The Vatican and the Situationists

On June 19, 2007, the Vatican issued the document "Guidelines for the Pastoral Care of the Road." A close examination reveals an unusual intellectual pedigree...

Vatican:

In addition to traffic congestion, people are directly exposed to dangers deriving from other related problems, such as noise, air pollution and intensive use of raw materials. We must tackle these issues and not just passively put up with them, partly in order to limit the costs of modernisation that are becoming unsustainable. In this context, it is a good idea to call for a commitment to avoid unnecessary car use.

SI:

A mistake made by all the city planners is to consider the private automobile (and its by-products, such as the motorcycle) as essentially a means of transportation. In reality, it is the most notable material symbol of the notion of happiness that developed capitalism tends to spread throughout the society. The automobile is at the heart of this general propaganda, both as supreme good of an alienated life and as essential product of the capitalist market: It is generally being said this year that American economic prosperity is soon going to depend on the success of the slogan “Two cars per family.”

Vatican:

When driving a car some people start up the engine to join a race, in order to escape from the troubling pace of everyday life. The pleasure of driving becomes a way of enjoying the freedom and independence that normally we do not have.

SI:

We must replace travel as an adjunct to work with travel as a pleasure.

Vatican:

Coexistence is a fundamental aspect of human beings and roads should therefore be more human. Motorists are never alone when they are driving, even when no one is sitting beside them. Driving a vehicle is basically a way of relating with and getting closer to other people, and of integrating within a community of people. This capacity for coexistence, of entering into relations with others, presupposes certain specific qualities in a driver: namely self-mastery, prudence, courtesy, a fitting spirit of service and knowledge of the Highway Code. Selfless assistance should also be provided to those who need it, by giving an example of charity and hospitality.

SI:

Even if, during a transitional period, we temporarily accept a rigid division between work zones and residence zones, we must at least envisage a third sphere: that of life itself (the sphere of freedom and leisure — the essence of life). Unitary urbanism acknowledges no boundaries; it aims to form an integrated human milieu in which separations such as work/leisure or public/private will finally be dissolved. But before this is possible, the minimum action of unitary urbanism is to extend the terrain of play to all desirable constructions. This terrain will be at the level of complexity of an old city.

Vatican:

In its evolution as a social factor, driving behaviour has sometimes developed on the fringes of ethical regulations, thereby -- we note -- generating a sharp contrast between the constant state of progress of transport and the continual and chaotic increase in road traffic, which has negative consequences for drivers and pedestrians.

SI:

The breaking up of the dialectic of the human milieu in favor of automobiles (the projected freeways in Paris will entail the demolition of thousands of houses and apartments although the housing crisis is continually worsening) masks its irrationality under pseudopractical justifications. But it is practically necessary only in the context of a specific social set-up. Those who believe that the particulars of the problem are permanent want in fact to believe in the permanence of the present society.

Vatican:

This is also a field of new evangelisation, so dear to the heart of Pope John Paul II. This sector also gives rise to an urgent appeal to seek new paths to bring the Gospel onto the routes of the world -- road and rail networks -- which are new Areopagi for proclaiming the Good News of Jesus Christ the Saviour.

SI:

Revolutionary urbanists will not limit their concern to the circulation of things, or to the circulation of human beings trapped in a world of things. They will try to break these topological chains, paving the way with their experiments for a human journey through authentic life.

Danvers Osborne: 18th Century Murder Mystery?

Meet Danvers Osborne, Baronet (Chicksands, Berkshire). 38 years old. Brother-in-law to Lord Halifax, British Commissioner for Trade and Plantations. Nervous, high-strung, a Romantic type. Depressed over the recent loss of his wife. A very sick man: "extremely flatulent," "perplexed" in "memory," "appeared with a sedate and melancholy Countenance, complaining of a great indisposition of body & disturbance of mind which could not be diverted." Governor of New York, October 7, 1753-October 12, 1753.

