MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN

Atheists received a real blow today when it was announced that the Carlyle Group – the Carlyle Group – the Carlyle Group’s “troubled mortgage-debt investment fund, Carlyle Capital” is about to fall to the first run (oh, okay, counting Northern Rock, second) of the New New New Economy.

Oh sure, there’s no Goooooood. Chump. Then how to explain this instance of a poetic justice so breathtaking that we’d reject it as the impossible happy end sequence of some movie? I mean, we are talking about the Carlyle Group – did I say that? The henhouse for old, corrupt, murderous politicos – the Bush family Mafioso – which was the very model and exemplum of the new private equity vehicles that provide corrupt, murderous pols with an easy transition space to the money they have, as legislators, made available to the most murderous and corrupt. Hmm, did I put in here, yet, the part about them being murderous and corrupt?

So – averting my eyes from the crash of that motherfucker, Spitzer – there is something to celebrate, to party hard about today!

“The fund, which invests mainly in triple-A rated mortgage securities issued by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, has received $400 million in margin calls, and some of its lenders started to liquidate collateral for $5 billion of debt. Banks are asking for their money back amid concerns the economic climate may deteriorate further.
The Carlyle fund said on Monday that it “requested a standstill agreement whereby its lenders would refrain from foreclosing and liquidating their collateral, and we are awaiting responses.”

Banks are asking for more collateral to cover loans after writing down more than $160 billion in assets linked to the subprime mortgage crisis, and fears of a recession are prompting them to call in some of the loans outright. Costs to protect even the safest bonds are close to a record, and investment funds like Carlyle Capital are finding it increasingly difficult to meet rising demands for collateral as the value of their portfolios declines along with the financial markets.

“At the beginning banks were willing to accept not to trigger margin calls because they feared forced assets sales,” said Philip Gisdakis, a senior credit strategist at Unicredit in Munich, “but now that there is a serious deterioration in the valuation of collateral, they cannot do that any longer and need to protect their loans.”
The Carlyle fund, which sold shares in an initial public offering on the Amsterdam stock exchange last summer, shares some of the Carlyle Group’s management and received a $150 million credit line from the firm. Among the fund’s lenders are Citigroup, Bank of America and Merrill Lynch.”

And you thought the divinity had exhausted himself with that last message of his, 'MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN.' Fuck no. The big guy is just a hesitant writer – rather like Flaubert, lying on a sofa, suffering over the exact description of Charles Bovary’s hat. However, as we all know, God is a fantastic stand up comic – he filled the ears of his prophets with wonderful routines, real William Burroughs stuff. So I thought it might be appropriate to quote something to celebrate the Carlyle Capitals imitation of an armadillo meeting a sixty mile an hour 18 wheeler.

“All this came upon the king Nebuchadnezzar. At the end of twelve months he walked in the palace of the kingdom of Babylon. 30 The king spake, and said, Is not this great Babylon, that I have built for the house of the kingdom by the might of my power, and for the honour of my majesty? 31 While the word was in the king's mouth, there fell a voice from heaven, saying, O king Nebuchadnezzar, to thee it is spoken; The kingdom is departed from thee. 32 And they shall drive thee from men, and thy dwelling shall be with the beasts of the field: they shall make thee to eat grass as oxen, and seven times shall pass over thee, until thou know that the most High ruleth in the kingdom of men, and giveth it to whomsoever he will. 33 The same hour was the thing fulfilled upon Nebuchadnezzar: and he was driven from men, and did eat grass as oxen, and his body was wet with the dew of heaven, till his hairs were grown like eagles' feathers, and his nails like birds' claws.”

