Tools for tyrants

Discourse on Political Economy/The Social Contract by Jean-Jacques Rousseau

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I had never read The Social Contract, but I knew the one-minute summary of it and knew the effect that it had on the radical French revolutionaries like Robespierre who carried out the Terror. It was good to see his whole argument.

Christopher Betts’ edition also includes Rousseau’s Discourse on Political Economy, a contribution to Denis Diderot’s Encyclopedia. It was good to read this first and get an understanding of earlier development of his thought, including the early development of his famous idea of “the general will”:

The political body, therefore, is also a moral being which has a will; and this general will, which tends always to the conservation and well-being of the whole and of each part of it, and which is the source of laws, is, for all members of the state and in relation to it and them, the rule of what is just or unjust; a truth which (I mention in passing) shows how little sense there is in the way so many writers have treated as theft the Spartan children’s compulsory acquisition of their frugal meals by stealth, as if anything ordained by law could not be lawful. (7)

I found Rousseau’s concept of society and government fascinating but troubling. I had always thought that he believed that people gave up all of their rights to government, but instead he argued that people gave up all individual rights to society in order to gain the increased freedom of being in society. For Rousseau, the social body formed by a contract between individuals is all-important, and everything else (including government and religion) serves the interest of that body. The government (whatever form it takes) is the executive branch, while the whole body of the citizens passes the laws.

From my admittedly elementary knowledge of Rousseau, I believe that he would have been horrified at the uses to which his ideas were put by the Jacobins during the Terror in France. For starters, he idealizes the city-state, not the large nation-state, kingdom, or empire. He writes in The Social Contract that the people who give their lawmaking power to representatives have given up their sovereignty. Also, he almost certainly would have seen that the “particular will” of the radical revolutionaries was dominating the general will of the French people.

But Rousseau leaves a lot of tools lying around for potential tyrants. The supremacy of society’s rights over any individual rights, his concept of the general will, the figure of “the legislator” who guides the people into understanding their best interests when setting up a constitution, and his confidence that the majority of the people will ultimately come to the right decision (unless society is already sick) are (and have been) potent intellectual weapons in the hands of bad governments.

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An illustration of Rousseau’s concept of the “general will”

To try to help my online students understand Rousseau’s concept of the general will, I adapted an example that I use in in-class discussion. The page numbers are from Christopher Betts’ Oxford World’s Classics translation.

Rousseau starts off, like other social contract theorists, with people in a “state of nature.” For our illustration, I will imagine that we as a class have just crash landed on a remote island (everyone survived). We are now individuals with no society.

Soon, though, we realize that we are likely to starve or get eaten by the rodents of unusual size (ROUS) if we don’t band together. So we get together and agree to form a society. All of us who do join give our individual rights over to the community (Rousseau 54-56). This community now forms a “public person” that all of us have joined (Rousseau 56).

This public person has a “general will,” which is for the best interest of the community. This general will is there whether we realize it or not. The general will for our little island community would include, for example, that we eat a balanced diet in order to survive. This is the case even if the majority of us decide that we don’t want to hunt and gather, but survive on the candy stash that we gathered from the wreckage of the plane instead. That’s not in our best interest. But Rousseau is confident (66) that eventually we will realize our best interest is to ease up on the Jolly Ranchers and find some proper food.

Now we must decide how we are going to feed ourselves. Let’s say that the island has a lot of berry bushes and leafy greens as well as some deer. There are fish, too, but they are small and not likely to be worth the effort. Different opinions arise as to how we will feed ourselves:

• Since I am an avid fisherman (not in real life), I argue that we need to fish.
• The vegetarians in the group don’t want to kill the deer (or the fish, for that matter).
• The majority decides that we must create a hunting group and a gathering group in order to feed ourselves.

Rousseau is confident that in a healthy society, the majority will always be right, at least eventually (66, 134-136). So hunting and gathering is the general will of society, and my preference for fishing and the vegetarians’ objections for hunting are merely particular wills. Those on the losing end of the debate ought to say, “When an opinion contrary to mine prevails, therefore, it proves only that I had been mistaken, and that the general will was not what I had believed it to be. If my particular will had prevailed, I should have done otherwise than I wished; and then I should not have been free” (Rousseau 138). This is because when you obey society, you are really only obeying yourself because you are connected with everyone else (Rousseau 55).

