history
The Upside Down: That’s The Way to Do It!
Long ago, when I was a student, I found myself directing the summer production at my college. It was my first time directing anything and a combination of youthful arrogance and a visceral dislike of student drama led me to attempt a commedia dell’arte.
For more than 300 years, from the 16th to the 18th Centuries, this anarchic, improvised style of Italian comedy had dominated the makeshift stages and marketplaces of Europe.
It worked better than any of us expected – my basic script offered plenty of opportunities for the cast to improvise and, by the end of the week, we’d begun to feel that odd alchemy that only the laughter of an audience induces.
But by far the biggest laughs and the sharpest intakes of breath were elicited by the episodes involving Pulcinella, his wife, and their unlucky baby.
Pulcinella, the hook-nosed, hunch-backed, cunning bumpkin of the commedia, is, of course, the ancestor of the English puppet, Mr Punch.
The episodes I wrote combined violent slapstick with surreal existentialist monologues; the two actors (and baby doll) and plenty of high-pitched squealing did the rest. On five warm summer evenings, the sinister, liberating energy of Mr Punch carried all before it.
The transformation of Pulcinella into Mr Punch happened in the late 17th Century, with Samuel Pepys recording in 1662 that he had seen an Italian puppet play in London’s Covent Garden that was “very pretty”.
Pulcinella soon became Punchinello, and his companion Joan transformed into Judy (one theory is that ‘Judy’ sounds better when spoken through the swazzle – a device comprising two pieces of metal wrapped in cotton tape that produces Punch’s characteristic cackling kazoo-like voice).
The marionettes evolved into hand puppets so that a single person – the Professor or Punchman – could mount a performance on their own.
By the mid-19th Century, the red-and-white striped booths were a staple in most English street fairs and seaside promenades. But the traditional ‘Punch and Judy Show’, although now mostly staged for children, didn’t start out that way.
From the beginning, Punch was cast as a peculiarly violent species of everyman: deformed, unmasculine in his speech, put upon but cunning, and lethal with his slapstick. He kills first his own baby; then Judy his wife; is unfaithful with Pretty Polly; flouts the law by battering a policeman; tricks Jack Ketch the hangman into hanging himself; and in his final encounter with the Devil, who is ominous in his silence, he either triumphs or is cast into hell.
It’s a peculiar sequence to adopt as a national drama and has always annoyed those who feel that domestic violence, misogyny, and sexual incontinence aren’t fit subjects for popular entertainment.
Charles Dickens, a man who knew a lot about what people liked, disagreed. “In my opinion, the street Punch is one of those extravagant reliefs from the realities of life which would lose its hold upon the people if it were made moral and instructive,” he wrote. “It is possible, I think, that one secret source of pleasure very generally derived from this performance… is the satisfaction the spectator feels in the circumstance that likenesses of men and women can be so knocked about, without any pain or suffering.”
This is true as far as it goes, but there is definitely the shadow of real pain and suffering that hangs over the character – and this is what makes Punch such a powerful and popular archetype.
He is the hero of his own show; he usually wins; we root for him. But, like all tricksters, there is a darkness or even an emptiness at his heart which repels as much as it fascinates.
In his brilliant Mister Punch, the poet David Harsent presents a Punch who might be both a rapist and serial killer, haunted by nightmares; both perpetrator and victim. He introduces his 1984 volume with a quote from Carl Jung: “The wounded wounder is the agent of healing.”
It is this uneasy paradox that animates Harrison Birtwhistle’s astonishingly violent one-act opera Punch and Judy (1968), Neil Gaiman and David McKean’s pitch-dark graphic novel The Tragical Comedy or Comical Tragedy of Mr Punch (2006), and even XTC’s council estate mini-drama Punch & Judy (1982).
My favourite modern deployment of the Punch archetype occurs in Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker (1980), a dystopian novel set in an England of the far-future after a nuclear holocaust. In this harsh and violent world, a version of the Punch and Judy Show has become the state religion. Riddley, the main character, uses the broken-down language of the novel to perfectly skewer the fascination of Punch – “a character so old he can never die” according to Hoban: “Why is Punch crookit? Why wil he all ways kil the babby if he can? Parbly I wont never know its jus on me to think on it.”
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Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times – review
In Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times, Samuel Moyn dissects intellectual battles within Cold War liberalism through six key figures: Judith Shklar, Isaiah Berlin, Karl Popper, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Hannah Arendt and Lionel Trilling. Teasing out their complex relationships with Enlightenment ideals, historicism, Freudianism and decolonisation, Moyn’s masterful group biography sheds light on the evolution of liberalism and the cause of the Red Scare, writes Atreyee Majumder.
In his most recent book, Samuel Moyn provides a set of intertwined intellectual profiles of six scholars of the Cold War, especially post-WWII era: Judith Shklar, Isaiah Berlin, Karl Popper, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Hannah Arendt and Lionel Trilling. Before I read Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times, I had never come across the term Cold War liberalism. As Moyn clarifies, the term was coined in the 1960s by enemies of liberal ideas (presumably from within the Free World) emerging at the time, blaming “domestic compromises and foreign policy mistakes”. Moyn offers an intriguing argument that liberalism arrived at its current iteration through its defenders in the Anglo-American region during the Cold War.
Moyn offers an intriguing argument that liberalism arrived at its current iteration through its defenders in the Anglo-American region during the Cold War.
Interestingly, all the scholars in Moyn’s study except for Karl Popper are Jewish intellectuals of the post-Holocaust era or are children of American Jewish immigrants. An Austrian émigré in England, Popper was born Jewish but later converted to Lutheranism. Moyn takes great care not to reduce their loyalty to a certain iteration of liberalism to their religious identity (111). He employs an interesting writing strategy whereby he establishes a grapevine of conversations among these six figures and their various compatriot liberals. For instance, Shklar appears as a sharp critic of Hannah Arendt in Chapter five, while Berlin provides a corrective to Shklar’s rejection and blaming of Rousseau for sowing the roots of the red spectre with which the free world was confronted with in the twentieth century.
The first two chapters elaborate on Shklar and Berlin who have divergent attitudes towards the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Rousseau. Both are critical of the Enlightenment to the extent that they find themselves amplifying liberalism’s state-limiting function over its dimension of emphasising creative agency of the individual. They differ on the extent to which the Enlightenment could be held responsible for the rise of the Red Scare. It is in the Karl Popper chapter (Chapter Three) that the plot thickens, as Popper rejects “historicism” by way of rejecting Hegel and his infusion of the idea of progress with Christian “inevitabilism” (77, 80). As Moyn narrates, Popper held that history, if embraced, would mean the inevitable progress as argued for Hegel and later, in Marx’s terms, would lead to a communist version of progress that would usurp liberalism’s dominance. This anxiety made Popper reject the category of history itself. In fact, Jacob Talmon, the “slavish follower” of Popper, described “the idolization of history” as a “nineteenth century novelty” (80).
It is through Hannah Arendt that we see the uncomfortable relationship the Cold War liberals had with the decolonisation movements outside the west
The book reaches a crescendo in the last two chapters on Hannah Arendt and Lionel Trilling, respectively. It is through Hannah Arendt that we see the uncomfortable relationship the Cold War liberals had with the decolonisation movements outside the west; those that claimed the word ”freedom” for colonised populations. As a reader from the postcolony, I found it instructive to read Moyn’s discussion of Arendt’s ambivalence about reconciling her liberalism with the growing liberalisms of the former colonies. In an insightful section at the end of the Arendt chapter (137-8), Moyn discusses how nationalisms of these fledgling nations were objects of suspicion for Arendt and the Cold War liberals while they were eager to embrace the cause of Israel’s nationalism. In the final chapter we witness Lionel Trilling’s strange embrace of Freud’s psychoanalysis, especially Freud’s late work Civilization and its Discontents (1930). Trilling wanted to render a reformed liberalism – one that wasn’t so naïve and shocked at crisis or evil in the world. Moyn writes of Trilling’s use of Freud in working out his own theory of liberty and liberalism (152):
“…..Freudianism affected the theory of liberty. It turns out that people are constrained in the control they can win from the passions, and therefore in the freedom they should have in their self-making. They must use what autonomy they can gain in pitiless struggle with their own proclivities in the service of self-control.”
Trilling’s own treatment of Cold War liberalism […] could have arisen from his repeated attempts to process what he witnessed in Europe in the 1930s as fascism took hold
Trilling’s own treatment of Cold War liberalism, Moyn speculates, could have arisen from his repeated attempts to process what he witnessed in Europe in the 1930s as fascism took hold; Moyn writes that “he rationalized out of it a new liberalism” (153) – a kind of “survivalist” one. Trilling’s move for a reformed and less idealistic liberalism marked liberalism’s slow shift towards the right.
Moyn has written a masterful interconnected intellectual biography of Cold War liberals, unpacking arguments within the liberal establishment about what actually brought about the Red Scare.
Moyn has written a masterful interconnected intellectual biography of Cold War liberals, unpacking arguments within the liberal establishment about what actually brought about the Red Scare. Moyn also makes clear that these figures are not particularly worried about the institutional arrangement that will bring about such actualisation of freedoms and hence, their version of liberalism. Moyn often uses the term neoliberal and I understand that his usage is quite different from the commonplace social science use of that word – which is a political form accompanying the condition of late capitalism. Hence, I would have liked Moyn to delineate his specific use of the term. Moyn does discuss, especially, in the chapter on Hannah Arendt (Chapter Five), the discomfiture of the Cold War liberals with the rise of new nations across the globe, claiming for themselves the political and social goods of liberalism through their own interpretation of what these might entail. He especially mentions, David Scott’s indictment of Arendt for her erasure of Haiti (138). A blind spot about the rest of the world seems to have existed among the Cold War liberals, which Moyn could have explored further. Finally, I was curious about whether Western Marxism – of the Althusser variety (I believe many of them are writing at the same time as Althusser in the 1960s) – were at all in the conversations that the Cold War liberals engaged in. If so, how would they respond to the Althusserian idea that “freedom” as ideology that hides actual class relations in the name of a pleasurable political ideal which thereafter encodes their worlds of desire? Nonetheless, Liberalism Against Itself is an illuminating and, at times, counterintuitive account of the intellectual wars internal to liberal establishment while it was under attack during the Cold War.
Note: This post gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Image credit: DidemA on Shutterstock.
East German history
I’ve posted a few times over the years about a trip I made with my partner to Leipzig in East Germany back in 1984, and I confess that the now-defunct country retains a kind of fascination for me. My rather banal judgement then and now is that the country, though marked by annoying shortages and inefficiencies, had a standard of living sufficient to give people an acceptable life in material terms, but that its lack of freedom, political repression, retention of its population by coercion were all unacceptable. I recently revisited an exchange I had with Tyler Cowen, 17 years ago, and I still think I was basically right and find it ironic that it was me, the leftist, championing freedom against the “libertarian” fixated on living standards.
I’ve just read Katja Hoyer’s wonderful Beyond the Wall: East Germany 1949-1990, which I would recommend to just about anyone. She traces the DDR from its origins to the fall of the Berlin Wall. The people who initially led the country were, of course, communists. But Hoyer reminds us that they were communists of a particular kind: the exiles who were left after Stalin had murdered most of them (he killed more of the German communist leadership than Hitler did). As such, they were cautious and conformist to a fault, and unlikely to strike out independently. They were also leading a ruined society, occupied by Soviet troops, with few natural resources and where, in contrast to the West, the victorious occupying power indulged in reparatory plunder rather than development aid. It was also a society initially seen as provisional, pending unification, and Hoyer argues convicingly that Stalin’s offer of a neutral unified Germany in 1952 as a means of preventing a NATO-aligned West Germany was sincere (though unlikely to succeed).
Obviously, the great stain on the country was the Wall and the militarized frontier, together with the murders of those who tried to escape and the system of extensive surveillance ran by the Stasi under Mielke (very much a state within a state). But Hoyer makes the case that once the option of emigration was blocked, people basically got on with building their lives and made a society that worked, where things gradually got better and where there was a surprising degree of pluralism and disagreement for what was effectively (though not officially) a one-party dominated state. Most people, after the upheaval of WW1, Weimar and Nazi tyranny, weren’t that keen on politics as a solution to their problems, and though the extreme exploitation of labour during reconstruction in the 1950s led to revolt and repression, things eased from the 1960s onwards.
One of the things that Tyler Cowen and I both noticed about 1980s East Germany was that the shelves in the shops were empty. We both drew the conclusion that this was a permanent feature of the system. But Hoyer argues that it was, rather, a symptom of the particular crisis of the 1980s. Of course, things were never good in consumer terms compared to the neighbouring West Germany, where many East Germans had relatives. Paradoxically, greater liberalisaton and exposure to Western culture also gave people a taste for what they were missing and fuelled dissatisfaction. Particularly interesting is the great Coffee Crisis of the 1970s, where an absence of foreign exchange made it hard to supply the real thing and the state tried to enforce consumption of a ersatz-adulterated alternative. Such was the disgust provoked that the East Germans engaged in one of the most successful programmes of development aid in history, creating the Vietnamese coffee industry from scratch (the world’s second-largest producer) in order to satisfy domestic consumption. Sadly for the DDR, the coffee plants only became mature from 1990. Too late, too late.
Hoyer also explores the dynamics of East Germany’s relations with its two most important external partners: the Soviet Union and West Germany. To put it simply: West Germany had money and cultural proximity; the Soviets had tanks and the ability to remove East German leaders they got tired of (such as Walter Ulbricht, sidelined on the pretext he was two old when younger than Joe Biden is now). The East German leaders, navigating this tension, increasingly tried to steer their own course, with limited success. Then, as now, energy dependence on Russia was an issue, with the alternative being the environmentally disastrous brown coal. (Much too in the book on music, fashion, and the rest.)
As I said, I stick by my judgement that it is the lack of freedom (including freedom of movement) that ultimately condems East Germany as a society rather than its constricted living standards (its citizens were still richer than most people on the planet). On living standards, it is worth remembering that the country was competing with the West during a period when Western societies were undergoing an amazing expansion in the amount and variety of consumer goods. Things look somewhat different today as the UK, France, Italy (to name but three) have been stuck at the same level for nearly two decades. The DDR did not succeed in providing its population with a cornucopia of consumption, but it did deliver the ability for people to get decent housing, to start a family, to have affordable childcare, for women to participate in the workforce to a degree that West Germany could not achieve. (Many things got better with reunification, the relative position of women got worse.) Societies like the UK and France today are not improving materially, young people cannot get decent jobs, find homes in which to bring up families, cannot afford childcare and our health services are creaking. To get anywhere, people have to engage in anxiety-producing competition in higher education to get the available good jobs (where success might depend on family money getting you past an unpaid “internship”). Moreover, we’re going backwards on the dimension of freedom with regression on democracy, rights to protest, human rights and a dramatic increase in state surveillance of the population, made possible by the internet. I’m not saying that the East German communists were right (they were not!) but the comparison to the West looks quite different in 2024 than it did in 1989.
