The Virtual Stoa

OK, let’s fill up some empty space with a bit more of this, continuing from where we left off last time. For convenient reading, I’ve broken this up into three chunks, although it’s one continuous paragraph in the original 1754 edition of the Institutes of Natural Law:

“Mr. Lock has applied these principles to explane the introduction of property both in moveable and immoveable goods. And if we go on to examine what he says upon the subject, we shall find, that he has mistaken the exercise of a common right for the exclusive right of property.

“He that is nourished, says this writer, by the acorns he picked up under an oak, or the apples he gathered from the trees in the wood, has certainly appropriated them to himself, no body can deny but the nourishment is his. I ask then, When did they begin to be his? when he digested? or when he eat? or when he boiled? or when he brought them home? or when he picked them up? And ’tis plain, if the first gathering made them not his, nothing else could. That labour put a distinction between them and common: that added something to them, more than nature, the common mother of all, had done; and so they became his private right. And will any one say, he had no right to those acorns or apples, he thus appropriated, because he had not the consent of all mankind to make them his? Was it robbery, thus to assume to him- [p.53] self what belonged to all in common?”

The answer here is obvious. When those acorns or apples are become a part of his body, we may, if we please, say, that they are his: but the right, which he then has in them, is the same, which he has in his whole person; and is no more to be called a right of property, in the sense that we use this word, when we apply it either to moveable or immoveable goods, than the right, which a man has in his leg or his arm, cam be called by this name. When he gathered them, or when he boyled them, he had likewise a right in them; but it was just such a right as any one else might have had: a right, as one of the joint commoners, to use as much out of the general stock, as he had occasion for. It is by no means necessary either to allow on the one hand, that he had an exclusive right of property in them, or on the other hand to contend, that it was robbery, thus to assume to himself what belonged to all in common. There is a middle opinion between these two, which is the opinion already mentioned; that when he gathered them, and was eating them, he exercised his common right of using and enjoying, out of the joynt stock, what his occasions called for. Though therefore we contend, that he could not acquire an exclusive right of property in them, or in any thing else, without the consent of mankind, either express or tacit; yet there is no fear of his being starved, whilst he is waiting for this consent; because in the mean time the exercise of his common right will sufficiently provide for his subsistence.

More soon, maybe.

At least half-a-dozen at least semi-regular readers of the Stoa are interested in this kind of thing, so here’s a chunk of something I’ve been reading in the Bodleian just now. It’s Thomas Rutherforth of St John’s College, Cambridge, lecturing on Locke’s account of property acquisition, and published as his Institutes of Natural Law, 1754, vol.1, chapter 3, §X, pp.50-2, and with the obvious typo silently corrected:

[p.50] “Mr. Lock agrees with Grotius, that occupancy is the foundation of private property. But then he does not consider occupancy in the same light, that Grotius considers it, as a tacit agreement between the joynt owners of the common stock and the future proprietor. In his opinion things, which originally belonged to all mankind in common, became the property of the first occupant; because, as he has a property in his own person, and consequently in the labour of his body, or in the work of his hands, by removing any thing out of the state, in which nature placed it, he has mixed his own labour or a personal act of his own with it; and by thus joyning to it something, which is his own, he makes it his property. For this labour being the unquestionable property of the labourer; no man, but he, can have a right to what that is once joyned to; at least where there is enough, and as good left in common for others. Thus, whilst he agrees with Grotius, in words, they differ widely from one another, when the sense of their words is explaned.”I design to examine at large his application of what is here advanced. But before we do that, let us stop a while, and enquire, whether his first principles are true. - As every man has a property in his own person; the labour of his body and the work of his hands [p.51] are properly his. - Now the labour of a mans body, or the work of his hands, may mean either the personal act of working, or the effect which is produced by that act. In the first sense it must be allowed, that a mans labour is properly his own; he has a right to exert his strength in what manner he pleases, where he is under no restraint of law. But it does not follow from hence, that the effect of his labouring, or that the work of his hands, in the other sense of these words, must likewise be properly his own. He has, you may say, mixed his own labour with what he removes out of that state, in which nature had left it: but will you conclude, that by thus joyning to it his act of working, he has made it his own? In order to strengthen such a conclusion it would be necessary to shew, that the labour of one man can overrule or set aside the right of others. If I knowingly employ myself, in working upon the materials of my neighbour; however I may have mixed a personal act, which is my own, with his property; this will never give me a reasonable claim to his materials. You may urge, that the cases are not parallel; because the materials, now in question, are not the property of any one; and consequently, that, by working in such materials, we may gain property in them; though we could not gain it, by the like act, where the materials were appropriated before. But the cases are parallel, as far as the point before us requires. It is allowed, that the materials do not belong to any person by an exclusive right of property; but then they belong to all mankind of common right. And if mixing my labour with the materials of an individual will not make these materials mine, in opposition to his exclusive right, I know not [p.52] how any act of the same kind, or the mixing my labour with materials, which belong to all mankind, should make them mine, in opposition to their common right. As setting aside the right of an individual, without his consent, is an injury to him; so setting aside the common claim of mankind, without their consent, is an injury to them: and if an injury cannot be the foundation of a right in one case; it will not be very easy to prove, that a like injury may be the foundation of a right in the other case.”

There’s more of this kind of thing if people want it, but I doubt you do.

Sarah reminds me that Rousseau turns 293 today, which is a fine age to be.

As I mentioned below, Immanuel Kant wrote a handful of essays on earthquakes, following the famous quake that struck Lisbon in 1755. One of them, his 1756 “History and Phsyiography of the Most Remarkable Cases of the Earthquake which towards the end of the Year 1755 Shook a Great Part of the Earth” exists in cyberspace over here.

While on the subject of philosophers and their hair a few days back, Backword Dave wondered whether everybody’s favourite Genevan republican Jean-Jacques Rousseau patronised expensive wigmakers or not. And he’s right to ask.

When Rousseau decided to reform his manner of living around 1750 he recalled in his Confessions that “I put on a round wig, laid aside my sword, and sold my watch; saying to myself, with inexpressible pleasure: ‘Thank Heaven! I shall no longer want to know the hour!’”

A round wig was not the kind one might have bought at a really expensive wigmaker’s.

While on the subject of eighteenth-century wigs and wig-makers, let me refer you once again to Immanuel Kant’s magnificent explanation of why wig-makers should have the vote, while barbers shouldn’t.

Over here [via Ennis].

While I’m on an eighteenth-century kick, here’s a link to the Encyclopédie of Diderot and d’Alembert Collaborative Translation Project, which is based at the University of Michigan. They’ve only posted a fraction of the 70,000 articles from the Encyclopédie, and it’ll probably be a work in progress for ever, but it’s a particularly worthy project.

D’Alembert’s Geneva and Diderot’s Natural Right, needless to say, are among the earliest posted translations.

Chris Bertram has just blogged about our little disagreement about just which county Jean-Jacques Rousseau was living in in 1766-7 during his time in England. Is it Derbyshire? Or Staffordshire? Radio 3 agrees with me that it’s Staffordshire, and I’m sure we’ll both be listening to “Rousseau in Staffordshire” (a worthy sequel to “Wittgenstein in Connemara”) when it’s broadcast on Sunday night.

All I’ll do here is post a chunk of the OS map of the area — on the Staffordshire side of the Dove — just because I can. (Apologies for the large image. I think it’s worth it.)

And here’s the obligatory copyright notice: Image produced from the Ordnance Survey Get-a-map service. Image reproduced with kind permission of Ordnance Survey and Ordnance Survey of Northern Ireland. Thanks.

As you’ll have noticed, a few days’ stoppage in the flow of bloggerage has just come to an end: I was off in Boston at the annual meeting of the American Society of Eighteenth Century Studies, where Chris Bertram of Crooked Timber fame had laboured to put together one of the Rousseau panels, and was nice enough to ask me to join it. I’m not sure the ASECS is really my scene (though I’m not sure the APSA is really my scene, either, but I’ve been there three times now, and will probably trek to Chicago this year), but the whole thing was a very good excuse on which to hang a visit to Boston, which is still one of my favourite American cities, and to see a surprising number of old friends.

