Some notes and recommendations. The Republicans are the demon spawn of Joseph McCarthy and Wile E. Coyote. 'nuff said. Let's talk about books. Anti-intellectuals carry on about the dark age of nihilism that has supposedly settled upon us. Yes, of course there are nihilists, as there have always been. But don't be fooled by the selective use of evidence. The fact is that we are living in a golden age of scholarship. I have pointed this out before, and now I'm back with further evidence. Harold J. Berman, Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition, Harvard University Press, 1983. Much social and political theory has been concerned with the idea of revolution -- the idea that society can go through a total transformation that affects every aspect of life in profound and coherently interrelated ways. Arguments rage about whether revolutions can be a good thing, and about whether they can happen at all. Without wishing to take a strong stand on the general question, Harold Berman points out that the clearest possible case of a social revolution is also a case that nobody, including Marx, had ever noticed before: the great wave of economic growth and institution-building that swept over Europe in the period from 1050 to 1200. Berman's focus is on legal institutions. He argues that there exists something called the Western legal tradition, as opposed to individual national traditions, and that this tradition arose in a definite place and time through the secularization of canon law across this 150-year period. Although I am terribly interested in the so-called secularization thesis and its seeming consequences for the processes of desecularization in our own day, I had resisted reading Berman's book because I had associated legal history with the dry and turgid writing of a Blackstone or a Holmes. Not so. This, remarkably, is legal history as bedtime reading -- not the minutiae of rules, but the social and institutional setting within which those rules took form. I have always believed that we moderns continue to live out the inheritances of history unawares, but rarely have I seen the case for this idea made so compellingly as here. Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages, revised edition, Oxford University Press, 1970. As we struggle to throw off the tedious millennialism of the "cyberspace" ideology, it is useful to revisit the historical origins of such thinking -- the idea that tomorrow will be discontinuously different from today. Cohn's book is a celebrated and influential account of the strange sects such as the Ranters, the Anabaptists, the Free Spirit, and the flagellants that were the radical movements of their day. Writing in 1970, Cohn obviously had in mind the hippies, who were indeed related to these movements through their antinomianism -- their desire to overturn, or literally to invert, every aspect of constituted society. The hypothesis, in other words, is that these medieval sects were the counterculture of their day. Although we tend to romanticize these sects for their exotic, rebellious character, Cohn argues that they were in fact movements of desperate and marginal people, led by marginal and uncompelling intellectuals. It is most instructive to compare Cohn's account of these sections, and especially the Ranters, with the equally fascinating account of them in "The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas during the English Revolution", by the British communist intellectual Christopher Hill. Hill was most impressed by one Gerard Winstanley, the leader of the Ranters, who he portrayed as a communist avant la lettre for his opposition to religion and private property and his advocacy of free love. In the end it was Cohn's argument that persuaded me. (I read Hill's book last summer on a terrifying overnight bus ride from Ljubljana to Sarajevo, 12 hours spent on gutted mountain roads through a moonscape of bombed-out villages and militia roadblocks. I was the only outsider on the bus, and I didn't understand what was happening most of the time. "Just keep ten marks in your pocket and bribe them if they hassle you", my host in Ljubljana said. So there I was with my ten marks. The whole time this is going on, a VCR on the bus is showing a series of terrible, extraordinarily violent Sylvester Stallone movies. So here I am at this Serbian checkpoint, nasty men with serious guns all over the place, hand-painted signs, this guy is scowling at my passport, and Sylvester Stallone is up on the video screen killing dozens of men. For a while there, Hill's book made perfect sense. Sarajevo, by the way, is a fabulous place, and you should go there before they ruin it.) Randall Collins, The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change, Harvard University Press, 1998. If you haven't been reading enough thousand-page histories of world philosophy lately, you might want to pick up this astonishing book, which describes both the substance and the institutional dynamics of every single school of