the Werepoet's Tolstoy

I have a feeling the werepoet is growing weary of her long posts about War and Peace. Well, this is too bad. Winn has a rare talent for not only cutting a plot down to its elements (something I am always trying to do as a reviewer), but rebuilding it as a comic tour de force. How terrible to subject my hero Tolstoy to such fine sacrilege! yes - sometimes Winn shivers my timbers, especially when she casts an evil eye on Tolstoy’s regrettably sexist lapses. But the werepoet is no snark meister – like certain NY writers – for instance, Matthew Sharp, in Jamestown – Winn has the ability to merge spleen and an oddly innocent humor. I believe this is the temperament of our era – we (Americans at least) all have this odd combination of imperial experience and disappointed expectation, it creeps into the way we talk, the way we pre-load failure into our hopes. The way, in essence, we try to trick our own naivete. It is another transmutation of irony - and I'm not speaking of post modernism here, that bugger all phrase for failed exercises in wit. Fuck that. I am speaking of the irony that comes out of being surrounded, as we all are, by constant lures set for our desires which are absolutely transparent to us, and to which we absolutely succumb. We embody both the conmen and the victim, it is the way we live. These are the dreams, crafted by the worst, forced upon us by every fucking old song blasting through a grocery store sound system, by every movie ad campaign, by every political hoax. We've built this irony on the ruins of authenticity, with the knowledge that nothing can be more authentic than what we experience, and what we experience is utterly bogus. I feel this style in myself, but I am too old to have it entirely.

However, Winn hasn't just been stuck in one register - as she went through the books, she gave the reader a fair sense of what it means to be caught in the trance-like pull of the book

So, here’s a link list. Start here. Then go here , here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Michael Walzer, moral midget

It is a bright shiny morning – oops (or erm, as IT says) now that I look out the window, I see that it is a gray, lifeless morning. A good morning to read about our wonderful celebrities in the NYT Magazine. There’s Angelina Jolie with some person in the photo on the cover – oops, that’s not Angelina Jolie. It is Natalie Portman. In truth, celebrities are a bit of a mash to LI – they blend into each other so that telling them all apart becomes one of those intellectual tasks that I, like Sherlock Holmes, have decided to leave to my reference books – or Google. I have never exactly seen Natalie Portman in a movie, but apparently she is a strong advocate for micro-lenders in Mexico. Hurray! Except that it is notorious that village usurers have usurped the title micro-lender to loan out small sums at rates of interest that are almost unbelievable – 300 percent per month, for instance. But such factoids have no place in the grand sweep of this article.

Hmm, LI has been thinking that it is about time that one of the newspapers mentioned that Blackwater, the murder outfit, is still operating with impunity in Iraq. Or maybe that Andrew Moonan, a murderer whose escape to the U.S. was facilitated by the State Department, is not only still at large but happily living in the 300,000 dollar home he built in Seattle while the family of his victim is no doubt happily on the way to Syria or Northern Iraq, given that surviving in a Baghdad apartment when the man of the apartment is shot down in cold blood causes Hobbesian problems. But lo! what light in yonder faux liberal palace breaks? It is the irrepressible Michael Walzer in the New Republic, filling a page with such depressingly ill thought out and ill written dribble that one wonders where his keepers are.

Walzer starts out with a couple sentences that seem to have been written in a mild state of intoxication:

“Weber's definition suggests that the state is constituted by its monopoly on the use of force. It is also, and perhaps more importantly, justified by its monopoly. This is what states are for; this is what they have to do before they do anything else--shut down the private wars, disarm the private armies, lock up the warlords. It is a very dangerous business to loosen the state's grip on the use of violence, to allow war to become anything other than a public responsibility.”

Since there was no preceding reference to Weber in this fucking throw-away, to refer to Weber’s definition is a bit of intellectual discourtesy – it assumes we all know Weber’s theory of the state. But, in actuality, it assumes that we all know the leading cliché that we get from a first year sociology class about Weber’s theory of the state. And even here we have this weird construction of “monopoly on” rather than “monopoly of”, which, though a common construction among sociologists (who are to the English language as the borer beetle is to the pine tree) shows a significant lack of looking up the Weber quote – which goes, for fans of the Economy and Society translation by Talcott Parsons:

“A compulsory political organization with continuous operations (politischer Anstaltsbetrieb) will be called a “state” insofar as its administrative staff successfully upholds the claim to the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force in the enforcement of its order. Social action, especially organized action, will be spoken of as “politically oriented” if it aims at exerting inflence on the government oof a polical organization….”

This, of course, is an entering wedge of rotten cheese for the decayed Walzer, because, being a moral interventionist of such moral gravitas that the moral atmosphere bends when he walks, and when he meets with his other good friend, that moral entrepreneur of fame and fortune, Paul Berman, it is almost moral hurricane weather – Walzer wants to consider whether another saintly organization, Blackwater – which he compares with the daring of a zombie on prozac to the International Brigades in Spain – should “save” Darfur.

“There are, of course, exceptions to every rule. Speaking at a conference of arms merchants and war contractors in Amman, Jordan, in March 2006, Blackwater vice chairman J. Cofer Black offered to stop the killing in Darfur. "We've war-gamed this with professionals," he said. "We can do this." Back in the United States, another Blackwater official, Chris Taylor, reiterated the offer.

Since neither the United Nations nor nato has any intention of deploying a military force that would actually be capable of stopping the Darfur genocide, should we send in mercenaries? Scahill quotes Max Boot, the leading neoconservative writer on military affairs, arguing forcefully that there is nothing else to do. Allowing private contractors to secure Darfur "is deemed unacceptable by the moral giants who run the United Nations," Boot writes. "They claim that it is objectionable to employ--sniff--mercenaries. More objectionable, it seems, than passing empty resolutions, sending ineffectual peace-keeping forces and letting genocide continue."

Some of us might prefer something like the International Brigade that fought in Spain over a force of Blackwater mercenaries. But the International Brigade was also a private militia, organized by the Comintern and never under the control of the Spanish republic. Does it matter that most of its members fought for ideological rather than commercial reasons? Scahill tells us that Blackwater is run by far-right Christian nationalists--for me, as for him, that doesn't make things better.”

Ah, you will notice that this brief from Max Boot and Blackwater skips lightly over Blackwaters Einsatzgruppe actions in Iraq – for instance, the recent massacre in Baghdad. If Walzer suggested sending, say, Al Qaeda to sort our the Darfur mess, he might have generated some controversy. But our terrorists have been normalized, in places like the New Republic, so that we don’t even bother referencing their blood spotty record.

Here’s how he finishes up – with a soupcon of irony that must make the ice rattle in the ice tea glasses in Princeton. Oh that Walzer, always one for the glancing reference to the tragic fate of man!

“Whatever Blackwater's motives, I won't join the "moral giants" who would rather do nothing at all than send mercenaries to Darfur. If the Comintern could field an army and stop the killing, that would be all right with me, too. But we should acknowledge that making this exception would also be a radical indictment of the states that could do what has to be done and, instead, do nothing at all. There should always be public accountability for military action--and sometimes for military inaction as well.”

So sweet! He is willing to send American mercenaries to the oil rich fields of Southern Sudan on … on moral grounds. I’m sure that the oppressed Christians of southern Sudan are contributing, even as we speak, a portion of their corn meal to raise a monument to this dissenter from the “moral giants.” Quoting Max Boot, whose sincere moral midgethood has been burnished by his support for the massacre of more than half a million Iraqis over the past four years – plus, let’s not forget, an amount of refugees that is a million over the count in Darfur – shows that Walzer is able to sally out and meet the knights of rightward thinking. His lance is at the ready!

Ah well. Walzer at one time did have a brain. But when you set yourself up as a moral panjandrum whilst slurping with the high and mighty, gradually it begins to slip away – down to the back pocket, then out the hole in the back pocket onto the floor, and next thing you know, mistaking that ugly grey spot for some chewing gum, you’ve thrown your brain away. A sure sign of that is writing pro-warmonger pieces in Marty Peretz’s mag.

Now, dance

LI chatted with our brother on the phone last night. This brother got burned last year in the stock market. Although who didn’t? So he’s letting his buys coast at the moment – the wisest course. As always, in these conversations there comes a moment when D. tells me that I’m always pessimistic. He claims I’ve been pessimistic since 1990 – and that I had to be right once, so that last year, when I told him to get out in the summer after he’d had a good ride on his stocks, I was simply lucky that, for once, pessimism was the correct view.