One thing that made me a bit reluctant to read Hoyer’s book is her propensity to write for right-wing British outlets like the Telegraph, Spectator and Unherd (to be fair, she also writes for the Guardian). But the book is remarkably objective, balanced and unideological. One thing I’ve noticed with people who come from the former East is that they can be surprisingly hard to fit into a conventional left-right spectrum. Perhaps that isn’t surprising given their experiences and those of their families. Anyway, if you are a leftist (as most CT readers probably are), don’t be put off: this is a magificent piece of work.
The French Politics of the Pantheon and the Monumental Hypocrisy of Emmanuel Macron
It was striking that a center-right president like Emmanuel Macron, who has recently hardened his position on immigrants and immigration, would grant such a high honor to two immigrant Communists. ...
The Wealth of a Nation: Institutional Foundations of English Capitalism – review
In The Wealth of a Nation: Institutional Foundations of English Capitalism, Geoffrey Hodgson traces the roots of modern capitalism to financial and legal institutions established in England in the 17th and 18th centuries. Hodgson’s astute historical analysis foregrounds the alienability of property rights as a key condition of capitalism’s rise to supremacy, though it leaves questions around the social dimensions of the free market system unanswered, writes S M Amadae.
The Wealth of a Nation: Institutional Foundations of English Capitalism. Geoffrey M. Hodgson. Princeton University Press. 2024.
English capitalism was built on empire and slavery…State intervention and slavery are examples of impurities within capitalism. Impurities can be necessary or contingent for the system. Some state intervention was arguably necessary, but slavery was not. (13)
Countering conventional understandings of capitalism, Geoffrey Hodgson contends that “Secure property rights were not enough,” because “[m]ore wealth had to become alienable and usable as collateral for borrowing and financing investment” (119). Hodgson’s The Wealth of a Nation: Institutional Foundations of English Capitalism is a welcome contribution to heterodox economics that incorporates historical excavation and theoretical analysis to provide refreshing nuance to established accounts of the rise of capitalism. Hodgson provides historical details of Great Britain’s early modern property rights and finance institutions, building on his previous works and covering a dense corpus of theories and data going back to Adam Smith’s 1776 Wealth of Nations. Hodgson’s analysis of the financial origins of English capitalism focuses on types of property rights from 1689 to 1760 and varieties of financial credit supporting British industrialisation between 1760 and 1830. While readers can expect a perceptive analysis of the origins of British capitalism, they should not expect a critique of the social dimensions of the free market system.
The Wealth of a Nation […] incorporates historical excavation and theoretical analysis to provide refreshing nuance to established accounts of the rise of capitalism.
Part II, “Explaining England’s Economic Development,” including Chapter Three “Land, Law, War,” Chapter Four “From the Glorious to the Industrial Revolution,” and Chapter Five “Finance and Industrialization,” carries the brunt of Hodgson’s argumentation. Three aspects of the book stand out. The first is his overarching argument that the central institution enabling the rise of modern political economy in England was finance: the ability to alienate the ownership of land and other property to serve as collateral for investment loans. The second is Hodgson’s heterodox economic analysis emphasising historical contingency (as opposed to universal laws); Darwinian Variation, Selection, Replication (203-206); and the role of institutions. The third is Hodgson’s apparent embrace of capitalism. He celebrates the productive power of finance capital and industrial investment, but eschews a critical analysis of capitalism’s social consequences articulated by the likes of Karl Marx, John Maynard Keynes and Karl Polanyi.
[Hodgson] celebrates the productive power of finance capital and industrial investment, but eschews a critical analysis of capitalism’s social consequences
Hodgson engages the theories of Karl Marx, Douglass North and Barry Weingast and Deirdre McCloskey, criticising their arguments for being incomplete or flawed. Marx identified the exploitation of the working class by the bourgeoisie; he missed that changes in law preceded changes in the material base that ultimately consolidated bourgeois power. North and Weingast apprehend the importance of secure property rights but missed that these could encompass feudal property rights mandating primogeniture (oldest son inherits all property) and entailments rather than the new class of alienable property rights. McCloskey rightly focuses on ideas as a force for social evolution but misses the exigencies of paying for costly wars and the practical need for legal means to pay off sovereign debt.
The key underlying factor of the British Industrial Revolution from 1760-1830 was the ability to obtain finance.
