Harvard University Press Blog

The Historiography of Capitalism

This Sunday the New York Times offered up that rarest of birds: front page coverage of historiography. The piece, by Jennifer Schuessler, looks at historians’ growing study of the history of capitalism, a pursuit that predates but has been invigorated by the global financial crisis. Since Harvard’s Sven Beckert taught what’s believed to be the first seminar on the subject in 1996, courses and programs on the study of U.S. capitalism have been developed across the country.

Well, as the scholars go, so go the books, and Schuessler highlights a nice group of ours in her story, all of which were brought to HUP by Joyce Seltzer, our Senior Executive Editor for History and Contemporary Affairs. Among them is 2007’s A Nation of Counterfeiters: Capitalists, Con Men, and the Making of the United States, by Stephen Mihm, who explains that respect for these areas of inquiry has grown greatly since the crisis left people asking “Oh my God, what has Wall Street been doing for the last 100 years?”

Another scholar whose work speaks directly to that question is Julia Ott, whose position at the New School is thought to be the academy’s first professorship in the history of capitalism. Ott, author of When Wall Street Met Main Street: The Quest for an Investors’ Democracy, calls attention to the often overlooked truth that markets and financial institutions “were created by people making particular choices at particular historical moments.” Her work has the effect of denaturalizing economic conditions that are usually taken for granted, such as when she took to our blog to explain that, despite today’s politicized panic over government deficits, during WWI many Americans welcomed the vastly enlarged national debt, believing that federally-issued war bonds would lead to a better postwar society in which all had a “stake” in the nation. As such, Ott argues, the War Loan programs “invited Americans to imagine the nation as a financial market,” which in turn fundamentally altered the common citizen’s conception of and engagement with financial instruments.

Study of the history of capitalism incorporates the concern with race and gender that has driven so much of the work of historians in recent decades, and Schuessler points to Bethany Moreton’s award-winning To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise as an example of a work that focuses on gender.

Whether they come from HUP or our sister university presses, many of the books considered in the piece are their author’s first, which serves to highlight the persistent value of UPs in our commitment to young scholars and emerging disciplines. We’ll leave you, then, with a deeper look at one of those first books the piece mentions, Jonathan Levy’s Freaks of Fortune: The Emerging World of Capitalism and Risk in America. Levy spoke with us last year for an episode of the HUP podcast, which you can listen to via the player below.

 

"The Sage of Modern China"

Lu Xun (1881-1936), considered by many to be modern China’s most important and influential writer, was passionately engaged with the events and debates that marked the nation’s path to revolution. Though after death his legacy was mobilized by Mao and his followers—Mao himself referred to him as “the sage of modern China” —Lu Xun never joined the party. Instead, as Gloria Davies shows in Lu Xun’s Revolution: Writing in a Time of Violence, he grappled with the tensions that defined his era but remained a humanist deeply committed to the ideal of empathy. Below, Gloria Davies describes Lu Xun’s profound impact on the Chinese language, and the challenge of honestly reading the work of a writer whose legacy has never not been politicized.

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My initial intention in writing Lu Xun’s Revolution was to let the essays of his last decade speak of the age in which they appeared. The more immersed in them I became, the more his language demanded continual contextualization, and the contextualization, in turn, led me inevitably to dwell on the modern Chinese sensibilities that he and his contemporaries helped to shape and define.

The result is a book that revolves around the intricacies of Chinese sense-making at a time when, under the myriad intertwined effects of war, politics and commerce, the nascent modern written vernacular, baihua, became at once creative, fluid and highly manipulable. That this language also became increasingly menaced by doctrinal utterances and slogans was a key reason for Lu Xun’s involvement in the polemics that dominated his later years. Like a large majority of educated Chinese, he saw the Communist cause as the best possible hope for a more equitable and just society at the time. However, while he professed admiration for the many true believers he befriended, whom he praised for risking life and limb on the nation’s behalf, he also loathed Communist ideologues, perceiving in them a hunger for fame and power that posed a real threat to true revolutionary change. The same ambivalence is reflected in his conspicuous avoidance of issues concerning party discipline and obedience.

Lu Xun complained that his adversaries had succeeded in wasting his time and energy “that could have been better spent on doing something of real worth.” His posthumous elevation as Mao Zedong’s revolutionary writer of choice ensured that his writings, and his characteristic defence of human empathy and intellectual independence, suffered a complicated fate. To unravel some of that complexity is an important aim of this book and all the more important because Lu Xun’s influence on the Chinese language, as it is used in the People’s Republic, is considerable.

