Pegs and awls: In the final essay of the winter quarter, assistant editor Brady Santoro muses on the alleged murderer Luigi Mangione and the “web of capital and power buttressed by technology.” Modern technological advancements are not innovative in the sense that they help the masses of people in America, only that they generate “more technological advancement.” Americans are confronted with this reality, powerless to do anything about it. Reckoning with class politics and the actions one can realistically take against an unfeeling injustice, Santoro concludes that in the face of a “society that destroys itself from the inside,” “we must reteach our society to be a human one.”
Elizabeth Eck, senior editor
The endgame: Writing in Smithsonian magazine, journalist Chris Heath profiles the legendary biographer Robert Caro. The piece is full of insight into Caro’s career, with the aged biographer giving Heath a personal tour of his newly opened archive at the New York Historical Society. But fans of presidential history may value the Smithsonian piece for another reason: it provides an update on Caro’s race against the clock to finish his work. Since 1975, Caro has assembled the most detailed biography of President Lyndon B. Johnson. Originally consisting of three books, it currently stands at 4 volumes and over 3,000 pages, but only covers the President’s life through 1964. The final volume, which will deal with the Civil Rights Act and Vietnam War, will bring Caro’s analysis to bear on Lyndon Johnson’s legacy. The update that Caro has 950 pages written and will see to it that some version of the fifth volume will be published if he dies is reassuring news by itself. Alongside anecdotes about Caro’s devotion to his work and the lengths that he’ll go to ensure that every detail is just right, the update on the book acquires a sort of urgency. When Heath asks Caro what he’ll do if he realizes along the way the series requires a sixth volume, the biographer answers that the fifth volume must be the last: “In this book, there’s an ending. I have my ending, and I have all the things leading up to it.”
William Moursund, contributing editor
Homo economicus: As historian, translator, and Harper Review contributor Blake Smith begins in his recent essay in The Hedgehog Review, “[i]f critique could kill, neoliberalism would long be dead.” Seeking to understand its essence, survival, purported failure, and possible future, Smith turns to Michel Foucault—as an implicit liberal.
Foucault at once understood neoliberalism as yet another instance of liberalism’s constant self-critique and as providing a novel “anthropology.” Man is exclusively a Homo economicus, a purely rational and self-interested actor. Smith quickly clarifies that this conception itself is at least as old as liberalism itself, but until the 1970s it existed healthily with other anthropologies. Indeed, even purported deviations from neoliberal tenets of nonintervention (be it “pro-family” or “industrial” policy) inherently work under neoliberal assumptions. Values do not influence man, but economic incentives do.
Even if one believes such a self-understanding of man to be harmfully reductive, it persists despite its critics. Unlike any suggested alternatives, neoliberal anthropology at least provides a coherent and “pre-political” framework. Liberalism, Foucault explains, is partially animated by “a fear of the state”: the politicization of independent parts of life. From this fear, there is the alternative “utopia” of apolitical being. Unfortunately, neoliberal anthropology seems to distinctly lack the necessary capability of “enchantment,” thereby risking surrender to, in Smith’s words, “a new barbarism,” or abandonment of anthropology itself.
Foucault at once understood neoliberalism as yet another instance of liberalism’s constant self-critique and as providing a novel “anthropology.” Man is exclusively a Homo economicus, a purely rational and self-interested actor. Smith quickly clarifies that this conception itself is at least as old as liberalism itself, but until the 1970s it existed healthily with other anthropologies. Indeed, even purported deviations from neoliberal tenets of nonintervention (be it “pro-family” or “industrial” policy) inherently work under neoliberal assumptions. Values do not influence man, but economic incentives do.
Even if one believes such a self-understanding of man to be harmfully reductive, it persists despite its critics. Unlike any suggested alternatives, neoliberal anthropology at least provides a coherent and “pre-political” framework. Liberalism, Foucault explains, is partially animated by “a fear of the state”: the politicization of independent parts of life. From this fear, there is the alternative “utopia” of apolitical being. Unfortunately, neoliberal anthropology seems to distinctly lack the necessary capability of “enchantment,” thereby risking surrender to, in Smith’s words, “a new barbarism,” or abandonment of anthropology itself.
Jacob Neplokh, contributing editor
Salt, sails, sex: By the early twentieth century, the seas were finally beginning to open up for women. No longer constrained by Victorian standards of morality and domesticity, some wives of merchant sailors opted to sail with their husbands and kept diaries about what they experienced. Some of the diaries, including Dorothea Moulton Balano aboard the Maine-based merchant shipHopkins, went on to be published.
While most captains’ wives abstained from writing about the intimate aspects of life on board, Moulton Balano spared no detail in telling the stormy romance between her and her husband, Fred. The diary offers a fascinating look into the early days of the shifting barriers of gendered spheres of influence. Her narrative of ship life includes discussions of sex, the desire to have children, and her husband’s promiscuity, shedding light on a little-discussed aspect of maritime history (it’s best to ignore the fact that the diary was transcribed for publication by one of her sons).
While the open seas were still very much a man’s world, Moulton Balano’s presence on the Hopkins illustrates a fascinating intersection of microhistories, and her writing offers a rare glimpse into the day-to-day of sexually liberated women in the early twentieth century.
While most captains’ wives abstained from writing about the intimate aspects of life on board, Moulton Balano spared no detail in telling the stormy romance between her and her husband, Fred. The diary offers a fascinating look into the early days of the shifting barriers of gendered spheres of influence. Her narrative of ship life includes discussions of sex, the desire to have children, and her husband’s promiscuity, shedding light on a little-discussed aspect of maritime history (it’s best to ignore the fact that the diary was transcribed for publication by one of her sons).
While the open seas were still very much a man’s world, Moulton Balano’s presence on the Hopkins illustrates a fascinating intersection of microhistories, and her writing offers a rare glimpse into the day-to-day of sexually liberated women in the early twentieth century.
Nora Holmes, contributing editor
Image: Claude Monet, On the Bank of the Seine, Bennecourt, oil on canvas, 1868 (Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois)