The Virtual Stoa

George W. Bush!

Daniel Davies is revisiting the terrain of the so-called liberal-(so-called)-communitarian debate over at the D-Squared Digest, with some justly rude remarks about Amitai Etzioni. What, he wants to know, is the communitarian position on masturbation?

Today’s Guardian reports that the riddle of “Usk“, T. S. Eliot’s “short but baffling poem” might have been solved, now that literary detective Philip Edwards has identified the “white hart” of the poem as referring not to an animal but to a pub at Llangybi, Usk.

Am I missing something, is the Guardian misreporting something, or have literary types been strangely blinkered for the last 68 years not to have guessed that this might, in fact, have been what was going on? “The White Hart” is a rather common name for pubs (I did a lot of my underage drinking in one of them), and it’s not as if removing the capital letters makes things entirely obscure.

Lots of socialists dying in August, it would seem.

Today’s celebrity fatalities are both German, the negative dialectician himself, Theodor Adorno (b. 11 September 1903, d.6 August 1969) and one of the founders of German social-democracy, Wilhelm Liebknecht (b.29 March 1826, d.6 August 1900).

Friedrich Engels, born 28 November 1820, died 5 August 1895 in London; his ashes were scattered off Beachy Head.

Also, one of the great economists of the twentieth century: Joan Robinson, born 31 October 1903 and died 20 years ago today, 5 August 1983. Her politics resist tidy classification, but I’m very happy to file her next to Engels in the DSW.

UPDATE: Perhaps Engels’s ashes weren’t so much scattered as buried in the sea off Beachy Head. Here’s Eduard Bernstein’s description of the occasion:

To the west of Eastbourne the cliffs along the coast gradually rise until they form the great chalky headland of Beachy Head, nearly six hundred feet in height. Overgrown with grass on the top, it slopes gently at first, and then suddenly falls steeply to the water, while down below it exhibits all manner of recesses and outlying masses. From the landward side an extremely fine drive leads up to the summit. Enterprising visitors have repeatedly attempted to climb Beachy Head from the beach at low tide, whereby many have nearly lost their lives. If they were unable to reach the top, and the tide rose in the meantime, they were left between the devil and the deep sea. From the coastguard station, which stands at the highest point of the Head, it is impossible to see what is happening on the face of the cliff, nor will a call for help carry thither. Only if he is noticed from the direction of the sea can the climber count upon help. About five or six miles off Beachy Head, in the year 1895, the Avelings, the old Communist Leaguer Friedrich Lessner, and myself, on a very rough day of autumn, cast into the sea the urn containing the ashes of our Friedrich Engels. Engels, who died on the 8th of August 1895, had directed, in a letter enclosed with his will, that his body should be cremated and the ashes thrown into the sea. And since we knew of his predilection for delightful Eastbourne, the sea off Beachy Head was chosen as the most suitable spot for the execution of this portion of his last will and testament. Since then, however, the impression has gained a hold upon me that this disposition of his ashes may perhaps have been dictated by another motive than his love of Eastbourne and the sea. The idea of Lethe may have been in his mind…

From chapter 8 of My Years of Exile. Bernstein gives the day he died as 8 August, but most sources seem to say it was 5 August.

Over at Crooked Timber (which I quite like, but not as much as I liked the old blogs by its individual contributors), Chris Bertram (the artist formerly known as Junius) has reproduced one of my favourite passages of Kant, from his essay on Perpetual Peace:

It is in itself wonderful that moss can still grow in the cold wastes around the Arctic Ocean; the reindeer can scrape it out from beneath the snow, and can thus serve itself as nourishment or as a draft animal for the Ostiaks or Samoyeds. Similarly, the sandy salt deserts contain the camel, which seems as if it had been created for travelling over them in order that they might not be left unutilised. But evidence of design in nature emerges even more clearly when we realise that the shores of the Arctic Ocean are inhabited not only by fur-bearing animals, but also by seals, walrusses and whales, whose flesh provides food and whose fat provides warmth for the native inhabitants. Nature�s care also arouses admiration, however, by carrying driftwood to these treeless regions without anyone knowing exactly where it comes from. For if they did not have this material, the natives would not be able to construct either boats or weapons, on dwellings in which to live. (Kant: Political Writings, ed. Reiss p.110)

Kant on space aliens is just as good (p.47 of the same edition), as is his tortured explanation about why wig-makers should be allowed to vote, but barbers not (p.78).But what interests me this time around is the significance of the reindeer in all of this: Perpetual Peace was first published in 1795; only a few years later in 1808 Charles Fourier also argued that we could discern clues about God’s plan from a consideration of the cosmic significance of the reindeer: in the famous passage about the giraffe-as-a-hieroglyph-of-truth, he noted that although the reindeer — or the “counter-giraffe” — “provides us with every service imaginable” (unlike the useless giraffe), “you will see that God has excluded it from those social climates, from which truth will also be excluded for as long as Civilisation lasts”. Under socialism (or whatever Fourier was calling it at that stage of his career), the reindeer and the giraffe would make way for the “anti-giraffe… a great and magnificent servant whose qualities will far surpass the good qualities of the reindeer, which so excites our envy and arouses our anger at nature for having deprived us of it”. (p.284 of the Stedman Jones/Patterson ed. of The Theory of the Four Movements).

Were any other major social theorists gripped by the reindeer at this important moment in post-Revolutionary European history? I’d certainly like to know.

Two exciting new books to look forward to later in the year, both from Princeton: Patchen Markell’s Bound by Recognition and Sankar Muthu’s Enlightenment Against Empire.

Alright: this is really a plug for books by two old friends. But they will be very good indeed.

[Links via Patchen's reorganised website.].