Harvard University Press Blog

Five Reasons Why You Should Read Thomas Piketty’s A Brief History of Equality

In his surprising and powerful new work, A Brief History of Equality, Thomas Piketty reminds us that the grand sweep of history gives us reasons to be optimistic. Over the centuries, he shows, we have been moving toward greater equality. We asked him about his impassioned new book: why he wrote it, how it’s optimistic, and what we need to do to continue making progress on creating an equitable world.

This book draws on your earlier works but is also very different. How would you describe the mix?

It’s partly a response to readers’ requests for a short book. My three major books are around a thousand pages each, enough to discourage many motivated citizens from reading them. I review the main lessons from those books here, explaining the basic facts of inequality and the reasons for its persistence and recent growth. But the new book does not content itself with just synthesizing previous ideas and findings. It also presents a new perspective on the history of inequality.

This new perspective seems more optimistic.

It puts more stress on equality, that is, on positive developments over the long term. Since at least the end of the eighteenth century, with the French and American Revolutions and the revolt of the slaves in Haiti in 1791, there has been a general movement toward equality. The march has been nourished by revolts against injustice, within countries as well as internationally, moving us away from societies of privilege and colonialism. It is a movement that has never completely stopped. On income and assets, we are today very, very far from the concentration levels of the early twentieth century, as well as previous centuries. Even since the 1980s, a period of rising concentration, we have continued on the path toward equality as inequalities arising from gender and origin, and between the global North and South, have diminished. In the long term, the march toward equality is very clear. I really want to insist on that.

What does the book tell us about how to continue that progress?

Partly we need to learn our history, to recommit to what works, to institutional, legal, social, fiscal, and educational systems that have promoted equality. We need to resist cultural separatism and excessive intellectual specialization. We also need to reverse certain trends. A few decades ago, for example, we invented an almost sacred right for people and companies to accumulate fortunes that depended on the public infrastructure of a country and then transfer assets to another jurisdiction, leaving the bill to the rest of the population. It is necessary to put an end to the free movement of capital without tax or social compensation.

You place a stronger emphasis on environmental questions and answers than in the past.

The questions are more urgent and are clearly bound up with questions of inequality. The richest 1% on the planet emit more carbon than the poorest 50%. Nearly four billion people live in the countries that will be the first to suffer the consequences of the lifestyles of the richest. A proportional carbon tax hitting the poor and the rich the same way—and in practice often exonerating the latter—is not the solution. It will only lead to new revolts in the North, as well as the South. Only a strong reduction of inequalities and the significant involvement of the richest countries will resolve these contradictions.

Overall, how would you describe the genre of the book? It’s academic, but also impassioned.

It’s a work of history and social sciences but also a call for civic mobilization. Looking at how we have moved toward equality helps us understand what needs to be done now. Unfortunately, this learning process is often weakened by historical amnesia and the compartmentalization of knowledge. I argue that economic issues are too important to be left to a small class of specialists and leaders. Citizens’ reappropriation of knowledge is essential for transforming power relations. This book contributes to that cause.

The Story of an Atlantic Slave War

Our third excerpt to celebrate Black History Month comes from Vincent Brown’s award-winning Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War, which Cornel West calls “brilliant” and “groundbreaking.” This gripping account of the largest slave revolt in the eighteenth-century British Atlantic world, an uprising that laid bare the interconnectedness of Europe, Africa, and America, shook the foundations of empire, and reshaped ideas of race and popular belonging.

Only the plotters truly knew if their plans had called for a general uprising from the beginning. The colonists were guessing based on evidence garnered from torture, and historians have little more to go on than their speculations. Were the events in St. Mary’s, Kingston, St. Thomas in the East, and Westmoreland part of a general insurrection?

Something important is at stake in the answer to this question. Historians sometimes view slave-conspiracy trials as evidence of panic, projections by slaveholders upon hapless victims. Another perspective casts the slaves’ actions as mostly reactive responses to immediate circumstances and opportunities, rather than as the outcome of careful organizing. By contrast, the first named historian to interpret Tacky’s revolt, Edward Long, agreed with his fellow colonists that the rebellion had been carefully planned:

“These circumstances show the great extent of the conspiracy, the strict correspondence which had been carried on by the Coromantins in every quarter of the island, and their almost incredible secrecy in the forming of their plan of insurrection; for it appeared in evidence, that the first eruption in St. Mary’s, was a matter pre-concerted, and known to all the chief men in the different districts; and the secret was probably confided to some hundreds, for several months before the blow was struck.”

For Long, Tacky was the “chief man” at the head of the conspiracy. But Long’s account is an unreliable guide. Most importantly, he offers an erroneous chronology of events. Wanting to show an island-wide conspiracy, he depicted the events in St. Mary’s Parish as simultaneous with later events in Westmoreland, extending the timeline for the St. Mary’s uprising and making it appear to last well beyond the Westmoreland insurrection. At least one detail of the account makes this misrepresentation seem willful. Long states that it was Admiral Charles Holmes who dispatched the naval vessels to the north side of the island, despite the fact that Holmes did not arrive at Jamaica until May 13, weeks after Tacky was killed and the rebels had dispersed. Long surely knew this, but distorting the sequence of events in this way had the effect of making the whole affair seem that it was indeed Tacky’s revolt.

This theory gave the insurrection an identifiable scapegoat, whom Long could blame and belittle all at once. Acknowledging Tacky as a “young man of good stature, and well made,” he called him “handsome, but rather of an effeminate than manly cast.” Mocking and demonizing black sexuality was an important part of establishing racial hierarchy, and Long hastened to add that Tacky “had flattered himself with the hope of obtaining (among other fruits of victory) the lieutenant governor’s lady for his concubine”—that lady being Edward Long’s eldest sister. In Long’s estimation, Tacky’s elevation stemmed not from his leadership abilities or military experience but from his supposed resemblance to “some favourite leader of their nation in Africa.” Most likely, Tacky had himself been a leader in Africa, but for Long this was merely a sign of Coromantees’ credulity. He compared Tacky’s followers to some Africans who had once encountered the bronze statue of a gladiator erected on a local plantation, which “the Coromantins no sooner beheld, than they were almost ready to fall down, and adore it.” With Tacky at the head of uprising, Long had devised an intelligible narrative of the violence that conveniently discounted the strategic implications he most feared. According to him, the uprising resulted from a concerted effort, but it was doomed by Africans’ intrinsic faults. Yet, as he knew, from the attack on Fort Haldane to Tacky’s death in the rocky valley upriver from Downes’s Cove, “Tacky’s Revolt” lasted only a week.

What explains Long’s desire to subsume the entire rebellion within a chronology that elevates the primacy of the events in St. Mary’s? Other sources, too, conspired to highlight the importance of the earliest clashes. The April 14 “Letter from a Gentleman at St. Mary’s” was the first and only coherently plotted account; the ones that followed display the irregularity and confusion of the colonists’ predicament. Dread governed their experience. By May, they were growing wild with fright as they ginned up the docket of African savagery. It is difficult to tell which stories came from captured rebels and which sprang from slaveholders’ imaginations, especially when the specter of cannibalism appeared in print. Colonists read that the rebels at Ballard’s Valley “cut off the Overseer’s Head, put his Blood in a Calabash, mixed gunpowder with it, and [ate] their Plantains dipp’d in it, as they did by every white Man they killed: In short, their savage Barbarity can scarcely be paralleled.” If there had indeed been a blood sacrifice at Ballard’s Valley, this report made it seem as if the rebels were taking some holy communion, with bananas instead of bread. The story made the sacrament all the more heinous by comparing the Coromantees to Catholics—Protestant Britain’s foremost global adversaries—and contributed to the sense that the colony was besieged from within and without by enemies at once familiar and strange. With each successive discovery of new unrest, the slaveholders grew more fearful and bewildered. Suddenly the uprising seemed to be happening everywhere at once. The shocking reminder that power did not guarantee security drove colonists wild with fear.

Over the next several weeks, lasting into July, they discovered several more conspiracies. In the commercial capital, colonial officials deepened their investigation into the circumstances surrounding the war-token mahogany sword. They learned that Kingston’s Coromantees had rallied around a woman named Cubah, whom they elevated “to the rank of royalty” and dubbed the “Queen of Kingston.” Like other Africans, she claimed territory for herself and her followers in the knowledge that the boundaries of her dominion were drawn more by peoples’ loyalties than by land surveyors. At meetings “she had sat in state under a canopy, with a sort of robe on her shoulders, and a crown upon her head,” adopting the “paraphernalia of power” she might have known on the Gold Coast. Upon this intelligence, the government seized Cubah and ordered her to be transported from the island. In the Vale of Louidas in St. John’s Parish, Coromantees belonging to the speaker of the House of Assembly, Charles Price, “had agreed to rise, ravage the estates, and murder the white men there.” Three people familiar with the plan betrayed the rebels, and the “ringleaders were taken up, and upon conviction, executed; others, who turned evidence, were transported off the island thus the whole of this bloody scheme was providentially frustrated.” More plots were afoot in the parishes of St. Dorothy’s, Hanover, and Clarendon, where Edward Long owned his estate. Throughout this time Henry Moore kept martial law in effect, and the military remained on the march all over the island.

Fear transported the slaveholders into a delirious fever dream from which they would not soon recover. Possibly the experience of frightened alarm during the uprising sent some of them into a fugue state, in which linear temporality had lost some of its purchase. They had lost the plot. The narrative they pieced together at the start of the rebellion represented the most linear description they could manage, until Long sat down a decade later in London to reconstruct the sequence. Partly for this reason, and partly because of events that occurred later in the 1760s, the St. Mary’s revolt established an enduring narrative pattern, providing an intelligible origin and knowable characters, with the colonists’ actions bending a discernible story arc from beginning to end.

The slaveholders were paranoid, and their slaves really were out to get them. Sometimes, these two facts could exist independently; the events of 1760 knotted them together. The causes of the insurrection were probably more broadly distributed and far more contingent than Long and the other slaveholders knew. Even so, whether or not these revolts were the result of a single grand design, they were not disconnected from each other nor merely opportunistic. The rebels coalesced around affiliations of language, regional identification, and military verve. If each uprising had its own inspiration, each also took careful account of local conditions, potential connections, and broader opportunities. In St. Mary’s, the path of the insurgency strongly suggests a defined objective: control or destruction of the commercial zone along the rivers. Yet if what happened in St. Mary’s parish could be called Tacky’s Revolt, it was only one conflict within a larger war, an unfolding uprising itself encompassed by wars within wars.

In the cascading series of events initiated by the rebels in St. Mary’s, we see how African militancy derived from the entanglements of empire, trade, and war across the Atlantic. Tacky’s Revolt was smaller and less significant than Long and subsequent historians have supposed only because the slave war it advanced was larger and more consequential. “A more dangerous or troublesome Affair I was never engaged in, in all my life,” wrote Zachary Bayly about the St. Mary’s insurrection. And still the Coromantee War was closer to its beginning than its end.

Celebrating University Press Week

In celebration of the tenth annual University Press Week, we are sharing the “famous last words” from ten of our most noteworthy books of the last ten years. This listicle represents the depth and breadth, not to mention the surprising variety, of titles we’ve published. Whether in the fields of philosophy, history, economics, art, education, or social science, the words of these authors are the final statement from their critically acclaimed works.

Sianne Ngai / Our Aesthetic Categories (2012) 

“By paying closer attention to the aesthetic categories that speak to the most significant objects and socially binding activities of late capitalist life—our affectively complicated relation to commodities, information, and performing, the ways in which we labor, exchange, and consume—one can at least make a start at closing the gulf between aesthetic theory and practice that began to open in the twentieth century, reenergizing the former by ensuring its continued relevance to the making, dissemination, and reception of culture in the present.”

Sunil S. Amrith / Crossing the Bay of Bengal (2013)

“Oceanic history is itself a kind of cartography. By foregrounding the Bay of Bengal—linked by journeys, memories, and the sinews of power—we can see beyond the borders of today’s nation- states, beyond the borders imposed by imperial mapmakers and immigration officials, to a more fluid, more uncertain world: a world that resembles our own. As the furies of nature grow clamorous, the fortunes of migrants are ever fickle.”

Thomas Piketty / Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2014)

“To be sure, the principle of specialization is sound and surely makes it legitimate for some scholars to do research that does not depend on statistical series. There are a thousand and one ways to do social science, and accumulating data is not always indispensable or even (I concede) especially imaginative. Yet it seems to me that all social scientists, all journalists and commentators, all activists in the unions and in politics of whatever stripe, and especially all citizens should take a serious interest in money, its measurement, the facts surrounding it, and its history. Those who have a lot of it never fail to defend their interests. Refusing to deal with numbers rarely serves the interests of the least well-off.”

Pat Shipman / The Invaders (2015)

“We may be more successful at preserving biological diversity and truly wild places as we see more clearly the factors that diminish them. We may be able to envision more accurately humans’ place in nature, for the good of all. I think it is time we recognized ourselves for what we are: the invaders. If one day we can meet the enemy of the earth and he is not us, it will be a triumph. But a big change in our behavior must happen first.”

Viet Thanh Nguyen / Nothing Ever Dies (2016)

“I think back to my father’s father and what happened to his remains. The Vietnamese believe a person should be buried twice. The first time, in a field removed from home and village, the earth eats the flesh. The second time, the survivors must disinter what remains. If they have timed it correctly, there will only be bones. If they have timed it wrong, there will still be flesh. Regardless of what they find, they must wash the bones with their own hands. Then they bury the bones once more, this time closer to the living.”

Mehrsa Baradaran / The Color of Money (2017)

“Modernity will inevitably bring us closer together, which can lead to either greater resentment or greater cooperation. Perhaps more people will realize that what benefits a minority will also benefit the majority. Full racial integration will eventually remove pockets of blight, crime, and deprivation across the country. This will advance the entire American population. Integrated schools will improve education for all students, and increased equality will spur economic growth. We must shed the destructive myths that separate can equal, that a segregated economy will reach prosperity on its own, or that black banks can lead to black prosperity without fundamental economic changes. We cannot deflect the responsibility of economic equality onto black communities alone. W. E. B. Du Bois declared in 1948 that the problem of American democracy was that ‘we have not tried it.’ Perhaps it’s time to try.”

Donna Zuckerberg / Not All Dead White Men (2018)

“Feminists deserve a better internet. And future generations of readers deserve a better kind of discourse about the ancient world: one that is free of elitism and neither uncritically admiring nor rashly dismissive.”

 

 

Anthony Abraham Jack / The Privileged Poor (2019)

“My work at Midtown College and Renowned University provides strong evidence that the differences I have observed between the Privileged Poor and the Doubly Disadvantaged has to do with their disparate precollege experiences rather than with differences between them before high school. This work points out the shortcomings of treating lower-income undergraduates as a homogenous group of at-risk students. Studies that do so cannot properly measure the effects of inequality and poverty on college experiences, and as a result, they lead to biased understandings of how class and culture reproduce inequality in college. I have documented large differences between the Privileged Poor and the Doubly disadvantaged, and both groups are represented in increasing numbers at elite colleges and universities. It is important for scholars to fully explore and document their experiences and recognize their distinctiveness.”

Nicole R. Fleetwood / Marking Time (2020)

“Smith and other artists whose work interrogates incarceration are involved in relational practices that put them in conversation, in connection, in community with Ojore Lutalo, the Fariton collective, Tyra Patterson, Deal Gillispe, Lisette Oblitas, Eddie Kates, Tameca Cole, fathers and mothers, siblings and cousins, friends and activists, and others held in captivity, excluded from civil society, public life, family structures. The works of these artists and activists extend radical imaginaries and relational practices beyond the regulatory and isolating structures of imprisonment to envision and help create a world without human caging.”