(Similarly, if I go to the ASECS next year, it’ll be a good excuse for a weekend in Las Vegas, which I’ve still never visited.)

(Foolishly, however, all three of my visits to Boston since I stopped living there have been Red Sox-free: the last two have been during Spring Training, and they were on a road trip when I was in town in 2002. I’ll have to be more careful next time.)

Last one for now:

I have a conjecture according to which it strikes me as very probable that Sirius or the Dog Star is the central body in that star system making up the Milky Way and occupies the central point towards which all the stars are related. If we consider this system according to the design in the first part of this treatise, as a crowd of stars which have accumulated on a common plane, then the sun which is similarly located near this plane will have a view of the appearance of this circularly shaped zone with a shimmering white light at its brightest on that side located nearest to the outermost edge of the system. For it is easy to assume that it is not positioned exactly at the central point. Now, the band of the Milky Way is brightest in the part between the sign of the Swan and the sign of the Hunter (Sagittarius). Consequently, this will be the side where the location of our sun is closest to the outermost periphery of the circular system. And in this section we will consider the closest of all locations especially the place where the constellations of the Eagle and the Fox stand with that of the Goose, because there in the intervening space, where the Milky Way divides, the greatest visible scattering of stars shines out. If we then draw a line approximately from the place near the tail of the Eagle through the middle of the plane of the Milky Way right to the spot on the opposite side, this line must meet the mid-point of the system. And in fact it does meet Sirius with great precision. Sirius is the brightest star in the entire heavens. Because of the fortunate combination of this and its preponderant shape, Sirius appears to merit being considered that central body itself. According to this idea, Sirius would appear directly in the band of the Milky Way, if the location of our sun, which with respect to the tail of the Eagle deviates somewhat from its plane, did not cause the visual displacement of the mid-point toward the other side of such a zone.

From the “Universal Natural History and Theory of Heaven“.

On a bit of a roll here. Patchen reproduced this one in Comments a while back, and bicentennial celebrations can bring it out into the light:

The urge to communicate must have been the original motive for human beings who were still alone to announce their existence to living creatures outside themselves, especially to those which emit sounds which can be imitated and which can subsequently serve as a name. A similar effect of this urge can still be seen in children and thoughtless people who disturb the thinking section of the community by banging, shouting, whistling, singing, and other noisy pastimes (and often even by noisy religious devotions). For I can see no motive for such behaviour other than a desire on the part of those concerned to proclaim their existence to the world at large.

From the “Conjectures on the Beginning of Human History”.

Here’s another one (though actually I’ve quoted it before):

A cause whose nature is not directly perceptible can be discovered through the effect which invariably accompanies it. What is an absolute monarch? He is one at whose command war at once begins when he says it shall do so. And conversely, what is a limited monarch? He is one who must first ask the people whether or not there is to be a war, and if the people say that there shall be no war, then there will be none. For war is a condition in which all the powers of the state must be at the head of state’s disposal.Now the monarch of Great Britain has waged numerous wars without asking the people’s consent. This king is therefore an absolute monarch, although he should not be so according to the constitution. But he can always bypass the latter, since he can always be assured, by controlling the various powers of the state, that the people’s representatives will agree with him; for he has the authority to award all offices and dignities. This corrupt system, however, must naturally be given no publicity if it is to succeed. It therefore remains under a very transparent veil of secrecy.

That’s from The Contest of Faculties. Do note, though, that a few pages earlier (and also in a footnote) Kant warned that “a people which has a monarchic constitution” cannot “claim the right to alter it, or even nurse a secret desire to do so” (my emphasis).