Indeed, precisely because Lu Xun’s legacy is formidably entangled, a degree of patience on the reader’s part is essential. China’s party-state has never ceased to rely on Lu Xun as a source of moral authority, turning him into its perpetual “helper” (bangmangzhe, to recall one of his favourite disparagements). At the same time, critics of the state have also always invoked Lu Xun as an exemplary conscience. Today, disgruntled citizens are fond of quoting Lu Xun to express their own frustrations with life under one-party rule.

Great State Autism

In The Rise of China vs. the Logic of Strategy, published last year, Edward Luttwak introduced the concept of “great state autism,” a collective national lack of situational awareness that reduces a country’s ability to perceive international realities with clarity. While the U.S. and Russia each suffer from obvious cases of the condition, Luttwak labels China’s autism an “especially virulent” strain, due to its ancient development in relative isolation and its sheer size, among other factors. Luttwak sees the affliction when, say, China flexes its military muscle in the face of a neighbor one day and then is surprised by the rebuff of a trade delegation to that same neighbor the next.

“In all great states,” writes Luttwak, “there is so much internal activity that leaders and opinion-makers cannot focus seriously on foreign affairs as well, except in particular times of crisis.”

They do not have the constant situational awareness of the world around them that is natural in small countries of equal advancement. After all, individual sensory and cranial capacities are much the same in smoothly operating states of a few million people, and in megastates such as the Russian Federation, the United States, India, and China, whose leaders face internal urgencies if not emergencies each day somewhere or other, in addition to their ordinary decision-making sessions and ceremonial obligations.

The result is not mere inattention. On the contrary, it is not only possible but common for great-state leaders and even entire ruling elites to make much of foreign affairs if only as welcome diversion from the harder choices of domestic politics, in which almost any decision that pleases some must displease others—and not mere foreigners whose political support will not be missed.

Great-state autism is worse than inattention because in the absence of the serious and earnest study that domestic urgencies make impossible, decision-makers cannot absorb in-depth information with all its complexities and subtleties, even if it is offered to them (which is unlikely: when intelligence officers adhere to the rule that their highest duty is to tell top leaders what they do not want to hear, their careers suffer). Instead, decisions on foreign affairs are almost always made on the basis of highly simplified, schematic representations of unmanageably complex realities, which are thereby distorted to fit within internally generated categories, expectations, and perspectives.

Now, in the recently-published Israel Has Moved, Diana Pinto describes Israel as suffering from its own case of autism, despite being a nation of far less territory than Luttwak’s Russia, China, India, or the United States. Pinto’s book is an unsettling take on Israel’s decades-long drift away from the European shadow in which it was founded and towards a new insularity. On the one hand are the country’s world-leading science and technology sectors, on the other its less successful international relationships.

Super-Israel at the technological heart of the new world economy suddenly becomes Israel the autistic with Asperger syndrome, the bipolar, the schizophrenic, the paranoiac, the psychotic, and even the psycho-rigid: in other words, an entity that denies the very principle of reality. These are very powerful, even terrifying, metaphors. They are not mine. Israelis from all camps—whether ultraorthodox or extremely secular, young or old, and coming from the most diverse cultural origins—used them freely before me as so many self-evident truths.

She writes of Israeli autism:

This condition, which occurs among the young (and Israel is both very young as a state and very old as a people), who are often quite brilliant in certain fields, defines those who cannot think of themselves as living in a world populated by others. They do not register the gaze or the emotions of others and are therefore unable to communicate or interact with them, because they do not grasp or understand what might motivate them… As with autistic people who feel threatened, Israel can reply to the aggressions of others (in its case most often real and not imagined) only by an excessively forceful and uncontrolled reaction, of which it often becomes its own victim.

Interestingly, while Luttwak makes no mention of Israel in his discussion of great state autism, Pinto cites China as the only other civilization whose “self-centeredness” resembles that of the Jews. Also striking are the contrasting conditions of each affliction’s incubation: Luttwak points to China’s ancient history of isolation from other states, whereas Israel’s defining characteristic is its keystoning of the lands along the Mediterranean Sea. In either case, the label seems a useful lens through which to observe these two major factors in the pursuit of geopolitical stability.

