The Virtual Stoa

Which Jane Austen Character Are You?

You are Mr. Darcy from Pride and Prejudice. You’re pretty arrogant, but that pride stems from the deep-seated knowledge that you are generally the most superior creature in any given room. The good news is that you are deeply loyal to your family, and you have a generous and charitable streak, even though most people don’t notice because you are too busy practicing a large vocabulary of stern looks.
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This might seem like a surprising result, but it’s actually quite scientific, in that Josephine did the quiz imagining herself to be me and got the same result, too.

I suppose this means I shall have to finish reading Pride and Prejudice. which happens to be one of those books that I’ve started several times, but never finished, which is curious, given that it’s not exactly a turgid read. [via]

“Potted meats. What is home witohut Plumtree’s potted meat? Incomplete. What a stupid ad! Under the obituary notices they stuck it. All up a plumtree. Dignam’s potted meat… With it an abode of bliss. Lord knows what concoction. Cauls mouldy tripes windpipes faked and minced up. Puzzle find the meat.”

The judgment in the Dan Brown / Holy Blood Holy Grail case is available here [pdf], and is quite fun. It’s better written than The Da Vinci Code, and it’s probably better written than The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, though it’s a while since I’ve seen a copy of that book.

Dan Brown doesn’t come terribly well out of the judgment at all (see ��197-217, 315-327, 343-5 especially), but fortunately for him he was up against Claimants like Michael Baigent, whose performance as a witness is described here:

“Mr Baigent was a poor witness. Those are not my words: they are the words of his own Counsel in his written closing submissions (paragraph 111). Those words do not in my view do justice to the inadequacy of Mr Baigent�s performance…” (�213)

And the judge observed a bit later

“I make allowances for the fact that Mr Baigent performed so badly he plainly missed obvious points when answering questions… Nevertheless the Defendants are right in their submissions even when taking in to account the factors mentioned above to submit that he was a thoroughly unreliable witness. They say that they do not know whether he was deliberately trying to mislead the court or was simply deluded and that he is either extremely dishonest or a complete fool. I do not need to decide that issue…” (�232)

There’s this, too, which I liked, when the judge was commenting on the evidence of Mr Ruben, a senior person at Random House, Dan Brown’s publisher: “His enthusiasm of the book [The Da Vinci Code] knew no bounds. I am not sure that it is as good as he says but then I am no literary person.” (�354)

As a footnote to last week’s posts on the Enlightenment, here’s a footnote from Istvan Hont’s Jealousy of Trade, which I bought yesterday (see below) and have been reading this morning:

198. [Adam] Smith expressed a violent dislike for the vicious combination of political and intellectual authority which today is often described as a characteristic of “the Enlightenment project.” “Project” is a genuine eighteenth-century key-word, but Smith deployed it for negative purposes. Jeremy Bentham, who regretted Smith’s aversion to “dangerous and expensive experiments” in business and technology, noted Smith’s hostility to projectors and his derogatory use of the term “project.” (Jeremy Bentham, “Letter XIII, ‘To Dr. Smith, on Projects in Arts, & C’” in Defence of Usury [1787], reprinted in Smith, Correspondence, “Appendix C,” pp.388-404) Samuel Johnson, like Bentham noted, defended projectors in science but made it clear that in politics “project” was a pejorative term. Projectors were persons of “rapidity of imagination and vastness of design,” such as Catiline and Caesar at the end of the Roman Republic whose projects were “to raise themselves to power by subverting the commonwealth.” Xerxes and Alexander the Great were projectors, and more recently there were the “royal projectors” such as Charles XII of Sweden and Peter I of Russia, all of whom Johnson, like Smith, detested (The Adventurer, [No. 99, October 16, 1753], subsequently retitled as “Projectors, Successful and Unsuccessful,” reprinted in Samuel Johnson: A Critical Edition of the Major Works, ed. Donald Greene [Oxford: OUP, 1984], pp.273-277). The Encyclopédie defined “Projet” as a kind of large-scale reform that had considerable beauty or imaginative order, like Lycurgus’ laws for Sparts, or Rome’s empire over Europe. While such large-scale meliorative efforts were of considerable beauty and imaginative order, the Encyclopédie asserted, the experience of centuries had shown such projects to be chimerical (Encylopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, par unes société de gens de lettres, ed. d’Alembert and Diderot, vol. 13 POM-REGG, [Neuchatel: S. Faulche, 1765], p.44b). The greatest enemy of projects in France was Montesquieu, with whom Smith was completely in tune on this issue; see Montesquieu’s “Preface” to the Spirit of the Laws: “In a time of ignorance, one has no doubts even while doing the greatest evils; in an enlightened age, one trembles even while doing the greatest goods. One feels the old abuses and sees their correction, but one also sees the abuses of the correction itself. One lets an ill remain if one fears something worse; one lets a good remain if one is in doubt about a better. One looks at the parts only in order to judge the whole; one examines all the causes in order to see the results” (p.xliv). By “projects” Montesquieu meant policies of “increase,” either as designs of conquest and territorial expansion, or grand economic schemes, mainly in revenue raising and taxation.

