The Great Transformation - Karl Polanyi

Daily our lives enact the hopes of a stark utopia. The free market system aims at achieving 'the greatest good for the greatest' through the market's ability to measure, and respond to, the needs and desires of individuals. While we may think of the market as nested within society, Karl Polanyi inverts this notion to suggest that society has become nested within market logics. This so-called "Great Transformation" renders men and women as economic entities. This is an assessment not only of the primary interests of the individual, but the extent to which each of us ought to be measured. It is the agglomeration of individual goods, transformed into the broader good of society, which is supposedly the goal of the free market approach. Polanyi argues that this utopian ideal is impossible. The total extension of the free market, he argues, would achieve no more or less than the destruction of society.

We are well-served to remember that the creation of the market society was specifically a historical occurrence nested within certain political and social contexts. This transition away from the period of state formation in the 17th and 18th centuries, into one of increasing global interconnection, altered the logic and balances of power. As states became awash in broader contexts their interactions took on a decidedly more economic air. Economic liberalism suggested that trade between countries and regions held the power to deliver men wealth beyond what heretofore had been possible. Of course, with winners there are losers, and the backlash of protectionism fostered deepening institutional strains. The requirements of greater production demanded the transformation, not only of industry and economy, but of landscapes, geographies, and human interactions. These transformations rested upon contradictory balances which required the careful governance of society and economy to ensure the 'proper' functioning of markets. In Polanyi's estimation the free market has never, nor can it ever, truly exist. Rather, society is an arrangement of priorities favoring certain economic values at the expense of broader human and environmental concerns. The isolation of the market, as the nexus of society, from these varying concerns, is, perhaps, the strangest of movements in the modern world.

It is this isolation of man from his broader concerns, and standardization of interactions, that renders the modern world something new under the sun. The freedom of modern society is rightly conceived as primarily freedom within a narrowly defined economic sphere: as long as we don't threaten the proper functioning of the market (read: society), freedom is ours to explore. However, any social organization is a negotiation of freedom regarding certain expectations of contract. The question becomes if the balance of society forecloses the expression of our broader freedoms. Society has become the new reality, how we measure and balance our desires and the expression of our humanity within it potentially authors further transformations.

Ecology Against Capitalism - John Bellamy Foster

A series of essays critiquing the relationship between capitalism and the non-human world, John Bellamy Foster employs a marxist perspective to describe the contradictions wrought by our global economic system.  Modern, economic, attempts to measure the immeasurable, to bring nature into the balance sheet, are seen by Foster to be both necessary aspects, and  unavoidable difficulties for capitalism. Examining the environmental debates (crisis?) of the 1980s and 1990s, these short essays variously touch on contemporary issues of technology and human freedom, while integrating more scholarly examinations of economic and social theory.

Throughout, Foster emphasizes the necessity for broad-scale social transformation to address growing human-caused, environmental degradation and transformation. This is largely grounded upon what he sees as the inextricable linking of the dominant political powers to the economic levers of influence. The uninitiated is left to imagine that such ties have only strengthened in the ensuing years.

Latent in Foster's critique (and it seems in most marxist criticisms) is the notion that society as currently constructed sacrifices the many at the alter of the few. Though the alienation of people from the world may be an issue which obscures our true relationships amongst each other and the world, left unclear is why people are not more outraged? The insights of a marxist approach, though they may run contrary to numerous, dominant, western paradigms, are not that irreconcilable with different approaches to knowing and governance. Why then, do people not raise more vocal oppositions? Are we silenced more than we realize? Do we simply ignore the disconnects in the world around us? Maybe it is that the rhetoric has become so demonized, but such critiques always smack a bit of paranoia. If we cannot provide an adequate rebuttal, why do we not therefore change our own minds, expectations, and approaches? What is the passage through which concepts must navigate to become reality?

Marx's Ecology: Materialism and Nature - John Bellamy Foster

While it is universally accepted that the work of Charles Darwin has revolutionized the natural sciences, lesser known is the impact it had on another of the 19th century's most formative figures. The publication of The Origin of Species helped cohere Karl Marx's ideas about the dialectical principles within the world. Much like Marxism was a philosophy rooted in the interactive, joint production of people and the world, Darwinian thought struck at two of the fundamental tenets of contemporary western thought: essentialism and teleology. By grounding history and society in a "materialist ontology of emergence" (p. 233) both Darwin and Marx would transform how humans conceived of their relations with the world.