On Thursday, October 11, Osborne had dinner with his host, the lawyer Joseph Murray. He excused himself early and went upstairs to his room, where he conversed with his secretary, who noticed that Osborne did not look well. When the latter departed, Osborne began burning his papers, shooing away a servant who came to check on him. Sometime between midnight and 4 a.m., Osborne snuck downstairs into the garden. The moon was full that night. According to our best evidence, he then looped his handkerchief around a fence hook at the lower end of the garden, facing the river, and then inserted his head into the loop. His body was spotted by a fisherman around 4:30, and by an elderly petitioner named Philips Cosby around 7:30.

Osborne's brief tenure merits hardly a single sentence in any of the leading histories of New York. One scholar's contribution is a single line: "he was found hanging from a tree in the garden of the governor's mansion," which somehow manages to be incorrect on two counts. Other scholars seem not to be aware that he even existed.

We have few sources about the Osborne episode. The best is a small folder at the New-York Historical Society, under Misc. MSS Osborne, which contains copies of depositions given by the witnesses on Sunday, October 14. It allows us to reconstruct a fairly detailed narrative. Another source is a brief account in William Smith, Jr.'s History of the Province of New-York. Finally, there is a fragmentary analysis in Smith and Livingston's Report on the Military Operations in North America (1758).

These accounts concur in asserting that the death was a suicide, and there are good reasons to think so. But there was enough shady stuff going on that there may be reason to consider it a murder, with a definite culprit: Oliver DeLancey, operating under the direction of the conniving and powerful politician James DeLancey.

Reasons to suspect foul play:

• James DeLancey, who had been fighting for political power for the previous decade, was the clear beneficiary of the death: he assumed the acting governorship immediately after Osborne died, and held it for seven years.
• As Chief Justice of the province, DeLancey was in a position to suppress any thorough investigation.
• Oliver DeLancey was a ruffian known for committing acts of violence against his political opponents, some of them (a respected doctor whom he stabbed) avoiding death by mere accident.
• Oliver DeLancey remarked in 1749 that it would perhaps be easier for his faction if it would “hang three or four people and sett up a Government of their own.”
• On the morning of October 12, Oliver DeLancey was spotted in the vicinity of the Murray house.
  
• Osborne's commission was very strict; he was sent to reform the colonial government and make it more efficient, which meant prosecuting illegal land grants held by DeLancey supporters as well as gathering more power for the royal prerogative. This threatened James DeLancey's carefully constructed network of patronage, which had allowed him almost unlimited freedom of action.
• Our only really specific evidence about Osborne's various illnesses comes from his secretary Thomas Pownall (yes, that Pownall who was later Governor of Massachusetts-Bay and an MP). Pownall had good reasons not to be involved in a murder investigation--that could threaten his career. Pownall testified that Osborne was sick on the trans-Atlantic journey, but his testimony was denied by a cabin boy who said Osborne was fine.
• The explanation William Smith, Jr. gives for Osborne's death is marred by inconsistencies. Smith writes that he “must have perceived that his administration would not only prove destructive to his private fortune, but draw upon him the general odium of the country, and excite tumults dangerous to his personal safety.” It is inconceivable that someone would commit suicide out of a regard for personal safety.
• The conclusion that the death was a suicide was reached within days, suggesting a lack of thoroughness.

Despite all this, I still think the death was a suicide. But there are enough vicissitudes to the case that it would make a pretty engaging story--and it is rare in historical research that we can find such specific information and such a clear confluence of suspect, motives, and circumstances.

Intellectual History, Ideology, and the Anxiety of Influence

The gradual expansion of intellectual history--and its cousins, cultural history, history of mentalités, and so on--into territories formerly occupied by social, economic, and institutional history raises important questions about its specific occupational practices. If, in the past, intellectual history had only to evince the theories or attitudes of a restricted set of thinkers and establish causal relationships almost exclusively to other theories and attitudes, today the mission is much broader: the field demands that the historian pin down the relationship between theory and practice in a particular historical context. Thus far, this demand has been unproblematic, since a fragmentary discussion of that relationship has been sufficient. But sooner or later, the specifically post-Marxist problematic of the tie between ideas and actions must be confronted.

