StephenKMackSD's Blog

Here is Professor Rodgers stunning historical precis of the Mythology of the Market as idea, political,economic and legal practice, in our national life. The pernicious idea of the Market as metaphysical quantity,historical/political actor and household god is here treated to a breathtakingly rigorus thirty five page history. He manages to make this historical recreation completely, absorbingly readable, and to top it off,not withstanding it utter complexity, comprehensible.Bravo!

http://press.princeton.edu/titles/5542.html

I’m reading this in the morning and at bed time. I can’t read just one book. The confessions of a bibliophile, or just the result of my relentless intellectual ambition?

‘Like Adam Smith’s pin factory, these were metaphors all. The timeless, placeless,self-equilibrating register of individual preferences that was now more and more often being called “the market” was an abstraction , as complex and intricately manipulatable a figure of speech as any of the neologisms in the Keynesian vocabulary. But metaphores are not idle. They “think for us”Donald McCloskey writes.’ 

http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?recid=30906

My current reading is Age of Fracture by Daniel T. Rodgers. I’m facing the challenge of self-doubt as a reader. I’m swimming against a rough tide of my own ignorance, although Professor Rodgers writing is fluent and it’s meaning is easily comprehended, the historical periods covered are familiar to me, as I lived through most of them. Perhaps my own memory and the intellectually fine grained analysis of Professor Rodgers are in a low grade colflict? His grasp of a variety of topics is nothing short of encyclopedic and it is absorbing reading. I read about Age of Fracture in the TLS of July 29,2011 in a review by Michael O’Brien which prompted my purchase of the book.

Stephen 

http://press.princeton.edu/titles/8358.html

Are you weary of the literary critic who draws his inspiration, indeed, his reason d’être from the laboratory, as if literature were a specimen, to be dissected using the instruments of  a science that creates itself, as it proceeds with its analysis? (But one must be aware always of the dense even unfathomable vocabulary of this procedure, this philosophy, this ‘science’, of this criticism.) Literary Theory: the hybidity of Existentialism, Structuralism, Semiotics, Deconstruction, Lacanian Psychoanalysis and Marxism, born in France in the middle of the 20th Century. The literary critic dons the lab coat, armed with an indecipherable jargon to explicate not the great works of literature, but those at the margins, a la Barthes or Derrida. Only these two thinkers fancied themselves Philosophers and Thinkers comparable to the Auteur. But, please, cast any unnecessary worry aside, for the book under review is The Temptation of the Impossible: Victor Hugo and Les Miserables by Mario Vargas Llosa, a writer not given to the casting of the spell of literary science, as practiced by the Theorists of a, now, fading theoretical past.  But an artist concerned with texts and contexts, of Literary History and the grand project of Literature, without apology. Read Mr. Llosa’s book in full confidence of the reliability of his power of explication, to cast light on this great text, marvel at his ability to bring the story and its writing into its’ literary, political, even psychological context of the literary giant, Mr. Victor Hugo; with a passion that makes the reading of this book a pleasure from beginning to end. I devoured this book in large chunks, putting it down only when sleepfulness and the late hour made resistance impossible.

American Litterateur

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/08/the-major-roadblock-to-muslim-assimilation-in-europe/243769/

In reply to Mr. Shadi Hamid’s Atlantic article:

Here is an excerpt from a December 17,2009 New York Review of Books article by Mr. Malise Ruthven entitled The Big Muslim Problem!: in it are reviewed Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West by Christopher Caldwell and What I Believe by Tariq Ramadan:

“While the figures-and the methodologies used to arrive at them –vary considerably, the conclusions to which they point is that Muslims do not greatly differ in their religious behavior from Europeans. For example, a French study in 2001 found that only 10 percent of Muslims were religiously observant. A study by the demographer Michele Tribalat the same year found that 60 percent of French Muslim men and 70 percent of women were ‘not observant,’ though the great majority respected ‘cultural attachments’ by abstaining from eating pork or drinking alcohol and by fasting during Ramadan.”

 http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2009/dec/17/the-big-muslim-problem/

To be up front about myself I’m a queer atheist with absolutely no interest in defending any branch of the benighted Abrahamic Tradition: that being said the information that Mr. Ruthven supplies in his review raises some questions about the exact nature of the closely beliefs of the Muslims in Europe, if any real determination can be made of such a diverse population, we are left with statistical data. How many European Muslims believe that stoning of female adulterers and the cutting of the hands of thieves falls into the category of the normative? Could the promise of Europe, to the immigrant, be the advantage of living a life free of the restrictive tribalist ethos of an indigenous Islam? Not willfully forgetting the myriad problems that Muslim immigrants face. Mr. Hamid supplies some statistical data of his own but one is doubtful, skeptical about an area of inquiry so fraught with prejudices and ideological baggage: I include my own set of beliefs, and prejudices in that, in the hope of resolution or, at the least, a pragmatic accommodation: which is one of the central constructs and practices of the modern secular republic. The larger question of the number and power of conservative Muslims in Europe remains open. Mr. Ruthven recommends two books in his indispensable article:

Islam in Europe: Diversity, Identity and Influence

Edited by Aziz al Azmeh and Effie Fokas (Cambridge University Press, 2007)

The Islamic Challenge:  Politics and Religion in Western Europe

Jytte Klausen (Oxford University Press, 2005)

Political Observer      

As we watch the historical unfolding of the Financial Crisis of 2008, to forget that the Financial Reform of 1999 is here the root cause of the crisis of 2008 is,of course, verboten in the language of the popular press and its repetition of establishmentarian cliche, and solemn warnings about the dangers of ignoring the new intellectual mirage known as Austerity. Forgotten in all this low grade hysteria,a perennial in American politics, is the fact that 'The Market' is simply a mechanism: it is not an arbiter of political conduct nor a guide to moral/ethical action, despite the concerted campaign of Political Romantics masquerading as economists and other forms of literary endeavor. Friedman, Hayck, Mises, and the redoubtable pamphleteer and apostle of unalloyed greed Ayn Rand, represent the central 'thinkers' whose unrelenting propaganda, aided by a network of think tank hacks, and their allies have trumpeted this political theology as 'The Answer' to all questions. We have seen the recovery of record profits for Wall Street, but jobs for us ordinary folk remain out of reach. The Market advocates and their allies in both political parties have no real answers, as we face economic prospects that are unrelentingly dismal.We can only watch as the Republican Party continues to manifest the political irrationalism that 9-11 spawned: raising the question, where are the Republican moderates? If any dare raise their voices amid the din of kleptocratic apologetics. President Obama has shown himself to be an advocate of IMF Structural Adjustment, without apology or explanation to his 'Progressive' followers. We are in need of leadership, but both Parties are failing miserably.

Political Cynic