November 12, 1859: at the Cirque Napoléon - a poem by Karen Chamisso

 

Léotard “qui tenait le spectateur

sous l’empire d’un Plaisir

indefinissible »

 

did not die on the flying trapeze

in some circus tragedy.

He died of smallpox

 

after inventing a new thrill altogether

at the same time Baudelaire changed the weather

of the modern.

 

Baudelaire doesn’t mention him at all

-          while his “memoirs”, an illiterate scrawl

bring out a snide remark from the Goncourts.

 

“… la hardiesse des sauts périlleux

L’imprévu des case-cou”

-an alexandrine arrested in mid-motion

 

a caesura crossed, from one bar to the other.

His suit, which showed the effortless bother

of the muscular ripple of his too mortal flesh

 

was named for him. In the brief spasm

of his flip and grab, orgasm

washed across the faces of the gaslit crowd.

 

Did Emma B. in outtake carry home some sense

of the sex in this suspense

a syncopation lost?

Baudelaire

 « Today,  23 January 1862, wrote  Baudelaire in his notebook, I was subject to a singular premonition, I felt pass over me the breez of the wing of imbecility. »

“ In 1863, the Figaro inserted an extract from a violent attack by Pontmartin against Baudelaire. In 1864, Figaro condescended to publish a series of the poems in prose. Only, after two publications  (7 et 14 February), Villemessant [the editor] ended this fantasy and here is the reason he gave to the author, to explain this measure : : « « Your poems bore everyone. »

- La Vie doloureuse de Baudelaire, by Francois Porche

I recently re-read one of my favorite books of the nineties, James Buchan’s Frozen Desire, an essay on money that gives as much weight to paintings of Judas, the life of Baudelaire, and Raskolnikov (the final dire dialectical figure at the end of laissez faire) as it does to Adam Smith, Keynes and Simmel – and of course it ignores the horrid Milton Friedman, God rest his soul.

About Baudelaire, Buchan quotes Proust’s phrase that Baudelaire sympathized with the poor as a form of anticipation – which is so wholly lovely that it is almost spoiled by going on (which, after all, is what determines, more than voice or rule, the way a line of poetry runs – it is only over when it is over for good – when nothing on that same line could be added that wouldn’t stain or destroy it – and thus the blank is part of the poem - and thus we fall down the poem as we fall down a ladder, rung by rung). Buchan adds that in the end, as Baudelaire was reduced to rags (but never dirty underwear, according to his biographer Porche), he compiled lists in his last journals. He listed all his friends. They were all prostitutes.

“Here the epoch has arrived of that long haired, graying Baudelaire, his neck enveloped – as per his hypochondria – with a violet scarf; the Baudelaire that was see walking like a shadow, a huge notebook under his arm, in company with the old Guys, at Musard’s, at a casino on the rue Cadet, at Valentino’s. To Monselet who, one evening, in one of those low dives where workers danced, asked him what he was doing there, he replied: I’m watching the death’s heads pass by (« Je regarde passer des têtes de mort. »).”

In these circumstances, when the old bird has almost molted its last feathers and the street reaches out its arms at night to take back its own, there is a moment of collapse and flight. This is when Baudelaire made his journey to Belgium. A complete disaster. And it is when he encountered an article by Jules Janin about Heine, in which Janin, praising Heine, still reproached him for being unreasonably melancholic at times – a point that Janin extended to all of contemporary literature. Where was the gaiety, the song? Where was that lie that eventually became La Traviata? Let’s have a little happy art, for a change. And of course, lets have no unexplained irony – irony is always being chased out of the city, fed hemlock, and in general fucked in the ass and thrown in the gutter – it is the dread of the Janins of the past, just as it is the dread of the Janins of the present.  Baudelaire wrote Janin a letter – which he never sent him. It is a fantastic document, one of those texts in which something blazes out that … it is unfair to call prophetic, as though it were high praise that someone in the past anticipated our moo cow and nukes culture. What blazes out, just as what blazes out of Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, is the world within the world of the sibyls of modernism …

It is difficult to translate because it is as dependent on sound as one of Baudelaire’s prose poems. Here’s a bit:

 

Quant à toutes les citations de petites polissonneries françaises comparées à la poésie d’Henri Heine, de Byron et de Shakspeare, cela fait l’effet d’une serinette ou d’une épinette comparée à un puissant orchestre. Il n’est pas un seul des fragments d’Henri Heine que vous citez qui ne soit infiniment supérieur à toutes les bergerades ou berquinades que vous admirez. Ainsi, l’auteur de l’Ane mort et la Femme guillotinée ne veut plus entendre l’ironie ; il ne veut pas qu’on parle de la mort, de la douleur, de la brièveté des sentiments humains

2.