Hodgson’s treatment is astute. The Dutch were leaders in public finance, and William III’s accession to the British throne in 1689 brought those practices into Britain (121). The period from 1689-1815 was one of “war capitalism” requiring that the state be efficient in raising taxes. The state gained the right to create money by decree, and debt itself could be sold along with contractual obligations to repay the debt. Hodgson dates the financial revolution to 1660-1760 (135) and associates the growing sovereign debt with the need to finance war efforts. The key underlying factor of the British Industrial Revolution from 1760-1830 was the ability to obtain finance. Hodgson challenges the conventional view that entrepreneurs obtained loans from family and friends. His argument rests on documenting that investors were able to stake collateral for their loans. He presents evidence on mortgages, such as for canals, and the rising ratio of capital existing as financial assets versus as physical assets. The British banking system had to adapt to offer credit for investment because the central bank was focused on financing sovereign debt for war efforts.
Hodgson redirects attention from the security of property rights to their alienability as the driving institutional invention critical for capitalism to emerge. Slaves represented a crucial category of this exchangeable type of property. Hodgson acknowledges that “By the end of the eighteenth century, slaves amounted to about a third of the capital value of all owned assets in the British Empire” (109). A sizeable category of alienable property in the early 18th century was that of slaves: £6.4 billion was land, buildings, animals, ships, equipment and other non-human assets, while £3 billion was slaves (2021 currency values, 149). Hodgson’s treatment of slaves’ contribution to the origins of what Adam Smith called the “system of natural liberty” is limited to their functional role as legally institutionalised property that could be alienated. Readers looking to heterodox economics to provide a critical stance on the origins of western free markets may seek more than Hodgson’s proposition that the institution of slavery was merely a contingent factor in the system’s rise. Hodgson acknowledges that the £20 million compensation paid to former slave owners for the 1833 Slavery Abolition Act stands as a historically unprecedented sum of liquid financial capital freely available for industrial investment in the 19th century.
The £20 million compensation paid to former slave owners for the 1833 Slavery Abolition Act stands as a historically unprecedented sum of liquid financial capital freely available for industrial investment in the 19th century.
In a twist of prevailing perception that the burden of debt is a form of bondage (eg David Graeber’s Debt, 2012), Hodgson frames indebtedness as the means of liberation to finance capital, which in turn drives economic growth. Hodson effectively defends Hernando De Soto’s property rights institutions to increase the welfare of the destitute by issuing land titles as a means to obtain credit. In a similar inversion of conventional sentiment, we can recall Adam Smith’s admonishment, counter to contemporary American libertarians, that tax, including poll tax, “is to the person who pays it a badge, not of slavery, but of liberty” because tax payers are subjects of government.
Hodgson adopts a Darwinian-inspired methodology based on variation, selection, and replication (the “V-S-R” system, 204). The section “Applying Darwinism to Scientific and Economic Evolution,” (206) is conjectural. He observes that, “Some individuals were more successful than others, affecting their chances of survival and procreation” (207). He rejects either a material account or a mental account of agency. The latter refers to “folk psychology” which attributes action to individuals’ desires and beliefs. Hodgson follows the school of thought holding that human action occurs before intention is conscious or rationalised (189-190). He holds that habits and dispositions, rather than deliberately formed intentions, govern action and form the bedrock of institutions.
[Hodgson] holds that habits and dispositions, rather than deliberately formed intentions, govern action and form the bedrock of institutions.
How, then, do we assess the merits of, or the underlying affirming conditions for, either the institution of slavery or alienable property and financial capital? Hodgson observes that,
People often obey laws out of respect for authority and justice, and not because they calculate advantages and disadvantages of compliance. Dispositions to respect authority have evolved over millions of years because they aided cohesion and survival of primate and human groups (201).
Hodgson’s argument that alienable property and appropriate financial institutions for investment were a condition for the rise of capitalism in Britain is convincing. However, without a clear conceptualisation of effective human agency, other than that driven by dispositions and habits, we are left with the stubborn question of the extent to which capitalist institutions are either emancipatory or the best means to better the human condition.
Note: This post gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Image: The painting Coalbrookdale by Night by Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg depicting the Bedlam furnaces at Coalbrookdale in Shropshire, England. Credit: The Science Museum, London.
Good Governance in Nigeria: Rethinking Accountability and Transparency in the Twenty-First Century – review
In Good Governance in Nigeria: Rethinking Accountability and Transparency in the Twenty-First Century, Portia Roelofs critiques conventional Western ideas of “good governance” imposed in Africa, and specifically Nigeria, through fieldwork and historical analysis. Stephanie Wanga finds the book a grounded and nuanced argument for alternative, locally shaped and socially embedded models of governance.
Good governance: a phrase laden with meaning and history. Good governance in Africa? Even more trouble at hand. Colonial and neocolonial projects in Africa have been justified in the name of good governance. However, to assume a sense of foreboding when one hears the phrase “good governance” is also to assume – and even to locate – its meaning in a particular provenance. This is exactly what Portia Roelofs, in her book Good Governance in Nigeria: Rethinking Accountability and Transparency in the Twenty-First Century, wants to trouble.
The author wants to draw out a re-conception of good governance: namely, as conceived of by everyday people rather than, say, the World Bank or other institutions whose projected definitions come with immense repercussions.