Well, I always squirm and protest that I’m not a pessimist. I’m sour-castic – an entirely different thing. This means that I always sound pessimistic. But all I mean is – we’re all gonna die!

In actuality, I am a great admirer of the plodding tenaciousness of your average American Joe. So I found this article about the rise and fall of a house building family, the Dunmores, pretty fascinating.

“When George P. Dunmore started his business in Sacramento in the early 1950s, World War II was over and the building boom was on. Over the next several decades his company, Dunmore Construction, along with other respected builders, took the tabula rasa that was California’s Central Valley and etched it with entire neighborhoods filled with well-built ranch houses on trim lawns.

Mr. Dunmore lived through his share of lean years, of course; that is the rhythm of the home construction business. But for the most part, his company prospered. His son Sidney got into the business. And Sidney B. Dunmore’s boys followed him.

But by the time Mr. Dunmore died last October, at age 89, his son Sidney found himself caught in the middle of a real estate collapse. Overextended and pursued by a long line of creditors, the company bearing the family name, Dunmore Homes, was sold to a New York corporation owned by a Sacramento-area mortgage broker for $500, including the assumption of liabilities totaling more than $250 million. Two months later, the new owner filed for protection from creditors under Chapter 11 of the Federal Bankruptcy Code.

A bankruptcy court in Sacramento is left with the task of untangling a web of transactions, affidavits, property transfers, loans and liens that have come to symbolize the real estate crisis not just for Dunmore Homes, but for an entire industry.”

My old man, like George Dunmore, wanted to cash in on the building boom of the fifties. Unfortunately, my old man did not live in sunny California, but in snowy Syracuse, N.Y. Outside Syracuse, really. Back in the days when the Cold War idea of creating living patterns that mirrored the concentric rings on a bombing chart was just getting started. Always the outlier, my old man, he converted the farm that he’d borrowed money from his folks to buy into lots, upon which he erected large houses. Too large, it turned out. These beauties he built on spec, and sold in the end, to the family. My earliest memories are of the sweet work of carpentry. The smell of sawdust, the whine of an electric saw, the pocking sound of hammers and the way a nail will tune itself in the wood to a straight blow. Its work to make your hands bigger; always, no matter how much Lava you use, there’s something under your nails in the evening – grit, tar.

The Dunmores did well for themselves (unlike the Gathmanns) and prospered in what the NYT calls “the go-go years of the California real estate boom.” What curious years they have been!

“Not only was George Dunmore a fair businessman, friends and acquaintances say, but he was an avowed family man as well. Of Mr. Dunmore’s three children, Sidney, now 53, showed the most interest in taking up the family trade. After years of apprenticing under his father, the younger Mr. Dunmore started his own firm, Dunmore Homes.

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Dunmore Homes expanded. The company formed more than a dozen subsidiaries throughout the state, with more than two dozen developments, many of them catering to first-time home buyers in need of subprime and nonconventional loans. The company eventually built a total of 22,000 homes.

The region was one of the fastest-growing real estate markets in the country. In Sacramento County, from 2000 to 2005, the median price of homes more than tripled, to $385,000, according to DataQuick Information Systems.”

That’s a lot of board feet. When you have an asset run up like that of the early Bush years, you have to ask – I asked, continually, just drag my blog posts – where the money was coming from. As I’ve said before, the recession that keeps yawning before us (providing the newspapers with a by now very stale conditional for the last three months, that we may be in a recession) is the 3 trillion dollar recession – the difference between wages and borrowing. It would be interesting to know how many of those 22,000 homes became piggy banks for the homeowners, as the offers came in to borrow money against the accelerating value of the house. As my bro said last night, why not? The puritan in me protests that there had to be something wrong with the life of consumer prodigality which characterized the middle class lifestyle in the Bush era. Are we not men? Are we mere locusts? On the other hand, why knock the locusts? The non-puritan part of myself has always taken the grasshopper’s side in the fable of the ant and the grasshopper.

