Tweet

by Mohammed Khallouk

The place of Islam in the European public sphere

Nilüfer Göle (source: EHESS, original photo: IHS; thumbnail image is considered 'fair use').

The  Turkish-born sociologist Nilüfer Göle, currently director of studies at l’École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) in Paris is the author of a number of books in Turkish, German and French, in which she investigates the identity conflicts of young Muslims, especially women, in European society. Several of her books have since been translated into English. Her latest book, an essay with the original French title “Interpénétrations: L’Islam et l’Europe”, first published in 2005, was issued in an English version last year by Markus Wiener Publishers; as the title for the English edition, translator Steven Rendall and the publisher chose the phrase “Islam in Europe: The  Lure of Fundamentalism and the Allure of Cosmopolitanism”. In a somewhat fragmentary way, the author claims for young educated Muslims in Europe to be a part of this continent, although – or maybe because –  Islam with its own value system is a basic element of their identity. The attacks of 9/11 and the subsequent debate were a decisive turning point in the consciousness of Muslims, who realized that they had to find a workable arrangement with Western modernity. The word “Interpénétrations” in the original title was meant to show the non-Muslim majority in the most important European countries that they could no longer continue to ignore the fact that Islam had become part of their civil societies and that, instead, they would have to come to an arrangement with Muslims living among them. Moreover, they would have to accept Muslims as European citizens with their own values and opinions that differ  from those shaped by Christianity as well as those of secular-minded Europeans.

Turkey’s “Third Way” between Islam and European Modernity

A main theme of Göle’s essay is the difficulty for Europeans to define themselves and the European Union as a pluralistic project that includes Islam in a modern interpretation. Europeans need to rid themselves of the thought, promoted by Samuel Huntington’s theory of a ‘clash of civilizations’, that Islamic civilization is a hostile opponent to their own civilization. What is needed is the realization that one can be member of the same civilization, even if one holds on to divergent religious beliefs and value categories. For Göle, the young veil-wearing Muslim women of the third immigrant generation in European cities like Paris or Berlin constitute evidence for her thesis. On the one hand, these women identify with a conservative female role as well as with traditional ethical codes  and sexual morals. On the other hand, they opt for a career of their own and pursue university diplomas and academic positions. As Göle sees it,  Islam, for a whole generation of young women in Central Europe, as well as in Turkey, is a means of becoming part of modernity and of finding their individual way of life in the world of modern Europe. They confront both the non-Muslim majority in Europe and the traditional Kemalist elites in Turkey with a new understanding of secularization – one that does not intend to hide religious symbols, but instead bring them out into the open, without thereby forcing others to submit to them.

In this context, both the ongoing tension between a (self-professed) Islamic-oriented government and the Kemalist elite in Turkey and the European debate about Turkey’s application to join the EU, in Göle’s eyes are equally significant. Indeed, with the help of Göle’s concept of “Interpénétrations”, a ‘Third Way’ between Political Islam and Secularism may be within reach, as may be a Turkey that is a member of a truly multireligious European Union, in which Islam has long been  represented by Muslim immigrants in Western European countries, where they share the public sphere with non-Muslim natives.

Cosmopolitanism as an alternative to radical Islamism and intellectual Islamophobia  

For Göle, the movie “Auf der anderen Seite” (English title: The Edge of Heaven, 2007) by Fatih Akin, a son of Turkish immigrants in Germany, illustrates how the envisaged interpenetration of Turkish Muslim culture with Western European urban culture can work in practice, and how classic European attitudes can likewise become part of the Turkish value system. However, the best example of a  modern European Islam, interpreted as a foundation for a new symbiosis of Islam and Europe, are the young Muslim women mentioned earlier. Although they believe in conservative Islamic values, with many of them wearing a headscarf  and adhering to traditional sexual morals, these women, according to Göle, pose the  most formidable challenge to radical Islamists, since their way of life is evidence of the fusion of the West and Islam – that is, of their own female individuality and religious spirituality, as well as of Oriental tradition and European modernity. Islamist terrorists are their enemies because the latter deny any possibility of finding an arrangement within Western modernity that does not require giving up  their own (“non-Western”) religion.

In summary, one can state that Göle’s essay shows, at many levels, what cosmopolitanism amounts to and in which direction lies the future of a Europe where Islam is a basic ingredient. The book is a stimulating read and presents a wealth of new aspects in the debate about the integration of Muslims into European society with its Christian roots and its basis in secularism. What is missing, unfortunately, is a common thread that would connect the various theses discussed – one that would offer a coherent answer to the question of how all these different aspects might be integrated. Nevertheless, Göle’s essay is recommended reading for anyone in search of a dissenting voice to the image of Islam and Muslim immigrants conveyed by such authors as Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Oriana Fallaci, and, most recently, the former Bundesbank board member Thilo Sarrazin. Göle’s essay in no way glorifies Islam – least of all of political Islam, which she characterises as a very real danger; instead, she offers the prospect of an Islam that has arrived in the modern world: an Islam that is compatible with European democratic pluralism.

Nilüfer Göle: Islam in Europe. The Lure of Fundamentalism and the Allure of Cosmopolitanism.
Translated by Steven Rendall
Markus Wiener, Princeton 2011.
ISBN-13: 9781558765269
Paperback, 320 pages, US$26.95

Mohammed Khallouk was born in Morocco and works as a political scientist and scholar of Islamic studies at the Phillips University of Marburg and the University of the German Federal Armed Forces in Munich. His work analyses Islamic fundamentalism in Northern Africa and the Middle East, which was the topic of his doctoral work. Another research theme of his is the history of the Jewish community in Morocco, which he is writing his Habilitation thesis on. He also works as a translator of German contemporary literature into Arabic.

(c) 2011 The Berlin Review of Books.

by Bruce Fleming

Two newspaper-headline-grabbing incidents from early 2011 involving words created storms of protest from the political left, which in the last few decades has emerged as more interested than the American right in policing public speech. One incident was criticism after the Tucson, Arizona, shootings of Jan. 8, 2011 (in which Democratic congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was severely injured) of Sarah Palin’s earlier use of gun language and cross-hair imagery to speak of politics. The other was Capt. O.P. Honors’s shipboard movie about sexual issues using terms and images the press called “lewd” that led to his removal, on Jan. 4, 2011, as skipper of the U.S.S. Enterprise.

Screenshot of controversial crosshairs map on Sarah Palin's website (Source: Wikimedia/fair use).

The criticism in both cases was that the language or images used had so a close connection to reality that their use constituted a punishable, or at least reprehensible, action. Speaking of Congressional seats or Congress(wo)men as “targets,” as Palin did, and issuing her famous “Don’t retreat, RELOAD!” Tweet seemed to critics connected to the subsequent shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, who had earlier warned that those who use images of crosshairs “have to realize that there are consequences to that action.” Palin, in many people’s estimation, then made things worse: she labeled the suggestion her language was in any way involved with the Tucson shootings a “blood libel,” a phrase used for the malicious fiction that Jews used the blood of Christian babies to make Passover matzos. Palin’s camp seemed to find ridiculous the idea that words could be causal: criticism of this later phrase was rejected as “obscene” by an aide.

News reports about Capt. Honors’s videos (made from 2005-2007 for shipboard use when he was the second-in-command) found offensive the fact that the word “fag” was used, as was the euphemism “f-bomb,” and that the word it replaces appeared on the screen. Further, there were scenes of people (undoubtedly real sailors, but for the purposes of these videos, actors) pretending to be same-sex pairs interested in staying in the shower longer than necessary for necessary for hygiene alone.

Capt. Honors, as a military officer, was prohibited from making a response to the criticism, but in an op-ed for the Washington Post (“Capt Honors and the crude videos the Navy needed,” Jan. 11, 2011), I argued that such theatrical and between-quotation-marks use of terms was not the same as using them as part of social interaction, and that the context of a movie offered a useful way of addressing hot topics that everyone was thinking about but were afraid to articulate.

In brief, the relationship between these words and the world was more complex than that implied by correctly noting that Honors or Palin said X or showed image Y. Proposing anal sex to someone, for example, is not the same as using the words “anal sex” in a classroom discussion as one topic of publicly unacceptable jokes—such as I did in my classroom at the U.S. Naval Academy, where I’ve taught for more than two decades. I was “counseled” by our Division Director Marine Colonel for uttering these words and warned to avoid a “hostile working environment” Later I was told I could not explain the medical details of a sex-change operation in response to a student question as this had the same effect. (I had proposed that Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, who is clearly unhappy being a woman, might have fewer problems if she were a man: discuss.)

How do words relate to the world? What’s characterized the political left in recent decades is a general acceptance of the stance of linguistic  idealism: at its extreme, this view— formed by analogy with the philosophical position of idealism that holds our minds make the world rather than existing in it—means that words are the world.  This in turn has led to the insistence on what we call “political correctness,” associated with the political left, with its emphasis on what is said rather than what is thought or done. If words are the world, it’s of utmost importance to police them.

Sarah Palin, then Governor of Alaska, at Fort Richardson in August 2008. (Photo by Capt. Guy Hayes, Alaska National Guard Public Affairs; released into public domain by U.S. Army)

The right, by contrast, tends to see a distinction between what you say and what you do—words are just words. For the right, the world exists independently of our minds, and we, as individual actors, exist in the world. The greatest interest of Palin’s defense of her gun language is her denial of linguistic idealism—even if she doesn’t put it like that—in favor of an underlying view that professional philosophers would call “naïve realism.” This holds that people are agents that act with each other and an independent world using words. Why criticize words? They’re just words.

In Order of Things, Michel Foucault dates the modern age to the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries. The defining characteristic of this modern age for my purposes is its general acceptance of the primacy of the mind over that of the world, its common thread of idealism. At least this is true of the educated classes, which, as a result, separated from people who didn’t have the luxury of believing this idealistic dogma, but were stuck with the day to day grind of realism. So the left-right divide is merely one single, political, instantiation of a much larger phenomenon, a separation of sophisticated/educated from the rest that, ironically, mirrors that of the ancien régime that the Modern Age overthrew.

Linguistic idealism as an ideology of the educated classes took off with Romantic artists, usually seen as rebelling against the Industrial Revolution and all the upheavals that characterized their time: for this reason Romanticism was addicted to the myth of a golden pre-Industrial past, the Medieval world.  Romanticism is a rejection of the world as it had become. How could the Romantic artists, such as Baudelaire, be surprised when non-artists interested in making money through industrialization (his hated “bourgeoisie”) hated artists back? The artists of two centuries have found valorization in just how misunderstood they were. And the common-sense men of action, as they increasingly saw themselves in contrast, preened themselves on just how little they were like these effete artists.

According to the Romantic poets, words make the world; poets make words; ergo poets make the world.  Shelley, in his “Defense of Poetry,” held that the language in the “youth of the world” is “vitally metaphorical”; now, however, that we are no longer in this youthful phase of the pre-historic past, language is “dead.”  That, according to Shelley, is why we need poets, who “create afresh the associations which have been thus disorganized”; poets thus remake not only language but the world and thus are the “unacknowledged legislators” of that world. “Poetry . . . makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.” This insistence that we need language to (re-)create the world was a primary tenet of the Russian Formalist movement almost a century later, as it is to virtually all post-Romantic theory, even today: according to Victor Shklovsky, the movement’s most skilled polemicist, “art makes the stone stony.” Without art, there would be no perception of the world; the world is made of art. It’s hardly coincidental that this doctrine comes from artists. Do butchers believe the world is made of slabs of animal flesh, which they produce? Perhaps, but they produce meat, not words, so no one is aware of this belief.

The notion of artists that they are essential to the very existence of the world for non-artists is, of course, ludicrous. To believe it, you have to accept the premise of linguistic idealism, that words create the world, or at least that without artists, the world ceases to exist, or to be perceived (Shklovsky held just this). Most people think the world gets along just fine without artists. This fact is the source of the split between “high” and “low” arts after Modernism. “High” arts after Romanticism emphasize medium rather than the message. And for this reason most people have abandoned them in favor of popular music and People magazine.

Modernism is learned, esoteric art: hardly anybody reads Joyce’s Ulysses outside of a college class and few people “get” academic cubism without the critical apparatus. Modernist painting departs from the realization that a painting is a flat surface with square corners and then realized that anything the artist did was art: art is its own end. The average footsore tourist hates the result, as well they might: Modernist art is something done, rather than something to be seen. Many will have encountered holiday-makers who take the time to stroll through the contemporary art museum in the metropolis, only to dismiss its contents with the flip assertion that “my dog/three-year-old could do that.” The educated classes roll their eyes at this: what philistinism!

But the tourists have a point. What they say isn’t correct, of course: the dog may be capable of swishing the canvas with a paint-laden tail, but it wouldn’t put the result in a museum, and this is the definition of contemporary art: art relates to other art. Contemporary art gets its point not from something the uninitiated can see about its relation to a common world—the foundation of the popularity of nineteenth-century  representative arts—but by the historical trail of references to other artworks it drags behind it. The artwork is a relational thing, not something to be perceived head-on. This is sometimes called the “dematerialization of the work of art”: art is gesture, not thing.

As twentieth century painting became abstract, about shapes and forms that expressed the artist’s sensibility, so too twentieth century literary criticism insisted that books were about books, not a world of breathing people. In literary theory there was first  Jacques Derrida (“there is nothing outside the text”) and then Foucault, with his insistence, echoing Nietzsche, that there was no such thing as objective use of language, and that any consideration by a more powerful entity of a less powerful one was an act of domination.

Foucault, in books such as Madness and Civilization, famously set the stage for the conviction of virtually all recent academics in the humanities and social sciences, popularized by Edward Said’s influential Orientalism, that any consideration by the rich West of the relatively penurious and formerly colonized East (or indeed, by extension, any non-Western country) was intrinsically an act of domination.  Words were themselves oppressive; objective consideration was impossible.  What was presented as the enlightened attempt to cure madness in the early nineteenth century was in fact malign, founded on an act of domination: the rounding up of formerly free “village idiots” and incarcerating them under the label of “the insane.” Naming controls, held Foucault. Note, once again, that this is a theory of writers, not soldiers. Soldiers might sooner accept Mao’s “power comes from the barrel of a gun.”

According to the educated, therefore, who generalized the dogmas of Romantic poetry, language makes the world, is the world. This is the class-based linguistic idealism of our day. But it is the reason that the educated go ballistic at the use of words they don’t approve of. And it’s the reason why Palin (see below) rails so shrilly against the educated and powerful, and seems to think that she can speak of “blood libel” without anyone taking offense.

The left-right political split is an instantiation of the split between idealism and realism, that has coalesced into a contrast—a false, absolute, contrast, as I insist— between thought and action. The left insists that individuals are part of a more complex fabric, the right that individuals are the foreground and the primary actors.  Words don’t kill people, Palin might say, people do—and the gun lobby’s insistence that it’s not guns either that do so, but rather people, is yet another working-out of this world-view.

Linguistic idealism leaves me cold. It’s a self-aggrandizing dogma of wordsmiths, which is to say professional thinkers, rather than non-intellectuals, people who work with their hands. Elsewhere [1] I have argued that this focus on a world of texts taught as if they composed an objective manifold like the physical world has destroyed the literature classroom too. We’ve substituted the professor for the literature, with his or her narrow view that got him or her the position and then tenure. And most professors are less interesting than the novels that have become the raw material for their own act of domination in the classroom. Students have noticed, especially the men, who have abandoned it in droves. Besides, critics are less interesting than writers; yet Gerald Graff suggested famously that literature professors “teach the conflicts” rather than the works—which is to say, the critical tail produced by professors quarreling about the work, rather than the work itself.

Politics, according to Foucault, is really most fundamentally textual, words. The dominant theme in twentieth century philosophy was, similarly, its medium: language, taking its impetus from first the early Wittgenstein of the Tractatus with his (later abandoned) “picture theory of meaning” and then later from his notion, expressed in the Philosophical Investigations, that meaning was found in use.  Whichever tack we took, the assumption was that if we could just understand language, we’d understand the fundamental issues. It isn’t true, of course: however we say language “means” it’s going to go on doing that, as it has for millennia. If it’s this fundamental, we don’t have to figure it out.

Wittgenstein’s legacy, therefore, was less his specific doctrines than the conviction he articulated that words exist at the intersection with the world. This was true both in his early insistence that words somehow show their meaning –which left a problem for the many words and propositions for which this was not the case, a problem he solved by calling them “meaningless”—and also in his later notion that words were actions that constituted the world of the mind. Intention, for example, isn’t an internal thing but a social one, expressed in words, which are at the social nexus—there is no such thing, according to Wittgenstein, as private languages; mental states are their linguistic expressions. Mental and physical fuse for Wittgenstein, as they do for the parallel twentieth century school of phenomenology: Heidegger, for example, insisted that we live in motion, what he called “thrownness”—rather than sit on the sidelines and think about it. For the whole twentieth century of academic philosophy, words reach out and fuse with the world—albeit in a variety of ways.

John Searle at Berkeley, December 2005 (Photo by Matthew Breindel, released under the GNU Free Documentation License; Source: Wikimedia Commons)

One thinker who inherited this legacy of Wittgenstein, a man who focuses most clearly on the place where words and actions fuse and hence expresses the linguistic idealism of our day in an interesting way, is John Searle. Thus his thought is susceptible to the same problem that beset the early Wittgenstein: what he’s focusing on is quite a small subset of language, and even there it’s not so clearly the case as he thinks. In his early work Speech Acts, Searle, following J.L. Austin, focuses on cases of what he calls “illocutionary acts,” words become actions of which the strongest example are things the “I do” that, in  his view, gets you married or the “I will” that binds you to an oath. (In fact, it’s not the words alone that do this: you could say these words but in so odd a way the judge would stop the proceedings.)

Searle’s most recent application of his underlying this interest, based on the claim that institutions are created by minds through words, is Making the Social World. Words create the world: linguistic idealism rather than a realism that holds that words mirror, express, or at least exist in the world rather than being identical, or are just things people say. Gentler but related theorists like George Lakoff point out that we become prisoners of our own metaphors (Metaphors We Live By) and that they can control us: Lakoff sees himself as elucidating psychological discoveries about the mind and how it functions to create the categories that determine our world.

Postmodernism, now all but dead, expresses this linguistic idealism with a vengeance. Postmodernism held sway during the last few decades of the twentieth century and is the end of the Romantic emphasis on medium rather than content, the notion that outside of words there is nothing. Postmodernism is characterized by a fin de (vingtième) siècle weariness: all has been said, all done; we are merely adding footnotes to footnotes. Pastiche, as in the works of Walter Benjamin, was held to be the most profound artistic expression; doing literature in the voices of others (espoused by the Russian theorist Bahktin and exemplified in the ingenious fables of postmodernism’s patron saint,  Jorge Luis Borges) was all we had left. Some of the postmodernists, to be sure, give the sense they’d like to be direct and fresh again, but can’t forget what they know: so academics tried unsuccessfully to blow up the walls of their ivory tower through the Marxist “cultural studies” of the 80s and 90s, focusing on Barbie and Princess Di instead of Tolstoy and King Lear.  Yet making Barbie academic just brought Barbie inside the ivory tower and displaced the things already there, classics of art and literature (written, it was pointed out as if this were the deal-breaker, by dead white males); the meat changed but the smothering sauce of academic jargon, the lingua franca of the educated classes, made it all taste the same as before.

There’s no way out of postmodernism in words because it uses words to guard the exits. Still, though we have to cut the Gordian knot to get out, we can exit. This may be easier to do nowadays because the financial bases of the world that allowed a dogma of outsider Romantic poets to spread among the educated classes in general (much as abstract art is the language of the Upper East Side in the twentieth century) have been so shaken by the crash of 2008. Waking up after the party holding our heads, we may be able to accept the possibility of an alternative.

The alternative involves action, rather than talk. Not action as an absolute contrast, but as part of a symbiotic whole with talk: we use words to articulate actions, and actions to carry out words. Unfortunately, nowadays when the right wants to criticise the linguistic idealism of the left, it goes too far. Blind action is opposed by the right to the too-great involution of the dogma of linguistic idealism of the left. Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice defended her boss, George W. Bush, famously inept with words, as being a “man of action.” What he did wasn’t important, the important thing was that he was acting. Midshipmen at the Naval Academy, who generally disapprove of ‘liberals’ (in the peculiar American sense of the word),  love a speech by Theodore Roosevelt usually called “The Man in the Arena” that contains this much-quoted passage: “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena.” Words are nothing, action is all.

As an English professor at a military institution, I insist that we can use thought to justify action, that brain and brawn must work together. And that is my position here: that words are not identical with actions in the world, but rather exist in varying distances from it, and that we cannot privilege either words or actions but must be successful in interweaving the two. There are many possible connections of words to world, a whole panoply of relations exploited by art—tellingly, ignored by both the left and the right wing, in their maddeningly absolutist stance, a black/white either/or vision of words either being the world, or being nothing compared to action. The whole realm of metaphoric language, of art and fiction, lies in this middle area that has been turned into a No Man’s Land between the trenches of left and right that ravage it daily. Sarah Palin’s utterances as well as the Capt Honors videos are far less literal than they have been held to be—as indeed most language is. Lighten up, I say to both sides. Art has a purpose, a place in the world that is not merely that of rejecting it—though this is the way it’s typically been perceived since the Romantics.

As I’ve argued in Art and Argument: What Words Can Do and What They Can’t, art is based on literal truth (the sky is up and people eat with knives and forks in both novels and the world). So too metaphoric or poetic language has a literal component: if we speak of a Congressional seat being a “target” we mean we aim (metaphor) at “hitting” (both). But this also means that metaphors have other qualities we don’t mean to emphasize, and that can later be emphasized (targets = guns). And metaphor is all around us: “all around us,” for example, is yet another. Thus there are many degrees of language use between the stonily literal and the purely incendiary. We have to be supple in negotiating between them, something the polarization of the current world into the left and right has made extremely difficult. Both left and right wing are famously intolerant of art, as it fails to advance either agenda. The critics of Palin’s gun language and Honors’s movies are left-wing critics, apparently holding that words make the world, and so need to be rigorously controlled: metaphoric or figurative language that can be understood in a way that someone can find offensive must be eliminated.

Palin is right – if we can attribute such a view to her – that linguistic idealism the dominant ideology of the ruling class, that it’s taken as an unquestioned dogma. What’s unfortunate about Palin, however, is that she couches her criticism the only way she logically can, having aligned herself with the naïve realists rather than with the linguistic idealists: as an attack on groups of people, rather than on their words or ideas. This is what makes her recent screed America by Heart: Reflections on Faith, Family, and Flag so full of bile. Nobody but she and her supporters qualifies as person at all, much less a patriotic American, and what characterizes her supporters is lack of power. The “meaning of America” has been forgotten “by the people who make the big laws, run the big corporations, write for the big newspapers and make the big movies.” These, of course are the educated elite, the “inside the Beltway” types Palin heaps scorn on. To this are contrasted “real people,” the Americans who “grow our food, teach our children, run our small businesses, help out the less fortunate, and fight our wars.”

Of course, the problem of the “government is the problem” right wing that campaigns against “inside the Beltway politicos” is that these are just the people the right wing hopes to become. Once they’ve assumed power, presumably, they’ll hand power back to the powerless (which sounds contradictory) and the state will wither away. It didn’t work for Marx, and it won’t work for Palin.

Reject the dogma, by all means. Please. But don’t do it by attacking the people who hold it. Love the sinner, hate the sin. Palin has presumably heard that one before.

Sarah Palin: America by Heart : Reflections on Family, Faith, and Flag
Harper, New York 2010.
ISBN-13: 978-0062010964
Hardcover, 304 pages, US$25.99

John Searle: Making the Social World. The Structure of Human Civilization
Oxford University Press, New York 2010.
ISBN-13: 978-0195396171
Hardcover, 224 pages, US$24.95

Bruce Fleming is Professor of English at the U.S. Naval Academy, Annapolis, Maryland, having previously held teaching positions at Vanderbilt University, the University of Freiburg, and the National University of Rwanda. His most recent books are Running is Life: Transcending the Crisis of Modernity (Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America 2010) and Bridging the Military-Civilian Divide (Fairfax, Virginia: Potomac Books). In addition to his scholarly work, he has contributed opinion pieces to the New York Times, Wahington Post, Baltimore Sun, and The Chronicle of Higher Education.

(c) 2011 The Berlin Review of Books. 

by Alex Prescott-Couch

Every Friday morning, postmasters in the United States send out over a million copies of US Weekly to subscribers. Combined with the approximately 800,000 newsstand copies sold, about two million Americans pay every week to leaf through page after page of the smiles, tears, tragedies, and triumphs of the famous and photographed. Whatever the drama or celebration, the pages – awash with pictures and dotted with text – guide the reader through an emotional program of tension (“Is Brad and Angelina’s marriage on the rocks?”) and release (“Lindsey’s new look”), giving instruction of what to feel about the events of the day. Should one feel outrage or concern at Kardashian’s latest stunt? Betrayal or vindication at Brad’s suspected dalliance? The exclamation points and rhetorical questions tell the tale. 