Gordon Wood, in a memorable phrase, has said that "ideas counted for a great deal." This statement conceals rather more than it reveals. Did ideas in general count for a great deal, or only political ideologies? Why did only one strand of Real Whig thought count for a great deal? Whose ideas counted? What was the relationship between the ideas of the elites who read Cato's Letters and the hazy, emotional conceptions held by urban rioters and pragmatic Sons of Liberty, like Isaac Sears?

These are serious methodological questions, and it may well be that the homo ideologus of intellectual history will turn out to be as theoretically elusive as Marc Bloch's homo oeconomicus, who not only did not follow his self-interest but also had little sense of what his self-interest actually was. Carl Becker, all the way back in 1931, mocked intellectual historians thus:

If Hume had only published his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion when it was written, he might have saved me much trouble. Had he published his book I might have shown that it was read by other Philosophers--Diderot and Holbach, for example; I might have found that Jefferson had a copy in his library, or that Franklin had mentioned, in a letter perhaps, having been impressed by this profound work: from all of which (and from much else of the same sort) I could no doubt have traced the "influence," as it is called, of Hume's Dialogues, and happily concluded maybe that as a result of this influence philosophy, becoming aware of a logical dilemma in her path, turned away from rationalistic speculation to the study of history, morality, and politics. And the beginning of this new venture on philosophy's part I might conveniently have placed at the exact date when Hume's Dialogues was published. Unfortunately, owing to his indifference to my problem, all I can say is that Hume discreetly locked the manuscript away in his desk, so that it was quite unknown (except to a few intimate friends) until after his death. A history lost and all for want of a petty date!

- Carl Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers

For intellectual historians, the "anxiety of influence" is not a problem of engaging with--and sloughing off--the legacy of the past, but a deep fear of investigating the true nature of "influence" itself--a problem it is all too easy to avoid confronting. Elsewhere in his book, Becker points out that one finds a text memorable or important because she already possesses a sympathy for its message. In other words, even if ideas can be "influential," they only operate on willing subjects. The circle is closed: the colonists liked Addison because they identified with the Real Whigs, but they identified with the Real Whigs because they'd read Addison.

The reason the problem of influence has been left an open question for so long is that our conception of the relationship between theory and practice is still residually Marxist, whether or not we are aware of it. Ideas are superstructures overlaying deeper sociopolitical realities like demographic pressure and economic expansion (an implication particularly evident in the work of Joyce Appleby). Thus ideas either appear or are absorbed by people entering a particular stage of development--effectively, if Addison did not exist, it would have been necessary for the colonists to create him. This does not exclude the possibility that the particular form in which an idea is absorbed--its rhetorical strategies, ideological corollaries, and so on--may have determining influence. Yet no intellectual historian would say that the colonists would have thought the same way had they, from the beginning, been a stratified and metropolitan society.

But ultimately the economistic explanation is unsatisfying, because distinctions in theory are often much less fine-grained than distinctions in practice. Two Loyalist clergymen from New York--Thomas Chandler and Samuel Seabury--disagreed on a number of issues, despite the fact that they occupied identical social, economic, and political positions. And thus it becomes incumbent upon us to explain why the colonists in general should have thought a particular way, while colonists specifically were often at odds. The two typical responses do not get us out of the quandary. The first is to dismiss the differences between individual ideologies as minor and insignificant, a strategy which fails because, before the task of intellectual history is complete, we are not in a position to tell important differences from unimportant ones--at worst, this leads to a crude petitio principii. The second response, which Baylin explicitly uses in his Ideological Origins and which other scholars advocate implicitly, is simply to exclude those who disagree, put them in off in a separate category, and promptly to forget about them. Not only is this approach highly tendentious, it is also a perfect example of the True Scotsman fallacy: "the colonists thought this way"--"here's a colonist who didn't..."--"he doesn't matter, the real colonists all thought so, and besides, history wasn't on his side."