- Istvan Hont, Jealousy of Trade: International Competition and the Nation-State in Historical Perspective, Harvard University Press, 2005, pp.108-9.

The other day I asked the security guard in the Bodleian what he was looking for when he dutifully inspected my laptop case for the seventeenth time. “Things you aren’t supposed to take into the Library”, he replied. “Sticky buns?”, I asked. “No”, he said, “explosives”.

I’ve just been over to Blackwells to buy a copy of Istvan Hont’s Jealousy of Trade (as I’m still thinking that I might go to this). I wasn’t sure whether it’d be in the History, Politics or Economics section of the shop - being a book about the history of political economy - with a fighting chance that they’d have stuck it in Philosophy, as it’s got a lot of Hume in it. It was a good thing I asked: they’d put it in Business.

(The last time a book I wanted was mis-categorised so egregiously over there, come to think of it, was eighteenth-century political-economy-themed, too. I looked for Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees in all the sensible places, only to find it in the end under “Miscellaneous Nineteenth Century Prose”.)

That’s probably enough for now. And finally, out of pure curiosity, can people tell me what their favourite piece of Enlightenment literature is, and, if you feel so inclined, why.

If, like me, you can’t ever visit a friend’s home without finding yourself involuntarily making sideways glances at the contents of the bookshelves, then you’ve probably already got an account over at LibraryThing. I think it’s a tremendous site. (I’ve probably said that before.)

Anyway: the main point of this post is to congratulate the LibraryThing people on the occasion of the cataloguing of the two-millionth book (only 0.1% of which were catalogued by me). Good stuff.

“Don’t be disgraced like the young Romans, who lost the Empire of their forefathers by being wishy-washy slackers without any go or patriotism in them.” - Robert Baden-Powell, Scouting for Boys (1908, 2004 OUP ed., p.278).

What books have you most enjoyed reading this year, Stoa-readers? I’m most interested in fairly-recently-published stuff, but if any of you want to tell me about older things that you really enjoyed go ahead. As you may have noticed, this is just like the features that every newspaper runs at this time of year, and that Private Eye regularly lampoons, but with this crucial difference: that I’m actually interested in your opinions.

I’ll kick off with endorsements for David Anderson’s Histories of the Hanged: The Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire and John Robertson, The Case for The Enlightenment: Scotland and Naples 1680-1760, to which I’ll add a 2004 book which I only read more recently, Steven Nadler’s Spinoza’s Heresy: Immortality and the Jewish Mind, which was full of things I didn’t know about, but wanted to.

Jennifer Pitts’ book, A Turn to Empire is out (in the States, at least: I picked up a copy at University Press Books in Berkeley; but it should appear over here before too long). I’m not wholly impartial, as we shared a flat in Cambridge, Mass., for two years, and I’ve read various early drafts over the years, but I think it looks great.

So if anyone’s interested in why English and French liberal political thought became quite so imperialist in the middle of the nineteenth-century (esp. Mill, Tocqueville) despite a fairly solidly anti-imperialist late-eighteenth-century ancestry (esp. Burke, Smith, Bentham), Pitts is your woman.

(A fairly topical subject, I’d have thought, given the extent to which people on blogs like to talk about the heritage of the Enlightenment, liberal empires, intervention in other countries’ affairs, and so on. Order yourself a copy now.)

(And, slightly off-topic, isn’t City Lights just wonderful?)

The books lined up in the picture below, reading from left to right, are The Anxiety of Freedom, by Uday Singh Mehta; Kant’s Ethical Thought, by Allen Wood; Collected Essays, by George Lichtheim; Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, by Adam Smith; The New Imperialism, by David Harvey; The Rosa Luxemburg Reader, by, um, Rosa Luxemburg; Conciliation with the Colonies, a pamphlet by Edmund Burke; Bodies That Matter, by Judith Butler; Signs Taken For Wonders, by Franco Moretti; Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism, by Perry Anderson; The Origins of Postmodernity, by Perry Anderson; On Human Diversity, by Tzvetan Todorov; The Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Political Thought, Miller, Coleman, Connolly and Ryan, eds.; The Guardian: Corrections and Clarifications, ed. Ian Mayes (who’s in the news today); Diderot’s Vie de S�n�que: A Swan Song Revised, by Douglas A. Bonneville, The Stoic Life, by Tad Brennan; something I don’t think I’ve ever seen before called the Bicycle Owner’s Manual; and an omnibus edition of the Ursula K. Le Guin Earthsea novels.