John Bellamy Foster sets out to reveal a forgotten history of Marx's (and Engels') ecological thought. Tracing the intellectual development of a young Marx through his dissertation examining Epicurean philosophy, Foster sows the materialist seeds that will blossom into Marx's central works. Overlooked in western recountings of Marxist thought, Foster argues, is an almost proto-ecological ethic. This is was not because Marx was some closeted, dreamy-eyed romantic, but rather because he drew sharp connections between the alienation of men from the landscape, and the domination of the capitalist. In Marx's estimation, the progression of capitalism relied on a double alienation of the worker both from himself (his human-ness) and from access to the land. Only the disconnect of town and country fostered a people abstracted from the world. In a passage that presages our own modern ecological concerns, Marx writes:

"Man lives, from nature, i.e. nature is his body, and he must maintain a continuing dialogue with it if he is not to die. To say that man's physical and mental life is linked to nature simply means that nature is linked to itself, for man is a part of nature."

It was, Marx thought, that only through such an awareness could the formative ensemble of relations between people and the world be adequately conceived. Attempts to separate Marx's political economy from his ecological theory will, Foster argues, incorrectly assess both the home-ground and the implications of Marxist thought.

For Marx, the true dialectic requires a proper situating of relations. Marx was a thoroughgoing materialist, one who saw the relational interaction of things as the constant reinvention of the world. In this materialism Marx was echoing the words of Epicurus and Lucretius: in materialism he too imagined the fundamental premise by which men could be freed to make their own history. For Marx, the materialist conception of nature and the materialist conception of history went hand-in-hand. As such, he and Darwin can be heard to speak the message, registering in different octaves.

What Hath God Wrought - Daniel Walker Howe

One can almost book-end what Daniel Walker Howe terms the formative years of the American republic with the political career of John Quincy Adams. As Secretary of State for President Monroe, Quincy Adams would pen the Monroe Doctrine, asserting the rights of the United States to the continent and setting the course for American expansion. On February 21, 1848, Old Man Eloquent would die serving at his post in the House of Representatives, speaking out against the country's continued insistence of celebrating the Mexican-American War, ambivalent about the expansion he had helped to nurture. Though he was only one of what might be considered the grandest generation of statesmen (including Webster, Clay, Calhoun and Hart Benton, among others), Adams cast a special shadow as the conscience of the young and fitful nation. His death was the final knell sounded for an older America, as it receded into history.

Interweaving growing industrialization, the increasing power of differing sects of Protestantism, and the advent of the two-party political system, Howe persuasively argues that the thirty years from 1815 - 1845 set the course for America beyond the Civil War and into the twentieth century. Though Howe's work sets itself the ambitious task of reviewing the entirety of the nation's history for the period, as an introduction and overview it ably casts a broad scope while pulling out salient and memorable details which provide a flavor of the politics and personages of the time. Throughout he emphasizes the speed and abilities of communication and the development of infrastructure as forces that would shrink time and space and bring the frontiers of empire to the door of civil-society.

The work succeeds as both a top-down review of political power and a bottom-up examination of the role that burgeoning social movements played in the growth of the empire and the American psyche. Howe's work is perhaps at its most insightful where these two concerns meet: the emergence of the modern US political party system. From virtual one-party rule under the Monroe Administration to the splintering of both the Whigs and Democrats in the run-up to the Civil War, the unsettled issues and contestations of debate are shown to interact within evolving nested contexts. Concepts of person-hood and rights, state versus federal power, and the privilege of the many versus the protection of the few, were far from settled by the Constitution and Bill of Rights. As the Congress and the Supreme Court struggled to enumerate the roles of government and the rights of citizens, the parties jockeyed for position and influence. With such uncertainty the political winds of influence blew in great gusts, swinging between seeming Democratic hegemony and Whig ascendancy. Shying away from simply defining all politics through the lens of slavery, Howe argues that the "peculiar institution" is better understood as one of a host of political (and ethical) concerns - though this too would evolve over the period. Yet it was often the cleavage point of slavery which continued to divide North and South, and served as the discursive shorthand for the opposition of different ways of life and conceptualization of the relationships between government and the people.

Here we see the adolescence of America in all its fits and starts. From the halls of the Capitol to the swamps of Louisiana. Within the percolations of such an era of global uncertainty we glimpse the formations of time and space; and are given room to imagine a world as it has been, as it would come to be, and, what did not come to pass.