Yesterday, I visited the Montparnasse Cemetery. It was an impromptu visit – I was going to a nearby library to return some books. I saw and photographed Sartre and Beauvoir’s tombstone, which was pleasingly strewn with old metro tickets, cheap flowers, and an old paperback copy, bizarrely enough, of the first volume of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. I noticed on a marker that this was where the cenotaph of Baudelaire was, so I also took a look at it – it was, unfortunately, the kind of structure that no bum could leave a metro ticket on. More’s the pity.

 

“Also, I have to admit that, for the last two or three months, I’ve let my character go, I’ve taken a particular joy in wounding, in showing myself impertinent, a talent in which I excel when I want to. But here that isn’t enough: one has to be gross in order to be understood.”- letter, October 13, 1864

It is odd that – at least as I remember it – Sebald, in his last novel, Austerlitz, part of which is set in Belgium, never mentions Baudelaire. Could I be forgetting something? The 1887 edition of the Oeuvres Posthumes contains a biographical introduction by Eugène Crépet that explains the peculiar horror that overcame Baudelaire in 1864 as he familiarized himself with Belgium – it was another piece of his habitual bad luck that he chose to flee from France to, of all places, Belgium. It was the kind of place, as he explains in a letter, where the only thing that could possibly move the people to revolt would be raising the cost of beer. He was tortured by the stink of Brussels – Crépet explains that Baudelaire had an extremely developed olfactory sensibility – and the ugliness of the people and the yawning lack of conversation.

By March, 1866, the devil that had tracked Baudelaire through his life, condemned all his books to failure for various reasons – here a press goes bankrupt, there the critics condemn him, and of course there is that most comic of volumes, Fleurs de Mal, a bunch of filth that can’t compare with the beautiful and healthful lyrics of a Musset – began to pursue its endgame. Baudelaire started suffering more and more visibly from some mental derangement. On a train going to Brussels, Baudelaire asked for the door to the compartment to be opened. It was open. He meant to ask for it to be closed, but he couldn’t find the words for that phrase. They came out backwards. In an article in the Figaro, 22 April, 1866, a journalist noted that Baudelaire’s symptoms were “so bizarre that the doctors hesitated to give a name to this sickness. In the middle of his sufferings, Baudelaire felt a certain satisfaction in being attainted with an extraordinary illness, one which escaped analysis. This was still an originality.” His mother took him to Paris, where he was confined to an asylum. By this time he couldn’t speak, except to say non, cré nom, non. He tried to write on a small chalkboard, but he couldn’t shape the letters. He could, however, gesture, and did.

At his death, a few journals noted, with satisfaction, the death of a degenerate who would now no longer bother the public with his childish pornography. The kind of things you’d expect in, say, the NYT today. Same complete nullity, the same numbskull public intelligence, that combination scold and lecher that is the voice of a million articles, with the point being to erect a wall, a protective blankness, to keep at bay any doubt the consuming animal might form about the system in which it moves and breathes.

The Treadmill of Production

When the Nobel committee in economics gave Nordhaus – a man of infinite environmental ignorance, - their little prize, they put their seal on a neoliberal agenda that is steering the planet into disaster. The committee no longer has an opportunity to right its wrong – to award its prize to an economist/sociologist who has actually written well about the environment: Allan Schnaiberg, who taught at Northwestern until his death in 2009.

In the early eighties, he published an influential book in the field of environmental economics – The Environment from Surplus to Scarcity. It was a book that introduced the concept with which he is most identified: the treadmill of production.

The big controversy in environmental economics is about ecological modernization. Briefly: the Manhattan institute’s all around publicist for “junk science” (otherwise known as science inconvenient to corporations), Peter Huber, proposed that the offloading of costs onto the environment during the twentieth century was caused by the State. If we just took the state out of the equation, private enterprise would develop ways of being greener. The thought was – greener is more efficient. Here’s a link to Huber’s career as a shill. https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Peter_W._Huber

Schnaiberg’s thesis was different. He coined the phrase, the treadmill of production, to talk about the network effects of industrialization – whereever the ultimate control over industry lay. In a recent essay, The treadmill of production and the environmental state, he revisits his thesis.

“From a conceptual perspective, we might characterize an "environmental state" as encompassing the following feature: whenever it engaged in economic decision-making, considerations of ecological impacts would have equal weight with any considerations of private sector profits and state sector taxes. Put this way, most industrialized nation-states fall far short of this standard. Indeed, it is increasingly true that any environmental policy-making is subject to more intensive economic scrutiny, while economic policies are subject to less and less environmental assessment (Daynes 1999; Soden and Steel

1999).”

Schnaiberg’s paper includes a case study of the recycling industry in Chicago, the study of which was at the origin of his work. It is a study about the structural changes that came about in that industry as it was turned into a regular private sector industry, with the goal of making a profit. I found this interesting as a case just because we remember the old recycling movement in the seventies and eighties. My brothers worked, at that time, heading up maintenance for some apartment complexes. They were both enthusiastic about recycling. They sponsored a cleanup of litter, for instance, along a highway leading into Stone Mountain Georgia. They got their complexes in touch with recycling services. For a couple of years, they devised a mass pick up of Christmas trees – the trees were, I think, going to be used by fish hatcheries or something. My brothers are enthusiasts, and they turned out the family, including my mother, my father, and me – in the Christmas tree deal – to do the various recycling projects.

However, as recycling became simply profit based, the air went out of volunteering. And as they became profit based, instead of applying the private sector efficiency in taking care of the whole spectrum of waste, the spectrum was cherry picked.

Schnaiberg writes:

“First, treadmill organizations [those in the treadmill of increasing consumer demand and cutting production cost by leveraging part of that cost onto the commons, or other people’s property] generally resist environmental regulation with all the substantial means at their disposal. For example, prior to the advent of recycling regulations and programs, container firms fought all forms of

"bottle bills", spending perhaps US$50 million opposing such bills, and succeeding in about 2/3 of the states. Yet even these bottle bills were only indirectly constraining firms. Legislation did not directly mandate a refillable container, but only the imposition of a deposit on all containers. Even in this limited regulation, the refunding mechanisms for the deposit put some cost burdens on non-refillable container manufacturers and/or users. Thus, in recent years in New York state, bottlers have refused to repurchase stockpiled

refunded containers. They have let these accumulate at brokers and large retailers, seeking thereby to mobilize opposition to the bottle bill system. For the remaining 2/3 of states, container manufacturers and bottlers have simply encouraged recycling, and have kept feedstock prices low, and avoided paying labor costs for refilling containers.

Second, where direct resistance against any environmental legislation becomes

infeasible, under pressures from environmental NGOs, firms first dilute the legislation to minimize its impacts on their operations. Then they wait for opportunities to further lighten their regulatory load, whenever the political climate shifts and/or NGOs are elsewhere engaged. In the recycling arena, this has been commonplace. Affected industries have continuously shifted their campaigns to avoid mandatory direct controls on their production and distribution activities. All U.S. government regulations have avoided mandating firms with a "life cycle" responsibility for their own generation of post-consumer wastes, as has

occurred in some European states. Instead, governments had introduced fairly weak mandates for firms, requiring higher "recycled content" of their production. Firms have responded by including post-production waste recycling (a standard economic practice for decades) as part of post-consumption recycling.”

The treadmill aim of weakening the impetus for even voluntary environmental action seems odd, at first, until you take into account what the companies take into account – such behavior leads to an enlarged sense of the interaction between the economy and the environment. It is not just to make more money that the great energy monsters sponsor all their think tanks and pay off all their politicians. When the Great Cheney convention of energy chiefs, in 2001, agreed to put the keebosh on conservation, it was chiefly, when the short term cost benefit is discounted, for ideological reasons: conservation countervails an insane consumerist ethos. If people are allowed, for a second, to fall in love with the planet to the extent of wanting to spare that tree or ice floe, the virus will spread. Questions about the justice of exhausting our resources will emerge. Fundamental questions about ownership and its limits. In fact, people will begin to think that politics doesn’t begin or end with what dumb party you vote for or the latest outrage that we must rush to have opinions on – is CNN more bought and sold than Fox News? Did somebody say something on Twitter? Rather, we will think about why, if Americans (for instance) are so happy, they are so indebted, so unable to stop buying the stupidest things, so unwilling to look at, say, the environmental horrors that are coming home to roost, like something out of St. John of Patmos’s paranoid vision, in fire, flood and plague.

