2. THE PUBLIC RELEVANCE OF HISTORICAL STUDIES: A REPLY TO DIRK MOSES

I am grateful to Dirk Moses for taking the time to study my work so assiduously and to comment on it so perspicuously. His essay is eminently well‐informed and even‐handed, and I have little to add to or correct of his characterization of my many, long on‐going, and admittedly flawed attempts to deconstruct modern historical discourse. He understands me well enough and I think that I understand his objections to my position(s). We do not disagree on matters of fact, I think, but we have different notions about the nature of historical discourse and the uses to which historical knowledge can properly be put.     

Movement in Print: Migrations and Political Articulations in Grassroots Publishing

What makes a book political? This essay takes up this question through analysis of a small network of grassroots publishing projects. In doing so, I suggest that the materiality and mobility of a book can be just as, if not more, significant than its content when considering its political character. Specifically, I examine the interconnected trajectories of a cluster of books published since 2010 that participate in conversations about migration, work, and popular politics in Argentina and Bolivia. By zooming in on two very distinct contexts of book culture (Buenos Aires and La Paz) and especially the connections and tensions that emerge between them, I seek to account for some of the heterogeneous contemporary formations of what Ángel Rama called the ‘lettered city’ in Latin America. As I focus on grassroots publishing projects, I shift my attention away from the usual spaces of book culture, allowing other marginal circuits of production, circulation, and consumption to appear. Combining ethnographic narrative with textual analysis, this essay develops the double concept of political articulation (as expression and connection) to offer a transdisciplinary exploration of how movement is shaping the print book – materially and politically – in Latin America today.     

Some Personal Reminiscences and What They Meant for Me

There are those who have said I should write a book, and there are those—about the same in number—who have said I should not write a book. Those in the negative assert that my “book” already is written in the several hundred opinions (majorities, concurrences, dissents) I have filed over the years, and in my public utterances. There are valid arguments, I suppose, on both sides. I certainly do not wish to write anything that merely seeks to explain further my vote in decided cases, or to comment—supportively or adversely—on colleagues' votes, or to express little more than after‐the‐fact criticism. In that context, what might be said belonged in the decisional process itself. But there are other things in Supreme Court experience. Law students are inclined to ask questions. Example: “Tell me, how does one come to be a federal judge?” Justice Tom Clark had a direct response: “One has to be on the corner when the bus comes by.” One federal appellate judge plaintively said to me: “The only reason I am on the federal bench is because I was a close friend of a United States Senator.” (He had served for a time as the Senator's administrative assistant.) It may perhaps be said that every federal judge comes by his status in his own way. Of course, there are things one must not do, but I doubt that there is a specific path one must follow to be eligible and seriously regarded as a candidate for federal judicial service.     

Further Thoughts on the Imperial Endgame and Britain's Dirty Wars

The publication of my book Imperial Endgame: Britain's Dirty Wars and the End of Empire in 2011 provoked many to respond, although not with a criticism that was consistent across the board. In my work, I intentionally did not draw a moral conclusion and took care to present what I considered a balanced account of British decolonisation, without praise or condemnation of past actions. This has made my argument vulnerable from several directions since, as reviewer Ashley Jackson commented, ‘it is rather difficult to know on which side the author's bread is buttered’. This paper is an attempt to bring clarity to my argument and to continue the debate on some of the aspects of Britain's end of empire that my book discussed.     

《还粹集》与“三生会”杂忆

上世纪二三十年代,闽中诗人何梅生（振岱）、刘龙生（敬）、高颖生结成“三生会”,不时聚会咏唱。高颖生《还粹集》刻成,赠我祖父刘敬一部,祖父在集中有批语,我年少时亲见过。此集旱已遗失,不料而今被福建图书馆找到。消息传来,惊喜不已,勾起对三位诗老昔日风采的回寸乙。     

3. CARL SCHMITT'S CONTRIBUTION TO A THEORY OF POLITICAL MYTH

My goal in this essay is to show that myths have played a larger role than we might think in politics and in political theory and that myths are essential to politics. For this purpose I will use Schmitt's theory of myth, since he elaborated his theory with strong interpretations of two different myths: Hobbes's Leviathan and Shakespeare's Hamlet. I will compare Schmitt's interpretations of Hamlet with my own, as doing so will provide a critical view of Schmitt's conclusions, and it will enable me to develop my own conception of myth and its relations to political theory and history.     