The Dunmore saga does not end in a “There will be blood” fashion – no homicide for these folks. It ends, more sensibly, in tax evasion:

“Any builder, even the best-capitalized builders, drank the Kool-Aid and bought too much land and loaded up at the peak,” said Ivy Zelman, a home building industry analyst. Ms. Zelman, who said she had no direct knowledge of Dunmore Homes, said she believed that the company might have taken on “way too much risk and just assumed values would go up.”
“I imagine that’s what they were thinking and didn’t have good disciplines in place.”
John Slaughter, a spokesman for Dunmore Homes who left the company this week, recalled how “so much happened with the mortgage industry, and prices dropping, and all the foreclosures.”
“It got to where we were a private company, competing with the large billion-dollar companies that could continue to reduce prices, and we just couldn’t compete with that,” he said.

In September, Dunmore Homes changed its name to DHI Development and sold its assets for $500 to a New York entity called Dunmore Homes Inc. The new Dunmore Homes is owned by Michael Kane, a Sacramento mortgage broker. He declined to comment.
Mr. Kane got not just the assets, but debts amounting to more than $250 million owed to a lengthy list of creditors that includes banks, contractors, landscapers, electricians, plumbers and paving companies.

Mr. Dunmore’s creditors cried foul over the sale, as well as the bankruptcy court filing in New York, a continent away.

Mr. Dunmore apparently had his reasons for the quick, cheap sale. According to court documents, by declaring his losses in the sale of the business, Mr. Dunmore is due a 2007 tax refund of approximately $11 million — money that he will use to pay off an $11 million obligation to Dunmore Homes.”

My brother might be right about my pessimism, which does blind me to certain truths that we hold self-evident. This is the New World, god damn it. We’ve moved out of the peasant world, with its iron Malthusian laws:

Nuit et jour à tout venant
Je chantais, ne vous déplaise.
--Vous chantiez ? j'en suis fort aise.
Eh bien ! dansez maintenant. »

Brer Rabbit and Lycurgus

"'I come atter you, Brer Rabbit,' sez Brer Fox, sezee. 'Dar's gwineter be a party up at Miss Meadows's,' sezee. 'All de gals 'llbe dere, en I promus' dat I'd fetch you. De gals, dey 'lowed dat hit wouldn't be no party 'ceppin' I fotch you,' sez Brer Fox, sezee.

"Den Brer Rabbit say he wuz too sick, en Brer Fox say he wuzzent, en dar dey had it up and down, 'sputin' en contendin'. Brer Rabbit say he can't walk. Brer Fox say he tote 'im. Brer Rabbit say how? Brer Fox say in his arms. Brer Rabbit say he drap 'im. Brer Fox low he won't. Bimeby Brer Rabbit say he go ef Brer Fox tote 'im on his back. Brer Fox say he would. Brer Rabbit say he can't ride widout a saddle. Brer Fox say he git de saddle. Brer Rabbit say he can't set in saddle less he have bridle fer ter hol' by. Brer Fox say he git de bridle. Brer Rabbit say he can't ride widout bline bridle, kaze Brer Fox be shyin' at stumps long de road, en fling 'im off. Brer Fox say he git bline bridle. Den Brer Rabbit say he go. Den Brer Fox say he ride Brer Rabbit mos' up ter Miss Meadows's, en den he could git down en walk de balance er de way. Brer Rabbit 'greed, en den Brer Fox lipt out atter de saddle en de bridle.”

Many a reader of Plutarch’s Lycurgus must have been struck by the resemblance between Sparta’s lawgiver and Br’er Rabbit. At least I was, last night.



In Kautsky’s book on Thomas More’s Utopia, he listed Lycurgus as a fore-runner of socialism. Kautsky said nothing about Brer Rabbit, however. Lycurgus got on the short list because, as Plutarch’s life shows, he imposed an apparently radically egalitarian ideal on the Spartans. Save, of course, for the helots. Myself, I think it is important to see this ideal for what it is: it is animated less by egalitarianism than for a hatred of the effects of wealth.