Marie Favereau / The Horde (2021)

“There was as much a Jochid way of empire as there was a Roman way, an Ottoman way, and a British way. When we think about the legacy of empires, we of course recognize the cosmopolitan effects of the Mediterranean, European, and Ottoman powers that made the world smaller through practices of tolerance, coercion, exploitation, protection, investment, and conquest. These empires are credited with driving global history. But nomads drove global history, too, and none more so than the people of the Horde.”

What would you add to the list? Visit our website to explore many more extraordinary books published by Harvard University Press over the last decade. Sign up to see what's around the corner. 

Alcibiades in the Shadow of Achilles

Alcibiades—the famously handsome Athenian, ward of Pericles, friend and pupil of Socrates, and charismatic general infamous for serial disloyalty—was one of the most remarkable figures of the Golden Age of Athens. In Nemesis: Alcibiades and the Fall of Athens, David Stuttard gives us a riveting account of the man and his age, “bringing to singing life,” per Paul Cartledge, “the mercurial, magnetic, passionate, and persuasive personality of this still hugely controversial Athenian aristocrat of the fifth century BC.” In what follows below, a slightly condensed version of his recent British Museum presentation on the book, Stuttard introduces us to one of ancient Greece’s most fascinating and slippery characters.

-----

I want to take you back just over 2,400 years to the high Anatolian plain of central Turkey. It’s the year 404 BC; it’s Autumn; and it’s the dark hours of the night. Alcibiades, perhaps the most controversial Greek of his generation, is living in exile in a compound at Melissa—probably modern Afyonkarahisar—where strange rock formations erupt out of the rolling plain, near the fabled Royal Road that runs from Sardis in the west to Susa, capital of Persia’s Empire, in the east. For now, everyone inside is sleeping, but then something awakens them. Perhaps the barking of a dog. Or perhaps the acrid smell of burning creeping through the rooms, or the ever-louder crackling of fire as brown smoke pours in beneath the door, and through the cracks beside the doorposts.

Here, from my book, is what happened next:

Fully awake now, fully alert, Alcibiades leapt out of bed and threw the door wide open. Outside, stacks of dried wood had been piled high, and the flames were already tearing through them. Shouting to the people in the house to help, he dragged out rugs and mattresses and blankets, and flung them on the fire. The flames were smothered. At least for the time being. But now the smoke was bellying, and tongues of fire were licking at the edges of the blankets, and the orange heat was growing more intense. And then the arrows came. From all directions. Thudding into walls and roof and earth. Anonymous and deadly. The only warning of their approach a soft sighing of air.

The household was panic-stricken as Alcibiades, his instincts kicking in, reached for his weapons. But they had disappeared. Somehow in the night someone had taken them. All that he had now was a short knife, which a comrade pressed into his hand. But no shield. No armour. Just a blanket wrapped around his left arm as he stood, poised on the threshold. And then, calling to his friend to follow him, he bellowed his war cry and ran, naked and exposed, out into the darkness. Silhouetted against the burning house, he made an easy target. From all around him javelins rained and arrows thumped like hail as first one, then another, then another found its mark. All Alcibiades could do was run into the night, and run, and keep on running while he could, until the night engulfed him.

That description’s based meticulously on ancient sources, but all seems so theatrical, so filmic, so larger than life. But political assassinations can be larger than life, and Alcibiades’ life was every bit as complex and nail-biting as any modern political thriller.

Alcibiades was born bang in the middle of the fifth century BC, in 452 in Athens, a city that nearly sixty years before had expelled a hated ruler and established the most radical participatory democracy the world had ever seen. His mother’s family and his father’s were wealthy aristocrats from powerful families whose members numbered famous politicians, winners in Olympic chariot races, decorated war heroes—and, go back far enough, even Homeric heroes of the Trojan War. And when Alcibiades’ father, Cleinias, was killed in battle, the five-year-old boy was looked after by the most powerful politician of his day, the equally aristocratic Pericles, whose policy shaped democratic Athens, whose dream inspired the Parthenon, whose ambition was for the Athenian Empire to rule the waves.

On Human Rights in an Unequal World

In the space of less than a decade, Samuel Moyn has defined—and largely created—the field of the history of human rights. With 2010’s radically revisionist The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History, he revealed how our modern notion of human rights was birthed only in the 1970s, showing their rise to have been a precarious, contingent, and uneven development. Now, with Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World, Moyn places the history of the human rights project alongside the precisely concurrent ascendance of neoliberalism to consider how the age of human rights has been a golden age for the rich. In the exchange below we pose a few questions to Moyn about this new work that George Soros says “breaks new ground in examining the relationship between human rights and economic fairness.”

-----

Q: Your first book on human rights, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History, was published in 2010. You begin Not Enough by noting that “no account of how the present emerged is definitive for long,” and point to the feeling that history is accelerating at a pace in our present age that makes that especially true. How would you characterize the ways in which the transformations of the years between these books have changed your perspective on the origins and achievements of the human rights movement?

Like so many others, I used to be primarily concerned about the viability of the liberal international order consecrated when the Cold War ended. I was curious how human rights became the moral lingua franca of international affairs at that moment, and my research for The Last Utopia took me into histories of ethics and politics as they led to an international order in which human rights matter and social movements pursue them. What was left out, however, was economics—even though I argued in The Last Utopia that, for most of modern times, socialism appealed to more people for far longer than international human rights principles. Already when I wrote up that first book in 2008-9, the global financial crisis was helping make its framing incomplete or even obsolete. Almost ten years later, in 2016-17, I wrote this sequel placing distributional justice and political economy much closer to the heart of the history of human rights than before. (I only hope the spike in populism that year has not made my new book incomplete or obsolete!)