Paparazzo statue, Laurinska street, Bratislava. (Photo: Benmil222; used under a Wikimedia Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Licence)

One of US Weekly’s most famous features is a two-page spread of photos depicting the quotidian banalities of celebrity life. These photos are overlaid with spunky exclamations – “They cheer at baseball games!” “They walk their dogs!” –  to the effect that even these people must hail cabs, buy babywipes, eat hotdogs, and wait for restrooms. Those who might seem to roll out of bed to a red carpet and take their morning coffee on a talk show couch, even they need to attend to the biological and social requirements of everyday life. The pictures and captions both embody and invert the standard sensationalism – a pack of paparazzi have dug up the dirt, and the joke is that what’s so startling is the utter lack of spectacle. “Stars – They’re Just Like Us.”

I’m not sure that Fred Inglis would like a review of his A Short History of Celebrity to begin with US Weekly. He might think such a beginning expresses surrender to the temptation to write a “lofty malediction over the celebrity cult” (p. 13) rather than a more fair-minded, less curmudgeonly treatment that his book seeks to present. Or it might provide the mistaken impression that celebrity is a new invention of the industrial mass media, exactly the impression he wishes to dispel by tracing the concept and practice of celebrity back over two hundred and fifty years. Maybe he would simply find it too easy.

Yet, despite such objections, the image encapsulates two main themes of his vivacious history of celebrity – the way celebrity and celebrities serve to educate our feelings, and the way celebrity makes us experience certain individuals as both intimately familiar and utterly supernatural. This notion of celebrities as otherworldly intimates who reflect and construct a certain point in the “history of feeling” is the thread that ties together the sometimes meandering but usually insightful biographical vignettes that constitute his “history” of celebrity.

Inglis begins his tale in eighteenth-century London, “the first city to construct itself as a city in a form that would prove recognizable to modernity” (p. 37). Powered by the forces of incipient industrialization, London was a mix of marketplace, gossip hub, urban sewer, and bourgeois leisure garden. Importantly for Inglis, it was also the site of a transformation in the nature of public acclaim. Up into the eighteenth century, public acclaim primarily took the form of “honor” or “renown.” “Renown” was the sort of acclaim “assigned to men of high accomplishment in a handful of prominent and clearly defined roles” (p. 4). Monarchs, military heroes, and learned men – just to give three examples – were known to their societies, but their acclaim was based on great deeds and rooted in their position in the social hierarchy. But in eighteenth century London, a new sort of acclaim was emerging, the “celebrity” possessed by the actors and artists that edified and entertained the urban bourgeoisie. This fame was still mediated by the social hierarchies omnipresent in eighteenth century England – as Inglis notes (p. 44), famed actor David Garrick kneeled to his audience – but signs of a celebrity-conscious consumer society were unmistakable. The life of Lord Byron most clearly exemplifies this tendency. Bryon scandalized London society by skillfully seducing aristocrats – including his half-sister – and then brazenly writing up his escapades in the verse that made him famous. Unlike renowned literary figures of the past, Byron was not only a social position but a man, an individual so overflowing with personality that his lyrics seemed a mere spillage from his life of passionate feeling. Byron’s public acclaim was bound up not simply with the work but with the life brought to expression in the work. Thus, Byron plays a key role in what Inglis dubs a “history of the feelings” not only because he was a public promoter of the Romantic ethic of authentic sentiment but because his life illustrates the new constellation of feelings through which the public relates to the famous, “the interplay of envy, admiration, generous acclaim, malicious denigration, prurient attentiveness, swift indifference” (p. 57).

Inglis’s narrative continues in nineteenth century Paris, the center of a new political and urban imaginary. As perpetual political upheaval forged a new language of democratic self-assertion, the city space was being restructured to make way for the boulevards, public parks, and glasshouse department stores that inscribed the ethos of the World Exhibition into the environment of everyday experience. These new aspects of the city augmented the oft-discussed arcades, those “fantasy avenues of the rich open to everybody to gaze into the shop windows and dream of unfeasible extravagance” (p. 86). With such spectacles just lying around in the streets, it isn’t surprising that urban perambulation became one of the chief entertainments of the rising bourgeoisie. The creature of the flaneur embodied a new culture of going out to see and be seen, a culture in which glamour and fashionable appearance became crucial. Individual attention-seeking paralleled the economics of the urban spectacle in which shops’ profits followed the number of passers-by lured in by their storefronts. This notion that success consists in successful attention-seeking is of course one of the cornerstones of modern celebrity culture.

The story continues in the money-and-gossip-obsessed New York of the Gilded Age. With the Weltgeist drifting across the Atlantic and the Hudson overflowing with cash from real estate, railroads, oil, steel, financing, the boom of big business generally, a new moneyed magnate aristocracy emerged with its own understanding of the basis of social respectability. While old money and a good name retained a certain status (p. 116), mammoth wealth more and more took the place of blood and breeding. The aura of money – and the realization that the whims of the mighty controlled the destinies of the working poor – raised curiosity about the goings-on of the mansioned rich, and newspapers adapted to slake this curiosity by passing on inner circle gossip. The mix of admiration, envy, bitterness, and adulation that Inglis sees as the constellation of feelings mediating our relations to celebrities today was born in the gossip column and in media profiles by journalists who were both muckrakers and sycophants. The mass press was a celebrity-making machine.

These first three stages – London, Paris, New York – form the core of Inglis’s history of celebrity and orient his analysis of a smattering of topics in the twentieth century. He devotes a chapter to the way our understanding of geography changed as the leisure industry cordoned off certain parts of the world as exclusive vacation destinations, and he provides some insightful commentary on the paraphernalia of capitalist success (yachts, diamonds, vacations on the Riviera, etc.).

One of the most interesting – but also most problematic – chapters, concerns Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin, “supreme celebrities” (p. 160) in the era of mass politics. Inglis emphasizes the elective affinity between the theatrics of 1930s political celebrity and literal theater performance – the elaborate pageantry, the controlled outward appearance, the mechanisms of psychological projection that bring the audience under the performer’s will. Moreover, the air of intimate familiarity yet inapprehensible mystery that defined these dictators’ public image would reappear in the perception of Hollywood stars.

Since modern celebrities and dictators are both receiving public recognition within technologically advanced societies with developed media apparatuses, it should be no surprise that there are similarities in the modes of public acclaim. Yet the relationship between the public and the prominent in consumer society and that between a dictator and his subjects in an authoritarian state are importantly different, and more careful attention to this would have improved the discussion. First, the authoritarian press is beholden to the authorities rather than devoted to uncovering their secrets. Pravda was hardly a muckraking outfit. Second, celebrities operating in the market are dependent on the whims of an adoring public, while a despot is largely immune to such caprice. Mussolini didn’t need the paparazzi to hold the attention of the public. Third, the press served to maintain the dictator’s image rather than create it on its own. Magazine profiles aren’t going to contain any surprises. These features reflect the general fact that in a consumer society the customer is king, but one would be hard-pressed to say this about the subjects of an authoritarian government.   

The last chapters bring the narrative into the present. Inglis discusses the era of great film stars with great sympathy, and does an admirable job articulating both the cultural importance and personal magnetism of icons like John Wayne, Cary Grant, and especially Marilyn Monroe. Despite the backdoor dealings and blatant criminality of Hollywood filmmaking in those days, such stars were able to represent “the best part of the national character narrative in which the audience believed” (p. 190) and “the impossible version of the best selves audiences could hardly be in everyday life” (p. 206). They showed an audience a way of looking, acting, and feeling. Inglis possesses notably less patience for the current denizens of the fashion world and reality TV. Unfortunately, Inglis’s inner curmudgeon here seems to get the better of him.  He writes, for instance, of fashion models:

“Having no accomplishments to display, no action to render as artistry, pitifully lacking such personal resources as reflective intelligence and meaningful experience, they are quick to take offense, and, living between public adulation on the catwalk and in the restaurant, and the hot, endless tedium of the dressing room, it cannot be a surprise how many turn to the deathly, uncreative recreations of passing sex and playful cocaine” (p. 245).

There is fairer treatment to be had.

Inglis’s discussions of particular figures in these last chapters are often individually insightful, but the chapters don’t possess the unity of previous sections. While he is a perceptive observer of popular culture and his general erudition is impressive, Inglis’s method of stitching together biographical sketches becomes less illuminating the closer we get to the present where much of this biographical detail is familiar. In these last chapters, we get a patchwork of fascinating details and commentary but not enough conceptual tools to systematically comprehend the historical changes behind the biographies.  

