the fact is that the world paid attention to Amin as a curiosity but not as a factor within international politics of any significance nor as an ideological bellweather. His third way between Communism and Capitalism was a disaster. But then so much of what Amin says in this film is a fantasy- he tells us that he always speaks the truth to the people which is why he cannot tell us the strength of his army. He rose to power on the back of a military career, influenced by the fact that after the British left, he was lucky enough to be one of the few African commissioned officers in Uganda. He has charisma- he has the ability to make you like him- despite the fact that what he says is bizarre and often unpleasant. That does not make him unique amongst human beings (a quick stroll around the blogging world will show many people whose rancour exceeds their wisdom by a considerable factor)- what made him unique was the power he had to effect his beliefs.

We see a cabinet meeting which lays bare the extent to which Amin had no idea of how to run a country- he sits at the head of a meeting and berates his cabinet ministers for not ensuring that there are more than four female hotel managers and for not controlling the minutiae of the administration. He attacks the foreign minister- significantly the foreign minister was found two weeks later in a river, dead. Amin governs through anger- through noticing something he doesn't like and shouting at the person responsible- assuming that the system is irrelevant to how it is performing. Amin believed that his own fiat could create and destroy. Not merely that, but he believed that when he came across obstacles they must be the result of global conspiracy- the Jews, the Bilderberg, the New World Order- all the paraphenalia of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. All bizarre, all wrong, all used in this case to justify genocide and excuse Hitler, not to mention to drive out the Ugandan Asians. The truly terrifying thing is not that Amin is crazy- several people in the world are crazy- but that noone could stop him in Uganda and no-one could tell him that he was crazy without ending up in a river, naked with a hole through the head.

Ultimately the fact about Amin was that he was driven by resentment and a confused idea that if the world did not work, it must be because of the nefarious conspiracies abroad and incompetence at home. You can see him visibly struggling with the reality of a confusing, complex world and trying to reduce it into his categories of conspiracy and calumny. This psyche became the psyche of a whole country though- Amin immitated the attack he hoped to launch on Isreal, using real tanks and planes. He ranted at cabinet ministers, not friends down a pub, or readers of a blog. He sent insulting joky letters not to insignificant friends but to the President of Tanzania, Julius Nyerere. Amin was mad- but he was in government. Politics in this case became personality and throughout the film one can see that for Amin those two entities are not distinct. That all the science and art applied to politics over the centuries became as nothing in the hands of a man with a gun.

Amin emerges from his own film as the classic tyrant. He is incapable of understanding the virtue of meekness and kindness- incapable of understanding the world as a place of confusion and complication not conspiracy- incapable of acting without cruelty and brutality. What is so interesting is of course he presents us this picture- whilst beleiving it is entirely to his own credit- what that exposes is that tyranny not merely creates great suffering, it destroys the tyrant. The tyrant becomes unable to see what is true and what is false- he makes his own reality and that reality does not map to the reality of the world. The darkness gathers and the shrouds of suspicion haunt the head that wears the crown- the throne is a dangerous place- and as Roman Emperors found the illusions created by power are the first step from the throne to the place of execution. Amin was overthrown within five years- after inflicting great damage upon Uganda, historically one of the richest countries in Africa, after Amin it was one of the poorest.

This is a fascinating film- a fascinating insight into the brutality of tyranny and into the mind of the tyrant. It made me think of that classic British TV drama I Claudius- as directed by Caligula!

Sammy Davis Jr and Mr Bojangles

One of the great performers- one of the great songs- I admit that I love Nina Simone's version too and one day will post that- but this is still amazing. Its such a moving story- the fact that it is true is another matter- and the way that Davis sings it makes it even more moving.

Confession of a Murderer

On the banks of the seine, a group of Russian emigres meet. Amongst them is a German who speaks Russian- our narrator. The rest of them sit around in the loneliness of exile with their small glasses of liquor. The cafe we learn later is transplanted directly from its original abode in Odessa- everyone in the room has a past- these are not aristocrats but the servants of the Tsarist state. Alone amongst them is the object of the fascination of our visiting German, a Russian with a queer smile and a grim face- who we later learn is called Golubchik and considers himself both a murderer and a good man. The novel plays with our beliefs about the truth- for which you need to read to the end- and also with our notion of morality. I do not want to discuss the problems of truth here- I don't think I could without giving away the plot- but there is something said here about the nature of what it is to be good that is important. Something that we need to understand about this 'good' murderer, this paragon of the bloody- and his haunted imagination.

This is the story of a haunted imagination, a character that might easily be described as a haunted imagination. Golubchik is an illegitimate son- the son of a Russian Prince, the Prince Krapotkin, who has harboured since his youth anger and ambition fused together in a poisonous passion to reintroduce him to his natural father. We know that Prince Krapatkin hardly recognises the stripling lad- granting him a snuff box- whereas he does recognise his own legitimate son- the young Prince. The young Prince and Golubchik go through life in a curious parallel trajectory. Golubchik becomes a secret policeman- a member of the Okhrana. The young Prince consorts with revolutionaries- but everything that Golubchik so supposedly the member of the most feared caste in Tsarist Russia does rebounds against the formidable reputation and power of Krapotkin, a prince with the ear of the Tsar and powers boundless in the land of Russia. Both are stalked by a sinister charming Hungarian called Lakatos.

And so we go through this fearful dance- feudal right versus totalitarian secrecy. In a sense this is a commentary upon the Russian Tsarist state- its a commentary upon the curious land where the Holy Father ruled his subjects through the apparatus of a secret state, the discipline of a state church and the awe of a divine monarchy. But it goes further than this- for it goes to the roots of morality. Golubchik says that he is a good man- what he means is that he has taken no action that was not neccessitated. He did what he did because he had to do it. That 'goodness' means that he can escape the way that he has used his power. If he had been born in a higher station, if he had been born to a greater destiny, or even if he had not had the luck to join the security services, he would have been fine. He transfers his evil deeds to the Mephistocles of the tale- the Hungarian- but the tale undercuts this brutally and dramatically.

Start with his conversations with Lakatos- he converses with Golubchik but Roth is keen to demonstrate to us that though he influences and proffers options to Golubchik, he never forces him to do anything. The moment I remember is that Lakatos gets arrested as Golubchik gets onto a train- and rather than stay on the train- Golubchik gets off it. Every time he gets off the train. Every time he chooses to perform an immoral act. So he falls in love with his half brother's model-girlfriend- he chooses to impersonate a Prince Krapotkin. He chooses all the way through and his actions are the product of his moral decisions. Furthermore he himself is the product of his decisions. There is no way to separate his situation from his person- he is a Russian of a certain class- he is his dreams, his haunted thoughts. To claim that he can be exonnerated because his circumstances would be fine if you could separate the person from the personal history- but you cannot. He is his history- and he and his history are judged and found in this tale wanting.