When you have no control over your mind or attention span, you are fucking owned. And that is the resource they are extracting with every hot air soundbyte and fake crisis. The treadmill of production begins in your mind.

Bla Bla Bla

 
Perhaps the only really moving speech in the twenty first century was given by Greta Thunberg, who characterized the official rhetoric around climate change – way around, whilst making as much money and as little change as possible – as bla bla bla. “Build better bla bla bla. Green economy bla  bla bla.” And, as she acutely said, we are drowning in the bla.

Not only is Thunberg correct about every speech by every politician in the past twenty to thirty years – in America from Mr.Bring it on to Mr. Hope to Ms. Break the glass ceiling (symbolically of course) to American first and  Mr. Build Back Better, and every one elsewhere, because frankly, the political class is the blab la bla class, leading us to the zombie apocalypse – but she was also obviously referencing Friedrich Kittler’s famous essay on Lacan, Dracula’s Legacy.

Well, who knows? But Kittler’s essay, which I decided to exercise my brain on – instead of crunching the news of the war in Ukraine, which is like eating shit every morning – does enter, crucially, into the nexus between the recording of the voice and what is brought by the voice – the signifier. Brought into our all too organic ear.
 
"If even Freud’s fundamental rule prescribes speaking at random [ins Blaue], if, further, the most directr way to the pleasure principle, without all those chin-ups “into higher spheres, as laid down by aristotelian ethics” leads to such bla bla , then nothing else will do. In order to tape blabla, magnetic tape, tv cameras and radio microsphones were invented.”

This is a harsh judgment, since we have long fancied that we are a society of facts, when all is said and done, a society that could not have invented magnetic tape or any of the rest of it if we had not a firmer foundation than bla bla. Or, as the first generation of Anglo analytic philosophers used to say, before digging into their disgusting English cuisine at the table in Oxford, nonsense. Nonsense, the magic wand.

Well, Greta and Kittler, I think, see through the nonsense crap. It is the sense, the infinite sensemaking and infinite denial, that is blabla. The most nonsensical of all events – the creating of an earth that will be hostile to the very lives of all the sensemakers – which is fully underway. In our imagination, the rich – who have been credited, with more blabla than even was accorded the apotheosis of Roman emperors, with being “creators”, when their only creation was administration and investment built on other people’s labor – get away. They build spaceships and get away. Or they will all go to Peter Thiel’s Treasure Island and eat lobster.

But will they catch the lobsters? And make the pots they boil them in? I don’t think so.  Bla bla then will eat like a cancer through their bones.  And all our bonery, as even a child, or teenager, can see. The pleasure principle, whip in hand, will take off its mask, then.

Such a price to pay - the nobel prize in economics was awarded to a special specimen of bla, William Nordhaus, who calculated that the extinction of the human race would be a loss of precisely 100 trillion dollars, although who exactly would lose that money, or what money means when there are no exchangers, is not a question for a University of Chicago raree show - and such ignobility and nonsense on our stumbling out of the exit.

Different kinds of crazy: the centrist version of history

 

The center-liberal view of resistance to vaccines in the pandemic has rested on what it thinks is a rational view of history: the government is basically looking out for the people and rarely ever lies or misleads in its larger policies. I found a perfect expression of this in, where else, the NYT, in the “ethicist” column. In that column, some clueless type asks a question and the ethicist answers it. The question this time is one of inheritance – which perks up the ears of the country club set that runs the nyt – with the questioner thinking of disinheriting his daughters who have become rightwing anti-vaxxers. In response, the ethicist fabulates a response beginning like this:

“Back in the late 1960s, when the “generation gap” gained currency, many families were divided over political questions, involving the Vietnam War, women’s rights, racial justice. Facts were relevant to these disputes, but at the heart of the matter were moral questions — e.g., When is a war just? Should social roles be assigned to people on the basis of sex?”

This is as fictious a view of the 1960s as anything woven out of thin air by the maddest Trumpite. By “elevating” the notion of “moral questions” over the “relevance” of fact questions, we just wipe away a whole dirty record of lies that actually happened in the sixties, lies told by the Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon administrations, lies that led to what, at that point in time, was known as the “credibility gap” – a gingerly country club name for lying, which is the shall not be named of the U.S. establishment press – beginning with the faked Gulf of Tonkin incident, including the secret war in Laos and in Cambodia, fed by multitudinous lies about the conduct and prospects of the war that were standard issue of what reporters then called the “five o’clock follies”, and of course ending, domestically (in a domestic scene where the FBI was engaging in a death squadish project called COINTELPRO while the CIA was engaging in systematic illegal activities called, among other things, Operation Chaos) with Watergate.