Kieran Healy started a discussion of Library Thing over at Crooked Timber yesterday, which I’ve found to be a tremendous facility. And, quite by chance, Kieran’s post was well timed, appearing just when I’d pretty much finished the basic catalogue of 1,930 items, with ten years worth of boring Fabian Society pamphlets being the last big thing to do. (Three of them, excitingly, by Paul “The Thinker” Richards! And two of them by Pollard!)

I’ve wanted to produce a catalogue of my books for a while now, because I’m that kind of person; and this website got going at exactly the right time for me, just after I’d moved all my books from one office to another at the end of the summer vacation, bringing a lot of them home to sit on some new bookshelves (the shelves that Andromache’s sitting on here), and they still need a great deal of sorting out in both places. I’m also going to have quite a bit less money for buying books in the months to come, for various reasons, than I’ve had over the last few years, and so this is a good time to think more about what I already own, and to read some of the titles which, inexplicably, I’ve never got around to reading up till now…

I’ve stuck the LibraryThing blogwidget (that’s a good word) down on the sidebar (scroll down), because that’s quite fun.

And now — how best to catalogue the journals…?

You can now order books at the Bodleian through Firefox (and, presumably, other browsers), which means that you don’t have to use the fiddly telnet interface any more…

There’s free access to the full text of the massive, splendid Oxford Dictionary of National Biography today, tomorrow and Sunday, in order to celebrate a year since publication. Over here. Don’t miss out. It’s a seriously good resource. [via]

Someone has just visited the VS after searching for “melanie phillips stoicism”…

… In other Stoic-related news, I’ve just started reading philosophy professor and occasional blog commenter Tad Brennan’s new book The Stoic Life, and I think it’s going to be really very good indeed.

(I’ll hold off deciding whether it’s splendid until I’ve made it through to the end.)

P.S. Google gives 425 records for “melanie phillips stoicism”, but an impressive 29,700 for “melanie phillips barking”. But then the proof of how misleading these things can be comes with the further stat that “melanie phillips sensible” garners a whopping 55,700.

As a lot of you probably know, some of my favourite books are dictionaries.

Pierre Bayle’s Dictionnaire historique et critique leads the way (I own a copy of the translation which Thomas Birch organised in the 1730s, the ten-volume General Dictionary, Historical and Critical, and one of these days I’m going to have to shell out to get the folios rebound, as they aren’t especially usable at the moment); astute observers of Thursday Kitten-blogging will have spotted that I’ve got a copy of Raymond Trousson and Frédéric S. Eigeldinger’s Dictionnaire de J-J Rousseau (it’s the big yellow book on the right in the lower of the two pics, just below the black kitten’s paw); time with the OED is never wasted; and recently I’ve been using the online Oxford Dictionary of National Biography a lot, which is also great fun, extremely useful, and partially written by my friends, current colleagues and former teachers, which is nice.

But that’s really just an over-long introduction to the question I wanted to ask, which follows (eventually):

Quite often — very often, in fact — undergraduate students begin their essays by telling you (the person who’s reading / marking it) what the key conceptual terms in the question they’re considering mean, and they do this by quoting from standard dictionary definitions, and generally from the OED. Now, on the one hand, there’s something handy about doing this. It helps to give clarity and content to words that might otherwise be slippery and vague, and - with a bit of luck - it gets the argument of the essay off on a firmer footing than might otherwise be the case.

On the other hand, it may also have a number of drawbacks. By presenting the conceptual terms as givens at the start of the essay, it makes it harder for the argument of the essay to do the work of clarifying the content of the concept itself. (We might think, for example, that we’d prefer to find a well worked-out concept presented at the end of the argument of the essay, rather than at the beginning.) If we think that the key concepts that are likely to appear in an essay-title are “essentially contested” ones (and this is is especially true in political theory essays), then quite a bit turns on which particular dictionary, and therefore which particular decontestation, gets presented in the language of the definition. And, thirdly, it concedes to the lexicographers an authority that they don’t really possess — and, in the case of the OED, an authority which its contents and design-principles contradict at every turn, with its concern to track usage rather than to prescribe meaning, and to pile up definition upon definition upon attestation upon attestation, all of which tends to a happy anarchy (”confusion’s masterpiece”?) rather than to any kind of precise, concicse authority. (Hobbes would have hated the OED — or perhaps he would have said that that’s what inevitably happens when you put the dons in charge of the dictionary.)

So the question’s really this: should students be encouraged or discouraged to go down the “at the start of your essay, define your key terms” route? Or should those of us who get paid to teach them just remain agnostic on the general subject, and point out when they either do it well or badly?