However, to continue along the traditional lines of telling the story: Lycurgus did create an egalitarian state. The way he did it was Brer Rabbit like. For instance, here is Lycurgus, solving the perennial problem of wealth inequality. First, he solved it for immovables (Henry Maine claims that the primal category of property is into immovables and moveables) by creating a new, equal division of land between all Spartans and all Laconians.

Then he moved onto moveables.

“Not contented with this, he resolved to make a division of their movables too, that there might be no odious distinction or inequality left amongst them; but finding that it would be very dangerous to go about it openly, he took another course…”

"Co'se Brer Rabbit know de game dat Brer Fox wuz fixin' fer ter play, en he 'termin' fer ter outdo 'im, en by de time he koam his ha'r en twis' his mustarsh, en sorter rig up, yer come Brer Fox, saddle en bridle on, en lookin' ez peart ez a circus pony. He trot up ter de do' en stan' dar pawin' de ground en chompin' de bit same like sho 'nuff hoss, en Brer Rabbit he mount, he did, en dey amble off. Brer Fox can't see behime wid de bline bridle on, but bimeby he feel Brer Rabbit raise one er his foots.
"'W'at you doin' now, Brer Rabbit?' sezee.
"Short'nin' de lef stir'p, Brer Fox,' sezee.
"Bimeby Brer Rabbit raise up de udder foot.
"'W'at you doin' now, Brer Rabbit?' sezee. Pullin' down my pants, Brer Fox,' sezee.
"All de time, bless grashus, honey, Brer Rabbit wer puttin' on his spurrers, en w'en dey got close to Miss Meadows's, whar Brer Rabbit wuz to git off, en Brer Fox made a motion fer ter stan' still, Brer Rabbit slap de spurrers into Brer Fox flanks, en you better b'leeve he got over groun'.

In order, Plutarch claims, to complete his radical egalitarian program, Lycurgus had to attack both the possessions and the private life of the Spartans. The first he did in the following way:

“… he commanded that all gold and silver coin should be called in, and that only a sort of money made of iron should be current, a great weight and quantity of which was but very little worth; so that to lay up twenty or thirty pounds there was required a pretty large closet, and, to remove it, nothing less than a yoke of oxen. With the diffusion of this money, at once a number of vices were banished from Lacedæmon; for who would rob another of such a coin? Who would unjustly detain or take by force, or accept as a bribe, a thing which it was not easy to hide, nor a credit to have, nor indeed of any use to cut in pieces? For when it was just red hot, they quenched it in vinegar, and by that means spoilt it, and made it almost incapable of being worked.
In the next place, he declared an outlawry of all needless and superfluous arts; but here he might almost have spared his proclamation; for they of themselves would have gone after the gold and silver, the money which remained being not so proper payment for curious work; for, being of iron, it was scarcely portable, neither, if they should take the pains to export it, would it pass amongst the other Greeks, who ridiculed it. So there was now no more means of purchasing foreign goods and small wares; merchants sent no shiploads into Laconian ports; no rhetoric-master, no itinerant fortune-teller, no harlot-monger or gold or silversmith, engraver, or jeweler, set foot in a country which had no money; so that luxury, deprived little by little of that which fed and fomented it, wasted to nothing, and died away of itself.”

What Lycurgus is aiming at is luxury –luxury is the vice of inequality, the effect of wealth, the thing that brings in itinerant fortune-tellers, harlot mongers and gold and silver smiths. The attack on wealth is an attack on the effect of wealth. And though it seems to be an attack levied for the sake of equality itself, it turns out that it is a way of clearing out unnatural hierarchies so that natural ones can flourish. The natural ones will be of the healthy and the strong over the weak – the good fuckers and good bearers of children over the degenerates – the silent, or plain speakers over the garrulous – the spending of words being parallel to the spending of money – etc.

In this, Brer Rabbit is different than Lycurgus. Lycurgus is the great deceitful lawmaker, and Brer Rabbit is the great deceitful lawbreaker. Since I’ve been considering the nineteenth century stories concerning the origin of property, I thought I’d put this note aside for later.

The shock of conquest.

This was the situation which capitalist production confronted as it, since the age of geographic discoveries, prepared itself for world domination through global trade and manufacture. One should think that this mode of marriage had suited it exceptionally well, and so it also was. And yet – the irony of world history is fathomless – it was capitalism that had to make the decisive breach in it. While it turns all things into commodities, it dissolves all obsolete, ancient relations, substitutes buying and selling, the free contract for inherited morals, historical right – as when the English legal scholar H.S. Maine believed to have made a great discovery when he said that our whole progress against earlier epochs consisted in the fact that we have come from status to contract, form inherited, transcended circumstances to freely contractual ones. Which was of course already in the Communist Manifesto, in so far as it was correct.

– Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.

Engels is, of course, right to point to the coincidence of views between Marx and Maine, even though there is little evidence that Maine came to his views from reading the Communist Manifesto. Like Marx, Maine rejected out of hand the 18th century’s Robinsonades, the stories of society's birth in the experience of some exemplary, isolated individual. Yet Maine was certainly on the other side of the political spectrum from Marx. Acton wrote, in a letter to Gladstone, that he found Maine to be a commonplace Tory. However, Acton might have been exaggerating Maine’s mediocrity. His star was descending at the time of his death – Thomas Huxley lamented, a decade after it, that Maine was largely neglected. Ford Maddox Ford was so struck by Maine’s expository prose that he exempted him from his general condemnation of the stupid nineteenth century in Britain. Contemporary anthropologists don’t give a lot of credit to Maine’s scholarship in Ancient Law – his friend and foe, James Fitzjames Stephen, claimed that Maine, at the time he wrote Ancient Law, was but dimly acquainted with Roman law, and had merely glanced at the Pandects on the way, so to speak, to the podium.

While these criticisms may be true, it is also true that Ancient Law is a great nineteenth century text, a codex of imperialist mythmaking. Using the theme of the origin of property relations allows Maine to touch on some of the great sore topics of the imperium – for instance, the relationship between violence and property. His use of the Indian village communes (supplemented by his use of the Russian village communes) introduces into the self satisfied Lockian tradition themes that can only distress it, that are outside of its reach. Even so, of course, Maine fit comfortably into the Lockean tradition, and in his real life, as a jurist in India, extended the rights of private property incrementally, thus adding his bit to the great work. Here we touch on one of those moments fraught with tension: Maine is, perhaps, the only real heir of that part of Burke’s philosophy that was expressed in the Hastings trial. He, too, extended his reverence for traditional social arrangements to other societies – notably, of course, India. (It is always India and Ireland for the British). Yet, practically, this was a move stunted by its inability to justify its own standing – for neither Burke nor Maine were opposed to empire. They could only shunt the moment of initial violence to the category that contained special cases. And so, although Maine takes an anti-Millian, anti-utilitarian approach in Ancient Law, one shouldn’t see this opposition as too absolute. Remember, too, that Maine was associated with the whole cast of imperial bureaucrats who responded with unparalleled criminality to the famine of 1879 – which is spelled out by Mike Davis in his book, the Late Victorian Holocaust. So the Burkean and Millian controversy about law in India, and, by extension, the social arrangements of European imperial states, is at the same time exquisitely evasive about the British responsibility for the state of utter misery and impoverishment that resulted in the series of famines in the late nineteenth century – famines which, as we know, could well have been mitigated by timely interventions, but were instead exacerbated by a punitive system of aid that was more attentive to laissez faire ideology than to human catastrophe. I reference Mike Davis because, if you look at histories of the Raj, at least by British authors, you will find references to famine are confined to a page or a paragraph, so as not to interrupt the pageantry.