It is a fact that rightwing politicians are trying to rewrite or forget the racist history of the U.S. by attacking critical race theory in schools – and it is also a fact that centrist-liberals are engaged in rewriting a history of the U.S. government that assigns doubts about the veracity of the government, the press, or the establishment in general to the precincts of the conspiracy theory set. In other words, both sides work very hard to distort U.S. history. The facts, for instance, about CIA links to narco-rich warlords in Laos are wished aside in the nice pink picture the ethicist has of the sixties. The fact that the government, at many levels, poisoned and drugged black men – for instance, in the MKUltra experiments with LSD supervised by Harris Isabel in Lexington, Kentucky – just isn’t in the picture. Nor are the literally hundreds of thousands of cancers caused by fallout from atom bomb tests that were performed by the government in the 1950s and sixties, the effect of which was strenuously denied by the relevant government agency, the AEC, while secretly AEC scientists were sounding the alarm about the effects of the fallout. Etc. While the NYT has cheerfully forgotten this history, popular culture has not. Just watch, say, Stranger Things, a popular show among teens, and you will have a more accurate view of the US government’s view of what one AEC document called the “low use” population than you will get from the collected ten year’s worth of the ethicist.

The struggle between fantasy histories of the U.S. is where we are at. You don’t have to chose one or the other.

the decline of the laugh

 

Jean Fourastié was one of the architects, in France, of the thirty glorious years of the postwar economy. He had reformed, or advised on the reformation of the French social insurance system in the thirties, and after the war he wrote optimistic books about the new world opened up by the consumer phase of capitalism. His predictions about the rising level of lifestyle seemed to be on target in the fifties and sixties, but somehow, Fourastié fell off the optimist wagon as he observed what consumerism had wrought – not a leisured and cultured working class in tandem with a leisured and cultured administrative class, but a mad rush towards disposable products and lifestyles that, in his view, had lost sight of, or even jettisoned, the volupté of satisfaction for the addictions to second degree wants that were manufactured by a new class of capitalist. The large mark of that turn was everywhere – in the environment, in the cultural impoverishment of non-urban areas, in the way in which busyness had infected all lives with addictions to perpetual scratching, as it were. The society of consumption turned out to be a society addicted to the itch.  As Regis Bolat puts it in his essay on Fourastié ‘s pre-1968 turn (one similar to Galbraith’s in the late fifties):

Fourastié thus painted a portrait of a “new homo economicus” of whom the essential trait is avidity. He saw in the indefinite growth of human needs what gave French society its preponderant characteristics and strongly conditioned the society of tomorrow. All research on consumption that took place in progressive countries seems to confirm this indefinite growth. Needs grow once the level of life is elevated: “no limit, no lassitude of the appetite of consumption, is what is always revealed by the statistics, whatever the amount of revenue expended.” In other words, Fourastié discovered that there was no internal limit within consumption, no horizon of satisfaction that allows the consumer, in a society in which consumables are subject to radical and rapid change and extension, to stop.

This is the background to Fourastié’s essay on the decline of laughter – or the laugh, le rire – in 20^thcentury ordinary life, Reflection sur le rire. Or, to put this in today’s terms, the decline of laughing out loud to LOL – an acronym that usually signals not laughing out loud, but pretend laughing out loud. Fourastié refers to Bergson’s treatise on the laugh as the classic work on the subject, but one that curiously neglects the psychological need to laugh. Being an economist, Fourastié is interested less in the individual’s psychology that the psychology of the collective. Whether or not the decline of the laugh really tracks the decline of “gaiety” in the street or the decline of laughing in the life of a man, Fourastié, who was approaching old age, his larger point about the utility, so to speak, of the laugh is worthy of his title.

Fourastié frames the laugh as a form of thought – or a form of thinking. “In fact, because laughter is a pheminon of joy and pleasure, the mechanism of the laugh engenders participaton in conceptual thought of instinctive forces.” This function is related to a more general notion of what is funny: “Every funny object presunts a “rupture of determinism”, a failure, a mini-conflect of sense and non-sense that the laugher must resolve by himself if he wants to laugh.” Laughter, in this view, or the object of the laugh, is a koan.

Fourastié was not the man to look at the intersectional victimage of the collective laugh – its policing of hierarchies.  But he is, I think, on target that laughter also addresses failure – a break in the logic of hierarchy.

I myself think that the gaiety of the Paris street has not really dimmed, although every account of the countryside and the far suburbs shows that this gaiety has turned sour.

Once, when I was a newfledged graduate student in the philosophy department at U.T., I had an experience of the laugh as omen. I was attending a class on Kant’s ethics. And the professor, a sweet man and one immersed in the atmosphere of anglo American philosophy at that time – analytic – mused one day that surveys didn’t seem to bear Kant out: people seemed less inclined to do things out of duty than to seek being happy. This way of putting things, which made it seem, suddenly, that normal people were outside of our circle, made me laugh. Except I couldn’t, since I was in the class and nobody else was laughing. This built my laugh up. The more I thought about it, the more absurd seemed the whole thing, and the class, and perhaps my being in philosophy itself. Whether I asked to excuse myself or we had a break, I don’t know. I simply remember walking up and down the hall in the building doubled over with laughter. Laughter is a power – it can seize a person. And especially a character such as myself, who have long been undermined in my efforts to be a serious person by a strong sense of absurdity.

I guess that laughter told me all I really needed to know about the unlikelihood, in my case, of an academic life.

 

War and loot

 I wrote this piece under Bad King Bush and his occupation of Iraq. I think it is ever so relevant now.

In the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars, William Hazlitt produced a polemic in his highest style that presented the classical liberal way of looking at war in an essay entitled “War and Taxes”. He begins with the distinction between productive and unproductive labor, and proceeds to show that war falls under the latter category. However, even if a project is unproductive, it must be paid for somehow. It has a cost:

“If the sovereign of a country were to employ the whole population in doing nothing but throwing stones into the sea, he would soon become the king of a desert island. If a sovereign exhausts the wealth and strength of a country in war, he will end in being a king of slaves and beggars. The national debt is just the measure, the check-acount of the labour and resources of the country which have been so wasted – of the stones we have been throwing into the sea. This debt is in fact an obligation entered into by the government on the part of the tax-payers, to indemnify the tax-receivers for their sacrifices in enabling the government to carry on the war. It is a power of attorney, extorted from nine-tenths of the community, making over to the remaining tenth an unlimited command over the resources, the comforts, the labour, the happiness and liberty of the great mass of society, by which their resources, their comforts, their labour, their happiness and their liberty, have been lost, and made away with in government knick-knacks, and the kick-shaws of legitimacy.”

This is a vivid and captivating idea. LI has often plugged into the notion that war is paid for by the loss of liberty.

The question is: is it a true idea? Does it really describe modern war?

Hazlitt wrote this in 1816. This is what had happened over the past two decades: France, after overthrowing the monarchy, had borrowed money to pursue its wars by liquidating the estates of the church and the nobility and divvying them up as paper. These assignats have a complicated history – in fact, the spider web of loans consolidated into mandats, which were divided between those to which the nation pledged its sacred purpose to redeem and those that were, in fact, left unredeemed – in other words, a form of bankruptcy – plunged European markets into chaos and has plunged every succeeding generation of economic historians, seeking to understand the system, into chaos too. Suffice it to say that the interest on the loans to the French created pressure on the English, so that Pitt was forced to suspend the gold standard, and designed a great system for floating loans to conduct the war – conduct which involved, among other things, financially supporting the opponents of France, Austria and Prussia. By 1815, the National Debt seemed overwhelming.

To the average textile worker or artisan, the English economy must have looked hopeless in 1816. Add to that, in Hazlitt's case, the extinction of his hopes for liberty. Hazlitt supposedly wandered around in a daze after Waterloo. He could not get over the return of the Bourbons, the repression of liberty, and the seeming return of the revolutionary energies unlocked by 1793 to the dungeon of history. On all of these counts, he was... well, not utterly wrong, but definitely not right in foreseeing the apocalypse. Britain was about to expand as never before. To see why, one has to put the British system of financing the great wars against France in an even larger context – that of the British system that had brought England not only back into European history since 1688, but that made England – a relative non-entity in terms of world power in 1688 – the greatest world power a mere century later. The rise of Britain is a mystery shrouded in the complacent assumptions we bring to the idea that the British empire was some kind of eternal thing, or that the British were a well respected European power. They were respected mainly for their pirates until the Stuarts, a subsidy of Louis XIV, were chased out. How did they become such an event?