Alright, so my favourite Kant footnotes are the same as everyone else’s. I’m not bothered. Here’s another one:

He who does a piece of work can sell it to someone else, just as if it were his own property. But guaranteeing one’s labour is not the same as selling a commodity. The domestic servant, the shop assistant, the labourer, or even the barber, are merely labourers, not artists (artifices, in the wider sense) or members of the state, and are thus unqualified to be citizens. And although the man to whom I give my firewood to chop and the tailor to whom I give material to make into clothes both appear to have a similar relationship towards me, the former differs from the latter in the same way as the barber from the wig-maker (to whom I may in fact have given the requisite hair) or the labourer from the artist or tradesman, who does a piece of work which belongs to him until he is paid for it. For the latter, in pursuing his trade, exchanges his property with someone else, while the former allows someone else to make use of him. But I do admit that it is somewhat difficult to define the qualifications which entitle anyone to claim the status of being his own master.”

Yes, that’s the footnote to the essay “On the Common Saying That This Might be True in Theory But That It Does Not Apply In Practice”, in which Kant explains why wig-makers should have the vote, and barbers shouldn’t, with a nice acknowledgement of the complexity of the question at the end.More soon, possibly.

How better to celebrate the bicentenary of the death of Immanuel Kant than with a celebration of his finest footnotes?

Man’s role is thus a highly artificial one. We do not know how it is with the inhabitants of other planets and with their nature, but if we ourselves execute this commission of nature well, we may surely flatter ourselves that we occupy no mean status among our neighbours in the cosmos. Perhaps their position is such that each individual can fulfil his destiny completely within his own lifetime. With us it is otherwise; only the species as a whole can hope for this.

That’s the classic space-aliens footnote to the essay “On the Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose”.

Norm has some of the details of Kant’s, um, wild side. I’ll just add my favourite biographical detail, that he also seems to have thought he was a Scotsman.

Well, he thought that he had a Scottish grandfather, at least, who had emigrated to Lithuania “for some reason that I do not know”. And somewhere along the line I presume that the original Scottish name “Cant” acquired its distinctive K.

A correspondent writes: “I have taken to consulting the Gibbon-o-Matic as a daily oracle, as much part of my routine as the first coffee at the desk. Today’s excerpt was particularly fine, and I thought I should share it with you”.

“A philosopher may deplore the eternal discord of the human race, but he will confess that the desire of spoil is a more rational provocation than the vanity of conquest. From the age of Constantine to that of the Plantagenets, this rapacious spirit continued to instigate the poor and hardy Caledonians: but the same people, whose generous humanity seems to inspire the songs of Ossian, was disgraced by a savage ignorance of the virtues of peace and of the laws of war. Their southern neighbours have felt, and perhaps exaggerated, the cruel depredations of the Scots and Picts: and a valiant tribe of Caledonia, the Attacotti, the enemies, and afterwards the soldiers, of Valentinian, are accused, by an eye-witness, of delighting in the taste of human flesh. When they hunted the woods for prey, it is said that they attacked the shepherd rather than his flock; and that they curiously selected the most delicate and brawny parts, both of males and females, which they prepared for their horrid repasts. If, in the neighbourhood of the commercial and literary town of Glasgow, a race of cannibals has really existed, we may contemplate, in the period of the Scottish history, the opposite extremes of savage and civilized life. Such reflections tend to enlarge the circle of our ideas: and to encourage the pleasing hope that New Zealand may produce, in some future age, the Hume of the Southern Hemisphere.”

So who might the Hume of the Southern Hemisphere (with special reference to New Zealand) be? I’d say it’s this guy. But other suggestions are more than welcome.

S.i.a.A.o.W. is discussing the Enlightenment, universalism and pluralism — which provides a good moment for me to recommend my friend Sankar Muthu’s excellent new book on just this topic: Enlightenment and Empire, which, as I have long promised to say, shows off Professor Muthu at the height of his swinging artistry…

… I’ve plugged this book before, but the difference now is that it is finally in the shops (at least, there was a copy in Cody’s in Berkeley two weeks ago, which I happily snapped up). And what a good book it has turned out to be — a very serious and sympathetic study of the anti-imperialist theories developed by, in particular, Denis Diderot, Immanuel Kant and J. G. Herder, which explores their understandings of human unity and cultural difference in a series of illuminating discussions of some key texts and episodes from the latter part of the eighteenth century. It’s very readable, and exceptionally timely.