Q: One way of describing Not Enough is that it’s a world history of how people have thought about the fair distribution of the good things in life—who should get what—and you track the shifting global focus from equality (a concern for the share of those good things enjoyed by the least fortunate with respect to the share going to the world’s most well off) to sufficiency (a concern for the share going to the least fortunate only with respect to some minimum level of provision). The philosopher Harry Frankfurt, among others, has argued that inequality shouldn’t concern us as long as sufficiency is satisfied, and Steven Pinker has of course just published another bestseller arguing that humankind has never been better off, in large part because of the steady improvements in absolute quality of life for many in the developing world. Make the case for equality.

Equality might matter as a moral principle in its own right, as many philosophers other than Frankfurt have contended. From the Jacobins in the French Revolution to John Rawls, some modicum of equality always has had a certain number of proponents, though they have debated what precisely requires equalization and how far to justify departures from perfect equality, as most did. But as a history book, instead of arguing directly on behalf of equality in response, I just try to show how many from the French Revolution through just a few decades ago have held out for a more ambitious equality in the face of less exacting obligations. Indeed, one of my goals in Not Enough is to locate the first thinker who contended that sufficient provision is all that morality requires of our institutions—I claim it was Thomas Paine.

I also track how early socialists slowly took on board distributional equality as a norm and, much later, postcolonial voices were the first to demand truly global equality. By the end, the goal is to show how unusual it is to have advocates of sufficiency alone as prominent as Frankfurt or Pinker, in the absence of egalitarian movements and politics, which were rife across modern history. It would have appalled many of our ancestors to see how many people today agree that it is morally acceptable how far the rich are allowed to tower over the rest as long as the poor are at least somewhat better off.

Making Sense of Neoliberalism

Most people would likely claim a general understanding of neoliberalism as a movement of laissez-faire principles aimed at ensuring free markets and an “unfettered” economy. In Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism, one of the first intellectual histories of the movement, Quinn Slobodian shows that, in the beginning, neoliberalism was actually about shielding the economic world from the political world—about protecting the global economy, not freeing it. For Slobodian, neoliberalism is ultimately less a theory of the market or economics than of law and state, and his work gives us a much clearer sense of how the old world of empire gave way in the twentieth century not to a quasi-libertarian world of markets but to international institutions that were highly active in prescribing trade policies and rules about competition. Below, Slobodian introduces his study, and recounts its origins in a late-1990s moment when passion could often outpace understanding.

-----

If I had to give this book an origin point, it would be almost 20 years ago, at the 1999 protests against the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle. For people who don’t know much about it, a famous coalition of “teamsters and turtles,” meaning environmentalists along with labor unions, students, anarchists, old hippies, and assorted others shut down the meeting and shook the organization to its core. Despite the director-general’s famous call to “re-brand” in the early 2000s, the WTO hasn’t completed a negotiating round since. So, the protest was a big deal.

I was a junior in college in Portland at the time, a few hours south of Seattle, and for reasons mostly to do with laziness and ennui, I didn’t go. I remember watching the protests on our small box TV with a coat hanger stuck in the back with the sinking feeling that “oh no, a world historical event is taking place that I passed on to watch some Lars von Trier movies on VHS.”

My friends and classmates felt activated, painting huge papier-mâché fists and strapping them to their backpacks, filled with certainty. Myself, I felt demobilized and filled mostly with disorientation.

The 1990s were a weird time to come of age. Middle class North American white kids like me were profiting from everything that went under the decade’s buzzword of globalization but also saw it as something ominous, sometimes verging on evil. We were the Adbusters generation. My sixteen-year-old sister was printing small stickers attacking McDonald’s viscerally. I wrote and photocopied a zine that said on the cover in block letters: OPEN YOUR EYES.

But open them to what exactly? The world economy was like the Nothing from my favorite childhood film, The Neverending Story, an anonymous, faceless force that seemed to swallow everything in its path, extinguishing particularity; it Coca-Colonized, to use a term of the time, squashed dreams of global modernization and turned the Third World back into a labor colony to make our stuff.

Before there was fake news there were what I saw then as fake needs, created by advertising and the mind control of the blizzard of logos—the swooshes and stripes that now adorn the cool kids in Berlin and Brooklyn. Back then we were all little Frankfurt Schoolers, or Frankfurt Pre-Schoolers, distrustful of irony though we were steeped in it, seeking elusive authenticity, wanting to unveil, unmask, expose, and upend—in my case, preferably from my desk, typewriter, and the warm chairs of the library.

So this book came out of a simple question that germinated at that time: why would anyone defend the great Nothing of the world economy, the power that forced the hands of democratically elected governments, anonymously imposed new rules and strictures and only rewarded us with what I saw in my adolescent mind as a disposable culture that would choke us all with plastic, garbage, and refuse before I even had a chance to die a natural death. (Capturing some of the melodrama of the time here).

Social Breakdown in Revolutionary Russia

In Crime and Punishment in the Russian Revolution: Mob Justice and Police in Petrograd, historian Tsuyoshi Hasegawa offers a new perspective on the revolutionary year from March 1917 to March 1918 by examining a frightening rise in violent crime that threatened the daily life of ordinary citizens in the capital city. Through the lens of crime, police behavior, judiciary ineptitude, and public response, Hasegawa demonstrates how the breakdown of political and social institutions paralyzed the city and paved the way for the rise of a new kind of authoritarianism. Below, Hasegawa introduces his study of the violent, chaotic lived experience of the revolution, and considers some of its relevance for our world today.