This tale is written beautifully, translated impeccably, and the atmosphere it produces is akin as many recognise to that produced by Dosteovsky or Kafka- the simularity is because of the similar theme. Like Dosteovsky we are dealing with the struggles of the individual soul- the moral person in modern society. Like Kafka we are dealing with those struggles within a system- not the system of the Trial's bureacratic nightmare- but the system of a self created hell. What Roth proffers is a Protestant novel in a world without God. A novel about guilt and sin in a world where there is no escape- where the mutilated corpse of the victim knocks at the door of the bar in which you are sitting- a world in a which all roads lead back to the conception of your own guilt.

A Foolish Post on Germans in St Louis and American History: An undisciplined thought

The Republican party fascinates me. One of the things that Oliver Stone in his film about Nixon captured very well was the fact that the Republican Party is ultimately the party of Lincoln. As much as Reagen, the gaunt figure of the sixteenth President of the United States and his legacy dominates what the Republican party is today and what the history of the United States has looked like since the civil war. It strikes me that from European and American perspectives the civil war is too often played down as a factor in what America looks like today- just as for instance the great struggles of 19th Century Liberalism are played down in Britain. Superficially there may not be much to link the America of 1868 to the America of 2008- the first a war torn, battered country, whose borders did not yet extend to the Pacific and who faced racial strife, anarchy and civil war- the second a confident, innovative, prosperous and (despite the current election campaign) content superpower which functions as a beacon not a backwater, a protector not a petitioner to the rest of the world. But Lincoln's America endures- and particularly through the constellation of the partys today. I mean to take an undiscipline ramble around American history now- forgive me for my errors but I think there is a thought here- because in my view we can explain some of what happened over the last century by reference to events in the late 1860s involving German immigrants, elections and St Louis, Missouri.

St Louis is an interesting place because its a place in which there were lots of German Americans. German Americans historically were in the 1860s a Republican constituency. They voted Republican more than any other candidate and more than any other ethnic group. They voted Republican because in large part they opposed slavery. And slavery was the defining issue of American politics running up to the civil war- and the second issue (behind the issue of sovereignty) during the civil war. Germans in St Louis though hold a unique place in the history of Republicanism in the United States- not because they were important- but because they drifted away. By examining why they drifted away, we can see how some of the choices made by Republicans in the era of reconstruction have influenced the constitutions of the parties in the states ever since- particularly in the north where within a generation the issue of slavery was settled. If we live in the shadow of the Civil War, we live in it because we live in the shadow of three great movements in American politics- the first Republican moment from 1860 to 1912, the second Democratic moment from 1912 to 1968 and the third that we live in now- the conservative moment.

So what happened in St Louis? (I draw here upon Kristina Anderson's article about the history of St Louis in the American Journal of Ethnic History). Well the German population became disenchanted with the Republican politicians who they found in power. They became disenchanted for two reasons- both of which were tied to the issue of slavery and both of which provide indications of the choices that Republican politicians made in the generations after the war. In 1872, Horace Greeley the Democratic Candidate captured the German wards that had voted both for Lincoln and for his successor Ulysses Grant in 1868. What had happened was that the German citizens of those wards had revolted, they had revolted both on religious and economic grounds. On religious grounds, they feared the emergance of religious language in the Republican party manifesto and in the Missouri constitution. The Republican antipathy to slavery was built on solid evangelical foundations- but the Germans found the intrusion of an alien religion into the form of the state a threat. Particularly they saw that the imposition of an oath that would require clergymen to assert their gratitude to almighty God was the thin end of a very intolerant wedge. Catholics, Freethinkers and Baptists all protested against this measure. They feared that the arrival of black voters, in their view inclined to the majority confessions, would strengthen the Republican Party's nativist tendencies- hence by 1868 the German population of St Louis voted ambivalently about black suffrage.

But there is something else. The something else is that as blacks moved north, they threatened the position of working class whites. They provided a source of cheap labour. Whereas some German Democrats beleived that there was no way a black man could work as well as a white man, most German Republicans, having opposed slavery, beleived that of course he could. Given that they were terrified that black workers would come to St Louis and undercut their wages. Furthermore they saw this in the light of the efforts of the main businesses of the town to deal with trade unionism. When the local newspaper for instance hired a black worker to replace a striking white printer in December 1864, the news spread and became an emblem of what might happen. By April 1865, disappointed with Republicans, radical German workers had set up their own Worker's Party in St Louis to contest town elections. There is plenty of evidence of growing support for this party and growing hostility between German unions and radicals and the Republican establishment. What we see here is that the German commitment to racial equality was real, but that they began to see the Republican party as undermining other radical causes and African Americans as part of that problem. They saw African Americans as being willing to support both nativist Republican religious policy and also undercutting the rights of Missourian and German workers.

What is interesting is what this teaches us- the first thing it teaches us is that conventional wisdom is often wrong- I'm not so sure that the Germans were right in either of their beliefs about black Americans- and given the history of the US, in the long run they proved very very wrong. Ultimately some of their concerns in 1868 were to be very similar to the social concerns of Martin Luther King in 1968.

But it does teach us that the way two separate things which are worth learning if we are to understand the impact of abolition and the way that political argument works. Firstly it teaches us that the world is much more complex than we often give it credit for. The German workers of St Louis were amongst the most loyal Republican voters of all- they marched, fought and died for abolition in the civil war. But after the civil war, the reasons which had inspired Republican mainstream thinking- religious commitment and a liberal antipathy to restraints on freedom- did not convince the Germans. Religious commitment led to the development of the Missouri constitutional religious clauses. A liberal antipathy to restraints on freedom led to the ability of businessmen to use black workers to undercut the white working classes. This created and here is my second point, a new opportunity. The opportunity was for a party that was neither religious nor racist nor free market- and that is the opportunity that the Democratic party was able to grab hold of. What St Louis provides us with in microcosm is a history of the United States until Roosevelt- it explains both the success of the Republicans- the way that the nature of their party leads directly on from the successes of the civil war- and also the revitalisation of the Democratic party and the trajectory of that party.

This is an ambitious thesis- and I'm drawing too much from one example (there are plenty of reasons why I shouldn't be so keen on this example- but its late and I am being foolish)- but perhaps in a way you can see the fracturing of the Republican coalition around worker's rights and religion which happened in the late 1920s- and you can also see the facturing of the Democratic coalition in the 1960s- when these Germans supported civil rights and white southerners didn't. In that sense as the politics of today is about the Democratic fracture and the world of Nixon- the politics of today are the consequence of the civil war.

Where were you when you heard about...

Dave Cole has just tagged me with a meme- and as I think its an ok one- and furthermore I hadn't got any better ideas of anything to write about this evening here goes,

The Death of Princess Diana- I was half asleep. To be fair I remember being half asleep and my brother coming into my room and saying Diana's dead and we went down and watched it on TV. I can't remember anything else about it- apart from the fact that all the TV networks were showing Diana non stop for weeks afterwards.