Now we haven’t even gotten to actually forming a government yet. His first two books are almost entirely about society. Government, he says, is put in place to carry out society’s wishes (91-92). So when we choose the members of our hunting group and gathering group, we have then acted like a government (Rousseau 68-69).

Rousseau vs. Locke: Rousseau on property (part 3) and the individual’s right to life

Twice before, I have posted about Rousseau’s views on property (here and here). In The Social Contract, Rousseau states that property is made secure in society. “The right of the first occupant,” he writes, “is more real than the right of the strongest, but it does not become a true right until the right of property has been established” (Book I Ch. ix, p. 60 of Christopher Betts’ translation). This establishment happens in “the civil state,” which is created by the voluntary social contract among individuals. In the civil state, an individual becomes a member of a community, a unified “public person” that has a “general will” to which all of its members are subject. For Rousseau, this means that each person is obeying himself, since he is bound to others in the social body (Book I, Ch. vi, pp. 54-56). Strictly speaking, he is not saying that the government is all-powerful, since there is a difference between the community of people, which is sovereign, and the government, which is set up to do the community’s will. I don’t think that this distinction has ever held up among Rousseau’s philosophical descendants.

But the civil state, unlike in Locke’s understanding (where the government protects “life, liberty, and property”), does not create an absolute right to property. It is limited to what the individual needs, and this need is determined by the community. There’s a parallel with his rejection of the absolute individual right to life as well. Christopher Betts notes that Rousseau argues against Locke’s argument that people cannot give their lives to a sovereign since they don’t have the right to dispose of their own lives (see James Rogers’ exploration, where he notes that “Locke argues that life is an inalienable right precisely because God owns us and, therefore, we do not own ourselves”). For Rousseau, on the other hand:

The purpose of a social treaty is the preservation of the contracting parties. He who wills an end wills the means to that end: and the means in this case necessarily involves some risk, and even some loss. He who wills that his life may be preserved at the expense of others must also, when necessary give his life for their sake. But the citizen ceases to be judge of occasions on which the law requires him to risk danger; and when the ruler has said: ‘It is in the state’s interest that you should die’, he must die, because it is only on this condition that that he has hitherto lived in safety, his life being no longer only a benefit due to nature, but a conditional gift of the state. (p. 71)

As you can see, there are massive possibilities for abuse opened up by this logic, even if Rousseau was not trying to create something like the French Republic or the Soviet Union.

Hat tip for Locke article: Rick Hogaboam

Rousseau and Aristotle: society makes people fully human

Yesterday, we started to discuss Rousseau’s The Social Contract in my modern Western Civ classes. In the ancient-medieval-early modern course, I assigned some excerpts from Plato and Aristotle. There was an interesting overlap between Aristotle’s and Rousseau’s conception of the relationship between the individual and the state.

Here is Aristotle (in the excerpt The Politics that I assigned) on the origins of the city-state:

Now, that man is more of a political animal than bees or any other gregarious animals is evident. Nature, as we often say, makes nothing in vain, and man is the only animal whom she has endowed with the gift of speech. And whereas mere voice is but an indication of pleasure or pain, and is therefore found in other animals (for their nature attains to the perception of pleasure and pain and the intimation of them to one another, and no further), the power of speech is intended to set forth the expedient and inexpedient, and therefore likewise the just and the unjust. And it is a characteristic of man that he alone has any sense of good and evil, of just and unjust, and the like, and the association of living beings who have this sense makes a family and a state.

Further, the state is by nature clearly prior to the family and to the individual, since the whole is of necessity prior to the part; for example, if the whole body be destroyed, there will be no foot or hand, except in an equivocal sense, as we might speak of a stone hand; for when destroyed the hand will be no better than that. But things are              defined by their working and power; and we ought not to say that they are the same when they no longer have their proper quality, but only that they have the same name. The proof that the state is a creation of nature and prior to the individual is that the individual, when isolated, is not self-sufficing; and therefore he is like a part in relation to the whole. But he who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god: he is no part of a state. A              social instinct is implanted in all men by nature, and yet he who first founded the state was the greatest of benefactors. For man, when perfected, is the best of animals, but, when separated from law and justice, he is the worst of all; since armed injustice is the more dangerous, and he is equipped at birth with arms, meant to be used by intelligence and virtue, which he may use for the worst ends. Wherefore, if he have not virtue, he is the most unholy and the most savage of animals, and the most full of lust and gluttony. But justice is the bond of men in states, for the administration of justice, which is the determination of what is just, is the principle of order in political society. . . .

Rousseau (Christopher Betts’ translation for Oxford World’s Classics, Book I, Ch. viii, p. 59):

The passage from the state of nature to the civil state produces in man a very remarkable change, replacing instinct by justice in his behavior, and conferring on his actions the moral quality that they had lacked before. It is only now, as the voice of duty succeeds to physical impulse and right to appetite, that man, who had previously thought of nothing but himself is compelled to act on other principles, and to consult his reason before he attends to his inclinations. Although, in the civil state, he deprives himself of a number of advantages which he has by nature, the others that he acquires are so great, so greatly are his faculties exercised and improved, his ideas amplified, his feelings ennobled, and his entire soul raised so much higher, that if the abuses that occur in his new condition did not frequently reduce him to a state lower than the one he has just left, he ought constantly to bless the happy moment when he was taken from it for ever, and which made of him, not a limited and stupid animal, but an intelligent being and a man.

Rousseau thinks that people are social because of circumstances rather than nature, but it’s interesting that they express the effects of society in a similar way. Rousseau must have read Aristotle, although I don’t know the extent of the latter’s influence on the former.

Rousseau and Burke

I assigned Rousseau’s The Social Contract this summer for my modern Western Civ course. One (or maybe more) students used an online translation instead of getting the book, and in checking the version that he used, I came across this part (Book III, Chapter 9), where Rousseau considers what kind of government is best:

The question “What absolutely is the best government?” is unanswerable as well as indeterminate; or rather, there are as many good answers as there are possible combinations in the absolute and relative situations of all nations.

But if it is asked by what sign we may know that a given people is well or ill governed, that is another matter, and the question, being one of fact, admits of an answer.

It is not, however, answered, because everyone wants to answer it in his own way. Subjects extol public tranquillity, citizens individual liberty; the one class prefers security of possessions, the other that of person; the one regards as the best government that which is most severe, the other maintains that the mildest is the best; the one wants crimes punished, the other wants them prevented; the one wants the State to be feared by its neighbours, the other prefers that it should be ignored; the one is content if money circulates, the other demands that the people shall have bread. Even if an agreement were come to on these and similar points, should we have got any further? As moral qualities do not admit of exact measurement, agreement about the mark does not mean agreement about the valuation.

For my part, I am continually astonished that a mark so simple is not recognised, or that men are of so bad faith as not to admit it. What is the end of political association? The preservation and prosperity of its members. And what is the surest mark of their preservation and prosperity? Their numbers and population. Seek then nowhere else this mark that is in dispute. The rest being equal, the government under which, without external aids, without naturalisation or colonies, the citizens increase and multiply most, is beyond question the best. The government under which a people wanes and diminishes is the worst. Calculators, it is left for you to count, to measure, to compare.

His reference to “calculators” (the Oxford World Classics translation by Christopher Betts, which I assigned for class, says “mathematicians”) reminded me of a section that I have read in Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolutions in France (I need to read the whole thing sometime). Here’s an excerpt:

It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then the dauphiness, at Versailles, and surely never lighted on this orb, which shehardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above thehorizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she just began to move in— glittering like the morning star, full of life and splendor and joy. Oh! what a revolution! and what a heart must I have to contemplate without emotion that elevation and that fall! Little did I dream when she added titles of veneration to those of enthusiastic, distant, respectful love, that she should ever be obliged to carry the sharp antidote against disgrace concealed in that bosom; little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fallen upon her in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers. I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone.

That of sophisters, economists; and calculators has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever. Never, never more shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom. The unbought grace of life, the cheap defense of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise, is gone! It is gone, that sensibility of principle, that chastity of honor which felt a stain like a wound, which inspired courage whilst it mitigated ferocity,which ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice itself lost half its evil by losing all its grossness.

I don’t know if Burke was referring specifically to Rousseau, but he seems to have had thinkers like Rousseau in mind.

Rousseau and Fanon

In Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality (Helena Rosenblatt’s translation), he describes the original state of nature (before civilization) and the origins of civilization, property, and government that create inequality. Near the end, he writes about absolutism and its demise:

Here all individuals become equals again because they are nothing; and subjects no longer having any law except the will of the master, nor the master any other rule except his passions, the notions of good and the principles of justice vanish once again. Here everything is brought back to the sole law of the stronger, and consequently to a new state of nature different from the one with which we began, in that the one was the state of nature in its purity, and this last one is the fruit of of an excess of corruption. Besides, there is so little difference between these two states, and the contract of government is so completely dissolved by despotism, that the despot is master only as long as he is the strongest, and as soon as he can be driven out, he cannot protest against violence. The uprising that ends by strangling or dethroning a sultan is as lawful an act as those by which he disposed, the day before, of the lives and goods of his subjects. Force alone maintained him, force alone overthrows him. Everything thus occurs according to the natural order; and whatever the outcome of these short and frequent revolutions may be,  no one can complain of another’s injustice, but only of his own imprudence or his misfortune. (93, emphasis mine)

Frantz Fanon, born in French Martinique but who became famous in writing about the Algerian revolution against France, expressed a similar idea about overthrowing colonialism in the mid-20th century. I couldn’t find my book that has the excerpt I first read, but I believe that this is the passage (from The Wretched of the Earth) that I remembered:

Decolonization, which sets out to change the order of the world, is, obviously, a program of complete disorder. But it cannot come as a result of magical practices, nor of a natural shock, nor of a friendly understanding. Decolonization, as we know, is a historical process: that is to say that it cannot be understood, it cannot become intelligible nor clear to itself except in the exact measure that we can discern the movements which give it historical form and content. Decolonization is the meeting of two forces, opposed to each other by their very nature, which in fact owe their originality to that sort of substantification which results from and is nourished by the situation in the colonies. Their first encounter was marked by violence and their existence together–that is to say the exploitation of the native by the settler–was carried on by dint of a great array of bayonets and cannons. The settler and the native are old acquaintances. In fact, the settler is right when he speaks of knowing “them” well. For it is the settler who has brought the native into existence and who perpetuates his existence. The settler owes the fact of his very existence, that is to say, his property, to the colonial system.

Decolonization never takes place unnoticed, for it influences individuals and modifies them fundamentally. It transforms spectators crushed with their inessentiality into privileged actors, with the grandiose glare of history’s floodlights upon them. It brings a natural rhythm into existence, introduced by new men, and with it a new language and a new humanity. Decolonization is the veritable creation of new men. But this creation owes nothing of its legitimacy to any supernatural power; the “thing” which has been colonized becomes man during the same process by which it frees itself.

In decolonization, there is therefore the need of a complete calling in question of the colonial situation. If we wish to describe it precisely, we might find it in the wellknown words: “The last shall be first and the first last.” Decolonization is the putting into practice of this sentence. That is why, if we try to describe it, all decolonization is successful.

The naked truth of decolonization evokes for us the searing bullets and bloodstained knives which emanate from it. For if the last shall be first, this will only come to pass after a murderous and decisive struggle between the two protagonists. That affirmed intention to place the last at the head of things, and to make them climb at a pace (too quickly, some say) the well-known steps which characterize an organized society, can only triumph if we use all means to turn the scale, including, of course, that of violence.

Fanon believed that violence was good and right in this context, and even redemptive. One statement attributed to Fanon is “Violence is man re-creating himself,” which seems to be from The Wretched of the Earth as well. You can see how he applies Jesus’ statement about the last being first (which in my understanding refers to the last judgement, and therefore Fanon is following the modern pattern of immanentizing the eschaton), and he says also in a later part from that link that “At the level of individuals, violence is a cleansing force.” It’s interesting how Fanon takes the opposite perspective of Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. For Fanon, violence was redemptive; for Gandhi and King, as Taylor Branch points out, suffering was.

I don’t know if Fanon was influenced by Rousseau, but it wouldn’t be surprising given Rousseau’s influence and Fanon’s life in the France and the French empire.

Rousseau on property

This quote, which opens up the second part of his Discourse on Inequality, gives the flavor of Rousseau’s critique of his society:

The first person who, having enclosed a plot of land, took it upon himself to say this is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society. What crimes, wars, murders, what miseries and horrors would humankind have been spared, by someone who, pulling up the stakes or filling in the ditch, had cried out to his fellow men: “Beware not to listen to this imposter [sic]. You are the lost if you forget that the fruits of the earth belong to all and the earth to no one!” But it is very likely that by then things had already reached a point where they could no longer remain as they were. For this idea of property, depending on many prior ideas which could only have arisen successively, was not formed all at once in the human mind. Quite some progress had to have been made, industry and enlightenment acquired, transmitted, and augmented from age to age, before this last stage of the state of nature was reached. (70)

From Helena Rosenblatt’s translation

Rousseau predicts the Terror

Rousseau dedicated his Discourse on Inequality to his hometown of Geneva, praising its republican constitution. Part of his praise was for its age, since he believed that a newly-formed republic would have uncertainty about the fitness of the government for the citizens, and vice-versa. He goes on:

For freedom is like those solid and rich foods, or those hearty wines, which are suited to nourish and fortify robust constitutions who are used to them, but which overwhelm, ruin and intoxicate the weak and delicate  who are unsuited for them. Once peoples are accustomed to masters they are no longer able to do without them. If they try to shake off the yoke, they move all the farther away from freedom because, mistaking it for an unbridled license which is its opposite, their revolutions almost always deliver them to seducers who make only make their chains heavier (29).

The quote is from Helena Rosenblatt’s translation. Rousseau’s Social Contract, of course, influenced the purveyors of Terror in the Revolution. It’s interesting that he also made a plausible case (at least to me) for what was at the Terror’s root. He cites Rome after the overthrow of the monarchy but before establishing what he considered a stable republic as a population unready for freedom.

Rousseau’s Second Discourse

Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men: by Jean-Jacques Rousseau with Related Documents by Jean-Jacques Rousseau

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This volume is part of the Bedford Series in History and Culture, a very fine series from Bedford St. Martin’s. Helena Rosenblatt, the translator and editor, sets up the context of Rousseau’s work in her introduction. Rousseau was a contrarian, a part of the Enlightenment movement but also critical of the way that its leading figures did not challenge the power structure in Europe.

Rousseau was a social contract theorist, believing the governments originated in agreements between governments and those they governed rather than in divine right. The key to social contract theory is that human beings existed in a state of nature (the characteristics of which varied according to the theorist) but eventually gave up some of their liberties for the stability that government provided. As Rosenblatt points out, social contract theorists did not necessarily believe that this is how governments really arose; Hobbes and Pufendorf treated it as a “theoretical construct” (11).

But Rousseau argued other social contract theorists and scientists imported things like property and philosophy into the state of nature:

Leaving aside, therefore, all the scientific books that only teach us to see men as they have made themselves, and pondering the first and most simple operations of the human soul, I believe I perceive in it two principles anterior to reason, of which on interests us ardently in our well-being and our self-preservation, and the other inspires in us natural repugnance to seeing any sentient being perish or suffer, especially our fellow human beings. It is from the conjunction and combination that our mind is able to make between these two principles, without it being necessary to introduce that of sociability, that all the rules of natural right seem to me to flow; rules that reason is subsequently forced to reestablish on other foundations, when, by its successive developments, it has succeeded in smothering nature.”(39)

He paints a idealized picture of noble savages who then gradually develop the family, property, farming, trades, and government. Ultimately, this government evolves into despotism. His reasoning about the development of society is very speculative, but you can see why is was provocative, controversial, and influential.

Rousseau included many endnotes in the Discourse, but he said that they were optional reading, so I didn’t read them. Maybe another time.

2 stars for Rousseau’s work and 4 stars for Rosenblatt’s presentation of it makes for 3 stars.