LI has already anchored our account of the triumph of happiness in the Great Transformation that brought about the dominance of free trade and the industrial system of production. Looking at the intellectual history of the discourse over the emotions (one of the dimensions of which is to ground and legitimate capitalism and the democratic state) , it is striking – it struck, I think, Maine – how the use of “enjoyment’ and ‘use’ are coupled together as the distinctive characteristics of the relation of the holder of property to the property he holds in British law. One has a sense that the telescoping of enjoyment and use by Bentham is suggested by this legal idiom. Maine’s question about the origins of the property relation is, in one way a question about how it came about that property is defined in terms of the exclusive enjoyment of an object by the propertyholder. Chapter 8, which we want to examine, takes up various aspects of the property relation, finds echoes of them (or, sometimes, does not find echoes of them) in ancient law and custom, and beats a trail back to India, its primitive status trumping Rome’s. We’ll start with the notion of res nullius – which, we have noticed, hasn’t attracted a lot of modern attention. However, for us, looking at Maine’s text in terms of imperial legitimacy, res nullius – the notion that the conqueror’s triumph dissolves all property bonds, rendering the objects free for the conqueror to seize – should be looked at as more than a curiosity.

the croakers want their own index

LI recommends David Leonardt’s column on unemployment in the NYT today. Leonardt has positioned himself as the NYT’s thorough Business columnist – he doesn’t have Gretchen’s instinct for hot stories of corrupt dealing, or Floyd Norris’ air of being a business columnist paterfamilias. Instead, he’s the economic historian of the bunch. In keeping with that rep, he begins with a fascinating story about the man who invented the way we measure unemployment, Carroll Wright, the chief of the Massachusetts Bureau of the Statistics of Labor in 1873 who was convinced that unemployment wasn’t as bad as the newspapers said it was. To “combat” the erroneous picture, “he created the first survey of unemployment.

The survey asked town assessors to estimate the number of local people out of work. Wright, however, added a crucial qualification. He wanted the assessors to count only adult men who “really want employment,” according to the historian Alexander Keyssar. By doing this, Wright said he understood that he was excluding a large number of men who would have liked to work if they could have found a job that paid as much as they
had been earning before.

Just as Wright hoped, his results were encouraging. Officially, there were only 22,000 unemployed in Massachusetts, less than one-tenth as many as one widely circulated (and patently wrong) guess had suggested. Wright announced that his “intelligent canvas” had proven the “croakers” wrong.”

The croakers have been down ever since – we croak that the reserve army of the unemployed is cynically manipulated to lower wages. Croak! We croak that the unemployment figures, like inflation figures, have been fine tuned by a combine of neo-classical economists and conservative politicians to churn out mind-numbingly bogus figures. Croak!
Which brings us up to the present:

“Over the last few decades, there has been an enormous increase in the number of people who fall into the no man’s land of the labor market that Carroll Wright created 130 years ago. These people are not employed, but they also don’t fit the government’s definition of the unemployed — those who “do not have a job, have actively looked for work in the prior four weeks, and are currently available for work.”

Consider this: the average unemployment rate in this decade, just above 5 percent, has been lower than in any decade since the 1960s. Yet the percentage of prime-age men (those 25 to 54 years old) who are not working has been higher than in any decade since World War II. In January, almost 13 percent of prime-age men did not hold a job, up from 11 percent in 1998, 11 percent in 1988, 9 percent in 1978 and just 6 percent in 1968.

Even prime-age women, who flooded into the work force in the 1970s and 1980s, aren’t working at quite the same rate they were when this decade began. About 27 percent of them don’t hold a job today, up from 25 percent in early 2000.”

It is a mad world, my masters. The croakers have still not penetrated the gated community in which dwell the pretty media princes and princesses. But outside that community, something is stirring. Us croakers have long been aware of an existential malaise, as we fight for our lives in our individual ratholes and receive reports about a world of sugar plum fairies in sugar plum McMansions, reports that are totally void of any hint that this magic world in which the dogs have all eaten the dogs and now want their desserts is not all the world there is.