Dimensions in Mathematics, Revealed

In the second book of the Millennium series, The Girl Who Played with Fire, Stieg Larsson’s Lisbeth Salander is devoted to a 1,200 page mathematics text. The book, by one L. C. Parnault, is titled Dimensions in Mathematics, and though Larsson informs readers that it was published by Harvard University Press, the book has been impossible to find. Until now. We’re very excited to announce the long-awaited publication of Parnault’s Dimensions in Mathematics.

Like no work since the Arithmetica of Diophantus two millennia before, L. C. Parnault’s Dimensions in Mathematics presents the fullness of mathematical knowledge attained by man. From Thales to Turing, Pythagoras to Euclid, Archimedes to Newton, the Riemann Hypothesis to Fermat’s Last Theorem, Parnault escorts both serious mathematicians and the non-mathematical mind through the deepest mysteries of mathematics. Along the way he offers the greatest expositions yet of number theory, combinatorial topology, the analytics of complexity, and his own groundbreaking work on spherical astronomy. Dimensions equips even elementary readers with the tools to solve the logical puzzles of the perfect universe that can exist only in the mind of a mathematician.

“Dr. Parnault’s elegant explications of seemingly every extant mathematical concept or quandary make this text as indispensible as any in our field,” says Fields Medal-winning MIT Professor Gerald Lambeau. “His presentation of combinatorial mathematics left me breathless.”

In addition to being a milestone for the field, the publication of Dimensions in Mathematics is a true publishing event, a crowning achievement in our centennial year. We’re extremely proud to finally satisfy the millions of Millennium readers who’ve sought out the book, and are deeply humbled by the experience of working with the legendary Dr. Parnault.

UPDATE: Just April Foolin’. Parnault and his book remain but fiction.

"The Boston Phoenix Made Me"

The abrupt shuttering of the Boston Phoenix earlier this month left HUP Executive Editor for the Humanities Lindsay Waters reflecting on the many great writers he came to know during the paper’s glory days. One in particular whom Waters remembers discovering in the Phoenix is Howard Hampton, a collection of whose writings we published in 2007 as Born in Flames: Termite Dreams, Dialectical Fairy Tales, and Pop Apocalypses. “I was hungry for what Howard might be writing in the Phoenix,” Waters says, “because it was in the pages of the Phoenix, the Twin Cities’ City Pages, the old Voice, and the LA Weekly that the spirit of combative aesthetic critical writing had migrated once a repressive super-professional industrial strength writing had killed most criticism in the academy. What I loved persisted in the writings of Frank Kermode and Tony Tanner and Greil Marcus and Bob Christgau and Pauline Kael, whom I had the great and stinging pleasure of visiting with Howard in 1999 at her home in Great Barrington, Mass. It took me some time to get Howard to pull his writings together, but when we did it made for a book that is a real doozie, one of the ones I love the most.”

Below, Howard Hampton himself looks back on his formative early days writing for the Phoenix.

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I have always been partial to the title of an early Graham Greene novel (later a film): England Made Me. That’s how I felt about a certain recently deceased alternative newspaper—The Boston Phoenix made me.

In January 1982, I received a manila envelope containing a few copies of the weekly’s Arts Section along with a short invitation from their Music (soon to be Arts) Editor Kit Rachlis. By then, his music section (along with Robert Christgau’s at the Village Voice) had displaced Rolling Stone and Creem as the major leagues of rock criticism. I was an unemployed college dropout who had never written a word professionally, but Greil Marcus had forwarded Rachlis a long, opinionated, obsessive letter of mine. Intrigued, he invited me to join the ongoing conversation amongst the twenty-odd writers who covered music for the paper.

Joyce Millman has written a lovely evocation of that era at the Phoenix. What I remember most vividly was the process of getting a piece into shape. Kit was a superb and utterly meticulous editor: we went over every piece line by line on the phone (I live on the other side of the country), and the writer had to be able to justify every comma, every claim, every flight of fancy/nonsense. It was sobering and bracing—Kit gave you a sense your writing mattered, but that to do anything less than full justice to the record at hand was to betray not only the music you loved but yourself as well.

My first feature assignment was a review of Laurie Anderson’s debut album Big Science. Kit pronounced the piece dead on arrival and went through it like a patient coroner, taking me through every lifeless abstraction and stiff locution. I whined one passage was perfectly valid in the stuck-up vein of a now-forgotten mid-level scribe at the Voice; “You’re better than him,” he shot back, and that was that.