Lawrence Stone, in “An Imperial State at War; Britain from 1689 to 1815” puts the issues into a liberal political form that Hazlitt would have appreciated:

“It is only very recently that historians have begun to study this paradox of, on the one hand, the use of massive external military empire to block a rival hegemonic power and to create a maritime trading power and, on the other, the preservation of internal liberty and the rights of private property – a rare combination only paralleled by Periclean Athens and America from 1941 to the present day. Judith Sklar described 18th century Britain as ‘a commercial, extensive, non-military, democracy disguised as a monarchy.” This is largely, but not entirely, correct.” Stone points out that the non-military part disguised the use of mercenaries – he doesn’t correct the democracy part, which is obviously insane. And he writes: It is also true, however, that British politics and society were bound to be deeply affected by a prolonged war with France. In order to win, the ruling elite were prepared to spend immense amounts of treasure and also torun up the national debt on a scale comparable only to the activities of the Reagan-Bush administrations in the United States.” The comparison in that last sentence is severely understated. The U.S. during the Reagan-Bush years contained a manufacturing stock undreamt of in the 18th century, as well as a wholly transformed sector of human capital that is hard to compare to a society in which bare literacy was the norm.

Hazlitt and in some way Stone speak of war, then, purely in terms of a cost – a waste. The accursed portion, the sacrifice, to use the more elevated rhetoric of Bataille. In this way of thinking, the older notion of war – war as looting – is left behind. The looting system is divorced from the new system of paying for war – which was the genius of the British system. From 1688 – the year that James II was deposed – onward, the British instituted a two tier system for paying for war – short term loans that would be repaid by long term loans. In this way, the British were able to get past the limits traditionally imposed by direct payment for war. Instead, the British steadily cultivated a national debt that was composed almost entirely of old loans, consolidated into long term ones, for an endless series of wars. But loans aren’t merely negative things – if they were, nobody would loan, and there would be no bond market. Rather, by producing a lively bond market, the English spread the debt for their wars around. To do this, the state had to perform a one/two step – on the one hand, centralizing organization enough to manage wars, and on the other hand, decentralizing finance to the extent of divvying its debts up among the upper bourgeoisie. Thus, when France, with its autocratic model of government and its dysfunctional parliamentary system, suffered untold misery trying to pay for its part in this series of wars, the British, whose debt to GDP ration was on some accounts worse than France, flourished.

Loot had not been forsaken as a motive to war. On the contrary, by 1794, the British were in possession of India and bleeding it for all it was worth. But the art of looting had gone up to another level.

The system wasn't, of course, flawless. Even the most beautiful system of finance does face the fact that payment must be made on debt. Here is another area in which war can have an unexpectedly blessed result. One of the takers on the British bonds was the Dutch, which had the most developed financial infrastructure on the Continent. What it did not have was a large army. When, in the 1790s, the French threatened Holland, the Dutch naturally turned to the British. Eventually the French occupied Holland, with the Dutch banks fleeing before them and relocating in London. By 1815 London had displaced Amsterdam as the world center of banking.

All of which is a way of saying that the distinction Hazlitt makes, the distinction that is still made, between productive and unproductive labour, is a much softer distinction – and is sometimes no distinction at all – than Hazlitt, and after him a whole liberal tradition, would like to be the case. As the Cambridge Economic History of Europe puts it, nicely: “Already in the eighteenth, more strongly in the nineteenth century, there existed among the British population a wealthy section capable and willing to invest part of its income in state bonds. Between 1761 and 1820, about 305 per cent of British public expenditure was financed from this source; between 1689 and 1820 the proportion did not fall as low as 29.5 per cent. This section of the population derived from these loans an income in the form of annual interest which grew to a substantial independent source of incomes within the total economy. Interest due to the wealthier section of the population was defrayed via the budget mainly from revenues derived from indirect taxes, paid overwhelmingly by sections of the population in receipt of lower incomes.”

The new system of financing war produced a whole new system of looting. The wealthy, in the anglosphere, have never forgotten this lesson. Those in “receipt of lower incomes” have never, ever learned it. And the liberals pretend, by and large, that it never happened.