Moreover, some of shortcomings of the end indicate problems profound and present from the start. The narrative that Inglis provides is so readable and his prose so full of verve that problems with the basic analytical categories and argumentative strategy can be easily covered over. The most obvious of these is the term of “celebrity” itself. First, are we talking about a person, a concept, a social role, or something else? One might think that distinguishing these doesn’t make a difference, since they are all interconnected: particular persons are celebrities in virtue of occupying a certain role in the social matrix, and applying the concept of “celebrity” to a person can have the effect of promoting or stabilizing this role (e.g. being classified as a celebrity leads one to be featured in celebrity magazines, which maintains one’s position as a celebrity). However, it’s important to differentiate person, concept, and role because the effects of each are distinct. It’s one thing to say that particular individuals, or a class of individuals, molded our feelings, actions, and ideals in a particular way. For instance, perhaps stars of the classical Hollywood cinema made us long to be debonair democrats, as Inglis says. It is quite another thing entirely to say that the concept of celebrity (or Hollywood starlet) affected feeling. Yet this is what Inglis seems to be getting at when he remarks that understanding the concept is important because it “serves to pick out those lives and ways of life which shaped themselves into the significant constellations of the past and provided quite a lot of people with stars to steer by” (p. 3). I take the idea here to be that the concept organizes people’s understanding and experience of success, and this way of understanding success has particular consequences. Similarly, it is important to distinguish the effects of the concept from the effects of the social role the concept picks out. For instance, a potential consequence of being universally acclaimed for one’s wealth and glamour may be to develop a certain dependence on the attention of others. It would be a very different thesis to claim that the need for continual attention a consequence of conceptualizing one’s position as a person who is universally admired. In the first case, the admiration of others is what is creating your need for attention, while in the second case, it is your conception of yourself as a celebrity that creates the need.

I mention these distinctions not to be pedantic but because I believe their elision explains the book’s strange combination of ease and obscurity. What makes the text both readable and confusing is that while much of the narrative focuses on the reception of particular individual celebrities, one of the main purposes of the book is to examine the consequences of the concept of celebrity and social role it picks out. If Inglis wants to understand “what celebrity does to people” (p. 16), then examining “historical examples, of individual life stories which neither constitute a sample nor provide epitomes” (p. 3) can muddle the issue.

Another pair of concepts that I believe could use some sharpening is the contrast between “renown” and “celebrity” that structures the text’s historical narrative. It isn’t clear how helpful this conceptual pairing is. First, each term groups together a rather heterogeneous array of features regarding the basis and object of public acclaim as well as the feelings of the admiring and the admired. Yet it isn’t clear whether these features are closely connected enough to form an ideal type that is useful for analysis. For instance, many current celebrities – the Prince of Monaco – receive acclaim on the basis of the social prominence of their offices and the public deeds that that their social position make possible. The fact that their prominence is attached to great public deeds performed from privileged positions of the social hierarchy (and those deeds reinforce the honor of the office) does not prevent them participating in “the interplay of envy, admiration, generous acclaim, malicious denigration, prurient attentiveness” (p. 57). Of course, we’re dealing with ideal types here, but the point is that the types Inglis picks out don’t seem to possess any sort of internal logic.

Given that the features of acclaim Inglis groups together often pull apart, the reader (or at least, this reader) had the feeling that the narrative of the book would have been clearer and the discussion of particular figures more illuminating with the addition of a few more distinctions. For example, when Inglis discusses Seamus Heaney (!) as the epitome of new celebrity, one feels something has gone awry. Heaney is of course well known in the literary world, but does the social role he occupies and the type of attention he commands bear even a family resemblance to that of Paris Hilton, let alone The Situation? There are some obvious distinctions – e.g. between those who are famous for their work and those famous for their social life – that would have helped the reader get a clearer sense of the historical and cultural topography. Adding some categories and making some distinctions would better enable us to explain our ambivalent feelings about the cult of celebrity. Inglis often expresses this ambivalence, and provides examples of why we should be ambivalent, but there is a slightly more general level of analysis that would be helpful. Without a more general discussion of different sorts of celebrity, Inglis’s attempts to separate the wheat from the chaff might seem appear to rely more on predilection than principle.

Despite these worries, A Short History of Celebrity is an excellent book. The prose is fabulous, and Inglis is brimming with insight and humor.  Moreover, one can’t help being drawn into tales of the rich and fabulous. However we may flatter ourselves, the stars are just not like us.

Fred Inglis: A Short History of Celebrity
Princeton University Press, Princeton 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4008-3439-6
Hardcover, 322 pages, US$29.95

Alex Prescott-Couch is a PhD candidate in philosophy at Harvard University. He lived in Berlin from 2005 to 2008.

(c) 2010 The Berlin Review of Books.

By Stephen John

Martha Nussbaum’s latest book opens with a chilling warning: we face “a worldwide crisis in education” of “massive proportions and grave global significance”. The crisis is that the arts and humanities are losing their place in the curriculum at all levels of education. Indeed, even “the humanistic aspects of science and social science – the imaginative, creative aspect and the aspect of rigorous critical thought” are being lost. This is to be lamented, according to Nussbaum, because the proper goal of education is the cultivation of citizens who can play a full and active role in democratic societies, and such cultivation requires exposure to the arts and humanities. Such concerns are, she thinks, not reflected in contemporary thinking about education, which stresses the teaching of narrow technical skills, and associated “thin market norms”, in the name of economic growth. Nussbaum proposes an alternative to the market paradigm, according to which education should be child-centred, and include a full and proper understanding of global history and economics, training in Socratic reasoning skills, and creative engagement in artistic activities. Such an education will create citizens who can feel compassion for others, whom they also respect, while making wise judgments about political issues which reflect a broader understanding of global interconnectedness without an exaggerated respect for tradition. As a side effect, such citizens will also be more economically productive.

Clearly, no-one could reasonably hope to prove all of these claims within a book of 170 pages. This volume is, I assume, intended more as a political act, rather than as a scholarly tract. Furthermore, I find myself more-or-less in agreement with what I take to be Nussbaum’s key political aim: to ensure a place for the humanities and arts in schools and universities. As such, it is tempting to overlook this book’s deficiencies in the name of political expediency, or to defend Nussbaum by stressing that her book is polemic, rather than careful study. Unfortunately, the entire point of this book is to defend an ideal of “Socratic critical inquiry”, where “only the nature of the argument counts”. Even taking into account issues of genre, Nussbaum’s arguments are bad. They rest on sweeping sociological generalisations, confuse different concepts, and fail to engage with possible criticism. 

A liberal arts education -- good for those who can afford it, but does it save democracy? (Photo: ECLA, used under a Wikimedia Creative Commons Licence)

One key flaw is Nussbaum’s tendency to speak ex cathedra on extremely complex empirical topics. For example, at one point, she describes the Indian state of Gujarat as “well known for its combination of technological sophistication with docility and group-think”. Not content with stereotyping fifty million people, she later asserts that the deadly anti-Muslim riots in Gujarat in 2002 were the result of “no critical thinking in the public schools and a concerted focus on technical ability”, combined with “propaganda purveyed … in state history textbooks”. To be fair, this extremely tendentious causal claim is supported by a single reference (to her own earlier work). However, it is surely an egregious simplification of an extremely complex social phenomenon. The sweeping generalisation mentioned above is not, it should be stressed, a slip into Orientalism; we also read, for example, that European academics (all?) “have no training” in teaching and so, “would be horrible” at small group teaching. Similar examples abound in the text. I suppose that such exaggeration might be justified by saying that Nussbaum’s examples are not intended as literal truths, but as vivid summaries, designed to illustrate, rather than support, her more theoretical claims. These more general claims about the declining prestige of humanistic education, and about the proper role and value of education are interesting, and of more general import. In the rest of this review, then, I shall resist the temptation to list implausible claims and focus on two key issues: precisely what Nussbaum thinks the current crisis is and her account of why we need the humanities. 

Nussbaum seems to diagnose three threats to humanistic education: first, an emphasis on the teaching of narrow technical skills in the name of maximising GNP; second, attempts to twist the teaching of history and social science to stoke nationalist and ethnic agendas; third, an increasing emphasis on standardised testing. I agree that a narrow, economically-driven curriculum, a desire to stoke nationalist sentiment and a focus on bureaucratically tractable outcome measures each poses a potential threat to humanistic educational ideals. I was far less convinced by Nussbaum’s apparent assumption that these three threats are all, somehow, inter-related. There might be Marxist arguments that capitalism survives best when the workers are stoked up to their eyeballs on religion and their energies focused on ethnic, rather than class warfare. However, on the face of it, inculcating rampant ethnic nationalism in workers seems in tension with creating workers who will play a docile role in multi-national corporations. Furthermore, it is unclear how either the neo-liberal or ethnic-traditionalist trends which, according to Nussbaum, threaten humanistic education relate to her real bugbear: standardised testing and quantifiable measures of educational “output”. Whether hatred has been inculcated is rather hard to measure; it may be easier to measure whether people have marketable skills, but it is unclear that the market itself demands excessive testing. Distinguishing different trends which might threaten humanistic education is not merely of theoretical interest. Rather, even if Nussbaum’s book is part of a political struggle, it is important to recognise that different societies face different problems: Indian academics who lament the BJP-driven rewriting of textbooks face different challenges to UK academics who wish to resist proposals for allocating research funding on the basis of “impact”. 