philosophy -- indeed, every single philosopher -- in Greek, Indian, Chinese, Japanese, and European history from ancient times until the early part of this century. But it's not just a catalog. Quite the contrary, as its title promises, it is a systematic theory of the conditions of intellectual change. Collins observes, for example, the just-about-universal regularity that a society that has any philosophy at all will have only about three to five schools of philosophy at any given time. If it has fewer schools, one or more of them will break into competing camps. If it has more schools, some of those schools will die and others will coalesce. This sounds hokey in the abstract, but it actually explains a great deal about many, many particular episodes in intellectual history. He also argues that philosophical creativity has special institutional conditions. A society needs to be organized in such a way that philosophers can be organized in the first place, obviously, but then it is also necessary for the philosophers to be organized into competing schools. A philosophical school that operates without sophisticated competition, in other words, will fail to produce creative work. It is frustrating to try to explain Collins' book in abstract terms because his own philosophy is nothing special. His own abstract theory, which occupies the first eighty pages of the book, makes it seem much too easy to draw analogies and generalize across cultures and historical periods. Nonetheless, his theory is theory enough to elucidate an incredible amount of material. And he does escape the most obvious kinds of reductionism: although he does give the economic and political context a role in shaping philosophy, he does not reduce philosophy to a mere ideological expression of that context. I'm about 40% of the way through the book, just wrapping up the discussion of Japan before moving to Europe, and the most striking thing so far is the effect of putting all of those Asian philosophies in historical context. California is full of romanticized versions of those philosophies, for example the selective appropriation of Zen by the Beats and a whole subsequent subculture, and it so it is striking to read Collins' theory that Ch'an Buddhism -- the Chinese version of Buddhism from which Zen was drawn -- was itself very much an expression of the later states of collapse and decay of Buddhism in China. That does not lessen the philosophical accomplishments of Zen founders such as Dogen, who was a tremendously sophisticated phenomenologist whose views clearly anticipated and probably influenced those of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, but it does help us understand these thinkers as people just like us, and not as the idealized myth-figures of New Age religion. Douglass C. North, Institutions, Institutional Change, and Economic Performance, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Douglass North is by far the most interesting of a vast school of conservative economists and lawyers who have been trying to implement the deceptively simple intellectual program that Ronald Coase laid out in two papers, "The nature of the firm" and "The problem of social cost". It is often observed that reality fails to correspond to classical economics, and Coase suggests that these very failures can be used as explanatory principles: if the world fails to correspond to the conclusions of the classical theory, for example by not allocating resources efficiently, then the world must also fail to correspond to the assumptions of the classical theory, for example by not circulating market information to everybody who needs it; and if the world changes so that it corresponds better to the assumptions, then we can predict that it will also change so that it corresponds better to the conclusions. North turns these forms of argument into a conceptual basis for economic history, as well as the comparative study of modern economies. He focuses particularly on institutions, which he has influentially defined as the "rules of the game" -- the "rules" that define the most basic relationships in social life, and particularly economic relationships. Institutions can include the family firm, capital markets, the credit system, the legal system, standard contracts, relationships between firms and the government, and so on. Implicit in North's theory is a normative, teleological view of history: all history is a march toward the English ideal of liberal individualism, impersonal market dealings, the rule of law, and laissez- faire economic policy -- in short, to Adam Smith's market -- and we can ask about the conditions under which this march moves, and in what direction. This literature is at its most persuasive when studying the fine details of particular institutions, such as slavery or particular regimes of property rights. It is least persuasive when explaining shifts from one institutional scheme to another. But whereas most authors in this literature have stuck with a superficial, rationalistic