Livingstone - Tim Jeal

"In analysing the life of a great man - and Livingstone was undoubtedly great - there is always a basic problem: to be great is to be different, so the ordinary criteria of judgment fall short...Very often his best qualities were also his worst."

How we feel about David Livingstone at the end of Tim Jeal's biography will be bound up with the extent to which we allow for a type of license to such a "great" man. Unquestionably David Livingstone was not a good man. Therefore, do we forgive him for a lack of humanity given all that he was able to accomplish? Clearly this will depend on how we regard Livingstone's accomplishments and these, as Jeal highlights, have become inextricably bound up in the myth of Livingstone. At turns regarded as a dedicated missionary, an intrepid voyager, a peerless explorer, a national hero, a failure, and finely, a living legend, how Livingstone's accomplishments were understood by his contemporaries bear little resemblance to our current recognition of them. At the time of his death it was believed that Livingstone had discovered the headwaters of the Nile. We know now that he was mistaken. It was believed that he "discovered" Lake Nyassa (Lake Malawi), but of course Arab and Portuguese slave traders had long since navigated the lakes shores (not to mention countless Africans). Livingstone's crossing of southern African from Angola to Mozambique we now know had been previously accomplished, and finally, his geographic readings have been shown to be in significant error. Beyond his own time his accomplishments seem greatly diminished.

Yet we must recognize that this modern reality bears little impact on the life Livingstone led. He was undoubtedly, by the time of his death, an inspiration to his countrymen and countless missionaries. Without his exploits the history of Africa and the colonization would have looked drastically different - whether for better or worse we can never know. His impact on geopolitics and his legacy may have grown much greater after his lonely death in the African wilderness, but rarely has one man been so absent from the same society that would come to revere his accomplishments so greatly.

Judgment of the dead by our own standards of morality is a tricky proposition. While Livingstone was surely a difficult and thankless individual, he also lived a difficult and largely thankless life. Though surely made of sterner stuff, he was also a man who grew up in, and spent his life inhabiting, stern places. He pushed himself beyond the bounds of what one man should reasonably be expected to endure, and failed to understand how others could not meet his lofty standards. Yet all of this cannot entirely save us from the feeling that Livingstone was simultaneously dismissive of whites and paternalistic to Africans. Can we divorce our sense that he was distasteful personally from the idea that we has a "great" man? As the magnitude of his accomplishments seem to fade with time, and his morals seem even more distant, this will become more difficult. He was a complex man, deserving of a complex understanding.

Republic - Plato

Education, freedom, and happiness, are, among lesser issues, the preeminent themes of Plato’s Republic. I suppose no one ever accused the philosopher of thinking small. As is the case (though the contrast is less stark) with Shakespeare, or The Beatles, a modern reader (or viewer, or listener, respectively) might be struck by the seemingly pedestrian nature of Plato’s work. What, perhaps, strikes the modern reader the most, is the philosophical dialogue Plato, through Socrates, seems to be responding to. Here we find one clue to the riddle of Plato’s novelty. What makes Republic so seminal – along with other Platonic dialogues – is its very novelty, or, more precisely, the widespread impact this type of novel thinking would have on the Western world.

                While the works of Homer, Sophocles’ Aias, perhaps even The Symposium (my history may be confused here) represent a certain type of relationship between the good and ourselves, between society and the individual, Republic conceives of a person’s relation to the world differently. While those works judge action and right as concerns measured relative to social context, Republic judges our actions as internal affairs. That which is best is that which assures the greatest happiness, to be recognized by the proper balance felt within the individual. Though Plato is ostensibly speaking of how to ensure the proper stability of society he is, so he says, primarily concerned with understanding and fostering the best persons. Perhaps his seeming focus upon the best state was Plato’s subtle transition towards a more individualized ethics.

                Unquestionably Republic casts a long shadow, perhaps the longest in Western literature. By turning our focus inwards, by transforming glory into the pursuit of knowledge and the pre-eminence of individual consciousness, Plato helped to inaugurate the modern world.

Paris, Capital of Modernity - David Harvey

David Harvey contests the notion that modernity was a discrete and absolute break with the past. Rather, in examining Paris’ political and social perturbations across the 19^th century, Harvey shows how the city, through fits and bursts, was reimagined to become a modernized space. We might assert this title of modernization if we, as Harvey does, recognize that modernity is less something new under the sun, and more an emergent conceptual shift. When does a place or a people cross the threshold into the modern? How could we recognize this transition and what does it mean to say so? Leaving these questions open to negotiation, Harvey examines what remains a seminal transition.

Given Harvey’s Marxist bonafides, it is hardly surprising that his story of Paris pits the proletariat and bourgeois against one another. At times his work seems little more or less than a straight application of Marx’s thoughts to the Parisian situation. This should not be read as a denigration of his application. Rather, we cannot help but wonder to what extent a hammer sees only nails. Perhaps, when it is all said and done, historians will agree that the transformative powers of capital truly rendered the 19^th century most recognizable through a Marxist lens. If this is the case Harvey convincingly posits Paris as the ideal urban space to bring the dialogues of capital and labour, urban and rural, and nature and production together.