-----

The catastrophic social breakdown of Petrograd, capital city of the Russian Empire, during the Russian Revolution of 1917 is an important aspect of the revolution that has been overlooked. There was euphoric excitement after the February Revolution, with people expecting immediate improvements to their lives. But life only got worse, and the city soon became paralyzed. Provision of electricity and water dwindled and soon stopped. Garbage piled up in the streets and courtyards, uncollected. The city stank so bad that newspapers commented that even an elephant would faint. Worst of all, basic food became scarcer. People had to stand for hours in long queues for a mere loaf of bread. Horses starved to death, and warnings were posted against their consumption. Dogs disappeared, ending up in people’s stomachs. Consequently, epidemics spread, filling the hospitals.

As horrible as this all was, the most frightening change in daily life was the sharp rise of crime, especially violent crime. The Tsar was gone, and the tsarist police were also annihilated. The newly created municipal police force was inexperienced and untrained, and infiltrated by former criminals. Pickpockets became muggers. Robbers became murderers. Faith in daily exchange suffered, as people believed that merchants were taking advantage of shortages and economic decline to soak a population already suffering from rationing and deprivation.

The old court system also became paralyzed, and the temporary new courts passed erratic verdicts without solid legal basis. Soon, even the temporary courts were abolished, leaving the citizens nowhere to go to lodge their daily complaints. The prison system broke down, leading to the mass escape of criminals back onto streets already riddled with crime.

Longing for the order and security that political authorities could not provide, people took the law into their own hands. Crowds turned to mob justice. When witnessing a crime, people attempted to catch the perpetrators, even petty thieves. They surrounded them there on the spot, beat them, sometimes even tearing them from limb to limb. They paraded them through the streets by tying them on carts, or threw them into the canals and rivers to enjoy watching them drown.

This brutal violence is, in my view, one of the most prominent, frightening, and often ignored aspects of the Russian Revolution. The revolution brought out the worst of human emotions—hatred, cruelty, brutality, and vengeance.

It is important to recognize that the Bolsheviks approved and often encouraged this breakdown of social order. Lenin in fact thought mob justice was the expression of justifiable popular anger against the bourgeois order.

But Lenin spoke too soon, because things went from bad to worse under the Bolsheviks. Both crime and mob justice grew in frequency and cruelty. Moreover, under the Bolsheviks a new element of mob violence was added: alcohol pogroms. Mobs attacked wine and vodka cellars in November and December. The most violent and notorious raid took place in the wine cellar of the Winter Palace, where many drowned to death. A Bolshevik high official helplessly observed that the Bolshevik power was drowning in a sea of wine and vodka.

Loebs New and New Again

June saw the publication of four new Loeb Classical Library volumes, a batch consisting of two revisions to earlier works and two new additions to the corpus. Below, General Editor Jeffrey Henderson introduces the offerings.

-----

Following the release in fall 2016 of the extraordinary Early Greek Philosophy in nine volumes (LCL 524–532), the Loeb Classical Library catalog for spring 2017 resumes a more typical pattern: two volumes of works new to the Library and two replacement volumes, one each of Latin and Greek. Yet this catalog is not so typical in longer historical perspective: each volume in its own way exemplifies significant adjustments to James Loeb’s original plan for the Library that have been developed over the past half-century in order to preserve the viability and maintain the vitality of his vision for new generations of readers.

Loeb aimed “to include all that is of value and of interest in Greek and Latin literature” and so imagined a moment when the Library would be complete, which almost came to pass in the 1970s as a solution (however unwelcome) to the financial challenges of that era. Instead, there were prospects for a new dawn: the roster of works that count as valuable and interesting is not an immutable or finite canon, but one that changes and expands in each successive generation. Nor are existing volumes immortal, as even the most solid ones inevitably grow outdated in one way or another. And so, the LCL embarked on a massive revaluation project to grade each existing edition for retention, revision, or replacement, and to add such new editions as would likely be received as valuable and interesting. Accordingly, new authors and works continue to be added, but revisions and replacements appear at an equal pace: over 25% of the Library’s editions have already been revised or replaced, and in many cases expanded by adding lesser-known or fragmentary works.

The idea of systematic revision was already in the air when General Editor Eric Warmington decided to revise Heseltine’s edition of Petronius in 1969 (LCL 15), as soon as the relaxation of obscenity laws in the US allowed (the UK had acted a decade earlier), and the de-bowdlerization of the Library has continued apace. Similarly for archaic or otherwise dated styles: Edmonds’ 1912 edition of the Greek Bucolic Poets, among other outdated features, claimed allegiance to the “fain/twain school” and used regional dialect or “colloquial suburban” to represent characters in the mimes, is virtually unreadable today and was finally replaced in 2015 by Neil Hopkinson’s fine and pellucid Theocritus. Moschus. Bion (LCL 28). By contrast, Way’s 1913 edition of Quintus Smyrnaeus (LCL 19), though it features a very stilted iambic pentameter translation, was deemed in the Loeb assessment of 1991 not to warrant replacement on the grounds that such a translation is “what this poetaster deserves” and that the existence of Vian’s sound text was “hardly sufficient to justify a new edition of this boring writer.” But here, as often, times and tastes have changed, so that Hopkinson’s replacement of the Way edition is scheduled to appear next year.