You can read the introduction here. And since it’s been published in hardback and paperback simultaneously, there are copies to suit all budgets.

The other must-read Enlightenment book of recent years is, of course, Jonathan Israel’s colossal Radical Enlightenment. But since the folks at S.i.a.A.o.W. have got the word “spinoza” in their collective email address, I like to imagine that they have a well-thumbed copy on their collective bedside table already…

A Gibbon-o-Matic!

[Via Brad DeLong]

Christopher Frayling was on Desert Island Discs this morning (repeat show, Sunday 11.15am), and answered the question I posed at the end of this post by choosing a song from Rousseau’s opera Le Devin du Village and the Ennio Morricone music from the climactic three-way duel at the end of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly as two of his records.

From Crooked Timber’s Chris Bertram:

I�m always on the lookout for media references to Rousseau, even if they usually perpetuate the “noble savage” myth. For some reason, I especially liked this write-up of a US tv show Tarzan:

In his 1755 “Discourse on the Origin of Inequality Among Men”, French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau stated, “Man in his natural state was born essentially good and free of all prejudices.”In a summer when Bravo’s “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” has attempted to tweeze, wax, massage, redecorate and redress man in his natural state in the hopes of making something more civilized out of him, Rousseau’s “noble savage” seems in danger of being replaced by the urbane metrosexual.

Not sure who this French philosopher Rousseau is, though…

[This is an atypically long post for the Virtual Stoa, for which, apologies in advance. You may want to stop reading now, and go and have a drink, or something.]

One of the many valuable things I learned from Bonnie Honig when I was a graduate student was that the reasons why Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s lawgiver must leave the city he helps to found in Book Two Chapter Seven of the Social Contract are the same as the reasons why the cowboy rides off into the sunset at the end of a Western.

Roughly speaking, the key claim is that, having solved the most pressing problem of a newly-established, somewhat precarious frontier community — bandits, Indians, the imminent return of Frank Miller, corruption, the problems that emerge when the farmer and the cowman aren’t friends (whoops: wrong genre), whatever: it varies from flick to flick — it’s important for the hero to Go Away if that community is ever going to be genuinely self-sufficient and able to solve its own problems with its own resources, rather than perpetually remaining dependent on (as Honig puts it) the”sheer power” of the hero’s “exemplary if flawed personality, innate sense of justice, and … mighty prowess with firearms” (see her excellent Democracy and the Foreigner, p.22 and, for the full argument, pp.18-25). (And my apologies for the overlong sentence there).

Since a typical UK undergraduate finds making sense of Rousseau’s political thought to be a slightly harder enterprise than enjoying classic Western films, it is a very useful analogy on which to draw when trying to teach eighteenth-century political philosophy. And the conversations to which it gives rise always remind me that I spend too much time reading (boring) academic literature, and not enough time watching (fun) Westerns.

The figure of the foreign founder — the stranger who comes in from outside, shakes things up quite a lot, mostly for the better, and then departs — is at the centre of that particular part of Honig’s argument. And in the context of the Western, the most interesting foreigner of all is the great Italian director Sergio Leone, who did not (of course) found the genre, but whose four Westerns (plus, I suppose, the superb Duck, You Sucker / A Fistful of Dynamite / Once Upon a Time in the Revolution [delete according to taste], which is set during the Mexican revolution but is still, basically, a spaghetti Western) exploited all of its conventions, turned them inside out and left the story of the American West just as epic as it had been before, but altogether more cynical, more violent (yes: more violent) and not a little bleak. (To continue the political-theoretical analogies, think of what Roman political thought looks like once Augustine of Hippo has gone to work on it in City of God: Augustine lacks Leone’s subversive piety towards his material, but the effects are much the same).

All of which is just a long and pretentious build-up to saying that I enjoyed watching Leone’s 1968 film Once Upon A Time in the West last night on BBC2 — the first time I’d seen the film in a decade — very much indeed. Oh yes, and that reports of the death of Charles Bronson, who played Harmonica in the film, were published this morning (a not-so-different kind of riding off into the sunset, after all).

And, as we might expect, then, the closing scene of Once Upon a Time in the West both repeats and avoids the classic conventions. Insofar as there is a hero — Charles Bronson / Harmonica wears lighter coloured clothes than the other leads, is not a crook, survives to the final scene, and is motivated by the non-mercenary consideration of blood revenge — he does ride away alone at the end of the film. But this departure is simply for the sake of narrative form. Were Harmonica to stay in the new town being built up around the railroad, it’s not clear that he’d destabilise it at all; there just wouldn’t be anything for him to do — though this may be a reflection of the wider fact that, having shot Henry Fonda’s Frank dead in the extraordinary gunfight at the end of the film, he doesn’t really have anything left to do with himself anyway or anywhere. But the genre still demands that he rides off stage right (the trains, which will replace his kind, enter from the left), and so that’s what he does.

Bronson faithfully follows the conventions of his genre in form, but in substance his exit more closely maps onto the departure - literally into the shadows - of that other hero of 1960s epic Italian cinema, the Prince of Salina (Burt Lancaster) in Visconti’s Gattopardo (see last week’s post below, and which also stars Claudia Cardinale). For by the end of their respective films both the Prince and Harmonica are anachronistic figures whose work is done, individual patriarchs who represent an older order (the Sicilian aristocracy, the Western gunfighters), and who, through the drama of the film, have successfully exploited the turbulent present to create a possible and - crucially - materially prosperous future not for themselves but for the representatives of a younger generation: Jill (Once Upon a Time…) and Tancredi (Gattopardo).

Significantly, however, neither the Prince nor Harmonica are the founder-figures in these films. There are Rousseauesque legislator figures in both movies, who, following in the footsteps of the Ur-founder Moses, never come to take possession of the land of milk and honey which they call into being. But despite this formal similarity, however, the founders which Visconti and Leone show us (or not, as the case may be) are quite different figures. In Gattopardo, on the one hand, the heroic founder figure is Giuseppe Garibaldi himself (as featured in Wind in the Willows, no less!), an absent presence throughout the film, who brings to birth the new world from the ashes of the old but who is never reconciled to the new regime — and is finally shot and wounded at Aspramonte on the orders of the repulsive Colonel, who is lionised during the stupendous ball scene that fills up most of the second half of the film.

In Once Upon a Time in the West, on the other hand, the Moses-figure is the generally unheroic (and, not coincidentally and in a rather unPC kind of way also physically disabled) Mr Morton, the caricature capitalist who dies staring not at the Pacific Ocean — his life’s ambition has been to see his railway extend from the Atlantic to the Pacific — but face to face with a muddy puddle, having been shot (one assumes) by Cheyenne / Jason Robards and his gang in a massacre which — unlike the massacre at the McBains’ farm — takes place off-camera.

So there we are: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Bonnie Honig and the Old Testament as the crucial texts with which to decipher the classics of 1960s Italian cinema, as it works through Italy’s own fantasies of national founding and political consolidation through projections onto its own periphery (Sicily / Gattopardo) or its transatlantic other (Arizona / Once Upon a Time…). And that’s enough rambling on a variation on a theme for now.

Finally: if anyone thinks they understand all the twists and turns in the plot, do get in touch. I have a number of questions about what goes on in the middle of Once Upon a Time…, though offhand I’m not sure that those questions really have answers.

Final, final Rousseau - Spag. Western question: can anyone tell me whether the Christopher Frayling who published the book which people tell me is very good about Sergio Leone the same Christopher Frayling who wrote his Ph.D. on Rousseau’s La Nouvelle H�lo�se? (There can’t be too many Christopher Fraylings in the world). If so then the pathway from eighteenth-century France to nineteenth-century Arizona (or wherever) is happily well-trodden indeed.

UPDATE [8/9/2003]: There’s some further comments on this kind of thing over at Walloworld.

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.].

The life and works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in postcards…