I rewrote the review, and as I was doing so, the landscape shifted as well: Lester Bangs died and Greil Marcus published “The Long Walk of the Situationist International.” (If memory serves, the Bangs obits and the Voice Literary Supplement with “Walk” were bundled in the same issue.) I wrote (or at least felt) like Dorothy abandoned in Alphaville, or Lemmy Caution stranded in Oz. (I guess that made Laurie Anderson… Anna Karina.) The piece established a beachhead for me. The Phoenix offered the opportunity to write about everyone from John Berger to Cyndi Lauper—there was a lot of open space there. I bonded with the wonderful Phoenix critic Mark Moses over our boundless love for Tapper Zukie’s Man Ah Warrior and our disdain for the gas-baggage that increasingly attached itself to music like barnacles on the Titanic.

Mark’s death in 1989 was, to my mind, the end of the paper: music editor Milo Miles (Kit’s excellent successor) had been sacked, and it was left to his unctuous replacement to eulogize Mark, a writer whose values (and compatriots) he swept away with the vacuous impunity of a robotic broom. Later, the regime changed again and the paper rebounded, but it never mattered to me; what was done was done. The Phoenix had nurtured the rock dreams of a bygone era: such stuff as Ray Davies and Alex Chilton songs were made of.

Stop Motion Environmental Humanism

Environmental Humanities, an open-access journal launched in November 2012, aims to “invigorate current interdisciplinary research on the environment” by bringing together scholarship in the humanities and the natural and social sciences.

Last fall, in preparation for the launch, the journal’s Editorial Board was invited to respond to the following “short provocation”:

We now often hear a lot about post-environmentalism and post-humanism as two parts of a broader critique of notions of “the environment,” “the human,” and indeed the humanities themselves. In this context, is there something a bit perverse about embracing the environmental humanities? What value is there in this trans-paradigm scholarship? What are the perils?

HUP author Timothy Morton (The Ecological Thought and Ecology Without Nature) and his Rice University colleague Cary Wolfe produced the following video response. Morton’s is the British voice, Wolfe’s is the other, and Allan Whiskersworth is The Cat.

 

Volume 1 of Environmental Humanities, which includes a piece from Morton, is available online now.

Broken Window Dressing

Last week, Chicago Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy announced his intention to bring “broken windows” policing to the city in the form of an ordinance that, if approved, would allow for criminal (rather than civil) implications for those who disregard tickets issued for routine offenses. “Fixing the little things prevents the big things,” he said, neatly encapsulating the thrust of the broken windows theory. With origins in a 1982 Atlantic Monthly article by James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling that itself called on ideas from a 1968 book by Wilson, the theory’s central premise is that public disorder sends a message that encourages crime, and that restoring order reduces offenses. The Chicago plan, subsequently endorsed by mayor Rahm Emanuel, would be just the latest application of what critical theorist and legal scholar Bernard Harcourt describes as a politically popular but analytically weak strategy.

Broken windows policing, also known as the “order-maintenance” approach, is most commonly associated with New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani’s “zero tolerance” crackdown in the early 1990s. The apparent success of the NYC program led hundreds of law enforcement representatives from around the world to visit the NYPD for briefings and instruction in New York-style policing, conventionally assumed to have been proven effective.

Surprisingly, though, the broken windows theory had never been empirically verified, and, as Harcourt argued in 2001’s Illusion of Order: The False Promise of Broken Windows Policing, the then-existing social scientific data suggested that the theory is probably not right. In a chapter he’s just contributed to Prevention and the Limits of the Criminal Law, a new book from Oxford University Press, Harcourt has surveyed the most recent studies and again concludes that the broken windows approach is really “window dressing,” and that there are actually “more profound processes of real estate development and wealth redistribution”—with complicated race, class, and ethnic dimensions—that are obscured by faith in order maintenance.

With record homicide rates devastating communities and bringing unwanted outside scrutiny, one can understand why the city of Chicago would be looking for a new policing strategy. Whether or not the adoption of broken windows policing can be causally linked to crime reduction—and the data suggest it cannot—the practice rests on a series of assumptions and judgments about the nature of disorder. As Harcourt explained in a 2002 Boston Review article based on Illusion of Order, and as we see confirmed by New York City’s aggressive Stop and Frisk policy, itself a broken windows-style tactic, such theories reflect the modern picture of the disorderly as “an unattached, young, most often racialized other, with a powerful tendency to commit crime and cause disorder.”