Roelofs, a lecturer in politics at King’s College London, has spent time in Nigeria, including undertaking research in the universities of Ibadan and Maiduguri. It is from her fieldwork in Nigeria that she wants to draw out a re-conception of good governance: namely, as conceived of by everyday people rather than, say, the World Bank or other institutions whose projected definitions come with immense repercussions. To do so, this work “places the voices of roadside traders and small-time market leaders alongside those of local government officials, political godfathers and technocrats…[theorising] ‘socially embedded’ good governance.” Using this method, she defends the argument that “power must be socially embedded for it to be accountable”, in opposition to those who cast social embeddedness as sullying politics and leaving room for all the varied forms of corruption that may hinder good governance.
If society and social demands might be seen as an enabler of corruption […] the necessary flip side is that it can also represent a constraint on the actions of those in power.
Indeed, Roelofs extends Peter Ekeh’s erudite analysis (in Colonialism and the Two Publics in Africa) of a “third space” that defies the binaries of political science’s beloved public and private spheres. Ekeh presented a space from which Nigerian (and wider African) politics could be more fruitfully analysed, a space that was “neither absolutely rational-bureaucratic public authority [nor]…patrimonial authority conceived as the personal or individual authority of a Big Man’s private household”. Roelofs presents evidence that “points towards the existence of more social forms of governance which are neither personalistic […] nor ethnic, but speak to a more general sociality”, which provides the basis for the notion of governance that is “both public and yet includes some social elements and the further possibility that this may constitute good governance”. If society and social demands might be seen as an enabler of corruption (something that is not, the author reminds us, a uniquely African problem), the necessary flip side is that it can also represent a constraint on the actions of those in power. In fact, the insistence on detaching the state from its societal embeddedness increases the opacity and unaccountability of the state.
Roelofs’ methodology may be controversial to those devoted to hyper-abstraction, but for those of us who theorise as we live rather than save theory for the books, good governance must always be socially embedded. However, Roelofs is engaging with real biases that run deep in both political theory and development studies, and that have had immense consequences. As she writes, “While personal contact between voters and politicians is pathologized in scholarly analysis of Africa, it is celebrated by political scientists working in Western democracies.” Social-embeddedness has been a kind of dirty word in a lot of the mainstream writing on African politics – it is this entanglement of the political with the social that causes diagnoses such as “the cancer of corruption” and other terms that pathologise African politics every which way.
This is a book that is quite close to me in terms of method, as a person who roots herself primarily in political theory but believes ardently in the ways other methods and sources, including history and fieldwork, must educate political theory. Along with this, the book is supposed to demonstrate “the associated possibilities for decolonising the study of politics”. One might question the extent to which this book rigorously engages this latter goal, but it continues in the tradition of thinkers including Thandika Mkandawire (to whom the book is dedicated) and others like Ndongo Samba Sylla and Leonce Ndikumana.
Roelofs contests the dominant World Bank discourse on good governance that is projected as universally accepted and uncontroversial. She proposes an alternative mode of governance whereby the people decide for themselves the terms of engagement – something that the World Bank has in multiple, egregious ways denied the continent. This very act is noteworthy – the “problem” of African politics has been repeatedly deemed “too embedded in social and material relations”, leading to the oft-cited ills of neopatrimonialism, corruption, etc.
Roelofs is self-conscious of her position as a white woman trying to turn the tables on colonial, trope-filled discourse and asks for thoughts on how such a move might be more conscientiously made.
However, though this goal of challenging what good governance means is named explicitly at the outset, it would have been useful to see the precise ways in which the book operates as a (potentially) decolonial act. Roelofs is self-conscious of her position as a white woman trying to turn the tables on colonial, trope-filled discourse and asks for thoughts on how such a move might be more conscientiously made. Indeed, many have questioned how “Africanists” – often white, often working outside the continent – have positioned themselves at the centre of changing tides in African political discourse. The racial blindspots (or worse) underlying African Studies must be called out alongside those of the financial institutions; the neocolonial project is a concert of efforts.
The author hints at this issue, but often in diplomatic terms. As Robtel Neajai Pailey writes, one needs to “speak into existence the proverbial elephant in the room of development: race”. However, one must balance this move with the recognition that all of us, including white academics, are responsible for taking the decolonial bull by the horns – that one must not shirk responsibility via the false generosity of “making space” for “people of colour”. The hard work of taking responsibility and being responsible must be consciously and explicitly engaged.
Another danger the book sometimes falls into is to play up the narrative of what Africa can teach the world.
Another danger the book sometimes falls into is to play up the narrative of what Africa can teach the world. This viewpoint is problematic in that it may suggest a need to peg the meaningfulness of work done in Africa to its importance for the Big Bad West (and elsewhere). The greater purpose may instead be to unearth meanings that only have value locally, to study Africa for its own sake, and not for the West’s education. The question of where meaning should be focused relates to Toni Morrison’s observations on racism as a distraction. This burden leaves a person desperately trying to prove that they, too, are worthy; that they, too, have important things to show the world, unaware that by that very token they are upholding a particular standard of worthiness.