For once, we have a valid historical use for deconstruction in the strict Derridean sense. Though I lack the energy and space to perform this study right now, the problem of ideology is the classic instance of a dominant term positioned as master signifier--and such a deconstruction, rigorously executed, has the potential to destabilize all our thinking about the Revolution. Some of this work has been attempted, but not nearly enough.

Marx and Eighteenth-century Historicism

According to François Furet, the significance of the Revolution for the history of France lies in its establishment of an interpretive framework for politics. The dramatic and cathartic way in which the events of 1789-1800 developed created an enduring cast of characters: Jacobins, Thermidoreans, Directory, Napoleon. After the events took place, these characters solidified into political tropes; henceforth, political upheavals would be analyzed in terms of the revolutionary period. After the Paris Commune, for instance, the establishment of the bourgeois and reactionary Third Republic was perceived as inevitable--at least partially a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Readers of Bernard Baylin will be familiar with this technique of interpretation. Like the French, the American colonists were equipped with an interpretive framework for history--a framework not determined by any apocalyptic event, but by the history of Rome and by Country Whig political thought. The characters in this framework were not groups or individuals, but institutional modes: standing armies, declines in civic virtue, corruption and patronage, Catilinian conspiracies. These developments constituted the sum total of the facts upon which the American revolutionaries were to act.

The principal difference is one of eschatological classification--where the French saw their revolution as a departure point for interpretation, for the Americans the revolution was the terminus. What is the significance of this difference?

First, it suggests that the American Revolution was actually inevitable (for reasons other than economics or demographics), because the practical basis of political thought was a normative philosophy of history--that is, a self-reflexive historicism which postulates a subject, the virtuous citizenry, which is not only aware of its own role in historical development ("class-conscious") but also possesses an autonomy which implies an ethics. That invites a comparison to Marxism. The Marxist proletariat-as-subject may be self-aware (in the sense that it recognizes its role in the dialectical opposition of capitalism), but it is not autonomous; since it lacks "virtue," it can only fulfill its historical role if it functions as oeconomicus--which, according to Marxism, it must do. There is an inherent paradox here, which is that despite its autonomy, the very nature of the virtuous citizenry implies that it can take no other action than revolt against corruption; the non-autonomous proletariat, on the other hand, is not bound by an ethics and is therefore vulnerable to a redirection of its interests in non-revolutionary directions. The historicism of the Americans, therefore, inevitably reaches its telos, whereas the historicism of Marx can never guarantee inevitability.

The French interpretive mode leads to other conclusions, which are also uncongenial to Marxism. Since it is fundamentally a version of history written in the ironic mode (as Hayden White would have it), it inherently denies the possibility of historical advancement. Where Marxism and American historicism analyze the structure and dialectic of historical continuity, the heart of the French interpretation lies in its exposure of the structuration of the discontinuous, apocalyptic moment itself. Though Marx himself devoted much time to the analysis of potentially revolutionary situations, he does not seem to have deeply probed into the actual moment of abheben. It is ironic that Marx suggested that "history repeats itself" in the Eighteenth Brumaire, yet did not consider the possibility that the tragic or farcical circumstances of the repetition are inherent in abheben itself rather than in any specific confluence of dialectical forces.

Marxism was hardly the first politicized historicism, and that invites unflattering comparisons with the past. It is for a good reason that the historicisms of the eighteenth century became self-fulfilling, while Marxism never ascended to that level.

Towards a Post-Eschatological Philosophy

The quote from Leo Strauss I posted earlier is undoubtedly melancholy and pessimistic. That does not make it false. We must consider the possibility that the "universal and homogeneous State" has already come to pass, irremediably.