Many other factors come into play when deciding whether to revise or replace an edition, for example the existence of a better critical edition on which to base the text, the quality and currency of the scholarship, the level of annotation, or the adequacy of the front and back matter; the first volume of de Melo’s Plautus (LCL 60) has a 120-page Introduction versus the 8 pages offered by its predecessor, a decision prompted largely by the lack elsewhere of a similar overview for Anglophone readers.

Both new editions in the spring 2017 catalog contain works from the second century AD: the first volume of Michael Trapp’s edition of Aelius Aristides’ Orations (LCL 533), and Christopher P. Jones’ Apologia, Florida, and De Deo Socratis of Apuleius (LCL 534), which together with the Metamorphoses (LCL 44, 453) complete our coverage of that author’s genuine works. Although this era of the “Second Sophistic” was exceptionally prolific on both the Roman and the Greek sides, intellectually and artistically rich and varied, and crucially important in the transmission of classicism, it had been for the most part the preserve of specialists until a recent renewal of interest began to equip the rest of us to understand and appreciate its riches. These works by Aelius Aristides and Apuleius, two of the most distinctive and celebrated figures of their time, join other recent and forthcoming additions by Philostratus (LCL 521) and Galen (LCL 523, 535, 536) to help fill out our picture of an important era.

The other two volumes for spring 2017 replace existing volumes, which are thus retired from both the print and the digital Library: Emlyn Jones’ and Preddy’s new Plato, volume I (LCL 36) replaces Harold North Fowler’s edition of 1914, and J. C. Yardley’s new Livy, volume IX (LCL 295) replaces Evan T. Sage’s edition of 1935. The decision to revise or replace differs in each individual case and then depends on finding the right editor to (re-)do both text and translation. In both these cases, replacement was surely merited. Fowler’s Plato lacked a solid foundation for revision: its text had long been superseded, its translation was dated and often inaccurate, its 10-page introduction was minimal and unhelpful, there were no explanatory notes, and Phaedrus does not belong with Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, and Phaedo. (Phaedrus is now slated to be included with two other dialogues on love and literature, Lysis and Symposium, in a forthcoming replacement of LCL 166.) Emlyn-Jones and Preddy, who had recently replaced our edition of Plato’s Republic (LCL 237, 276), were happily ready to repair these deficiencies, and continue to assist us in our long-term efforts to update our twelve volumes of Plato.

An even more massive replacement project is inaugurated by Yardley’s new volume of Livy, whose complete LCL edition is currently in fourteen volumes. Livy presents a special challenge insofar as his monumental History of Rome begins with the city’s foundation and continues down into his own era in the age of Augustus, thus requiring editorial expertise spanning multiple historical periods. Hence our original edition, begun in 1919 and completed in 1959, was divided among four editors: B. O. Foster for Books 1–22 (LCL 114, 133, 172, 191, 233), Frank Gardner Moore for Books 23–30 (LCL 355, 367, 381), the aforementioned Evan T. Sage for Books 31–42 (LCL 295, 301, 313, 332) and his collaborator on volume XII Alfred Cary Schlesinger for Books 43–45, etc. (LCL 396, 404). Each of these volumes is a product of its time, and needs updating for various reasons. Yardley’s LCL volumes of Livy’s third and fourth decades, based on Briscoe’s new critical edition, initiate our efforts to convey Livy’s meaning to the Anglophone reader more uniformly and accurately, with much fuller annotation in line with current scholarship. (We began with the fourth decade while we awaited the publication of the final books of Briscoe’s edition of the third.) Yardley, a veteran translator of Livy, is just the right scholar to set the overall tone for this undertaking, and even as his new LCL volumes will replace Sage’s, so too will replacements for the existing LCL volumes by Foster, Gardner Moore, and Schlesinger follow in due course.

Russia’s Story of War

As the role Russia plays on the world stage continues to face extreme scrutiny, from the ongoing investigation into their part in the American election to international impatience with Putin’s steadfast support for Assad in Syria, it becomes increasingly important to understand how Russians themselves see their place in the world. A new book from Gregory Carleton, Russia: The Story of War, examines this through the lens of violent conflict and the centuries-old part it plays in Russian culture and self-identity. As Carleton writes, “we cannot fully understand Russia without recognizing its experience of war and the resulting stories it tells of itself. We need not condone them, but to ignore them or, as is commonplace in the West, to dismiss them as ludicrous, as the product of delusional fantasy, handicaps our ability to understand how they have profoundly shaped Russia’s self-image and worldview.” In the excerpt below, Carleton looks at the Russian experience of war and how this feeds into a self-mythologizing idea of “exceptionalism,” so strong that it has continued through massive shifts in ideology and government over centuries.

-----

Bully. Bear. Insatiable aggressor. To many the words are inseparable from Russia itself. Wherever one looks support can be found for such epithets. The annexation of Crimea and military intervention in eastern Ukraine; the earlier flash war with Georgia and flattening of Chechen dreams for independence; the inward turn to authoritarianism and open assault on civil liberties—all push Russia onto the stage of international villainy.

The images, to be sure, enjoy little favor at home. There the titles one hears come as if from a parallel world where all is turned on its head. Allusions to Russia the defender, the protector, and even the savior or liberator permeate state media, academic tomes, religious manifestos, and popular histories. In spite of how far apart the two worldviews are, sustenance for these alter egos can be drawn from the same events and actions. The distance between the two is as unbridgeable as the values that define them. They share, perhaps, only one feature. Neither is new.