Jaume Cabré's Viatge d’hivern and the Short Story Cycle

Critics have been uncertain as to the genre of Catalan writer Jaume Cabré's 2000 book, Viatge d’hivern. The confusion, I argue, is due to the fact that the volume is a short story cycle, a literary form situated midway between the novel and the short story collection. Forrest Ingram differentiates among composed, arranged, and completed cycles, and Cabré's comments in his Epilogue to Viatge d’hivern indicate that the book is an example of the third category. While he composed its fourteen narratives over a period of years, when he revised them for inclusion in a single volume he discovered that various threads, some secret and others more obvious, connected the stories. In this essay I examine ways in which theme, structure, and motifs, as well as recurrent imagery and wording, form a web of associations among the individual units of Viatge d’hivern.     

The Relevance of Cassirer and the Rewriting of Intellectual History

Summary

This essay aims to discuss the historiographical implications and premises of Peter Gordon's masterly book Continental Divide, in which he re-evaluates the Davos meeting between Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger. This impressive reminder of the prospects of intellectual history deserves to be paid serious attention, particularly in European philosophy departments. Gordon's book exemplifies how problems of systematic philosophy can be clarified by a detour through history.

I want to highlight three aspects of Gordon's book that fundamentally transform and deepen our understanding of intellectual history in general and the Davos meeting in particular. First, I highlight one of the main merits of Gordon's study: his emphasis on the plurality behind the term ‘continental philosophy’. This opens up a whole new perspective on a seemingly well-known event within the history of twentieth-century philosophy. Second, I address Gordon's methodological premises, which challenge and fundamentally transform our understanding of intellectual history. Third, I attempt to summarise, from an intellectual history perspective, Gordon's argument about Cassirer's relevance. Here we are faced with the task of realigning and legitimising philosophy in a radically historicised world. To adumbrate the core of my comment I should say that I am thrilled by Gordon's book. I agree with nearly everything he says apart from his conclusions. In a closing remark I will try to explain the reasons for this surprising divergence.     

HISTORY TO THE MAX

Steven G. Smith advocates a maximal approach to history by both historians and theorists of history, maintaining that a commitment to fullness or totality should always serve as an ideal. In my review, I try to explain what the author means by this ideal, and consider how practical such an ideal can be. He further maintains that history is mostly about shared action, and is itself an instance of shared action. I have certain reservations about this notion, though I think Smith's book deserves credit for calling attention to it.     

THE END OF AMERICA: THE BEGINNING OF CANADA -A REPLY TO THE COMMENTARY

I presented 'The End of America: The Beginning of Canada' as a speculative piece of geographical interpretation. Judging by the length of the foregoing commentary and the number of written responses I have personally received, it is evident that my speculations have aroused considerable interest. I welcome the opportunity to clarify my argument. Rather than replying point by point to all the issues raised in the commentary, I will focus my remarks on what I take to be the central objection.     

Jacob Vernet and ‘The Religious Enlightenment’: ‘Rational Calvinism’, the Pastors of Geneva and the French philosophes

Summary

In this article I react to dismissive remarks made about my Jacob Vernet, Geneva and the philosophes (1994) in a recent book by David Sorkin, The Religious Enlightenment (2008). Vernet, a distinguished Genevan pastor and theologian, who fell foul of d'Alembert, Voltaire and Rousseau, is one of six figures studied by Sorkin, who claims that the religious dimension of the Enlightenment has been much underestimated and that the philosophes were considerably less significant than has usually been thought. Reacting to the accusation that my treatment of Vernet's theology was superficial and unreliable, I reconsider the latter's major theological works (including his Traité de la vérité de la religion chrétienne, Instruction chrétienne, and Pièces fugitives sur l'eucharistie) in an attempt to validate my previous interpretation, and illustrate that Vernet refused to acknowledge ideas that he had actually published. The second part of the article draws more general conclusions, pointing out spectacular errors in Sorkin's depiction of eighteenth-century Geneva and arguing that he has a clear agenda, which, in my opinion, is wrong-headed, easy to refute and—above all—often based on gratuitous accusations and statements lacking any evidence.     

Playing with fieldwork

Field research produces all kinds of knowledge, only some of which makes it into our texts. Rich troves of data are mined over many years, but some materials get stuck, constituted as marginal, imagined as private musings, anecdotes, mere ‘stories’ told over dinner but never part of the formal narrative. During a year of often-arduous field research in rural Sudan, I kept a comic book journal where I secreted my crankiness, recorded my amusements and amazements, and kept myself afloat. Like most journals, it was private, reflective, and therapeutic. It was a way to laugh at what can be so maddening or painful in doing research, all the more so—as will be readily apparent—because I have no idea how to draw, but in years of traveling, making comics had become a way to get away from being away, to spend time inside my head. Over the years I realized that my comics were also ‘fieldnotes,’ and that sharing them could, at the very least, comfort someone else doing field research, but more so that they recorded important ‘findings’ in and of themselves. This ‘graphic essay’ brings these findings in from the margins as it meditates on the politics of knowledge and its representations.     