Despite this, Roelofs’ book serves as both rigorous, extended analysis of the good governance discourse and a worthwhile historical introduction to the troubles that have besieged state-making in Africa. Roelofs keenly dissects several key historical moments in Nigeria to tease out how they theoretically shape contemporary understandings of good governance.
Roelofs’ book serves as both rigorous, extended analysis of the good governance discourse and a worthwhile historical introduction to the troubles that have besieged state-making in Africa.
To this end, she writes about how good governance in Nigeria is often tied to the person (and myth) of Chief Obafemi Awolowo, who, to some, was the best President Nigeria never had. However, there is more to the picture than the “modernising, elite-led, progressive” elements that epitomise notions of good governance in Nigeria and that Awolowo represented. Working through the contested ideas that surround good governance, Roelofs comes up with what she calls the “Lagos model”. This is a homegrown approach, made of a shared set of reference points acting as a yardstick against which governance is evaluated. Roelofs names the reference points as “an epistemic claim to enlightened leadership, a social claim to being embedded in one’s constituency and a material claim about the sharing of resources”. Roelofs shows that the ideas of good governance grounded in epistemic superiority were in tension with more populist visions that emphasised the need for satisfying short-term economic desires and connecting with leaders. From this dialectic “a full and rounded picture of legitimate leadership as containing epistemic, social and material aspects” emerges. The struggle to balance each of these three aspects is what produces good governance, and the gaps in managing the give and take across the three is what gives various kinds of actors, nefarious and otherwise, entry to “fix” what appears broken.
Overall, the book is accessible and unpretentious, even while quite history-heavy. Though it may lack the poetry and passion of a Mudimbe or Mbembe, its appeal to democratise understandings of good governance demands the reader’s engagement reckon. It is a refreshingly democratic take on what it means to govern well, by rooting the definition in what everyday people in a specific context truly seek.
Note: This post gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Image credit: Tolu Owoeye on Shutterstock.
Belonging as Poetry in New Narratives on the Peopling of America
T. Alexander Aleinikoff and Alexandra Délano Alonso chat with Paloma Griffin about challenging conventional stories of immigration in their book NEW NARRATIVES OF THE PEOPLING OF AMERICA....
Tactical Publishing: Using Senses, Software, and Archives in the Twenty-First Century – review
In Tactical Publishing: Using Senses, Software, and Archives in the Twenty-First Century, Alessandro Ludovico assembles a vast repertoire of post-digital publications to make the case for their importance in shaping and proposing alternative directions for the current computational media landscape. Although tilting towards example over practical theory, Tactical Publishing is an inspiring resource for all scholars and practitioners interested in the critical potential of experimenting with the technologies, forms, practices and socio-material spaces that emerge around books, writes Rebekka Kiesewetter.
Working at the intersection of art, technology, and media, Alessandro Ludovico is known for his contribution to shaping the term “post-digital” through his book Post-Digital Print: The Mutation of Publishing Since 1894. Ludovico’s notion of the post-digital, in brief, challenges the divide between digital and physical realms by exploring the normalisation and ubiquity of the digital in contemporary culture and urges for a nuanced perspective beyond its novelty, as boundaries between online and offline experiences blur.
Tactical Publishing is presented as a sequel, evolving and updating Ludovico’s concept for the concerns of a contemporary computational media landscape shaped by technologies and platforms (social media, algorithms, mobile apps and virtual reality environments) owned by large multinational corporations. Through discussing a wide variety of antagonistically situated experimental and activist publishing initiatives, Ludovico discovers fresh roles and purposes for books, publishers, editors, and libraries at the centre of an alternative post-digital publishing system. This system diverges from the “calculated and networked quality of publishing between digital and print … to promote an intrinsic and explicitly cooperative structure that contrasts with the vertical, customer-oriented industry model” (8).
Ludovico develops this argument around a captivating array of well and lesser known examples from the realms of analogue, digital, and post-digital publishing stretching the prevalent boundaries of what a book was, is, and can be. Ranging from Asger Jorn’s and Guy Debord’s sandpaper covered book Mémoirs (1958), to Nanni Balestrini’s computer generated poem “Tape Mark 1” (1961), to Newstweek (2011), a device for manipulating news created by Julian Oliver and Danja Vasiliev. Tactical Publishing also ventures into the complex relationships, practices, socio-political and economic contexts of the production and reception of books. It draws on these relational contexts to explore their disruptive potential. For example, through forms of “liminal librarianship” practiced by DIY libraries, networked archiving practices of historically underrepresented communities, and custodianship in the context of digital piracy.
Ludovico develops this argument around a captivating array of well and lesser known examples from the realms of analogue, digital, and post-digital publishing stretching the prevalent boundaries of what a book was, is, and can be
As in Post-Digital Print, Tactical Publishing offers an abundantly rich resource for scholars interested in exploring the ways in which experimenting with the manifold dimensions that make up books, can be a means for creative expression, intellectual exploration, and social change in the digital age. Ludovico dedicates considerable attention to these case studies, allowing them ample space to shine and speak by themselves in support of his argument.