What is our world like today, from the perspective of power relations? First, it is increasingly dominated by capital. Though this is hardly a new development, capital has, in the last several decades, made any talk of its "expansion" or "contraction" irrelevant. This is because capital is no longer about development; the rise of eco-tourism and similar consumer trends has made even undeveloped countries part of the capitalist production system (a point which has become orthodox only recently). Global capital, therefore, cannot be escaped, and it is truly universal.

Second, our world is dominated by the State. It would be easy at this point to describe this phenomenon in terms of a unipolarity centered upon the United States. Such an argument has two flaws: it is false (China and the European Union have emerged as distinct, non-US-dominated political powers), but it also obscures the fundamental nature of this domination. The domination is not one of any particular state, but of the structure of individual states and international organizations such as the United Nations. These international organizations (expanding largely in response to the needs of global capital) extend police authority, environmental regulation, and economic standardization throughout the world. Even if these organizations are at present limited in their power, the trend is unquestionably towards a common global power network where the decisions are made by policymakers with ties to the highest echelons of states. Just as capital has colonized allegedly non-capitalist areas by positing them as a site of escape for first-world consumers, the global state has responded to disruptions in its matrix with United Nations-style "humanitarianism." Thus, even areas without a stable form of state power, like Somalia or Darfur, are colonized by non-governmental organizations (which are dependent upon international power networks and governmental alliances) and blue-helmeted peacekeepers. Recent developments in international relations theory suggest that we should deemphasize the nation-state as the basic unit of analysis. This is basically correct; individual nation-states currently function, or will function, simply as the viceroys of the global power network. The remaining oases of isolationist dictatorship are not likely to survive the next century.

We have therefore come to an "end of history," or at least an end to the self-actualization of state power. Fukuyama is criticized (unjustly, I think) for his alleged triumphalism, but we need not accept the global "democratic" state as normative in order to view it as empirically inevitable. Why is it so difficult for many to acknowledge, or even seriously consider, this conclusion? The answer must necessarily be psychological: philosophers, who have learned in the past few centuries that "what is" is not the same as "what is good," have not yet learned to make a similar distinction between "what is good" and "what is possible" (the early Foucault, of course, excepted). The optimism of, say, Hardt and Negri regarding the possibility of a destruction of Empire by Multitude seems not to be founded on any realistic analysis of either the actual potential for the global unification of the oppressed or for the ultimate victory of that alliance. The self-delusion of the Left on this issue parallels the self-delusion of right-wing paranoids: the New World Order, which they present as always on the brink of coming to be, has in fact long passed that brink.

This is where Strauss comes into the picture. It is significant that the quote in question is part of a response to an essay by Kojève, which, like any Hegelian text, argues for the universal and homogeneous state as being both normatively good and empirically inevitable. In other words, Kojève looks forward to the future, both of history and philosophy. Strauss' response does not challenge the historical contention that the universal state is inevitable; indeed, it seems resigned to that fact. Fukuyama, a direct intellectual heir of Kojève (nb: if we define "neocon" as "Straussian," FF is certainly not a neocon), looks at the present, where he sees the universal state as already existing. Strauss' insights apply to Fukuyama's world as much, if not more so, than Kojève's.

Strauss, then, is useful for us because he has the courage to acknowledge the reality of our present situation. This quote is a vital starting point for a new philosophy, which must be both post-eschatological and post-apocalyptic. The discussion that follows presumes that the present and future universal state (the "what is" and the "what is possible," which are almost identical) is not the same as "what is good," and is, in fact, diametrically opposed.

What is meant by a post-eschatological philosophy? Eschatology is the study or the revelation of the apocalypse. I have previously discussed the fundamentally eschatological nature of most of our present political orientations, particularly leftist ones. In other words, they focus on either the danger of a particular transformative historical configuration coming to be (e.g., the NWO) or on the possibility of the abrupt occurrence of a liberating historical configuration (e.g., the Revolution). If we accept that the danger is already irrelevant because it exists now, and that the Revolution is a myth which legitimates various forms of ideological and physical repression, then we have entered into a post-eschatology.

This means that, as radicals, we can no longer be either Left or Right, because we have reached the terminal point of both the left and right philosophies of history. It means we must desist from writing manifestos, from the invocation of a false militancy or revolutionary spirit. (Robert Anton Wilson: "A militant is a liberal who cuts out the diagram of the Molotov cocktail from the New York Review of Books, hangs it on his bathroom wall, and jacks off in connection with it.") We must abandon the ceaseless reiteration, at ever-decreasing intervals, of the claim that we occupy a New, a unique historical moment with its own supposed liberating potential. This includes Hardt and Negri, who seize upon the revolting spectacle of anti-globalization protests as a new historical agent rather than a structural symptom and emergent property of the universal state. We must recognize that these supposed new historical agents are a distraction, a puppet show for the benefit of optimistic leftists. The Radical Right's survivalists and doomsday prophets are better adapted to the present historical moment, because they accept that ultimately they will be the victims or beneficiaries of forces on so large a scale that human efforts are insufficient to affect them.

What, then, does "post-apocalyptic" refer to? It is the praxis that follows from the negation of eschatology. Strauss has already outlined something of what this means: it is no longer a question of philosophy changing the world, but a question of philosophy's self-preservation. The post-apocalyptic philosopher's task is to figure out how to subsist and maintain autonomy of thought in a world actively hostile to its expression. The situation is not dissimilar to the post-apocalyptic genre of films and computer games: an irradiated, barren world, in which communities of survivors cobble together a mode of living out of the debris of fallen civilization. No relic of the thought or mindset of the past must be left unexamined for possible value in this regard. Since no consequences now result from our having discovered a Truth or a Lie, we are free to embrace contradiction or skepticism (or, for that matter, the fullest analytic consistency), to adhere to feudalism or the Babylonian religion, to pretend, perhaps, that the world is different than it is.

The last men alive in a besieged city do not hesitate to eat their vermin and their brethren, to seek refuge in palaces and cathedrals, to find a mutual escape in fantasy.

some lines from Leo Strauss

I offer no commentary, only quotation.

"There is no longer fight nor work. History has come to its end. There is nothing more to do." This end of History would be most exhilarating but for the fact that, according to Kojève, it is the participation in bloody political struggles as well as in real work, or generally expressed, the negating action, which raises man above the brutes. The state through which man is said to become reasonably satisfied is, then, the state in which the basis of man's humanity withers away, or in which man loses his humanity. It is the state of Nietzsche's "last man." Kojève in fact confirms the classical view that unlimited technological progress and its accompaniment, which are the indispensable conditions of the universal and homogeneous state, are destructive of humanity. It is perhaps possible to say that the universal and homogeneous state is fated to come. But it is certainly impossible to say that man can reasonably be satisfied with it. If the universal and homogeneous state is the goal of History, History is absolutely "tragic." Its completion will reveal that the human problem, and hence in particular the problem of the relation of philosophy and politics, is insoluble. For centuries and centuries men have unconsciously done nothing but work their way through infinite labors and struggles and agonies, yet ever again catching hope, toward the universal and homogeneous state, and as soon as they have arrived at the end of their journey, they realize that through arriving at it they have destroyed their humanity and thus returned, as in a cycle, to the prehuman beginnings of History. Vanitas vanitatum. Recognitio recognitionum. Yet there is no reason for despair as long as human nature has not been conquered completely, i.e., as long as sun and man still generate man. There will always be men (andres) who will revolt against a state which is destructive of humanity or in which there is no longer a possibility of noble action and of great deeds. They may be forced into a mere negation of the universal and homogeneous state, into a negation not enlightened by any positive goal, into a nihilistic negation. While perhaps doomed to failure, that nihilistic revolution may be the only action on behalf of man's humanity, the only great and noble deed that is possible once the universal and homogeneous state has become inevitable.