Why Dennis v. United States is a Landmark Case

A landmark, Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary tells us, is “an event or development that marks a turning point or a stage.” In my life, the case of Dennis v. United States ¹ is a landmark, or perhaps more accurately, a series of landmarks. My 1973 doctoral dissertation was on Dennis. ² Four years later that thesis became my first book. ³ My second book, a collection of articles on American political trials that appeared in 1981, contained an essay by me on Dennis. ⁴ By then, I assumed, I had said about everything I had to say on the case. In 1993, though, Mel Urofsky brought me back to it, asking me to write a retrospective article on Dennis for the Journal of Supreme Court History, of which he had just become the editor. ⁵ Now, fifteen years later, here we are together again. I am beginning to think that the “grave and probable danger” test that Dennis introduced into constitutional law will be inscribed on my tombstone.     

Hobbes and the Rationality of Self-Preservation: Grounding Morality on the Desires We Should Have

In deriving his moral code, Hobbes does not appeal to any mind-independent good, natural human telos, or innate human sympathies. Instead he assumes a subjectivist theory of value and an egoistic theory of human motivation. Some critics, however, doubt that his laws of nature can be constructed from such scant material. Hobbes ultimately justifies the acceptance of moral laws by the fact that they promote self-preservation. But, as Hobbes himself acknowledges, not everyone prefers survival over natural liberty. In this essay I show that Hobbes can argue that the desire for self-preservation is rationally required by modifying his subjectivist theory of the good to equate what is good for an agent only with the satisfaction of desires (for her own life) that she has at the time that they are satisfied. It is thus irrational to prefer postmortem glory over survival since an agent must be alive for glory to have any value for her.     

Marginalia of a revolution: naming popular ethnography through William W. Bunge's Fitzgerald

Having recently been writing about the geographies of survival, here in this brief essay I extrapolate a methodological and ethico-political sensibility from the scattered fragments of my personal interactions with foundational radical geographer William W. Bunge. This essay is intended to reconcile the marginalization that Bunge experienced, and experiences today, within geography, with the methodological approach he pioneered, even as he is often not recognized for doing so. An exploration through a pile of notes, electronic voice files, and faxes helped me to think through lived forms of intellectual marginalia via the life and methods of William Bunge and possibilities that exist for recovering his method of ‘popular ethnography’.     

Esoteric Tangles

Abstract

I attempt here a very general reply to the preceding sixteen essays by addressing the broad, structural constraints of my book, from which many of the particular problems raised in the essays flow. Philosophy Between the Lines is an effort to give a very sweeping account—theoretically and historically—of a phenomenon that is, in many respects, highly particularized and situation specific. The characteristic sin of the book is overgeneralization or simplification. In the present essay I attempt a brief and partial clarification, primarily by selecting one main theme of the book—defensive esotericism—and redescribing it from a more localized and fine-grained perspective.     

REJOINDER TO FRACCHIA AND LEWONTIN

In their response to my article, Fracchia and Lewontin have not refuted any of my three principal objections to theirs; they have ignored altogether my suggestion that evolutionary game theory illustrates particularly clearly the benefits that neo‐Darwinian concepts and methods can bring to the human behavioral sciences; and they have attributed to me a version of “methodological individualism” to which I do not subscribe. It is, as is usual at this stage of a Kuhnian paradigm shift, too soon to say how much selectionist theory can contribute to the human behavioral sciences in general and comparative sociology in particular. But selectionism's critics achieve nothing by alleging that its proponents are committed to propositions to which they do not in fact assent and deny propositions with which they in fact agree.     

Capitalism,Christianity, America: Rethinking the Issues

Abstract

Appreciative of the points made by all four commentators, William Connolly seeks to clarify some issues and modify a few positions taken in his book Capitalism and Christianity, American Style (2008). Philip Goodchild's account of "resonance" is superb, but I hesitate over his tendency to argue that the demise of capitalism is inevitable. Catherine Keller deepens the theological issues pursued in my book, as she shows additional ways to open "theopoetic" connections between those who pursue deep, multidimensional pluralism. David Howarth makes important links between my position and that of Ernesto Laclau, and he joins me in resisting those who eschew engagement with the state as they fight off the neoliberal/evangelical machine. I use the occasion of this dialogue to explore further the relations between conceptions of immanence and those of transcendence. Kathy Ferguson admirably shows how the experience of grief by evangelical women opens a possible door to engagements of agonistic respect. In each engagement I try to follow some of the suggestions and to add a couple of my own.