The impacts of changing Parisian economics create a patchwork quilt of evolving modernity across the city. While Haussmann and his planners remade the city on the broad-scale rationality of straight lines and organized services (for which we should at least be partially thankful), they simultaneously necessitated movements and informal livelihoods of the working classes. Perhaps this call-and-response across the social sphere is endemic to ‘modern’ ways of being: as society becomes more rational informal space takes on new meaning. Even though it may be the official sphere which recognizes the designation of formal versus informal, this does not imply that the formal will dictate the informal. Along the parkways and over the barricades which delineated political identities, new identities and societies would be formed. Along each side both the formal and informal, the modern and the traditional, would play a role, respond to one another, and drive change. The modern inhabits and invents a space that is at once new and nested. Rather than simply break with the past, we consciously recreate and redefine it, as we recreate and redefine ourselves.

1493 - Charles Mann

The coming of Columbus to the Americas would inaugurate a series of biological, economic, and ecological transformations unlike any previously experienced in human history. Much has been written about the social, cultural, and political transformations which cannot be imagined without the bridging of the new and old worlds. Yet what Charles Mann argues in 1493, the companion piece to his 1491, is that the previously underappreciated aspects of what Alfred Crosby termed “the Columbian Exchange” had further reaching consequences in altering the social-ecological world co-inhabited by humans and nonhumans. What we would term “globalization” first took flight in the transportation of different biological entities across the oceans.

Because we are linked together with the ecology of our world, human actions must also be viewed ecologically. Such is what Michel Serres termed the basis for our potential natural contract. Mann examines the implications of changing social and ecological relationships as they were transformed by the linking together of the old and the new world. This is a mighty task to address comprehensively – perhaps more than can be reasonably expected from one volume. The book is wide-ranging, to say the least, and Mann introduces some novel and necessary concepts for how we envision both our past and present. Most incisively the question arises: can we justifiably say that Europe, Europeans, or European culture dominated one side of the Columbian Exchange? Would it mean to suggest such a judgment? Too often, it seems, we assume that Europe expanded to fill the world. What if our assessments are misguided and the meaning of the West was irrevocably altered through contact? What would the implications then be? Mann’s book is too discursive to properly treat any certain aspect of such wide-ranging transformations. Nevertheless, it synthesizes a great deal of information and provides much food for thought.

The American College and University: A History - Frederick Rudolph

The development of American higher education demonstrates an interesting reimagination of both the English college and German university. A marriage between these two approaches, wed within a sort-of Jacksonian democratic ideal  accounts for a large part of the strengths, and difficulties which have come to characterize colleges and universities, both public and private, across the United States.

Tracing the growth and movements of higher education, from the birth of Harvard University, to the debates which typified Robert Hutchins' tenure at the University of Chicago, Rudolph situates his own history along the dominant streams of American cultural and social history. In so doing he has captured the notion and the feeling that the history of higher education, particularly those elite institutions which comprise the thrust of his work, stands at once separate from, and responds deeply to, changes throughout American history. Though schools like Yale, Johns Hopkins, the University of Michigan, and Cornell continue to play such a formative role in creating many of the country's preeminent leaders and thinkers, Rudolph succinctly illustrates how these institutions are responsive, albeit sometimes slowly, to the exhibited needs of the world around them. To the extent that this influences the type of experiences the next generation of leaders and thinkers will have, the arena of higher education cannot help but feel like a slightly conservative force within American society (there are, of course, exceptions to this).

Rather than moralize over the extent to which colleges and universities manifest democratic ideals - a critique so readily leveled in contemporary discussions of higher education - Rudolph traces the very growth of the democratic spirit, and how this has helped to expand colleges and universities, while often compromising the very mission they often pursue. The tension between trying to create an education which is deep, rigorous, and broad, and the possibility of providing for the learning of the many, may forever remain unresolved in American higher education. Perhaps this reflects a tension within society. Though it need not necessarily be the case, the demands of a practical education always seem to oppose the dreams of a scholarly and introspective one. While we may regard this as a failure of educational theorists and developers, we might conversely wonder if our social world forecloses the prospect of living a thoughtful and introspective life which is also social? If we agree that this tension exists in education, can we similarly assert that the same tension exists in society, and within ourselves?

The Age of Jackson - Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.

The battle between the differing ideals of Thomas Jefferson's small-government notions, with freedom and energy based in the hands of the decentralized electorate, and Alexander Hamiliton's Federalism, which recognized the needs for a strong centralized government around which the states would have to orbit, would only begin to be settled by the generation which succeeded the Founding Fathers. As the young nation battled over the less revolutionary issues of governance and domestic tranquility, the form and function of American government and society would begin to take lasting shape. Such becomings, Schlesinger argues, could not be understood isolated from the rise of industrialism, and the awakening of class consciousness which attended it. Debates centering upon issues such as the Bank of the United States, the Free Soil difficulties (and eventual violence), the annexation of Texas, the American System, and the Tariff of Abominations (to name just a few) are best understood as a young nation not only trying to negotiate the civil relation to government, but also between the classes. Would power be vested in manhood, or in property? While we may know the country's answer to this question (how certain are we really that the people won-out?) the years of Jacksonian America were a time when these contestations were far from settled.

To historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr's way of telling it, Andrew Jackson's founding of a vigorous and powerful executive branch upon the will of a democratically empowered electorate, was to set the standard for how America would come to expect the relationships between democratic and republican principles to be negotiated. More than any other single time period, it was the Age of Jackson, and the years which followed it, which set the course for American government as part of American society.

While it may be tempting to see these largely democratic principles as the spawn of Jeffersonianism, Schlesinger reconciles Jefferson's calls for limited government with the strong unifying power of the federal system which the country felt in 1944, and which we feel still today. The rise of industrialism and the centralization of populations, coupled with the coming storm of civil war, meant that Jefferson's ideal (over-emphasized by many) of a country composed of yeoman farmers would prove largely impossible. As wealth became divorced from the land, and was refounded in the cities, it was no longer enough to say "that government is best which governs least." Were the government to continue to retreat from the civic sphere, it would only ensure the rampant growth of industrial wealth, further vesting power in the upper class. Such would sound the death-knell of Jefferson's democratic principles.

Though the author of the Declaration of Independence could not have foreseen such eventualities, during the Age of Jackson Jeffersonian democracy would become unified with a vigorous and powerful executive branch. Were either capital or labor, during these crucial years when their relationship seemed still in its birthing pangs, to fully gain the upper hand over the other, the history of the United States would look very different. The changing arenas of presidential and congressional politics throughout this age simultaneously responded to and altered social and business spheres. Yet the age was governed largely by democratic principles responsive to Washington as the seat of power. As the electorate struggled to reorient itself to a changing world, so too would the political sphere be transformed. Much was uncertain during these formative years, yet they can be properly termed the Age of Jackson because the tenor of American class and political contests cannot be understood without reference to the role the Jackson played in founding the power of a strong central government directly upon the will of the people. This centralized American democracy still exists today.

The Great Triumvirate - Merrill D. Peterson

The American Revolution may have been a fundamental break – one setting not only the infant nation, but indeed the entire global dialogue concerning democracy along a new path. The founding fathers were a generation which hewed and built a government unlike any of its age. Their works and deeds resound through the ages, as do their names. Jefferson, Washington, Madison, Franklin; for most Americans these require no introduction. Through the years of that first generation the country’s laws and government would take shape. Before the court of Marshall, in the doctrine of Monroe, along the journey of Lewis and Clark, the country as a land and an idea would emerge. Yet it was only with the passing-away of this first generation that the first few staggering steps of the country could be transformed into the assured pace of a certain nation. If America was to be a grand republic, and not simply the bright flash of a single generation, then it would be the free-born sons of the revolution who would make it so. The country could only be truly forged once it dealt with the business, less of creation, and more of persistence.

From the presidency of John Quincy Adams, to the years of the Fillmore administration, three men would do more to shape and define the country’s ideals, values, and extent than any others. Daniel Webster of Massachusetts, Henry Clay of Kentucky, and John C. Calhoun of South Carolina represented not only the three regions composing the young states (New England, the West, and the South, respectively) but also three ideals of the republic which would be contested in front of the courts and underneath the Capitol dome. While Webster embodied the Federalists’ call for a stronger union, Calhoun’s states’ rights southerners fought for the preservation of their own way of life. In-between was the star of the West, the voice of union and compromise, Henry Clay. Each, in his own way, would take up his own banner, and the banner of diverse causes; each with one foot planted firmly in the foundations of the past, while simultaneously striving towards what they believed was both a proper and necessary future. Both the originality and the difficulty of the American Constitution can be understood through the differing interpretations these three gave to it. While their conclusions and moralities may occasionally seem outmoded – perhaps even quaint to the modern ear – we cannot disagree that each latched upon a crucial strain of thought in the nation’s founding documents. Their status as great minds is assured. That the words and ideas which founded the republic can be so diversely meaningful and open to interpretation may do more to support the continuation of the American republic than the work of any person, or the protection of any force. Through their struggles, Webster, Clay, and Calhoun not only helped to forge the nation, they served as exemplars for how the country might be continually renewed.

While the evolving political climates of their time would variously place each at odds with the other, these climates would also create strange bedfellows and unlikely alliances. The capriciousness of changing parties, and the turbulence of the era, may have led the country to select more belligerent or politically-minded executives. It was, through no small fault of the mansion’s tenants, the era of a diminished White House. While each of the triumvirate would repeatedly try for the country’s top post, and variously be humbled, humiliated, debased, and denied in their attempts, this was not the era of the powerful presidency. It was within the Capitol that the great debates would take place; from which the edicts shaping the coming generation would issue. At no other time has America more closely embodied a true republic. At the height of congressional influence three men stood head-and-shoulders above the rest. Webster, Clay, and Calhoun: each is celebrated and lauded, denigrated and excoriated. Each similarly provides a multitude of interpretations down through the ages. Thus we may say that they have truly joined the American pantheon. Together they support our own continual re-founding of the nation.