... The Chief of the universal and homogeneous state, or the Universal and Final Tyrant will be an unwise man, as Kojève seems to take for granted. To retain his power, he will be forced to suppress every activity which might lead people into doubt of the essential soundness of the universal and homogeneous state: he must suppress philosophy as an attempt to corrupt the young ... The philosophers in their turn will be forced to defend themselves or the cause of philosophy. They will be obliged, therefore, to try to act on the Tyrant. Everything seems to be a re-enactment of the age-old drama. But this time, the cause of philosophy is lost from the start. For the Final Tyrant presents himself as a philosopher, as the highest philosophic authority, as the supreme exegete of the only true philosophy, as the executor and hangman authorized by the only true philosophy. He claims therefore that he persecutes not philosophy but false philosophies. The experience is not altogether new for philosophers. If philosophers were confronted with claims of this kind in former ages, philosophy went underground. It accommodated itself in its explicit or exoteric teaching to the unfounded commands of rulers who believed they knew things which they did not know. Yet its very exoteric teaching undermined the commands or dogmas of the rulers in such a way as to guide the potential philosophers toward the eternal and unsolved problems. And since there was no universal state in existence, the philosophers could escape to other countries if life became unbearable in the tyrant's dominions. From the Universal Tyrant, however, there is no escape. Thanks to the conquest of nature and to the completely unabashed substitution of suspicion and terror for law, the Universal and Final Tyrant has at his disposal practically unlimited means for ferreting out, and for extinguishing, the most modest efforts in the direction of thought. Kojève would seem to be right although for the wrong reason: the coming of the universal and homogeneous state will be the end of philosophy on earth.

- Leo Strauss, On Tyranny

Thoughts on Pocock

I just finished reading JGA Pocock's monumental Machiavellian Moment. Although it is clearly a work of tremendous genius, I had a few problems with it. One has to do simply with my own dullness: I can't really follow the discussion of the Italian Renaissance thinkers in the first half of the book at all. Knowing very little about the period, the names and ideas blur together for me and I am unable to extract any significant meaning. Another problem I faced is the lack of a clear definition of the differences between virtue, virtus, and vertu. But all that isn't very important.

Pocock should have included significantly more discussion about the articulation of ideas of vita activa and vita contemplativa, something which he outlines in the first section but does not even mention again until the very end of the book. This particular dichotomy seems essential to his argument; without a more detailed exposition, we know only what each thinker considered the nature of the polity to be and not at all how he conceived his own relationship to it. It is possible that this discussion is present but implicit; that is nonetheless a flaw. If anything, the American revolutionaries were more acutely affected by these ideas than the Renaissance humanists, and Pocock's inattention to this weakens his argument.

Although in his last chapter Pocock purports to offer an analysis of American revolutionary thought, in reality the Revolution is erased completely. Pocock leaps straight from Bolingbroke to Hamilton and Adams. The period of the Constitution is significantly different from the period immediately preceding the war. The revolutionary period includes great fodder for Pocock's analysis (Payne's critique of "summer soldiers and sunshine patriots," for instance), making this omission all the more mystifying. Along with his erasure of the Revolution, he also erases the Loyalists, who had unique and well-developed ideas about the nature of society and government. It is clear that his grasp on eighteenth-century American history is very much weaker than his knowledge of the Italian Renaissance and of seventeenth-century England. For some, this might be unproblematic, but it is crucial for me.

Pocock's views on commerce are also somewhat blinkered. Albert O. Hirschman's The Passions and the Interests provides a compelling argument that commerce was viewed as society's salvation from the rule of passion and more corrupt forms of self-interest. Perhaps I am prejudiced in favor of Hirschman because of his clear and felicitous style. Still, he gives good evidence against the hypothesis that eighteenth-century thinkers were paranoid and opposed to commercial activity on civic-humanist grounds.

These problems are not decisive, but they suggest that we might temper our admiration of Pocock's evident brilliance with frank critical thinking.