(I’m especially interested in answers from anyone who does teach, has taught, or plans to teach at university-level here, though obviously opinions from anyone else are more than more than welcome.)

And a supplementary question: anyone know where students pick up this habit of starting with dictionary definitions? Is it something teachers at school tell them is good practice, is it something encouraged by other university teachers, or is it something that students do because they think it’s what we want to see? Or — more boringly, but perhaps more likely — is it some kind of combination of the three? (Or, more interestingly, something else altogether?)

Recent reading has included Diarmaid MacCulloch’s Reformation (splendid), Richard A. Peterson’s Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity (not bad at all), Charles Tripp’s history of Iraq (fairly solid, I thought, though he uses the word “narrative” almost as much as a bad journalist writing about David Davis), and two best-sellers that were kicking around in the flat we were staying in, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (great fun) and The Da Vinci Code (rubbish nonsense, and, oddly enough, far more childish that HP&tPoA, as well as much less well written), together with various other bits and pieces, and lots of copies of L’Equipe, of course. (Favourite headline: “Il est implacable”, with a picture of you-know-who.)

Since the launch of the new Harry Potter book was widely covered in the French media, I can report that French journalists say “‘Arry Pott-eur” when they are trying to say his name in English, and “‘Arry Pott-air” when they are trying to say his name in French.

And my goodness the Paris academic bookshops are wonderful. I could spend a lot of time and a lot of money in the Vrin shop, or in the basement at Compagnie. Well, I did. But I would have spent even more of both if I hadn’t succeeded in restricting my attention to the Stoics / Augustine / Hobbes / Rousseau sections of the shelves.

It’s a good thing, for example, that I managed to resist the temptation to buy (for 320 euros) the Dictionnaire de Port-Royal (here, and scroll down), as I almost certainly wouldn’t have been physically able to cart it home. (Maybe next time.)

It’s the 101st anniversay of Bloomsday, and I think I’m right in remembering that 16 June fell on a Thursday in 1904, too. What a day. What a book. What a guy (Joyce or Bloom, according to taste).

On a day that the Archbish gave us some of his John-Lloyd-fuelled thoughts about the media, I’ll leave you with Chris Miller’s image to illustrate “Aeolus“, from his excellent (but still unfinished) Ulysses Project.

It’s strangely satisfying to learn that while I was sitting in the Bodleian Library this afternoon reading James Tyrrell’s 1693 Brief Disquisition of the Law of Nature (very dull) and Samuel Parker’s 1681 Demonstration of the Divine Authority of the Law of Nature and of the Christian Religion (much more interesting), the usual suspects were discussing natural law theory over at Harry’s (David T isn’t a fan).

Well, I was reading in the English, Protestant, slightly-voluntarist, late-seventeenth-century variety of natural law theory, whereas the discussion over there, when it isn’t about gay marriage, is about the transformation of more straightforwardly Thomist theory at the hands of people like Finnis, Glendon, and B-16. But that’s close enough for the World of Blogs.

If people want to carry on organising their blog discussions around what I’m reading, tomorrow would be a good day for an argument about the changing character of Dutch republicanism in the middle of the seventeenth century, as I work through the second half of Blom’s book (see below). Good luck!

I’m sitting in the Bodleian Lower Reading Room reading Hans W. Blom’s Morality and Causality in Politics: The Rise of Naturalism in Dutch Seventeenth-Century Political Thought when I see that Sarah has dug a hole for me and passed me the spade. Where better to think about books than in the LRR of the B? OK then, very quickly:

1) Total number of books I’ve owned: Thousands, I’m afraid. I don’t spend much money on anything else, and it’d take me too long to make a sensible estimate, especially if it involves books I used to own but don’t any more, for whatever reason.

2) The last book I bought: Probably a critical edition of Paradise Lost, which I’m enjoying (though haven’t got especially far yet).

3) The last book I read: Making Sense of Suicide Missions, ed. Diego Gambetta. Good book.

4) Five books that mean a lot to me (no particular order): Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue; Njal’s Saga; Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose; Arnold Lobell, Owl at Home; Franco Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel, 1800-1900.

5) People to Tag: No-one in particular. Sorry if you should have liked to have been tagged by me.

Apologies for the silence over the last few days. I’ve been in the Bodleian reading Richard Cumberland’s De Legibus Naturae. I don’t think many people blog while reading De Legibus Naturae, but I may be wrong.

The fools who read the Observer think that Nick Hornby’s somewhat engaging and mildly interesting Fever Pitch is a better sports book than C L R James’s imperishable classic Beyond a Boundary (and scroll down to #3). This is idiocy on a large scale.