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To Change the World, Chapter 5

Hunter now turns to history to show how his explanations of cultural change can explain important changes: the Christianization of Rome, the Christianization of the European barbarians, the Carolingian Renaissance of the 8^th and 9^th centuries, the Reformation, religious revivals like the Great Awakening, the abolition movement in Britain, the Enlightenment, the European socialist movement, and secular and modern culture in the West.  Here is how he sums up the dynamics of change, even with the different relationships of the necessary elements of cultural change:

At every point of challenge and change, we find a rich source of patronage that provided resources for intellectuals and educators who, in the context of dense networks, imagine, theorize, and propagate an alternative culture.  Often enough, alongside these elites are artists, poets, musicians, and the like who symbolize, narrate, and popularize this vision.  New institutions are created that give form to that culture, enact it, and, in so doing, give tangible expression to it.  Together, these overlapping networks of leaders and resources form a vibrant cultural economy that gives articulation, in multiple forms, and critical mass to the ideals and practices and goods of the alternative culture in ways that both defy yet still resonate with the existing social environment. (77-78)

Change can only occur when the leaders and networks of this alternative culture “challenge, penetrate, and redefine the status structure at the center of cultural life” either from the center of the culture or from a position outside the center.  Political power is most effective when it “creates space” for the development of the alternative culture rather than when it “imposes a cultural agenda” (78).

As a history teacher, I really enjoyed this chapter as it gave a cultural interpretation of the events that I have listed above.  I’m not going to go into depth on his explanations, but I’m going to include a short summary of some of the developments that he talks about:

The Christianization of Rome: While Christianity began very much in the cultural periphery of the Roman Empire, the ties of urban commerce and the Greek language aided the early church, as did the well-educated and well-born church fathers.  Other wealthy Christians could also provide funds.   Christians eventually began to produce culture that could not only defend itself but to be taken seriously as an alternative vision of its own and incorporated the Roman concept of education that trained the elite to be leaders (in the case of the church, bishops) but also declared themselves to be ‘lovers of the poor’ ” (55).  Bishops became important leaders in the religious and legal lives of their cities.

The Christianization of European tribes: Monasteries cooperated with the new leaders of Europe to Christianize Europe and build on a Roman-Christian-Germanic culture on which laid the foundation of the Middle Ages.

The Carolingian Renaissance: Charlemagne and Frankish nobles cooperated with clergy (especially Alcuin, the leader of Charlemagne’s educational efforts) to improve scholarship and education in Charlemagne’s empire.

The Reformation: Following on the humanist revival of scholarship in the Renaissance, well-educated scholars like Luther, Calvin, Melanchthon, and Beza benefitted from the printing press, the wealth of cities, networks of scholars and merchants, and the protection of nobles as they enacted their reforms.

Great Awakening and British abolition: Well-known heroes like George Whitefield and William Wilberforce were part of networks of colleagues and supporters.  Whitefield benefitted from the publishing industry and the transatlantic economy, as well as his and fellow leaders’ elite educations.  Wilberforce’s England was a place where the Enlightenment language of freedom also supported the idea of abolition, in cooperation with the Whigs.

The Enlightenment: An parallel patronage network of salons, royal academies, and other societies produced a movement unconnected by patronage to the various churches but rather connected formally or informally to the governments of Europe.  His summary of the change is too good not to quote:

At the time that John Locke died and Rousseau was born in the early years of the eighteenth century, it was unimaginable that Christendom would ever be diminished.  Yet in less than a century, traditional Christian authority had either been overturned (as in France) or had been forever weakened.  In this we see a cultural transformation of world historical significance.  To see this only, or primarily, as an evolution in the history of ideas fails to grasp the nature and character of the change that took place.  Rather the Enlightenment was a revolution generated by an alternative network of leaders, providing an alternative base of resources, oriented toward the development of an alternative cultural vision (a new anthropology, epistemology, ethics, sociality, and politics), established in part through alternative institutions, all operating at the elite centers of cultural formation.  (75)

As I said, this chapter was really good and gave strong evidence for his theory of cultural transformation.  At the same time, it would be interesting to read critiques as well, especially by historians who study these periods.  It’s natural for his model to look airtight when he provides the narrative.  But like I said, it was good.

One important point that he raises is patronage.  All cultural products have to have some kind of patronage.  In our economy, the most obvious patron is the consumer, which dictates to some extent the cultural products that are produced.  But a deeper study of elite patronage in our culture would also be interesting.  Wealthy benefactors are still around, universities allow for scholars to engage in research that produces books that few non-academics will ever read, and there are other examples of patronage outside of the market as well.  It seems like understanding patronage is one key aspect in understanding culture.