view of the matter, North has explored increasingly daring -- from the standpoint of the academic field of economics -- integrations between economics and cognitive science. The point is not that any particular theory of cognition is the last word, but that forms of cognition are now taken to be (as economists say) endogenous -- that is, historically variable, affecting other features of the system and affects by other features of the system. This broadening of the scope of economics has made it conceivable that the undeniably powerful modes of economic reasoning can be integrated with other fields that do not share the narrowness of most economic theorizing. Not recommended: Isaiah Berlin, The Proper Study of Mankind: An Anthology of Essays, edited by Henry Hardy and Roger Hausheer, London: Chatto and Windus, 1997. The late Isaiah Berlin is famous in the United States for the lucid essays he wrote introducing various European social thinkers to the English-speaking world. His terrific book on Vico and Herder, for example, can be recommended to anybody who is wondering where the controversy about multiculturalism came from. In Britain, by contrast, Berlin seems to be celebrated largely for his legendary sophistication at dinner-table conversation, which the culture of Oxford and Cambridge often seems to value ahead of profound scholarly achievement. Perhaps for this reason, Berlin never bothered to publish most of his writing, and we know his work primarily because the editors of this new volume, Henry Hardy and Roger Hausheer, went to a great deal of work to edit it. When Berlin died, the big question was whether Berlin was a genuine social thinker in his own right, or whether he was just a dinner-table conversationalist who wrote some particularly clear secondary sources on the work of other thinkers. Hardy and Hausheer understandably want Berlin to be remembered in the former of these ways, and this book is their brief. I am sorry to say that they have failed. Berlin's essays on European social thinkers are as vivid as they ever were. But the editors have placed their primary emphasis, and the bulk of their page count, on the essays in which Berlin elaborates his own philosophy. The contrast, sad to say, could not be more stark. Berlin's own essays feel tentative, murky, meandering, trivial, and ultimately pointless. Most of all they feel unfinished. Perhaps they were useful to him as thought experiments while writing his essays on the work of others. But they should have stayed experiments. The editors would have been much better advised to bring out the philosophy that Berlin was surely developing between the lines in his writing about the others. That task, however, will have to be left for better scholars to pursue. Some URL's. Microsoft strategy memo on Linux and other open-source software http://www.opensource.org/halloween.html Clinton, Conspiracism, and Civil Society, by Chip Berlet http://www.publiceye.org/conspire/clinton/networks.htm Internet Mail Consortium http://www.imc.org/ G7 Government On-Line http://www.state.mn.us/gol/democracy/ Report on the NSA's Echelon surveillance system http://www.freecongress.org/ctp/echelon.html Law Enforcement Can Track Cellular Users http://www.currents.net/newstoday/98/10/31/news3.html Getty Conference on technology in museums http://www.ahip.getty.edu/c98/index2.html Early Computer Security Papers http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/history/index.html "Institutionalized Resistance To Asynchronous Learning Networks" by David Jaffee (a good example of the standard story about resistance to technology) http://www.aln.org/alnweb/journal/vol2_issue2/jaffee.htm Simson Garfinkel's article on the W3C http://www.techreview.com/articles/nov98/garfinkel.htm new report on technologies of political control http://www.nrc.nl/W2/Lab/Echelon/stoa2sept1998.html Arts and Letters Daily http://www.cybereditions.com/aldaily OECD Ottawa conference on electronic stuff http://www.ottawaoecdconference.org/english/announcements/res_center.html Critical Infrastructure: The Path Ahead http://www.xiwt.org/ROBIN/ROBIN-NOV/ROBIN-home.html CIA's Drug Confession http://www.consortiumnews.com/consor29.html Legal Journals on the Web http://www.usc.edu/dept/law-lib/legal/journals.html Simson Garfinkel's book on privacy http://www.2048.com/ CAUSE98, "The Networked Academy", 8-11 December 1998, Seattle http://www.educause.edu/conference/c98/c98.html Reinventing Assessment: Speculations on the Future of Large-Scale Educational Testing, by the Educational Testing Service http://www.ets.org/research/pic/reinvtoc.html Index of distance education resources http://www.cisnet.com/~cattales/Deducation.html The Household Cyclopedia of General Information http://members.xoom.com/mspong/ Who Will Own Your Next Good Idea? by Charles C. Mann http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/98sep/copy.htm Resources for Facilitators and Moderators of Online Discussion http://star.ucc.nau.edu/~mauri/moderators.html end