Furthermore, in in . Nussbaum herself notes that those who value economic growth might often have reason to value humanistic education. However, she seems to overlook deeper grounds of agreement. Nussbaum draws a very sharp boundary – between an “old”, “growth-based” model of development and society with an associated narrow technocratic model of education – and her proposed alternative, which sees the promotion of capabilities “ranging from life, health, and bodily integrity to political liberty, political participation, and education” as the goal of a good society. One obvious worry about this distinction is that it seems to overlook alternative mixed models of development, which, arguably, actually motivate many policy-makers. Furthermore, and more seriously, Nussbaum also seems to overlook why people might adopt a growth-based model of development, and, in particular, how such a model might be compatible with her own concerns. Even if the main goal of education is to promote citizens who can contribute to political debate, and this requires exposure to the humanities, such citizens might democratically agree on the value of economic growth. Conversely, full democratic participation might be a dream in a country where all are extremely poor. Nussbaum writes as if we are faced with a stark choice, but it is unclear that the choice is as stark as she paints it, and even that we have a choice to make at all. Along similar lines, Nussbaum seems to ignore the fact that even if actual bureaucracies have adopted stupid and self-defeating measures of educational attainment leading to what she calls a “pedagogy of force-feeding for standardised examinations”, there are excellent democratic reasons to seek to measure and assess the success of publicly-funded education. 

In short, even if, as a matter of fact, humanistic education is under threat from a variety of directions, and even if, as a matter of principle we think that growth-based models of development are incomplete or problematic, the threats to humanistic education are not all necessarily motivated by concerns which are deeply incompatible with humanist or democratic values. Again, I stress, these claims are not solely of scholastic interest; rather, they point to a serious problem with using this book for the political purpose of defending the humanities. On the one hand, Nussbaum tells us that training in the humanities produces citizens who “understand other traditions from within” and who can “think well about political issues affecting the nation”. On the other hand, her own arguments seem ill-suited to forming political alliances based on an understanding of others’ concerns. Not only does this tension rather undercut Nussbaum’s own assertions, but it makes it unclear who Nussbaum believes will be convinced by her arguments; were I a supporter of increased technical education, of the BJP or of standardised testing, I would find nothing in this book which spoke to my concerns. 

One resolution of this tension is that Nussbaum is preaching to the converted: rousing humanists to fight their corner, and providing them with tools with which to do so. The tool Nussbaum provides is an argument that the arts and humanities are valuable because their teaching is part of an education for “a more inclusive type of citizenship”. This is an interesting proposal, because many humanists seem tempted to defend teaching and research in their subjects by appeal to something like the intrinsic value of a humanistic education, and, as such, to resist attempts to justify curricula and research programmes in terms of “impact”. Nussbaum seems to suggest, however, that, rather than resist talk of impact, humanists should, instead, challenge prevailing conceptions of what constitutes impact. In general, this strikes me as an excellent proposal: given that continued teaching and research in the arts and humanities depends to a large degree on taxpayers’ money, it seems incumbent on humanists that they can provide a justification for their subjects which clearly relates to political concerns and demands. What worries me, however, is that Nussbaum seems to confuse two different issues. The first issue is whether we should conceptualise the good society in narrowly economistic terms or in broader terms, which include a concern that citizens are able to make reasoned contributions to debate. The second issue is what we should teach in Schools and Universities. Nussbaum’s argument seems, often, to run together these two questions, because she seems to assume that there is some very strong relationship between what we teach and the health of democracy. While I agree that there might be some relationship here, I was uncertain precisely what Nussbaum sees this relationship as, and without further specification of the precise relationship between curricula and democracy, it is unclear how best to use Nussbaum’s argument. 

An obvious worry here is that it seems that we have excellent inductive evidence that those highly trained in the arts and humanities can, often, fall very far short of Nussbaum’s ideal citizens. This is a point she herself notes in a brief aside on the anti-semitism of Wagner and Humperdinck. Furthermore, to choose an example Nussbaum does not mention, we might note that Nineteenth Century English public schools and Oxbridge turned out many men who had an excellent education in the classics, but who went on to administer a brutal Empire. In short, it is unclear that exposure to the arts and humanities is sufficient for crafting good citizens. In response to such concerns, it might be suggested that it is not exposure per se, but the right kind of teaching which suffices for good citizens. However, if this is Nussbaum’s thought, then it is unclear how useful her arguments are for practical purposes, given that, as she herself sometimes seems to acknowledge, there is a huge gap between actual current educational practice and her proposals; even if the curriculum set out in this volume would create a new kind of citizen, we might worry that this does not represent a practicable ideal. 

An alternative way of reading Nussbaum’s arguments would be as claiming that some exposure to the arts and humanities is necessary for maintaining democratic societies; in a rousing phrase, we read that “knowledge is no guarantee of good behaviour, but ignorance is a virtual guarantee of bad behaviour”. In a nearby passage, we also read that in the absence of humanistic education human interactions are “likely to be mediated by the thin norms of market exchange in which human lives are seen primarily as instruments for gain”. Leaving to one side the complicated issue of why Nussbaum assumes that we are faced with a stark choice between markets and democracy, the general thought she expresses here may seem plausible. However, they are exceptionally hard to pin down once we recognise that the vast majority of the world’s population has had little education; either Nussbaum must think that most of the world’s population are likely to engage in “bad behaviour” or she must think that the merest touch of a humanistic education can avoid “bad behaviour”. Neither of these claims strikes me as particularly plausible (furthermore, the claim that the particular form which the bad behaviour of those not educated in the humanities must take is a tendency to see others as instruments for economic benefit seems completely implausible: to return to some of the issues mentioned above, whatever else went wrong in Gujarat it was not that Hindus saw Muslims in merely economic terms). 

It is a favourite trick of philosophers to say that X is neither necessary nor sufficient for Y, and, therefore, that there is no interesting relationship between X and Y. This is a bad trick, and not one I want to play here; there might well be a relationship between humanistic education and democratic citizenship, even if that relationship is not simple. Intuitively, such a claim seems plausible – how could people educated in the arts and humanities fail to be better at arguing over policy? – and politically appealing – what even minimally enlightened policy-maker could disagree that strengthening democracy is an important end? My worry is that Nussbaum provides no way of spelling out such concerns. Furthermore, to raise a final worry, it also seems that one aspect of Nussbaum’s approach is likely to be particularly problematic in this regard: her insistence that all education from the kindergarten to undergraduate study should be understood in terms of the creation of better citizens. 

This strategy is, unfortunately, rather ambiguous. It is unclear whether Nussbaum believes that the needs of democracy demand that all citizens receive at least an undergraduate level education (with a strong focus on the humanities, and so on) or that the needs of democracy demand that all those who receive a University education are trained in critical thinking and so on. The first claim seems excessively utopian; were Nussbaum engaged in what political philosophers call “ideal theory”, then the claim that democracy requires that all citizens be educated until 21 might be a valid claim. As a basic assumption in what is essentially a polemical work, however, the claim seems, at best, to engender despair. Even in a developed country such as the UK, fewer than 50% of 18-year-olds attend University. Matters are, of course, even worse in Nussbaum’s beloved India, where female literacy is about 54%. Not only do such facts make the normative claim that all must be educated to University level seem excessively utopian, but they also make it difficult to understand the precise relationship between education and democracy; clearly, if democratic citizenship requires a University education (with a stress on the humanities), we are, and always have been, a long way from democracy. 

Maybe, then, Nussbaum’s argument is intended to be that, for as long as citizens are educated, their education should stress humanistic and humane virtues. This strikes me as a pleasant enough claim, but deeply problematic if the value of such virtues is because of the ways in which they equip citizens to function in democracies. After all, if some do not receive the training in democratic virtues accorded to others, then it seems all too easy to argue that, under real world conditions, it is the well-educated (specifically, those well-educated in the humanities) who should hold greater power in political debate. It is undoubtedly true that in modern societies, it is the well educated who tend to hold real power, and, as such, it may well be true that it is they who most need critical skills and the virtue of tolerance. However, to make such an argument is, in effect, to acquiesce in a form of oligarchy, where what really matters is that decisions made in Whitehall or Wall Street or the World Bank are reasoned and humane. (In this regard, it is a striking feature of Nussbaum’s argument that she thinks that it is a good thing that many US Universities rely on private funds from alumni who appreciate their “liberal arts” training, and a bad thing that UK Universities must rely on government funding. She is also keen to stress how enlightened businesspeople appreciate their humanities education, and employ others with a similar education. A strange undercurrent of the book, then, is that the real dangers to the humanities are posed by small-minded policy-makers and close-minded parents, rather than by big business.) Were Nussbaum asked to clarify her position, I have no doubt she would deny that it has such oligarchic implications. However, it strikes me that there is an important distinction between viewing the ends of compulsory primary and secondary education in terms of the promotion of democratic capabilities, and also viewing University, non-compulsory education in the same way. Even if there is a plausible argument that humanistic training needs to be part of the curriculum all the way through the education system, it seems that we need to be careful that this argument is compatible with the values of democracy more generally. 

This book has an important message: if we think that a good society is one characterised by relationships of democratic equality, rather than merely by the maximisation of GNP, then this should be reflected in debates over educational policy. In turn, such a framework seems to suggest that we should value the arts and humanities, as they can play an important role in shaping citizens’ capabilities. Unfortunately, what Nussbaum fails to provide us with is a clear sense of how we should develop this argument, who opposes it, and how we should respond to such opposition. Furthermore, in failing to do any of this, this book leaves an unsavoury impression that its contents belie its conclusions. 

Martha C. Nussbaum: Not For Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities
Princeton University Press, Princeton 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4008-3422-8
Hardcover, 177 pages, US$22.95 

(c) 2010 The Berlin Review of Books.

by Mohammed Khallouk

Recent polls conducted by a number of polling institutes indicate that, in the minds of Germans and Europeans, Islam – more than any other religion – is associated with negative feelings. The phenomenon of resentment towards Islam, which is widespread in society, has been ignored for a long time and has recently begun to attract some attention; in particular, there have been efforts to investigate, and publicly debate, its origins, heterogeneity, and repercussions, by a number of prominent representatives from various academic disciplines. One such effort has resulted in the present volume, edited by Thorsten G. Schneider, under the title “Islamfeindlichkeit – Wenn die Grenzen der Kritik verschwimmen” (roughly, “Islamophobia: When the Limits of Criticism become Blurred”), which draws a line from the slander of the Prophet Muhammad in medieval Europe all the way to contemporary internet-based incitement against Islam.

As the first chapter of the book, about the historical evolution of the European perception of Islam, makes clear, large parts of the European population have tended to stigmatise the dominant religion of ‘the Orient’ – in spite of the, at times, significant anticipation of cultural achievements in the Near East. From the mid-20^th century onwards, due to the increase in encounters with Muslim immigrants and ‘guest-workers’ (as well as, more recently, the acceleration of globalisation), these sentiments have again surfaced more prominently.

However, as the first of the contributions by the theologian Thomas Naumann shows, by reflecting on the supposedly ‘darkest chapter’ in European-Islamic history – the age of the Crusades –  the direct encounter with Islamic culture sometimes also made it to possible to overcome feelings of resentment. When viewed from this angle, the present volume can also be understood as a manifesto for cultural dialogue with Muslims, with the goal of finding a consensus on values.

Since negative reports tend to have a stronger emotional impact on a non-expert audience than positive reports, some pundits with an, at best, reserved attitude towards Islam, have succeeded, time and again, in reviving historical legends about Islam, even in the context of what are essentially modern contemporary problems – thereby bringing outdated historical ressentiments back into public consciousness.

This might also explain the observation, well-documented by Werner Ruf, an emeritus political scientist, in his contribution based on an analysis of official NATO documents, that both the scenario of an ‘imminent threat’ from the Muslim world (a familiar trope in medieval and early modern Europe) and a feeling of cultural superiority (which has its roots in 19^th-century imperialism) are enjoying renewed popularity in some political quarters and certain mass media.

The second chapter in the volume analyses the deep repercussions of the resentment that persists in European civil society towards the Muslim faith and its adherents. In particular, it creates barriers for the – politically desirable – integration of Muslim immigrants into German society, and for the recognition of legitimate religious demands, as far as the educational system, professional life and legal system are concerned.

The contribution by Navid Kermani, the Iranian-German scholar of Islamic studies, emphasises that the prejudice-laden image of Islam in parts of German society is, to a large extent, fuelled, and perpetuated, by the use of selective quotations from the Quran, which are taken out of context and then related to specific social problems or developments. As a result, any negative occurrences may then be blamed on Islam itself, whereas other attendant circumstances, such as political conditions, educational backgrounds, or the immigrant status of those involved are often ignored.

The role of the media in perpetuating and cultivating negative connotations of all things Muslim, is analysed in detail in chapters 3 and 4 of the book. What is especially problematic is that some, originally left-leaning, liberal intellectuals, have adopted a tone of wholesale criticism of Islam and ‘the Muslims’. The contribution by the editor, Thorsten G. Schneider, a political scientist and scholar of Islamic studies, unmasks the unsavoury methods by which some of those intellectuals (many of whom have never pursued degrees in Islamic studies or Orientalistik) pass off their warnings against an undifferentiated Islamic threat as an exercise in ‘casting light on the nature of Islam’.

In addition to these mildly depressing findings about the attitudes and behaviour among German civil society towards Muslims – who, after all, by now have become an integral part of it – the papers in the volume also present some reason for hoping that Islam might one day be recognised as on an equal footing with Christianity and Judaism. Several contributors point to the painful, but eventually successful, path towards equal treatment that, historically, was part of the Jewish experience in Christian societies and which might now serve as an inspiration for Muslims.

Even though the number of papers included in the volume – the total of which runs to 28 – might seem a little daunting to the layperson and casual reader, the diversity of disciplines and approaches represented by the contributors shows clearly the relevance of the phenomenon of “Islamophobia”, and its consequences, across society as a whole.

Thorsten G. Schneider (ed.): Islamfeindlichkeit. Wenn die Grenzen der Kritik verschwimmen
VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, Wiesbaden 2009.
ISBN-13: 978-3-531-16257-7
Softcover, 485 pages, EUR 39.90

Mohammed Khallouk was born in Morocco and works as a political scientist and scholar of Islamic studies at the Phillips University of Marburg. His work analyses Islamic fundamentalism in Northern Africa and the Middle East, as well as the history of the Jewish community in Morocco. He also works as a translator of German contemporary literature into Arabic.

The German version of this article first appeared in Gazelle Magazin; translated and reproduced with permission. Translation: The Berlin Review of Books. All rights reserved.

by Daniele Archibugi

Anyone who thought that the history of piracy was now something out of a Hollywood movie has had to think twice. The events in the Gulf of Aden lead us to wonder what differences there are between ancient piracy and the modern version. Perhaps if we examine the piracy that reached its peak between the end of the seventeenth and the early eighteenth century, and preyed on the major trade routes, we may get a clearer understanding of modern piracy. However, opportunity makes men thieves and the cleverly written and witty book by Peter T. Leeson, The Invisible Hook. The Hidden Economics of Pirates (Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2009), enables us to do so.

U.S. navy capturing suspected pirates in the Gulf of Aden, May 2009. (U.S. Navy photo, public domain)

According to Leeson, pirates applied economically rational principles aimed at obtaining the maximum result with the least effort and above all minimum risk. They too, in other works, apply the rules of Adam Smith’s invisible hand, or rather the invisible hook. Pirates were not cruel out of sadism but simply because by spreading terror they were able to increment their booty. Flying the infamous “Jolly Roger” served the purpose of generating what economists call the “announcement” effect: the potential victims were warned that any attempt to stave off the attack by a pirate vessel would lead to ferocious reprisals. If, on the other hand, the vessel attacked surrendered without any resistance, everything of value on board would be seized but the crew would be spared. The same applies to the pirates’ widely publicized ruthlessness against prisoners: many of the latter were tortured, others forced to walk the plank. Also in this case the pirates’ intention was to create what economists call the “reputation” effect. Prisoners might try to conceal information about valuable goods or about the routes followed by other trading or navy vessels and would be induced to reveal all their secrets by the terrible reputation enjoyed by the pirates.