Russia has long borne this Janus-faced reputation, no matter what flag it has flown or ideology it has embraced. Its image as villain stretches back virtually unbroken for centuries. Other nations have at times taken the limelight, but none in the modern age has been such a consistent member of the cast, as if history permanently and purposefully assigned Russia that role.

War is where Russia’s contested legacy has been forged. For a millennium its lands, along with those of Belarus and Ukraine, have been among the world’s great battlefields. The scope, savagery, and frequency of conflicts that have ravaged this region are almost unprecedented. The largest armies, the biggest battles, the worst losses of life—all of these superlatives would rightfully, and tragically, point there.

As a consequence, war saturates Russian culture. Many of its churches have been built to honor its military heritage—some directly on battlefields with icons of warrior-saints adorning the walls while they continue service as the country’s heavenly guardians. Noted operas and ballets are devoted to war, while its dominance in cinema and television is unparalleled. The saturation runs so deep that Russia’s most famous writers, many of whom wore a uniform, cannot avoid the subject, whether in novel, verse, story, or essay.

The Idea of the Muslim World

President Trump’s weekend address in Saudi Arabia, a centerpiece of his first foreign trip since taking office, was billed as an address to the “Muslim world,” much in the same way as President Obama’s 2009 speech in Cairo. Though Trump’s focus on the threat of Iran undercut the notion of Muslim singularity, the speech was both presented and received in the context of an imagined global Muslim unity. In The Idea of the Muslim World: A Global Intellectual History, Cemil Aydin asks how, despite “the obvious naïveté of categorizing one and a half billion people” as a single community, this idea’s become so entrenched. “How did we arrive at this point,” writes Aydin, “where a fantastical entity could be so present, so prevalent in political thinking? Why do so many Muslim and non-Muslim political leaders, intellectuals, and religious figures comfortably base many of their arguments and decisions on the idea of the Muslim world without reflecting on the accuracy of the generalization that this term signifies?” In the excerpt below, Aydin begins to trace the emergence of this imagined global unity during the peak of European hegemony in the late nineteenth century, when poor colonial conditions, European discourses of Muslim racial inferiority, and Muslims’ theories of their own apparent decline nurtured the first arguments for pan-Islamic solidarity.

-----

The idea of the Muslim world is inseparable from the claim that Muslims constitute a race. The distinction of the Muslim world and the Christian West began taking shape most forcefully in the 1880s, when the majority of Muslims and Christians resided in the same empires. The rendering of Muslims as racially distinct—a process that called on both “Semitic” ethnicity and religious difference—and inferior aimed to disable and deny their demands for rights within European empires. Muslim intellectuals could not reject the assumptions of irreducible difference but responded that they were equal to Christians, deserving of rights and fair treatment. The same conception of Muslim unity and difference justified appeals to Muslims as a global community during World War I and World War II. Racial assumptions also ensured that later subaltern and nationalist claims for rights would be framed in the idioms of Muslim solidarity and an enduring clash between Islam and the West, giving rise to the Islamism and Islamophobia of the 1980s and beyond.

It is thanks to this elaboration of both Muslim difference and Muslim unity that contemporary writing, scholarly and otherwise, tends to emphasize Muslim exceptionalism. The assumption is that Muslims, due to their piety and the nature of their faith, naturally resist the liberal international order of independent, pluralistic nation-states. Muslims’ attitudes toward politics are presumed different from those of Buddhists, Hindus, Jews, and Christians, whose societies need not be explained by reference to faith tradition or civilizational identity. However, this theory of Muslim exceptionalism is unsupported and unsubstantiated. The Ottoman Empire, Republican Turkey, British-ruled Indian Muslims, Afghanistan, the Saudi Kingdom, Pakistan, postcolonial Egypt, and Iran under the shah ardently supported the imperial and later nationalist world orders. The seeming importance of Islam in the contemporary politics of Muslim-majority societies derives not from theological requirements or a uniquely high level of Muslim piety but from the legacy of imperial racialization of Muslim-ness and from the particular intellectual and political strategies of Muslim resistance to this racialized identity.

The geography and technology of empire were essential to these processes of racialization and resistance in the second half of the nineteenth century. New transportation and communication technologies such as steamships and the telegraph fostered unprecedented levels of connection among Muslims, naturalizing the geopolitical concept of the Muslim world in Europe and its colonies. The networks enabled by these technologies were the medium of pan-Islamic thought born of confrontation with imperial racism.

Imperial racism, but not empire itself. Muslim leaders and thinkers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were not, for the most part, anti-imperialists. Instead they sought fair treatment from the four major European empires: British, Dutch, French, and Russian. These were cosmopolitan arrangements, home to wide-ranging ethnic and religious groups. But racialized legal categorizations shared across European empires, the empowerment strategies of colonized Muslim subjects, and tactics employed in imperial rivalries confirmed rather than challenged Muslim difference, ensuring that Muslims would be a separate class within the imperial whole. The British ruled almost half of the world’s Muslims and therefore played an especially important role in guiding the development of pan-Islamic thought. British fears of rebellion and policies of oppression engendered specifically Muslim responses. At the same time, Muslims understood that their vast numbers and the reality of their overwhelming loyalty to the empire all owed them real clout.