Song of Myself - Walt Whitman

Whitman writes of wonderful interconnection; cosmos wheeling underneath, numbered hairs and dignity within, and without. So many roads to walk and, similarly, to move under our feet. "And there is no object so soft but it makes a hub for the wheel'd universe." How to synopsize, how to coalesce and communicate a statement of the self that is at once driving headlong, and similarly, felt at the margins? Both bold in assured dignity and timid in tentative wonder? Much as Whitman bequeaths himself to the dirt, or hastens to converse with the chorus of the all-purposed invisible, he lives and breathes, touching within and without, in surrender.

The binding notion for Whitman, in my own estimation (at least today) is total emptiness at the center: the arrival of oneself is the whole coming-together of an entire history of the universe - past, present, and at the knife-edge of creative novelty. We are, and it all is, constantly being reinvented. "Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes." Total stability renders phenomena immobile. Thermodynamics demands the loss of energy; the unintended outcome gives rise to the new world, and, thus, the new self. If we were already full, determined, drivers of our own destiny, then whither our new sense of self, our own transformation? We would be rendered immobile by Ecclesiastes - disparaging of nothing new under the sun. Recombination. Stagnation. Death there.

But I hesitate to simplify it, even so. Surely there is much more to find and be found. Wiser minds thinking wiser thoughts. The mountain doesn't simply come to Muhammad, nor can it provide our own salvation. Each, like Whitman, brings what he or she will to each new pass-way, each tight-rope movement. Transcendent effort, his, and each of us can meet him along the road - that place of co-production. Thus, the world is borne again, and each of us within it, and constituting it. Forever and ever. Great exultation there.

"I know I have the best of space and time, and was never measured and never will be measured."

Thanks, Gary.

Moa - Quinn Berentson

Quinn Berentson's Moa: the life and death of New Zealand's legendary bird, is part environmental and scientific history, part anthropological travelogue, and all elegy for these grand, extinct, birds of New Zealand. The moa emerges in Berentson's work as both product and producer; gateway into a disappeared world, and formative of this new-found place.

In detailing the settlement of New Zealand alongside the introduction of the moa to the western world, Berentson reveals how the last journey of the moa would be New Zealans's first: as they both entered into our consciousness. Uncovering the shifting grounds of uncertainty surrounding scientific discovery, Berentson allows us to peer into the unknown in the world around us, and reflect upon, not only how we come to know, but that we too leave footprints on the landscape trod.


Complete review published in Ostrich: Journal of African Ornithology

Trying Leviathan - D. Graham Burnett

The sound of a startling hubbub permeated New York City between Christmas and New Years, 1818. At issue was a court case debating a, seemingly, simple question, "are whales fish?" Yet, as D. Graham Burnett relates, this straight-forward question of classification and natural history was anything but, for it touched not only on the place of cetaceans and people in the "great chain of being," but also on the place of scientific and popular knowledge within the young American republic. In delving deeply into the historical and social context of the court case, Maurice v. Judd, Burnett has provided a far-seeing window allowing the reader to glimpse not only the evolution of classification within biology, but also contestations over who was the rightful representative of the natural world within the human sphere and the how definitions and placements of the natural delineated roles and differences within society.

It would be easy for a retrospective historian to look at this trial as one more tired example within the popular opinion versus scientific knowledge narrative. Luckily for us, Burnett has far too deft a touch, and is clearly too careful a thinker, to allow for such reductionist pandering. Rather than attempt to cut through the uncertainty and messiness of the period, with some modern-day dismissal of our naive and ignorant predecessors, Burnett sinks himself into the morass of context, to make us wonder along with everyone else, "what exactly makes a fish a fish?" Was it so settled that scientists thought whales were mammals? What about whalemen? Surely those who had actually grappled with a living beast ought to have their say. As for the common people, even their understandings were not so easily categorized. This final concern was of central importance. For, as the trial closed, it was about the practical application of understandings within the young republic, and how these differed across space, that would decide the fate of leviathan. Maurice v Judd was to become not only a question of classification, but of the placing of science within the politics and policy of the city.

Toward the end of his work Burnett refers to natural history of the period as existing within a "paradigm of confusion" and, indeed, it is the careful elucidation of this paradigm which grounds Trying Leviathan. Certainty and uncertainty rarely fall into such neat classifications. Too frequently we assume to know everything, or nothing. Truly, it is often the case that we have some information, that we move forward tentatively, with uncertainty. Capturing the spirit which animates the tough slog of living gives history a more nuanced, and yes, a more truthful animation.  Whether we hail the whale as a brother of Mammalia is about expertise yes, but also about common acceptation, which, like knowledge, is always subject to revision and change. We too are caught in the same morass; overwrought by the same hubbub.