Leeson gives credence to the economic interpretation of the pirates’ behavior: mutineers were certainly attracted by high profits; in the early 18^th century a sailor of a merchant vessel earned no more than 25 pounds a year, and a courageous pirate could earn as much as 300. But as well as borrowing from the trappings of economic theory, Leeson does not disdain also casting a penetrating glance at the social and political motives of these odd outlaw communities. Life on board ship, whether a merchant or a navy vessel, was regulated in an authoritarian and hierarchical fashion (and it might be added that things have not changed much since those times). The ship’s commander had the power to inflict very severe corporal punishment, stop crew members’ pay without good reason and demand that the crew perform work not envisaged in the original contract, and more besides. On board the captain had the power of life or death without any checks or balances. It is true that the sailors could sue for justice in the courts on returning home, although the latter usually sided with the commanders, also because the judges came from the same social class.

It is thus not surprising that, far beyond the reach of the dominant authority on land, sailors should set up a completely different social organization. And it is striking to see the extent to which this was based on principles of equality. In the first place, political equality. “Every Man has a Vote in the Affairs of the Moment” runs article one of the Code of Conduct on board the private vessel of Captain Bartholomew Roberts. Furthermore, it was the crew members who elected their own captain. Furthermore, the commander could be deposed by the pirates themselves if judged to be inadequate, corrupt or not bold enough, as happen to the famous Captain Edward England. In the rudimentary system of checks and balances characterizing the pirate republics, also a quartermaster was elected to look after the ship’s management, and who had the power to avoid individual crew members being unjustly punished. Nor must it be overlooked that, in an era in which the European nations were getting rich from the slave trade, many pirate ships granted equal rights also to colored men.

The pirate communities were in other words far from being anarchic: indeed, they developed a democratic system opposed to the autocratic system prevailing in the other vessels. Pirates had even too many rules: their codes of conduct prohibited sailors from gambling and smoking on board, from drinking after sunset and from keeping lamps alight late at night. They were also prohibited from bringing women on board to avoid causing jealousy.

The distribution of the rewards was much fairer than the pay on merchant or naval vessels: the pay of the captain and the quartermaster was only twice as high as that of ordinary pirates. Moreover, in the case of accidents in the “working place”, the pirates’ republics had a much more highly developed welfare system than that applied on the other ships: they meticulously specified how much was due to any crew member who had lost a hand, a leg or an eye. On the other hand, desertion during a boarding operation was punished by death or marooning on a desert island.

If piracy offered so much more to its members than was available to other sailors, the question is not so much why there were so many (it is estimated that there were two or three thousand in the early 18^th century) but rather why so many sailors did not become pirates. Perhaps it is because when captured they were almost always hanged: a count of executions between 1716 and 1726 indicates that about 400 were hanged, about 40 per year on average. But if we consider the high death rate among law-abiding sailors it must be concluded that the “announcement” and the “reputation” effects worked more for the scaffold than for the Jolly Roger.

Peter T. Leeson: The Hidden Economics of Pirates
Princeton University Press, Princeton 2009.
ISBN-13: 978-0691137476
Hardcover, 296 pages, US$24.95

Daniele Archibugi is director of the Italian National Research Council (CNR), and professor of innovation, governance and public policy at Birkbeck College.

This article first appeared on openDemocracy.net ; it is here republished under a Creative Commons Licence.

By Sara Farris

Intellectual voyeurism is alive and well, especially when it is permitted to intrude into the private life of a classically repressed personality like Max Weber. Joachim Radkau’s biography accomplishes the task of scholarly snooping well, and will satisfy even the most prurient curiosity. In this 700 page work we are informed in detail of Weber’s emissions “in his sleep”, of which his wife used to keep a detailed record to be carefully reported to Helene, Weber’s mother. The latter, as in the most typical Oedipal circumstances, was Weber’s greatest misfortune and dream, for she instilled in him the “horror of sexuality” while forcing him at the same time to “make young women happy”.

Courtesy of Polity Press

It is through the motif of Weber’s “sexual misery” that we are led to explore his scientific interests, political concerns and difficulty in reconciling the two. The theme is not new, as there have been other attempts to trace Weber’s mental weaknesses and breakdown (which occurred at the action-packed turn of the 20th century) back to his struggle with his father for his mother’s love: from Marianne Weber’s first biography, to Arthur Mitzman’s depiction of Weber’s religious background. Nonetheless, Radkau’s biography goes further and takes great advantage of the archive documentation and of the family correspondence made available by Guenther Roth’s enormous 2001 effort, Max Weber: A Family Portrait 1800–1950.

By means of these new materials, Radkau attempts to answer a perennial question: what role does personal life play in theoretical and public life? Does it influence the formulation of problems and hypotheses? Does it shape their specific configuration? We might be tempted to respond affirmatively when reminded of the legitimate association between Kant’s clockwork routine and maniacal ego-centrism and his philosophical subjectivism, or when we think of Hegel’s Spirit running through history in 1807 (the year of the publication of the Phenomenology), while his son Ludwig – not precisely the fruit of great love, according to biographers – was bursting into life.

Though neither a Weber scholar nor a biographer of intellectuals, Radkau’s psycho-clinical approach is to be framed within his documented interest in the depressive social atmosphere of early 20th century Germany, and the various expressions of intellectual ennui, to paraphrase Fredrick Jameson’s portrayal of Weber. Radkau’s previous book from 1998, entitled The Age of Nervousness: Germany between Bismarck and Hitler, is an extensive examination of the discourse and treatment of “nervous disturbance” under the Second Reich. Here the Bielefeld-based historian argues that it was the failed resolution of this social illness that played a not insignificant role in the Nazification of Germany.

The inquiry into Max Weber’s work and life, “paradigmatic figure in the torments of bourgeois culture” as efficaciously portrayed by Antonio Negri, provides Radkau with a further key to the understanding of German society between the Wilhelminian Era and the Third Reich.

With this driving thesis in mind, Radkau’s main argument revolves around the notion of “nature”. Weber’s work appears as the battlefield of an unresolved tension between an original “nature” and theories of the social. Moreover, the emphasis Weber seems to put upon the concept of “nature” (which appears almost 3,600 times in the digitalised version of Weber’s work) leads Radkau to draw out the intimate link between private struggle and the theoretical work, between society, the individual and nature. “Until now,” Radkau argues, “Weber has been thought of as an enemy of nature … this is based on a fundamental misunderstanding.” Thus, we can reconsider Weber’s most influential theoretical categories, such as “charisma”, “rationalisation”, “understanding” and “value freedom” by means of a focus on Weber’s fixation on human nature and on the centrality of passion. Above all, Radkau’s concern is the passion of conviction and thought, as the subtitle of the German edition of the book suggests (Die Leidenschaft des Denkens – the passion of thought).

Radkau’s journey into Weber’s life and the attempt to reconcile the self and his work by bringing to light unknown details has the merit of remaining very readable, despite its length. Nonetheless, other interpretations could be explored, beyond the focus upon “nature”. After all, the work of Weber was particularly sensitive to current events and his social background and political consciousness was explicitly rooted in and committed to a very specific political agenda: namely, a struggle against both feudal residues and radical leftism, particularly the Marxism of his time.

Weber’s political commitment can also be explained in relation to his personal life. Son of Maximilian Weber senior, prominent member of the National Liberal Party (NLP) and civil servant, Max jr. was profoundly influenced by the nationalist and class demands promoted by his familial environment. Weber’s subsequent academic career, in constant tension between social concerns, a certain fascination for social-democracy and a vicious imperialist conviction, were mixed in a peculiar cocktail that indeed led to path-breaking results in the intellectual and scientific fields, but which were a failure on the political level. Thus, the son of the enlightened German bourgeoisie, hostile to the agrarian-aristocratic block, could engage in patriotic outbursts for German grandeur during the First World War, as well as making passionate calls for a united front between the workers’ aristocracy and the industrialists. His scientific output, in a more complex and intriguing way, develops on this terrain and has made Weber an advocate of agency against the tyranny of the structure. These remarks, it must be said, do not deprive Radkau’s work of any of its importance and originality, though they suggest that one should retain a certain dubious attitude towards solely “naturalistic” explanations.

Joachim Radkau: Max Weber. A Biography
Polity Press, London 2009
ISBN-13: 9780745641478
Hardcover, 700 pages, 25GBP/US$35.00

Sara R. Farris is a research fellow at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam and the Jan van Eyck Akademie, Maastricht.

This article first appeared in The Philosophers’ Magazine, issue 46; reproduced with permission.