Margerate Thatcher's resignation 22nd November 1990- actually this is an interesting one because it is my first significant political memory (before that I'd been far more into Arthur Ransome and history). I was coming home from Sainsburys and school with my mother- we got out of the car and a neighbour shouted across, 'She's gone', no need to know who 'She' was. My next political memory interestingly is a chat about John Major with my dad.

Attack on the Twin Towers 11th September 2001- this actually came at an odd time in my life when every time I was abroad there was a national disaster. It all started with a trip that me and Vino and some others took to Europe- immediatly there was the fuel crisis. The next year again I set off with Vino and the same group to Ireland, and we were on a bus in Ireland, got off the bus went into a neighbouring cafe to wait for another bus to take us to our youth hostel- and this must have been in the late afternoon- they had footage of what had happened on the screen behind us. Cue, as you would expect, political argument ad nauseum...

England vs Germany World Cup Semi-Final 1990- this seems to be a good exercise in picking firsts- this was the first football match I properly and consciously watched, being aware of how it went, aware of what the tactics were etc. I still remember the desperation of the last half hour and the terrible bad luck of the German goal...

President Kennedy's assassination 22nd November 1963: strange to think that this was 27 years before Margerate Thatcher's resignation! But I wasn't alive at that point- it is one of the many events- from the Potsdam and Yalta conferences forward that my generation lives in the direct shadow of. I suspect with Ted Kennedy's speech at the Democratic convention we are moving yet another step further away from JFK- if that is indeed his brother's last contribution to politics- and one of the perilous insights of historians is that all these events will one day, however dramatic they seem now, pass out of story and song into forgetfulness. It is happening with Diana's death- it is happening with that semi-final, will happen to Thatcher and to September 11th. Kennedy's death was so important at the time- but now it is fading and I suspect for my grandchildren will be as important as President McKinlay's is today.

I suppose I have to tag someone incidentally- I'm going to go for James Hamilton, the Organic Viking, Ian Appleby, Chris Dillow and Matt Sinclair.

Liberty

A girl comes onto the stage and proclaims herself- liberty- a man carries her off to have sex with her. Liberty is a harlot coming to the magistrate of the republic- an image which carries us away from the idealised images of La France at the height of her revolution and into the darkness of the career of Robespierre, the error of the terror to come. Liberty is a play about that process- the process where the word changes from a thing of beauty to a harlot to tyranny, from an instrument of enlightenment into an instrument of torture. All of its characters go through the historical experience of revolution, destruction and disaster. In different ways they tell the story of the French Revolution- a Revolution whose consequences we are still two hundred years later struggling to understand and whose course still we are struggling to chart.

Let us open the scene then, a muse of fire would bring forward now in you in a meadow in the French countryside- but I hope to awake for you a wooden O, with actors and actresses sitting upon it as though they were at a picnic. We have our characters- there are basically six. Three men, three women- two younger of each sex and two older. We have the young French reformer, the girl whose frivolity he loves, whereas she loves his seriousness- we have the artist and the actress, the aristocrat and the lady who believes that connections can tame the beast of terror. The year is 1791 just before the terror, just before the axe of the guillotine. After the events of 1789- after Mirabeau and moderation have quitted the French stage- the one literally, the other metaphorically. We see the rise of our young French idealist to power- elevated by the lady he becomes a judge, takes as his wife the girl, Elodie, who loves him. Across Paris, the terror stalks pursuing the rest of the characters- guilty of innocent it lashes them. Even Elodie, as she becomes an object of suspicion for her lover- who loves the incorruptible heart of revolution Robespierre and the friend of the People, Murat more than he loves a perishable and sinning piece of flesh and blood- becomes a victim. Artless to the end, she is driven from her wits- whilst others have a more literal severing from their brains to contend with.

For us to care though- these characters have to matter. I've only named one of them- and that is because thanks to a good performance from Ellie Piercy, she did matter to me. Elodie because of the vitality of Piercy's performance comes across in the first half as a real live girl- someone that you could imagine falling in love with- and the fact that our young revolutionary is no surprise. Her evolution though does not work so well- we do not see enough to show us how this vital and strong young woman is destroyed, ground down by a revolution she does not care for. She slowly vanishes and the tale of her evolution is dealt with perfunctorily. Our young revolutionary does well too- but conversely he is more beleivable as the play finishes- at the beggining he is just irritating. By the end, he has become terrifying- the servant of a passion that goes beyond human love- to craft a world perfect enough for a supreme being to want to inhabit. He asks at one point about the world that Christ might live in- and his world is one suited to Gods not to human beings- so perfect that it becomes immoral. The acheivement of this play is that there are two halves- one whose masterspirit is Elodie- and whose spirit is of youthful exuberance and a morality centered on people not principles, the second is the world of revoluiton- whose master spirit is our young revolution- centered as one of the characters says upon 'the people' and not upon people, upon principles and perfections. Its not a hard decision to choose between them.

But equally nor is the transition between them managed well. The play is an adaptation of a novel by Anatole France- the canvass would suit a novel. The mould of personal and political would work in the longer format. But a play has to choose and this falls between being a story and a tract. There are fine performances here- Maurice an old friend to our revolutionary and an aristocrat is played touchingly. But there are also very stagy performances- voices which are too nasal to work in any format. Some characters- Louise our Lady- are managed without a hint of nuance. The writer in my view loses control of his story because he wants to experiment with the form- too busy constructing iambic pentameters he forgets the virtue of telling a tale. I wanted to like this play and I liked features of it- its message is right- but somehow it lectures where it should be quieter, its lessons are not profound enough and its soul is split. Good performances cannot save what is more important a good script.

Lolita

My copy of Lolita has on its cover a blonde girl, reclining in a park, her eyes seductively pointing at the reader. That image of Lolita has persisted down the years- seductive, available, think Britney Spears playing the schoolgirl in her first pop video. That image of Lolita is completely and utterly wrong- it puts the reader into the position of Humphrey Humbert- makes us see him as the tragedy and her as the tempting siren. That image is entirely wrong- this is a book about Lolita, but Lolita as mediated by the gaze of Humphrey Humbert- this is a book about a girl written by a pedophile. Humbert confesses several times throughout the novel that he does not feel sexual excitement about women- that of Lolita's friends, the more physically mature are for him the less sexually attractive- it is the snub nosed, unmade up, chestnut haired, dirty Lolita that he loves and that he eventually rapes (as she says). The novel's artistry is that it presents this picture through Humbert's voice- if you do not read it carefully you can be seduced into being Humbert- and if you do that, you will fall victim to two massive mistakes.

The first of those mistakes concerns Humbert himself. Humbert thinks that he is an artist, he groups himself with Dante, Petrarch and Edgar Allen Poe. He thinks that paedophilia is the prerogative of the poet- the marker of a true distinction of taste. He says that the subtle beauty of what he calls nymphets- girls between the ages of 9 and 14- are available only to those who see the true artistic beauty of the universe. Of course in this he is a satire, a brutal satire and culmination of that romantic tendency to see the existence of art as the construction of an excuse. For Humbert cannot achieve and has not achieved anything- his wealth is a matter of happenstance, an accident of inheritance- he has alternated between the positions of a drone and a madman, running betwixt asylum and attic- and producing nothing in either. He has no books of original ideas out- a couple of translations- poor return for someone who considers himself a poet- only in small town America would he be taken as a cultured individual, with his overt use of French tags and his feckless past, present and future.

The second concerns Lolita. Nabokov allows us to hear once in a while Lolita's own voice- at one point she writes a letter to Humbert and her Mother- and addresses it, as any twelve year old might, to 'Hummy and Mummy'. She is a kid. She is aware of her sexuality- but as a teenager might be- she has kissed another girl, had an experience with a boy and sat on a man's lap and felt excited. But she cannot be a woman- and Humbert wants her to be a woman- he wants her to be a wife. The reason that Humbert is so blind about Lolita is that he completely ignores her. He ignores what she wants, ignores what she is interested in, despises her desires- for films and celebrity magazines- this is not a solid basis for a relationship. Humbert even speculates on the prospect of eventually marrying Lolita, his step daughter, impregnating her and then ten years later molesting his new daughter! Indeed it adds to the idea that whatever emotion Humbert has for Lolita, it cannot be called love- obsession, fascination maybe- but not love for he does not care for Lolita, only for her nymphet (or childish) form. The novel is explicit from Humbert's view- but this is not an erotic novel- rather it is a warning, a fearsome warning.

It is a warning against self absorption. Humbert is phenomenally self absorbed- he desires Lolita because he can control her. Because he can twist her into being the girl he lost when he was thirteen- one of the interesting things about the novel is that Humbert represents all elder women as being not merely unattractive but threatening- their talk threatens his autonomy, his self sovereignty. They threaten with equality! As others have said it is also a formidable warning against tyranny. The tyrant here is the paedophile- forcing the girl to have sex with him for little treats. The tyrant though also writes a history in order to prove that he was what the girl needed- that she was asking for it. It is a worrying sign of the times that we do not read Lolita for what it is- a ferocious counter attack on the tyranny of personal relations and powerful states- but for an account of how Lolita is the guilty party. That pouting girl on the front cover of my volume symbolises the way that we have got this story wrong- the way that we have misunderstood the fact that this dark and brilliant novel is filled with irony, that Humbert here is the great villain and Lolita is the harmless victim. A harmless victim that Nabokov implies can survive- but survives damaged and ultimately of course survives barely longer than her tormentor.

Read this novel, but read it not to be erotically excited, read it to explore the dark sides of the human mind- the ways that paedophilia represents an analogy for the evils of tyranny that Nabokov fled to escape in the West- read it as a terrible warning of how humanity is perverted by power and how our innermost desires can turn into a warped message of self assertion and obsession.

"The Rhythm that was different": a thought on the English Enlightenment

Edward Gibbon is amongst the greatest historians to have ever written in English- his magisterial history of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire has influenced and inspired historians in the two hundred years since Gibbon took up his pen and published his first volume. Gibbon's importance cannot be underrated- a friend of Adam Smith, a colleague of David Hume, a competitor to Samuel Johnson- he was an MP who served Lord North in the Parliaments of the late 1780s and more importantly a key intellectual thinker in what we might term the English Enlightenment. The Decline and Fall was greeted with horror by contemporary Christians- alarmed by Gibbon's account of their faith in Chapters 15 and 16 where he tackled the early Church- the rest of his account argued with some of the main postulates of Enlightenment thinking. John Pocock has just over the last few years published a survey of Gibbon's place in the world- and his survey enables us to turn to a vexed and important question- where did England stand in the Enlightenment? Franco Venturi told us that in England the rhythm was different, that in England the rules of the Enlightenment did not apply. Pocock argues that Venturi was right and wrong- that instead of looking to a hegemonical enlightenment based in France and spreading outwards- we need to look to an enlightenment of Calvinist and Protestant dimensions- and he uses Gibbon as a case study for the argument.

England in the 18th Century faced a key issue which defined most of its politics up until the French Revolution. Lurking in the back of the 18th Century mind, whether it faced Jacobitism in Scotland or Revolution in America, was the events of the seventeenth century. During the previous bloody century, England had gone through an awful civil war (more dead as a proportion of the population than in the First World War) and had been threatened by the spectre of further civil war in 1681, 1688 and so on. The political situation of England was a nervous one- Jacobitism, the belief that the excluded House of Stuart should resume the throne, played a large part in English politics- Gibbon's own father was a Jacobite for example and until 1715 the question of the Jacobite faction played large in politics until it was sublimated with the Hanoverian succession (though not so successfully as that it could not pose a military threat both in 1715 and in 1745). Alongside that there was another terror- the rise of enthusiasm. The troops of Cromwell's army who had pissed in the fonts of Cathedrals and paraded their radicalism through the streets of London were not forgotten- and the spectre of enthusiasm, religious license and the destruction of the national Anglican Church remained a feature of English life right up until 1828.

Positioning an English Enlightenment in this political context might seem odd- but it does make sense. The English Enlightenment was two things- it was a social movement and a religious one. Shaftesbury, the great son of the greater politician, argued in the early 18th Century that England needed to develop a series of political languages that could expel the enthusiast.The purpose of the early Spectator, edited by the Whig partisan Richard Addison, was precisely to develop this argument. The reason that historians often miss the English enlightenment was that for many in England, including Gibbon, the idea of a group of philosophe discussing politics in the arbours of the French academy was dangerous. They preferred that philosophy, that enlightenment was an amateur pursuit- something that united gentlemen in their opposition to the twin evils of enthusiasm and superstition. Evils that David Hume identified in his History of England as those that had swept the nation to civil war in the previous century and to Popish tyranny in the years before. The argument was simple: rather than developing a caste of philosophers, Gibbon beleived that philosophy was dangerous if not combined with the pursuits of a gentleman. When he said that the experience of the militia commander of Hampshire had not proved useless to the historian of the camps of Rome, in part he meant that historians could derive from their experience lessons to apply to the past, but in part he also meant that historians and philosophers should not become a caste apart- but should pursue their studies from the position and pose of leisured gentlemen. Rather than an academy as in France, it was the Club (founded by Joshua Reynolds and of which Gibbon was a member) which dominated the idea of enlightened conversation in England.

When Gibbon arrived in France in the 1760s, it was the separation between the gentleman and the scholar and the contempt for the amateur that enraged him and provoked his first literary excursion. In his essay on the study of literature, Gibbon sought to rebuke the Encyclopediast, D'Alembert, who had argued that philosophy was sovereign over the other subjects and reason over the other faculties. For Gibbon this was too narrow. You had to understand that philosophy was a servant, not a sovereign and that it might share the role of intellectual leader with other great faculties- amongst which the young historian put history. For Gibbon in France it was the Society of Antiquities in particular that he was interested in- and not the philosophe, not the Encyclopediasts. He esteemed Montesquieu because of his vast learning. He also became a citizen of the salons- and in particular attempted to cultivate the notion of a gentleman scholar. From France, with which Gibbon was always intellectually engaged, he learnt to respect the English society that he had left- he learnt the virtue of the polite argument made by Addison and Shaftesbury that rejected the philosophical enthusiasm- the Calvinist feeling- of the intolerant philosophe and atheist.

Such enlightened conversation embodied an attack on religious enthusiasm. And that is the second real issue in England in the 18th Century. From Samuel Gardiner in the sixteenth century onwards, Anglican intellectuals had sought the origins of the English church in the history of the early Church- they argued for what historians now call caesero-papism, the argument that the powers of Constantine had descended upon the civil sovereign of England- Henry VIII was as the act of succession proclaimed him, an emperor and his title was imperial. But what happened when as in 1688, the monarch fled and was replaced. Some Anglicans argued the issue was simple- divinity rested in the apostolic Church even under a false King. The King's flight changed nothing. But this doctrine came close to an argument that the Church was independent of the King, that it might exist without him and approached Catholic arguments that the Church had jure divino authority. Other Anglicans argued that the Church had no authority to do this: some like Conyers Reade at Oxford went further and argued that the Church was not a divine body. This tendency threatened to lapse into socinianism- the belief that Christ was not himself divine, for as soon as one suggested that the body of Christ, the Church, might not be divine what did that do to Christ himself. The threat was implicit: 1688 might turn the Church of England Catholic or force it to resign the Trinity. The problem, as Pocock understands, for the Englishman of the eighteenth century was the relationship between the Church and the King: ultimately their question was what kind of person was Christ and what kind of person was Leviathan? The key here for the young Gibbon was the doctrine of miracles. Conyers Reade had argued that no miracles were performed after the time of Christ himself and his apostles. Gibbon converted to Catholicism at Oxford because he sought to cut the Gordian knot of Anglican theological controversy- by acknowledging the authority of Rome, he could escape from the problem of the authority of the King by denying it, and from the problem of the authority of the Church by assuming it on the basis of the authority of Peter. The rock upon whom Christ built his Church was the same rock upon which Gibbon built his adolescent faith.

Catholicism was one exit from this dilemma. Others embraced other exits. John Locke and Isaac Newton argued for various versions of adjustments to the Trinity. Into the nineteenth century, John Henry Newman took the same steps as Gibbon- whereas Pusey danced the tightrope of High Anglican belief in the authority of the King and the unity of Church and King for evermore. The problems have not gone away either. But the events of 1688 made them visible in a way that they are not today- given the security of the current Governor on her throne and the way that she has become elevated beyond theological conflict. The events of 1688 pressed Englishment to a dilemma, was the church social or spiritual, was its role to create religious enthusiasm or to support the civil peace? Questions such as these dominated the English enlightenment- they were shared by thinkers on the continent. The radical Pierre Bayle was uncertain in religion but certain about the authority of the crown and advised French Huguenots to support the French crown no matter what: ultimately Paris as Henri Navarre said was worth a mass. Catholic thinkers faced a variety of the same problem when considering the role of the Jesuit. But it is worth bearing in mind this issue when one comes to analyse why the early Church was so crucial in the enlightenment debate- settling whether the Church was divine or not said something both about the divinity of Christ and the stability of the civil sovereign.

Where does this leave the English Enlightenment? I hope I've brought out here the way that the English enlightenment saw a different rhythm because of the different situation in the Kingdom- the problem of peace was the centre of British political thought, it had been since Hobbes, and it continued to be right up until the French Revolution and beyond. In many ways the English Enlightenment through the lens of Gibbon both shares and does not share aspects of the French and European Enlightenments. England was where the rhythm was different- but aspects of the English situation could be found in France and in the Protestant world of the Netherlands and of Lausanne- to where Gibbon himself retired to write the Decline and Fall.

I have taken Gibbon as my starting point in this thought because he is the subject of John Pocock's recent volume on Gibbon and his Enlightenments but I hope what I have demonstrated is that there are reasons why Gibbon, so long thought of as atypical, should be interesting to us all when we examine whatever the English enlightenment was or was not. The movements of eighteenth century Europe which Pocock describes in the same rich volume (and by the way it is worth reading, I have barely transcribed a mite of what is there and that I have almost certainly imperfectly understood) are not the subject of today's article, but the argument of his piece about England is interesting. It demonstrates a continuity with earlier preoccupations- going back to the civil war, to the Constantinian settlement of the Anglican Church and ultimately to the early Church of Christ which are an important backdrop to the English experience of the 18th Century. They are not all that was going on- but they are important and Pocock's vast erudition brings out themes that I had not considered- and that are important.

Tacitus and Idi Amin

Having just seen a film about Idi Amin- not the last king of Scotland but another that I shall review soon- and reading John Pocock's analysis of the way that Tacitus contributed to the history of Rome written by Gibbon, a thought struck me about the nature of tyranny. What Pocock highlights and what the film obliquely suggests is that at the door of the tyrant public rhetoric stops. That is true because politics is discussion- there is no point in having an ideology unless you have an argument. In Republics and Democracies, argument is key: it is the way that you convince others to support your cause. In a tyranny that is not how the political system works- rather than working out what your argument is, rather than adopting a rhetorical structure to embody the virtues of your position- you have the task of adapting to the tyrant's moods. Your political activity turns from a study of political argument into a study of a personality. Consequently the study of courts- from Tacitus to Castiglione- emphasized the way that a courtier had to behave in accordance with his master's wishes. Optimists like Castiglione beleived that the King could be twisted towards a rational argument, pessimists like Sir Thomas Wyatt thought that that was impossible and the court was just a struggle for preferment (Sir Thomas More's position in Utopia is curiously poised between the two). But the point is evident- in the quietness of the court, as opposed to the loud hubbub of the public fora, something happens to the way that political arguments are couched. They become less rhetorical, more personal and in the minds of the great republican theorists, less political. The words of the tyrant are the expression of the law- not the contribution of one individual to the forming of a collective mind- and in that system it is the personality of the tyrant that governs the nature of the argument, not the truth or the fallacy of the propositions advanced.

Wall-E

Wall-E is a brand name- that is important for the rest of the film- and its the name the robot who bears the brand has taken as his own. He is a small garbage compressor living on an earth deserted by human beings and other robots and left to him and a friendly cockroach to inhabit. The first half of this film follows the insect and the robot around. The second half develops from the moment Wall-E meets another robot, Eve, and the humans who have left earth- but the story from there on in is far too interesting, exciting and to tell more would ruin it. Suffice it to say that there are robots cooing, cockroaches tickling robots and a robot obsessed with old musicals, where men and women dance together, watching them in the loneliness of a paradise of rubbish.

But the film has a message as well as a story, and whilst I don't want to ruin the story, I do think I can ruin the message. The real question here is an old one- which is what is happiness and how is it achieved. At one point in the film a character says that he would prefer to live than to survive. In a sense those alternatives are the alternatives open in the film all the time- to risk and live, to enjoy and survive. We see the alternatives mapped out throughout the film. What the film suggests is that there is a clear hierarchy of pleasures. Take the beggining, Wall-E exists in some sense, he has his wants fulfilled in the world that he inhabits to begin with. Most of the humans in the story are at that stage in their development too- and the film implies that the market meets their needs well. They have milkshakes assigned by computer to them, they have advertising, they have TV and they have all the stimulation that you need: but they and Wall-E lack that which goes beyond survival, they lack life.

The alternative is more risky and less market driven because it is more individual- and that is that you live in order not to survive but to be happy. The point is that the profit motive does not very well describe what that kind of happiness might be- partly because it is so individual. The fil though does demonstrate what it might look like- love is a form of that happiness, so is interest. That happiness does not need glossy adverts nor the kind of superfluous waste that Wall-E collects on earth. Its a trite conclusion- but whilst watching this film I felt its force- in part because before it I had been forced to sit through a plethora of adverts. Half an hour of corporate swill rammed down my throat despite the fact that my ticket had cost me 12 pounds, half an hour of corporate swill most of which involved persuading people that love was about toned bodies, that sex was the ultimate good, that a new toy is the best way to look after your child and that what you really need in life is a mobile phone tarrif of under 30 pounds- that these are the things you ought to care about and spend your time worrying about.

You see the message of Wall-E is a big raspberry to all of this- so what if T-Mobile offers you a slightly lower tarrif, the idea that love is about toned bodies is laughable and immoral, the idea that a new toy is the best way to look after your kid is also immoral- the truth is that none of those things will get you any nearer to happiness. The point of Wall-E is trite- but its one that is so often forgotten that it enters the class of truisms that needs shouting from the rooftop- most of the good things in life are things that you cannot use mastercard for, and they are the things worth fighting, investing and sometimes dying for. Wall-E the brand is a pile of trash ultimately- dispensible and often harmful to our lives (if useful economically)- Wall-E the individual is to be valued and loved. Brands have their place in the life of society- but individuals should always be paramount.

Simon How or Howel

On 31st May 1688, Simon How or Howell (the Old Bailey records record both names) was sentenced to death. When we inquire why, we find this note in the records

Simon How , of the Parish of Stepney , in the County of Middlesex, was Indicted for Runing from his Colours, he being entertained as a Soldier in the Regiment of the Right Honourable the Lord Dartmouth; in which Regiment he continued for about the space of two Years and upward, and Received the Kingspay ; But in February last sented himself, and was taken in Rosemary Lane, The Prisoner did not deny his going away, said he was poor, and had Money oweing him f the Company, he being a Suttler, or Seller of drink to them. So upon the whole, the Evidence being plain against him that he Received the Kings pay, though not positive of his Receiving the Press Money he was found Guilty , &c.

How was sentenced to death for desertion. There are a couple of things of interest to note here. The first is the date- 1688. In 1688 James II was deposed by William III, he was deposed because of what his opponents saw as his Catholic tyranny. William was the stadtholder of Holland- and in November of 1688 mounted the last successful invasion of England. What is interesting about this note in the Old Bailey records is a simple thing- it is what it does not say rather than what it does say. We often presume that armies in the advance of war are made of ideological zealots and that desertion is an ideological action. That isn't true. How deserted because he was poor and the Company owed money to him that they would not pay, one presumes he thought that there were better markets for the drink he was selling- including markets who would redeem their debts. Ideology seems to have played no part- and James's courts were zealous in prosecuting people for political treason- this seems to have played no part in How's desertion and demonstrates that it is wrong to assume that desertion or indeed participation from and in an army are always ideological actions.

The second thing that is interesting here is How's job. We all often assume that armies are made up of people who are provided for by the state- the British army in Iraq are provided with everything they need (sometimes to a lower degree than they or we might wish!) by the state. Private contractors contract with the MoD to provide them with other services. The world of the pre-modern army was completely different. Firstly this army did not exist for a long time- James's army had been built up over the previous couple of years- it was not the permanent organisation that modern armies are and so didn't have the permanent logistical aparatus or contractual provision that modern armies have. Secondly this army was more like a marching market- behind it came a great deal of people who provided services from sex to drink. Some soldiers like How got involved in the trades and sold on to other men. Whenever we think of pre-modern armies, we are wrong to assume that they look like and behave like modern armies- despite having the same name, they were completely different organisms.

The case of Simon How therefore provides us with a lot of evidence to challenge what we think today about armies. His case suggests that we should not assume that armies are ideologically disposed to fight for their cause- and his case was not uncommon (my favourite is a soldier who in the English civil war fought for the Irish Catholic Rebels, the royal army in Ireland, the Scottish Presbyterians, the royal army in England and finally the New Model Army of Oliver Cromwell). There is a last thing that it reminds us of- that pre-modern justice was a blunt and yet very cruel instrument. How fled the army because there was a reasonable chance that noone would find him- once he was found though, death was his reward for being unable to sustain himself as a soldier.

Hard Candy

Hard Candy is a film about paedopilia- the first image we see of the film is a computer screen on which a fourteen year old girl and a thirty two year old man are chatting, we just see the text and we know that this relationship should not exist. The fourteen year old girl and the man agree to meet at a cafe- they flirt- they joke about chocolate cakes- the man buys the girl a T shirt, the girl flashes her bra at him- she compliments his car- he compliments her on how mature she is- he charms, she yields or that's how the story grimly runs- only not in this film, not in this film. For in this film something else happens. They go back to his house. The man pours a glass for the girl, she turns it down saying you should never drink a drink someone else pours. She pours him a drink and the screen goes dark... and then we find out that Hayley is a girl on a mission, she is crazy, insane but the headline waiting to happen isn't the headline about paedophile abuse, its a headline about something else- about revenge for everyone that he has ever tormented. She has his measure- "you were speaking to me so selflessly, you don't want me to castrate you for my own benefit". There are uncomfortable lines here- "I am not fucking livestock./You keep telling yourself that, stud."

In some ways this plays as a better, darker version of Interview. Whereas Interview played idly with the conflict between two individuals- one of whom was bessotted with the other- this film goes further, goes darker. There is no question that during the scenes of torture, and almost none of them involve any actual violence or blood- everything here is imagined, that the paedophile is going through incredible suffering. He is literally panting and animalistically grunting and screaming. Hayley on the other hand is cruel- she is coldly vindictive- she uses every witty put down in the book. She smashes into his arrogance- the arrogance of a handsome man- throwing back his sins into his face. This is a battle of manipulators- the clever Paedophile, so expert at getting fourteen year olds into bed- comes up against this fourteen year old and faces intellectual as well as physical anihilation. "Why don't you just kill me?" he asks, we know the answer- because that would not be enough. Capitol Punishment is too easy for a paedophile- far better set up a camera and force him to watch his own mutilation.

This raises hard questions- some of them involving the sheer nastiness of the film's subject matter. But more what it raises are questions about this scenario- not only is this a young girl taking her revenge on a paedophile but there are potentially disturbing subtexts here, some of which are explored by Roger Ebert here and the Flick Filosopher here. At one point, she says 'I wonder why they don't teach this [castration] at girl's scout camp...this would be really useful'. Its a darkly ominous comment. Does he deserve it though? Does he deserve this pain, does he deserve being directed to eunuch'squestion.com and to have a young girl talk about literally bouncing his testicles around? This film is really really cruel- Hayley takes a delight in humiliating and torturing the man. She enjoys every minute- again can we be pleased to see that kind of enjoyment? We should remember though that our sympathies are with him and not Hayley in part because we see him as a victim- but not his victims as victims. We don't hear their screams. We hear his.

But still that doesn't answer why we feel sympathy with him? I do not think its entirely about the torture- I feel no sympathy for Tarentino characters. I think though this character obtains our sympathy less because of the torture he undergoes than because of the mental torture he undergoes. His life is thrown back at him, his words turn like dogs upon their master. He is prosecuted in a court where he faces a lawyer who is more powerful than him and more adept and what is more, the verdict is presumed guilty. There is a justice in the film but it is a brute justice- you harm the perpetrator and there is no holding back. Hayley basically tells us that this man deserves not merely death but torture- he deserves not merely punishment but recrimination beyond the point of punishment to the point where it becomes not judicious but vindictive. This is vindictiveness- once he has entered into this process- in a Kafkaesque way it matters little if he is guilty, it matters that he is merely there. He is guilty of course- but still tied in that Kafkaesque world- he is no innocent, he is definitely a paedophile but the question this asks, just like the earlier and greater film on the same topic M asks, is whether a paedophile deserves a 'normal' punishment or whether any sin deserves a 'normal' punishment.

That works because of the work done by the actors- both Ellen Page and Patrick Wilson deserve praise here. Page's work is truly astounding- she not merely acts everyone else off the stage- she draws easy comparisons with Natalie Portman and then surpasses them. This announces her as a future presence in cinema- and hopefully she will not like Portman has, take the route to decay, Starwars and the Other Boleyn Girl. Wilson as the man has an equally difficult job, portraying a Paedophile as a person. Like Peter Lorre in M, he attempts to make us see the whole figure of this ghastly human being and he succeeds- you cannot see this man as a caricature, an evil monster- you see him as a man, a terrible horrible man, a sleazy slimeball but a man nonetheless. That acheivement is important- both of these actors have to be on their best form to make this film work in anyway and thankfully they both are.

Where the film fails is that in my view, it occasionally goes over the top. In truth the last twenty minutes should have been compressed- by the time we have him facing the dilemma of death or publicity, we have everything we really need- and then the director and writer should have sought to bring it to a close. This film would have been more powerful at 80 and not 104 minutes- but even so at its best it is powerful and interesting. The torture goes over the top, especially towards the end, but especially in the conversational segments in the beggining and middle of the film, this film captures something. Better than Interview, at its best it has the same format- a conversation. Poorer than M, at its best it aspires to the same themes- about punishment, politics and power. If it matches Interview it must be good, it doesn't match M it still is worth watching, for the power of the performances, if not for the restraint of the director.

Enter the Memory Palace

I have just begun reading Jonathan Spence's account of Matteo Ricci's life. Spence begins by outlining the medieval method of mnemonics- the science of memory. Ricci was interested in this and attempted to teach it in China. But I think it is interesting in its own right- as a means of considering the way that the medieval mind (if there was such a thing) approached the world. The idea was that instead of memorising a fact, you memorised an image associated with that fact. You created your own symbol for the thought and arranged that symbol in a pattern, an architectural pattern- a palace or street. Ricci said that you were better not to arrange your memories within a busy space but within a quiet one. There you could take a tour of your previous thoughts and recover your ideas. Take for example the student of history who faces a test about who were the Early Roman Emperors- asked the question who were the first four emperors of Rome, our student mentally enters her palace and turns to the room of Roman history. Immediatly as she enters she sees a frozen tortoise hanging in the basket of a fishing rod, and she can answer Augustus, Tiberius, Claudius, Caligula. Why? Because she has remembered that image- and thus has the initial letters of all the Roman Emperors- A Tortoise Caught Cold.

This system was patronised by many of the writers about rhetoric in the ancient world- Quintilian wrote about it. The medievals even thought that the greatest ancient speaker of them all Marcus Cicero had used the same method. The idea of memorising images, as a more powerful device than a word, was common within medieval culture. One Italian handbook for religious women told them to imagine the scenes of the bible, one by one, with the faces of their friends on top of those of the apostles and Christ. Ignatius Loyola was also a stern advocate of this kind of memory training- Loyola wanted his missionaries to keep in their minds the brutal image of the suffering Christ so that they too could endure the torments of life as a missionary, as a potential martyr to the faith. Images for Loyola would be so much more effective than words at reminding the missionary of his calling. Memory skills were much prized in the middle ages- indeed one of the marks of the new science was to, as Cornelius Agrippa or Francis Bacon did, despise the tricks of mnemonic masters as just that tricks, without reason. (Remember if you have read it my last article and Hobbes's suggestion that prudence was inferior to wisdom.)

Memory was a resevoir for bringing forwards images to the mind- for nourishing spiritual resources in the great battle between Satan and Christ that dominated the medieval mind. Such nourishment of course could be dangerous- peasants were prosecuted in Italy and France for remembering too well- such a perfect memory could only be devilish. And of course, others wondered about the radical potential of memory- to divert one's gaze away from scripture to the mystical rapture of one's own mental creations. But memory was still central- especially this kind of visible memory- and central in particular to the way that the Catholic Church envisioned religion. When we look at the grotesque carvings of hell in the works of Bosche and others, it is worth remembering that we are seeing what the Medieval Catholic Church wanted all humans to carry in their heads all the time- the image of the darkness that would inevitably welcome us all but for the grace of Christ and the defiance of his Church.

Phillip Pettit's Hobbes

Phillip Pettit, the Professor of Political Philosophy at Princeton, is one of the most formidable political thinkers around today. Pettit's latest book explores an innovative line of interpretation which suggests a real connection between Hobbes's thinking about science and the mind and his thinking about politics. What Pettit argues is that Hobbes did something truly innovative- that he changed the face of political philosophy in a much more fundamental way. He suggests that Hobbes's thinking came out of the collapse of the medieval picture of the world, a world ordered by divinity to its own purposes. After the scientific revolutions of the sixteenth and seventeenth century, that divinely ordered world seemed implausible- Descartes and his followers believed in a more mechanistic universe. Descartes however argued that the world was dualistic- mind and matter both existed in the world and were different substances. Hobbes disagreed- he thought that mind was matter and that there was no distinction between the two. How then did he come to explain the unique faculties of the human mind? Descartes couldn't without inventing a separate substance from matter- mind- Hobbes had a different view.

Hobbes argued that human minds were similar to the minds of animals. Both were mechanical, responding to motion in the outside world. Both minds reacted to things that stimulated them with desire and to those that did not with aversion. Minds learnt- Hobbes called this prudence from experience. So animals tended to adopt certain trails or hideouts to catch their prey- and human beings extended that faculty into the construction of histories and proverbs. Prudence Hobbes suggested was a part of knowledge- imperfect but useful- and it was shared by both human beings and animals. But human beings did something different- they had located a technology- Hobbes does not provide an account of how but he does provide an account of why this technology was so significant- that technology being words.

Words enabled human beings to do a number of things. Firstly it enabled them to construct universals- to pick out characteristics common to their observation and suggest that these things constituted identities. Human beings made the identity of objects. Furthermore they constructed abstractions from those identities- so seeing shapes in the world meant that humans devised perfect shapes, that did not exist, and labelled them square, triangle, circle and gave them definitions. Secondly language constructed personhood- it gave human beings the ability to impersonate and represent each other to each other. It gave them the ability to argue from their own perspective. Thirdly it gave them the ability to incorporate- to create corporations or groups of individuals- Hobbes uses the example of a mercantile company or indeed a state to suggest to us how this might happen. But words created a problem or rather two problems: they created competition between humans- what Rousseau called amour-propre, a self love based upon the destruction of others- and furthermore they created a concept of the future in people's minds, a future which might and probably, given natural animal equality, would be insecure- such insecurity would lead humans to take measures to protect themselves- measures that would lead to life for everyone being 'nasty, brutish and short'.

So what did Hobbes believe would get you out of such a difficult situation. Hobbes argued that there was no single person in a state of nature (a place without a state) who could end this situation- no one could force everyone else into a state nor will people in a state of nature be able to accept a state of equality, after all they would have no guarantee that others would accept the state of equality. The only method to get out of the state of nature would be the appointment by contract of a sovereign who was completely absolute. Any other authority would be unable to guarantee the security of people- because another authority- be it legal or parliamentary would not be a safeguard for the people but a competing authority that would create conflict, argument and strife. Hobbes suggested that such a sovereign would be limited rather by the fact that its authority was limited by the condition of the contract- i.e. that he managed to perpetuate a peaceful society. The sovereign's main activity though was to extend and deliver legislation: that took two basic forms. One was a constitutive form- the sovereign would define the meaning of property- create rights from persons over the world which could not be competed with because they would be backed by sovereign power. Furthermore the sovereign would enable people to trust each others' words, and form corporations themselves, because he would guarantee that free riders would be prosecuted and dealt with.

The last key question Pettit introduces is Hobbes's concept of liberty. Most theorists of his time would have argued that Hobbes's sovereign would have seriously impinged upon his subject's liberty. They saw liberty as the opposite of slavery: and would have argued that the subject in Hobbes's state was unable to make any decision because he would always live in fear of what the sovereign might do to him. Hobbes argued that this was a false view of liberty- as he defined liberty, redefined liberty, as the ability to do something- and argued that whatever views might influence you in doing something were irrelevant. So for example Hobbes argued that the fact that the sovereign could decide to execute you for having done something, still meant you were free to do it. Therefore Hobbes argues that the sovereign that he has constructed does not impinge at all on your liberty but guarantees your security.

Pettit's argument about the construction of Hobbes's sovereign is fairly traditional and fits well with most other understandings on the subject. However his understanding of Hobbes's philosophy of language is very innovative and very interesting. Hobbes definitely spends a lot of time in most of his philosophical tracts- particularly his last one Leviathan- in discussing language. In Behemoth, his argument about the civil war's origins in England, he suggested that the English civil war owed much of its origins to the careless use of language by university professors. It is definitely a strand of thinking within Hobbes's thought- and though I have not investigated Pettit's work on the texts I find his theory plausible.

Where I do worry though is that Pettit treats Hobbes's philosophy as a monolithic enterprise. Hobbes wrote three books- the Elements of Law, De Cive, Leviathan- and a number of more minor treatises like the Dialogue between the Philosopher and the Common Lawyer and Behemoth. Pettit quotes mainly from the major works- but he does treat them as though they all had the same argument- which I'm not so sure is entirely accurate. He refers to Professor Skinner's argument that Hobbes's view on liberty changed but does not refute the argument that Professor Skinner makes. I do not mean to suggest that Professor Skinner is entirely right: but Hobbes made different choices in the set up of his works, published several works about the same subject over a decade (and then nothing afterwards apart from translations of previously published works- the Latin Leviathan!) and that suggests to me that his argument evolved rather than stayed exactly the same. However I have not investigated it and cannot prove that. Furthermore Pettit, like most of the rest of the literature about Hobbes, concentrates on the non-religious elements of Hobbes's thought- Hobbes though spent plenty of time examining and rejecting the claims of particular churches in politics and it would have been interesting to hear more about the strategies with which he undermined their use of the Bible.

However despite those minor caveats, this is a really interesting piece of work. Its a fine introduction to Hobbes which has a provocative theme and deserves to be read widely. It deserves to be read both because Pettit's interpretation and his argument are interesting, but more because of Hobbes's continuing relevance to the world in which we live. Hobbes is one of the thinkers who best articulated some of the problems of modernity- this new understanding of Hobbes through his anthropology of language merely supports that fundamental insight. Reexamining Hobbes has provided generations of political thinkers from Rousseau onwards with nourishment and his thinking, especially about liberty, underlies much of what people think about today. (A little recognised irony is that the begetter of the libertarian idea of liberty was himself a pronounced absolutist.) Hobbes may be wrong, but he is wrong in provocative and interesting way- and Pettit's take on Hobbes is one of the most fascinating around. In short this is an exciting argument about one of the indispensable philosophers- and it deserves a wide audience.