The book is divided into six chapters, each mixing illustrative instances of practical application with theoretical reflection. Chapter one explores how reading is transformed by digital screens. These, as the author explains, tend to enforce industrially standardised experiences, while neutralising cultural differences and leading to a potential loss of sensory involvement. Ludovico proposes to reclaim enriched and multisensory reading experiences by combining digital tools and physical qualities. He illustrates this proposition by discussing a series of publishing experiments in music publishing that have used analogue and digital technologies to integrate text and music media.
Chapter two examines the transformation of the role of software in writing. Here, Ludovico presents a transition from an infrastructural to an authorial function that blurs distinctions between human and artificial “subjectivities”. The latter being a simulation of human-like experiences, characteristics, and behaviours often associated with human subjectivity, such as learning, decision-making, or emotional responses. This simulation Ludovico argues increasingly obstructs the ability to distinguish between actions and expressions originating from humans and those generated by technological systems. Ludovico contends that the “practice of constructing digital systems, processes, and infrastructures to deal with these new subjectivities can become a political matter” (89). One that requires initiatives intertwining critical and responsible efforts in digitising knowledges, making digital knowledge-bases accessible and searchable, and developing and maintaining machine-based services on top of them. However, the origin and nature of these institutions, and what their efforts might entail remain unspecified.
Ludovico presents a transition from an infrastructural to an authorial function that blurs distinctions between human and artificial “subjectivities”.
Chapter three explores how post-truth arises from a constant construction and deconstruction of meaning in transient digital spaces, and through media and image manipulation. Ludovico emphasises that, in this context, it is important to build “an information dam … to protect our minds from being flooded with data, especially emotionally charged data” (123). Chapter four, “Endlessness: The Digital Publishing Paradigm”, makes the case that the fragmented short formats characteristic of digital publishing underscore the importance of the archival role of print publications and the necessity of networks of “critical human editors” (130). These can act as a counterbalance to this flood of information and foster a more focused and collaborative exchange of information.
Chapter five proposes a transformation of libraries from centralised towards distributed and networked knowledge infrastructures in which librarians strategically contribute to the selection and sharing of “relevant collections” (197). Chapter six concludes Tactical Publishing synthesising the previous chapters by proposing the strategic integration of analogue and digital realms within an “open media continuum” rejecting a calculated, networked approach in favour of a cooperative structure sustained by “responsible editors” (212), publishers, librarians, custodians, and distributors. Last but not least, a useful appendix offers a selection of one hundred publications, encompassing both print and digital formats.
Tactical Publishing sits within a well-established canon of critical media studies, digital humanities, and cultural studies, focusing on the materiality of media, historical dimensions of technology, media ecology, politics of information, and socio-cultural implications of post-digital communication. However, its theoretical contributions are at times subdued by the host of examples presented. Some readers may also be left wanting a more pronounced engagement with recent theoretical works discussing the concept of post-digital publishing and its interventionist potential into dominant publishing systems, norms, and cultures from cultural hegemony critical, post-Marxist, various feminist, post-hegemonic, and ecologically-minded perspectives. Such an engagement might have helped clarify questions about the politics and ethics related to the alternative post-digital publishing system and the “comprehensive liberatory attitude” (4) Ludovico advocates for, beyond the motivation to counter the alienation of the current computational media landscape.
Tactical Publishing sits within a well-established canon of critical media studies, digital humanities, and cultural studies, focusing on the materiality of media, historical dimensions of technology, media ecology, politics of information, and socio-cultural implications of post-digital communication.
Similarly, Tactical Publishing also leaves unresolved related questions of positionality, accountability, and agency. For example: Who is the “we “Ludovico addresses, not least in the final chapter titled “How we Should Publish in the 21st Century”? What drives “the critical human editors” (130) whose role is to “filter the myriad of sources, to preserve their heterogeneity, to … include new sources, but to keep their final number limited, and to confirm them, transparently acknowledged, in order to strengthen trusted networks” (211), and what legitimises their activity? And where, in a post-digital world, is “the personal trusted human network” situated that, according to the author, can be “resistant to mass manipulation by fake news and post-truth strategies” (123)?
However, despite (or exactly because) the theoretical argument occasionally takes a backseat to numerous meticulously selected and well-arranged examples, Tactical Publishing is an inspiring resource for all scholars and practitioners in design, the arts, humanities, and social sciences that are interested in the ways in which experimental publishing can help question, challenge and rearrange dominant publishing systems.
Note: This article was initially published on the LSE Impact of Social Science blog.
This post gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Image credit: Dikushin Dmitry on Shutterstock.
Toward an Intellectual History of Genocide in Gaza
The destruction of Gaza begins with ideas.
War and Peace in Jonathan Glazer’s Zone of Interest
In a way, our memory culture both in Germany and in Israel is an exact reversal of the reality revealed by the film. Perhaps that's why the film seems to annoy many people in Germany, who complain that it shows the "perpetrator's perspective." But memory must also be a memory of perpetration and its normalization; that is the difference between an honest memory and a convenient one....