Corey Robin on that Thatcher quotation

As the heat around Margaret Thatcher's death begins to cool a bit, I thought I would post something that addresses some larger questions around her career. Here is what Corey Robin had to say about the famous quotation about the nature of society.

Left critics of neoliberalism—or just plain old unregulated capitalism—often cite Margaret Thatcher’s famous declaration “There is no such thing as society” as evidence of neoliberalism’s hostility to all things collective. Neoliberalism, the story goes, unleashes the individual to fend for herself, denying her the supports of society (government, neighborhood solidarity, etc.) so that she can prove her mettle in the marketplace.

But these critics often ignore the fine print of what Thatcher actually said in that famous 1987 interview with, of all things, Woman’s Own.  Here’s the buildup to that infamous quote:

Who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families…

It’s that last phrase (“and there are families”) that’s crucial.  Contrary to popular (or at least leftist) myth, neoliberals are not untrammeled individualists. In many ways, they’re not that different from traditional conservatives: that is, they see individuals embedded in social institutions like the church or the family or schools—all institutions, it should be said, that are hierarchical and undemocratic.

Thatcher isn’t alone in this.  For all their individualist bluster, libertarians—particularly those market-oriented libertarians who are rightly viewed as the leading theoreticians of neoliberalism—often make the same claim.  When these libertarians look out at society, they don’t always see isolated or autonomous individuals; they’re just as likely to see private hierarchies like the family or the workplace, where a father governs his family and an owner his employees.  And that, I suspect (though further research is certainly necessary), is what they think of and like about society: that it’s an archipelago of private governments.

To my eyes, the connection between this and Ron and Rand Paul is pretty clear.

Image:  ...as in "A man's home is his…"  That's "a MAN'S home!"

Condemned out of his own mouth – Rand Paul

A few days ago Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, the great hope of the new libertarianism, went to Howard University and spoke to mostly African-American students in an attempt to show them that it was the Democrats back in the 1850s who showed themselves to be hostile to African-American interests, and one should never forget that, while nothing the Republicans have done since 1964 should be held against them.

When challenged on this, Sen. Paul said, according to Salon

 “The argument that I’m trying to make is that we haven’t changed — there are some of us that haven’t changed,” Paul said. “We don’t see an abrupt difference” between the party of Lincoln and the party of Richard Nixon.

Anyone who can't tell the difference between those two parties, or says he can't, should not be trusted as far as you can throw him.

Look for a red shoe

Couple of weeks ago, to my great surprise, a writer named Ted Gioia wrote an article about science-fiction author Cordwainer Smith for the Atlantic. It was a good article, but what I found most remarkable about it was the fact that it was written at all. Cordwainer Smith was highly praised by those who appreciated him, but he was always very much a minority taste. Part of this was the fact that he wrote exclusively about a time 14,000 years in the future, and his style was if clear and accomplished, very eccentric. Think Iain Banks's Culture series for the scope and futuristic science, but with a society which is a lot stranger and an author who makes more demands on his readers' imagination. (Though the Player of Games might well be a Cordwainer Smith story.)


I have some of Smith's work sitting around the house, and today I  picked up a book of short stories – Smith's forte was the short story – and was creeped out. I remember why I don't read read him very often.

I think the easiest thing to say is that Smith had an intense appreciation of how cruel the universe and humanity are. Maybe because he was a China expert working in the first half of the 20th century? Today's story was "Think Blue, Count Two" which superficially concerns the dynamics between three human beings trapped in a ship sailing between the stars and dragging thousands of frozen emigrants behind it. The one woman who's awake is the most beautiful person on earth, who is being sent to a distant colony to boost the average genetic beauty quotient. She also in the view of future scientists has a high daughter rating, meaning that the vast majority of human beings will instantaneously adopt her as a daughter-figure do anything to protect her. And even so it is almost not enough. She has to be saved by a mouse brain turned into a ceramic computer.

Well, this may give you some idea of whether you want to read Cordwainer Smith.Or maybe not. My description is a mere shadow of the reality. I could work all day and not get any closer to it.


If there is one further thing to be said, it's that Smith does not write in any detectable way as someone working in the 1950s and 60s. He is amazingly contemporary in his concerns and his style. He may be equally strange or equally familiar 100 years from today.

The Big Chill in the Eastern Mediterranean

Brian Ulrich alerted me to this:

The Big Chill and the Eastern Mediterranean

Among the solid contributions to Middle Eastern environmental history which have come out the past couple of years is Ronnie Ellenblum's The Collapse of the Eastern Mediterranean: Climate Change and the Decline of the East, 950-1072.  Its topic is the effects on the eastern Mediterranean of the protracted period of cold spells which Richard Bulliet termed the "Big Chill," and which was part of the global climate shift which also gave rise to the Medieval Warm Period in the North Atlantic which is well known to historians of medieval Europe.  Ellenblum convincingly ties enough major developments into the "Big Chill" that it deserves to be considered a major watershed in the region's history.

What are these developments?  One is the rise of nomadic powers, such as the Seljuqs in the Middle East, the Pechenegs in the Byzantine Empire, and the Banu Hilal in North Africa.  Multiple dynasties fell or were weakened with the collapse of bureaucracies and the agrarian base to sustain organized military power.  Major cities witnessed a decline in their population and infrastructure, marking the sharp final decline of the urban life developed in the region during the Hellenistic period.  Finally, population shifts, both in-migration and out-migration, led to religious change as Muslim nomads took the place of Christian peasants in agriculturally marginal regions.

Some will probably accuse Ellenblum of environmental determinism, but this is not his argument.  In his own words:

Civilizations are altered and transformed by calamities, although they usually succeed in finding, when the crisis is over, ways to reconstruct new stable societal structures and a new equilibrium that resemble, to a certain degree, the pre-calamity social order. Differences between pre- and post-calamity cultures, however, are often discerned.

In other words, in periods of environmental catastrophe, people adapt in a variety of ways, and even when the catastrophe is over, those ways continue to exist and leave their own historical legacies, whether in demographic shifts, institutions, or settlement structures.

Sounds interesting!

Image:  Snow in Damascus, January 2013

Just about...

I passed 2500 published posts on this blog sometime in the last month. Imagine!

"Spring" in the Near North, 2013

Morning temp:  -14 C
Snow: 6-9 inches on the ground
Trees: barely any budding
In the air:  a bug.

Yakutia laughs.

Oddball 14th century herald's name of the day

Moniquot, an "honorable" herald (is there any other kind?) who brought a message from King Henry of Spain (= Castile) to the Good Duke.
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Image: More AEMMA.