Legally Poisoned by Chemical Compounds

In Legally Poisoned: How the Law Puts Us at Risk from Toxicants, Carl F. Cranor documents the health threats posed by toxic hazards in commercial products such as cosmetics and cookware. Cranor argues that these chemical compounds should be subject to pre-market testing, as is the case with pharmaceuticals and pesticides, rather than presumed safe until harm is done. Below, Cranor presents the case for legal reform and outlines some of the additional channels of toxic contamination that have been documented since the initial publication of Legally Poisoned, which is new in paperback this month.

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Recent scientific findings on the developmental origins of disease pose major problems for laws that currently seek to protect the public from toxic substances. Existing laws permit our children and us to be legally contaminated with untested substances that may be toxic. We are “legally poisoned.”

Since the hardcover publication of Legally Poisoned in 2011, a number of studies have reinforced its concerns. New York University researchers found that the chemical bisphenol-A (BPA)—previously known to cause hormone abnormalities, asthma, behavioral problems and obesity—is linked to heart disease in children. BPA is used to line food and beverage cans to prevent corrosion and because of its pervasiveness contaminates our food supply. More than ninety percent of the public is contaminated by BPA.

Brazilian scientists found that infants whose mothers were exposed to the commonly used pesticide permethrin during pregnancy were up to seven times more likely to have leukemia. Even children whose mothers were exposed three months before conception were twice as likely to develop infant leukemia as those whose mothers reported no exposure.

Scientists at UC Berkeley have found that children’s exposures to brominated flame-retardants (PBDEs) in the womb or early childhood can lead to cognitive declines: poorer attention and motor skills and lower IQ scores. Other researchers have found that brominated flame-retardants reduce the male hormone testosterone in men. Children have higher concentrations of these substances than adults, but virtually all citizens are contaminated. Brominated flame-retardants are in carpets, upholstery, curtains, plastics, furniture and house dust, but once released into the environment return to contaminate various foods.

These studies and others on the developmental origins of disease are revealing how diseases and dysfunctions can be predisposed or triggered by toxicants, diet, or even infections in utero or in early life. Children are especially susceptible to diseases and dysfunctions during development and much more sensitive to toxic exposures than adults at the same concentrations. Major catastrophes resulting from in utero exposures to Thalidomide, methylmercury, and diethylstilbestrol (DES) in the 1960s and 1970s shattered the view of the womb as a protective shelter in which children could develop safely before they began facing some of the risks and hazards of the external world into which they would soon be born. Subsequently, researchers have found that early life exposure to PCBs, lead, radiation, DDT, phthalates, brominated flame retardants, synthetic estrogens, some pesticides, some pharmaceuticals and other substances can cause less dramatic diseases or dysfunctions, many affecting a person for a lifetime.

Eleanor of Aquitaine and the Four Kings, 1950

At the beginning of 1948, Harvard University Press unenthusiastically received a manuscript from Amy Kelly, a seventy-year old woman who had been a headmistress at a girl’s school and a teacher of English composition at Wellesley College. Published in 1950, Eleanor of Aquitaine and the Four Kings became the Press’s first New York Times bestseller, landing first at the #10 spot and remaining on the list for months. The book, which in 1971 was in the first group of paperbacks ever to be published by HUP, is one of the 100 significant titles we’ve chosen to commemorate our first 100 years. Below, longtime HUP sales representative Patricia Nelson reflects on the book, an excerpt of which you can read at our centennial site.

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Eleanor of Aquitaine and the Four Kings bears re-reading with grace. Amy Kelly’s tightly woven prose tapestry might well have been described by Helen Sword in her practicum on Stylish Academic Writing: “serious, entertaining, straightforward, poetic, unpretentious, ornate, intimate, impersonal, and much in between.” Kelly lyrically inflects her portrait of Eleanor with sagacity, charm, gallantry, nobility, qualities the author attributes to highly stylized crowned heads carved on a Romanesque capital taken from the Langon chapel near Bordeaux and now in The Cloisters. That these are now thought not to be portrait heads of Eleanor and Henry II does not diminish the luminous restraint with which Kelly reads, beneath the stone’s wise calm, the age in which it was carved and its queen.

At perhaps fifteen, upon the sudden death of her father Count Guillaume of Poitou and Aquitaine, the Duchess Eleanor became heiress to one of the “goodliest” patrimonies of the feudal world. “The fief of the duchess was rich and desirable in itself; but its special importance was that its addition, through the marriage of its heiress to any other domain in western Europe, would raise that domain to preeminence over all others.” Her overlord Louis the Sixth married Eleanor in haste to his monkish second son and surviving heir, soon to be Louis VII. Eleanor is Queen of France in the Paris of Peter Abelard, of scholasticism and young men “consuming the last inch of candle wax to snare universals, corporeal or incorporeal.”

In the heat of civil war, Louis’ ravages and atrocities finally overcome him with remorse; the ultimately calamitous Second Crusade offers “the succor of Jerusalem.” Eleanor accompanies her husband on the years of crusade, but conflict and the lack of a male heir lead to separation. Eleanor secures an annulment, after fifteen years of marriage and two daughters, on grounds of consanguinity. Scarcely eight weeks later, Eleanor marries Henry, Duke of Normandy, a Plantagenet soon to wrest the crown of England. Her lands joined with his will create Henry’s destiny, the Angevin Empire stretching from the Pyrenees to England and Ireland, “a destiny owed not wholly to his own merit nor to Angevin contrivance, but also to some happy conjunction of the planets… It had been a lucky stroke determining the future fatefully—his unexpected capture of the Countess of Poitou.”

The World Order Known as Umpire

In American Umpire, historian Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman argues against the familiar notion of the United States as imperial power. In her telling, many of the values and ideals that have become prevalent in the world may have originated with America, but they spread on their own merits, pushing most of the world in the direction of democratic capitalism. The United States did play a unique role in international affairs, Cobbs Hoffman argues, but it did so as a necessary and welcome arbitrator.

Arbitration itself is one of three goals or practices that Cobbs Hoffman sees as having gradually supplanted “the world order known as Empire.” Along with arbitration of disputes are access to opportunity and transparency in government and business. World War II was a watershed event in the transmission of those values, and Cobbs Hoffman notes that in the war’s aftermath the United States stepped forward to play an international part that was then sorely needed.

American Umpire traces world history from the American Revolution to the present, documenting the spread of these global values and the largely benevolent role Cobbs Hoffman sees the U.S. as having played. In that verdict, of course, she’s at odds with any number of critics of America’s international conduct, historian and HUP author Andrew Bacevich perhaps most prominent among them.

One of the interesting things about that disagreement, though, is that each narrative arrives at the same place: whether its leadership has been for better or for worse, welcome or resented, it’s time for the United States to step back from its role as the world’s steward. As Cobbs Hoffman sees it, the United States should greatly reduce its global presence, retire some of its permanent foreign military bases, and make room for other nations to lead. And, as she argued last week in a much noted New York Times piece, doing so would significantly reduce American defense spending, ameliorating the country’s struggling economy and helping to curtail its partisan budget battles.

Part of Cobbs Hoffman’s project, then, is to help the world see ways to carry on in relative peace after the retirement of its American umpire:

How the United States might cease playing umpire is not obvious. The trends toward access, arbitration, and transparency have not yielded an idyllic world. Violent, divisive conflicts remain. Holding the proverbial tiger by the tail, the U.S. government has been loath to let go. Perhaps by examining how the American role developed, this book will encourage other trustworthy nations to do more policing and the United States to do less—as occurred during the Libyan crisis of 2011, when France and Britain took the lead.

The Republican political objection to that strategy of “leading from behind” in Libya, the forceful arguments from the likes of Senator John McCain that the U.S. must intervene in Syria, and the persistent strain of American exceptionalism in the 2012 presidential contest all serve to illustrate the many domestic obstacles in the way of an international American drawdown. For her part, Cobbs Hoffman is dismissive of those who worry that the world would fall to instability without American lead (“It’s patronizing and naïve to think that America is the only truly ‘necessary’ country.”), but the nature of the above-noted objections indicates the challenges to the corrective she’s offering. For it’s likely that the very voices who’ll most welcome her depiction of American benevolence are those least likely to heed her plea for the nation now to stand aside, and those most likely to agree with her calls for a reduced American role are likely least inclined to accept her characterization of its historical valence.

Here’s Cobbs Hoffman describing the book: