2016: My Year in Books

As an unrepentant bibliophile, I often think of my level of happiness with a year by the quantity and quality of the books I managed to read. On that score, 2016 was a reasonably good year (not the best I have had but well far from the worst). Here are the books I read (/ remembered reading) and what I found most memorable and exciting about them

History Books

If I have anything close to an “intellectual first love”, it would be history – not too difficult to figure out the roots of this urge since I have a historian father. I read a number of interesting books (some released in 2016 and others released earlier)

The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England by Dan Jones. Really interesting book about the royal family who ruled England for over 300 hours (starting in 1154 with Henry II, until 1485, when Richard III died). The book takes readers through 300+ years of medieval English history told through what is essentially a family saga that started with the drowning of a prince  in the English Channel as his drunken crew attempted to cross from Normandy to England while thoroughly drunk. This triggered a 12^th century version of the constitutional crisis as the drowned prince was the only son of Henry I and on his death, the attempts by his daughter Matilda to establish her reign was thwarted. Matilda’s son (Henry II) finally managed to secure the kingdom in his own right and launched a dynasty that proceeded to rule for 300+ years and gained and lost different bits of the current British Isles and France. The book covers such historical figures such as Richard the Lionheart and events such as the early innings of the 100 year war. Overall, great introduction to medieval English and French history

The Perfect King: The Life of Edward III, Father of the English Nation by Ian Mortimer. Continuing the medieval English theme is the book on the life of one of the greatest Plantangent kings, Edward III. Medieval societies were much simpler than our current age and facets of life were more fused back in the day. It would take a couple more centuries before business, civil administration and the military will split into distinct areas of human endeavor. Reading this account of this monarch who ruled England for 50 years is like reading an engaging account of someone who was the greatest military general, most important civil administrator and richest businessman all at the same time. This often misunderstood figure probably oversaw the height of English influence in the medieval period, a sharp reversal from his father’s ill-fated reign - his father (Edward II) was deposed by his wife (Edward III’s mother) and her lover (Roger Mortimer).

The Normans: From Raiders to Kings by Lars Brownworth. After earlier reading a highly entertaining history of the Bryzantine empire by the same author (https://seunoloruntimehinsblog.blogspot.co.uk/2014_07_01_archive.html), I was excited to discover this book. History buffs all over the world easily associate the Normans, a group of Scandinavians (“Norse-man”) who had earlier settled in the area of France they came to give their name to (Normandy), with the conquest of England in 1066. What is probably not as well appreciated is the central role that the Normans played in Europe more broadly. Groups of Normans settled in and heavily influenced nations as diverse as England, Ireland, France, Italy and Cyprus. I was particularly impressed by the kings produced by the Normans in the Kingdom of Sicily and with one in particular, Frederick II who became Holy Roman Emperor and whose talents were so numerous he came to be widely known as Stupor Mundi (the wonder of the world).

After the Prophet: The Epic Story of the Shia-Sunni Split in Islam by Lesley Hazleton. Interesting narrative history of the origins of the Sunni-Shia split. Even-handed portrait that puts the schism in a solid historical context. Longer review here: http://seunoloruntimehinsblog.blogspot.co.uk/2016/12/after-prophet-epic-story-of-shia-sunni.html

Conquerors: How Portugal seized the Indian Ocean and forged the First Global Empire by Roger Crowley. If you have ever wondered why so much of the world speaks Portuguese, then this book introduces you to the coalface of the pioneering efforts to forge that empire. The book provides gripping narrative accounts of the pain endured and inflicted by these pioneering Portuguese sailors and explorers in the 15^th and 16^th century in places as far afield as present-day Angola and India.

The Medici: Power, Money, and Ambition in the Italian Renaissance by Paul Strathern. History of one of the most powerful banking families (perhaps only rivaled by the Rothschild’s). Tells the story of how a family, in the course of a few generations, parlayed a small banking operation in Florence into a much larger fortune that bought control of a city, ensured entry into titled high nobility and also bought a few papal crowns (including two members of the family who became popes). A longer review is here: http://seunoloruntimehinsblog.blogspot.co.uk/2016_05_01_archive.html

The Romanovs: 1613-1918 by Simon Sebag Montefiore. Think of a dysfunctional family with a spotty track record of governing ability but with monopoly autocratic power over a vast empire, then you have the Romanovs. This was the royal family that reigned over Russia for 300 years before the Bolsheviks made it impossible for them to keep reigning. Simon Sebag Montefiore as usual delivers a sweeping history that is both gripping in its narrative and rich in historical detail. A longer review is here: http://seunoloruntimehinsblog.blogspot.co.uk/2016/12/review-of-romanovs-1613-1918-by-simon.html

The Quartet: Orchestrating the Second American Revolution, 1783-1789 by Joseph Ellis. If you think the American constitution (in operation since 1789) was arrived at organically by the delegates to the constitutional convention, or even more bizarrely, something that was divinely inspired in some late-18^th century version of Moses receiving the stone tablets of the Ten Commandments, then you really need to read this book by Joseph Ellis (a noted scholar and author of the early American republic). The author argues that the shape the American constitution took was the deliberate and sometimes slightly manipulative work done by George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison who served as President, Treasury Secretary, Chief Justice and Congressman in the first government under this constitution. All four men had witnessed the shortcomings of the previous confederacy arrangement (which was still favored by several leaders, including Jefferson) and were resolved to birth a more cohesive, federal arrangement.

Current Affairs

I not only spend my spare time reading about people who are long dead or events that are long past. I sometimes also read about current issues or recent history.

The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu: And Their Race to Save the World's Most Precious Manuscripts by Joshua Hammer. The one sentence description of this book is that it is about the efforts of librarians in Timbuktu to spirit away hundreds of thousands of valuable ancient Islamic manuscripts during the occupation of Timbkuktu and Northern Mali by Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb in 2012. However, that will be a gross simplification of the author’s efforts to describe the cultural richness of Timbuktu in its 14^th / 15^th century heyday, the concerted global effort in the1970s and 1980s to track down and preserve these beautiful ancient manuscripts and finally the painstaking and very dangerous task of smuggling the manuscripts out of the various libraries in the city before the invading Al-Qaeda forces could get to destroying them as they had destroyed other global cultural patrimonies. The author also provides a good insight into the poor governance, shifting tribe loyalties, economic desolation and civil wars that have shaped the Sahel and made it such a fertile soil for germinating extremism.

Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis by J D Vance. Why is Donald Trump president-elect? Simple, he won the presidential election in enough states to get over 270 pledged delegates threshold to the Electoral College that actually elects US presidents. Well…yeah, but why did a neophyte politician dominate a sizable Republican field and then went on to puncture the shibboleth of a Blue Wall for the democrats that ran through the rust belt (winning states not carried by a Republican since Reagan). And why did his message of “Make America Great Again” resonate with so many voters? While we will never fully get the answers to this questions, this great book (released before the election) does a good job of explaining why this pithy if somewhat silly slogan resonated with a huge swath of people who treated it as their cri de couer and then subsequently turned out in large numbers to deliver a primal scream of an election result. This book does a great job of introducing readers to the deprivation experienced by many communities in the Appalachian region of the US from a viewpoint that is both non-condescending and informed. This is a viewpoint that only “a member of the tribe” and a “local boy made good” is capable and qualified to have.

Tomorrow Is Another Country: The Inside Story of South Africa's Road to Change by Allister Sparks. How did a vicious system of apartheid come to an end in 1994 without the massive upheavals widely predicted by many experts? Apartheid crumbled with much less violence and much quicker than outside observers predicted just a few years earlier. Some people credit divine providence and some others credit the almost-saintly regard in which Nelson Mandela was held. Well, both views may well be true but they are very incomplete. For to take both viewpoints (all due to divine grace or all due to Mr. Mandela) is to ignore the concerted and broad human agency that delivered the transition from apartheid to universal suffrage. The author chronicles the many years of clandestine meetings and negotiations between then enemies in places as diverse as London, Lausanne and the South African wilderness to hammer out a resolution to a system that both the oppressed and oppressor had come to accept could not continue. Reading the book I was struck by the deep patriotism and love of country exhibited by both sides, the Afrikaner-dominated National Party led by De Klerk and the ANC led by Nelson Mandela. Neither party was willing to watch the country they love burn or go to the dogs so they were willing to compromise. The result is a constitutional democracy, which for all its warts, is a thing that many of us Africans should be proud of and eager to emulate. Majority rule is entrenched but minority (including sexual minority) rights are strongly protected and the judiciary is indeed independent. The result of the many clandestine meetings in the 80s and 90s detailed in the book is the current situation in which very few people are as happy as a clam but not that many are driven to violent desperation. While this doesn’t sound romantic, it is as good as one could have wished for starting from the dark days of apartheid and something the cast of characters in Mr. Sparks’ book can be proud of midwifing.

Travelogues / Unclassified

These books probably shouldn’t be in this category. I just put them in this Travelogues section because their authors are best known as travel writers.

Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan by William Dalrymple. Book on the Fist Anglo-Afghan war (1839 to 1841) that ended in a humiliating defeat for the British. The book highlighted the challenges the British faced in establishing order over a country with a tough, unforgiving terrain and deeply fractured tribal loyalties. Reading the book, I was reminded by the saying attributed to the Roman Poet Horace, Mutato Nomine De Te Fabula Narratur (“change but the name, and the story is told of yourself”). One could easily have changed the date on many of the stories / intrigues the author described to the 2000s and the stories will still fit as a glove. It seems over 150+ years, the outside world’s understanding of Afghanistan had not changed materially -  the more things change the more they remain the same.

Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms, and a Vast Ocean of a Million Stories by Simon Winchester. I decided to read this book after earlier reading a great book about the pioneers who physically united the vast continent that is the United States through linkages such as roads, railways, canals etc. (review here: https://seunoloruntimehinsblog.blogspot.co.uk/2014_02_01_archive.html). This book is basically a biography of the Atlantic Ocean. While it may seem silly to describe a body of water in biographical terms, it is perhaps apt to do so since the Atlantic is a living, breathing thing  - the Atlantic was born some 100 million+ years ago when the plates of the super-continents shifted, the ocean also continues to grow every year as ice caps melt and temperatures rise and the ocean will someday die in the very distant future. The book provides a rich account of man’s interaction with this vast body of water from pre-historic times to the modern age. It describes in vivid fashion, our attempts to cross it (by boat, by air and by submarine cable), the wars we have fought on it and how it has come to define coastal communities from Lagos to Newfoundland and Tierra del Fuego. One sad thing that struck me is the sheer amount of pollution that the Atlantic has endured ranging from the tailpipe emissions from the numerous ships and planes that cross it daily to plastic waste and even nuclear waste! (until 1993 many countries adopted the Atlantic Ocean as a dumping ground for nuclear waste)

Economics / Business

Like many people lacking the nourishing security of a trust fund, I must work for my bread and the way I earn my keep is to work as a private equity investor. This makes reading books about economics and business a necessity (if only to not be terrible at my job). However, I was lucky that none of the business books I read this year felt like a chore. 

The Rise and Fall of Nations: Forces of Change in the Post-Crisis World by Ruchir Sharma. This is a very accessible book on the guidelines (he lists ten) for accessing the economic growth potential of countries. The author has unique credibility as he does not only have academic economic training, he is also a markets practitioner in his role as Global Head of Emerging Markets at Morgan Stanley Investment Management. So this is not an ivory-tower type, this is someone who has to find a way to make money for clients like the rest of us. I had two very important takeaways. One is the dampener that slowing population growth (or even aging) will put on economic growth. Major economies all over the world are facing a marked decline in the growth of the working age population (China’s working age population shrank last year) and this will be a major headwind on economic growth globally. The second key takeaway for me is the importance of the reform cycle to economic growth in emerging markets. Many emerging markets are poor partly because institutions are weak and economies are often badly managed but fixing these issues are politically costly and most politicians will rather not reform. However, when such countries are pushed to the wall (global recession, commodity price bust etc.) they bite the bullet and make needed changes. This reform cycle provides a tailwind for economic growth and supports asset prices for a while until the leaders get comfortable / complacent, stay too long and start doing silly things. At this stage, these countries get set for another bust and the cycle starts again when a reformer shows up again. This boom-bust cycle makes it critical to get the timing right in emerging markets if one is to escape unscathed.

The Rise and Fall of American Growth by Robert Gordon. Interesting book about the extraordinary productivity revolution that was seen in the closing decades of the 19^th century and the first seven decades of the 20^th. The upshot of the book is that the period in America (and much of the world) between 1870 and 1970 was an exceptional time in human history for economic growth and most of that was attributable to the rapid increase in productivity. At the beginning of the period, the fastest way most people could have travelled from point A to Point B was the speed at which a horse could travel (granted the transcontinental railway in the US was built in the prior decade, but the general point holds). By the 1970s, overworked bankers were already shuttling from London to New York at the speed of sound on Concorde flights. The book is replete with the productivity enhancements from inventions such as the washing machine, the automobile, penicillin etc. The challenge is that productivity boosting innovations have stalled over the past few decades. Facebook is nice, it gives its users a great deal of satisfaction and has made loads of money for its founders but it is not even in the same zip code in terms of increasing productivity as the invention of the washing machine or dish washer was. Washing machines and dish washers saved housewives all over the developed world from hours of drudgery and helped increase women’s participation in the labor force and made the ones already in the workforce more productive. This is a somewhat sobering message. If Robert Gordon is saying productive growth will be flat / slow going forward and Ruchir Sharma is saying that working-age population growth will be a headwind and both play out as predicted, then we should all be bracing up for secular stagnation in global economic growth.

How Asia Works by Joe Studwell. Interesting book about how the Asian economies were able to deliver rapid economic growth and lift a lot of people out of poverty using tools / policies such as capital control, mass mobilization of rural people into light manufacturing and government directed investment into areas such as energy, roads, ports etc. This sectors are critical for growth but are often not the most attractive place for investors or lenders to direct money to without government intervention. Japan followed this path first, then it was followed by the various Asian Tigers and China. Not sure how many times this rabbit could be pulled out of a hat but Ethiopia appears to be pursuing this strategy in Africa, let’s see how it turns out.

Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power by Steve Coll. Exxon Mobil is not an ordinary company, it is the largest company in an industry (oil & gas exploration and production) that is far from normal. Ploughing billions of dollars into drilling for oil (sometimes in “iffy” countries) just strikes me as somehow different from selling toothpaste, soap or cheap shirts. The book by Steve Coll does a great job in giving readers a peek behind the curtains at this very unusual company that has its own security apparatus and sometimes even better intelligence in some countries than governments do.

Capital Returns: Investing Through the Capital Cycle: A Money Manager's Reports 2002-15 by Edward Chancellor. Many investment books tend to look at companies through a demand lens: how many widgets can it sell? who will buy the widgets? how much can they pay for them? etc. This book, based on the investing strategy of one of the world’s most successful fund managers, takes a different approach. It evaluates companies on the supply side: how much new capital is coming into a given sector, what new capacity is being added and how rational is the new capacity? etc. If one accepts that a key detractor to generating profits and creating wealth is competition (we’d all love to own an unregulated monopoly!), then thinking about companies in this way makes a lot of sense. 

Review - After the Prophet: The Epic Story of the Shia-Sunni Split in Islam by Lesley Hazleton

Like anyone else with an interest in Middle Eastern geopolitics, or frankly with a working CNN subscription, I have heard the phrase “the Sunni-Shia split” hundreds of times. That is why I was attracted to this book by the noted popularizer of religious history, Lesley Hazleton.

While I have always had a sense that the conflict between these two strands of one of the world’s great monotheisms is a longstanding one, I had never really had the proper historical context for the schism which is now a millennium and a half old. This book does a masterful and engaging job in providing the context and motivations for the protracted internecine struggle that followed the death of Prophet Mohammed in 632 AD. In this book, we see how adherents of a young religion struggled to come to terms with the death of a founder who fused religious, political and military authority in his charismatic self.

The author takes the reader on a narrative history of the four succeeding caliphs to the Prophet Mohammed (Abu Bakr, Umar, Uthman and Ali), collectively referred to as the Rashidun (i.e., the rightly guided caliphs). The tensions and struggles in the early history of the faith was reflected in the fact that of the first four caliphs, only Abu Bakr (the first caliph who ruled for two years) was not assassinated. Ms. Hazleton very exhaustively and humanely examined the main cast of characters and their motivations and intrigues over this 30 year period.

The book ends with the death of Hussein (grandson of Prophet Mohammed and son of the 4^th Caliph, Ali) at Karbala (a city in modern day Iraq) in AD 680 at a battle with the forces of the Yazid (the 2^nd Umayyad caliph who ruled from 680 to 683 AD). That singular battle, commemorated in heart-rending fashion by annual Ashura events across the Shia world, continues to echo with a great deal of significance into the present age. The martyrdom of Hussein is an event which continues to be a deep source of angst and a potent mobilizing force for millions of people all over the world. It is impossible to know how the history of the world would have turned out if the events at Karbala in AD 680 had turned out differently or if a confrontation had been avoided all together. While it will never be known for certain if it is true, many traditions hold that Muawiyah (the first Umayyad caliph) advised his son and successor Yazid to treat Hussein gently (“as for Hussein what can I tell you concerning him? Be careful not to confront him except in a good way. Extend to him a free hand and let him roam the earth as he pleases…”). If this account is true, it should serve as a cautionary tale for all of us, as we do not know how long the negative effects of what currently seem to be expedient actions could last for.

Overall, I think this book is a great book for anyone who like me constantly hears about the divide between the two main strands of the world’s 2^nd largest religion but remains essentially clueless about its origins. This book doesn’t proffer a solution to the long-running schism but it at least provides an accessible historical context for non-experts like me. 

Review of The Romanovs: 1613-1918 by Simon Sebag Montefiore

I recently read the latest book by the popular historian, Simon Sebag Montefiore: The Romanovs: 1613-1918. After reading Jerusalem: A Biography, by the same author I had set a high bar for the mix of entertainment and information that his particular type of narrative history delivers. This high expectation was very well surpassed by this magisterial book on the 300 year history of what must be one of the most intriguing dynasties to rule a major power.

The author takes the reader on an exhilarating trip through the dynasty that was born when a group of Russian noblemen placed the crown of Russia on a young (at 17 years) and very reluctant Michael I in 1613 and which met its end when the Bolsheviks executed the last Tsar (Nicholas II) in 1918 along with his family. The book is a tour de force of narrative history, dealing with weighty topics such as the Russian response to Napoleon’s invasion and the modernization of Russia by Peter the Great while also delving deep into the great love affair that was the relationship between Catherine the Great and Grigory Potemkin – Peter the Great’s epic parties (styled by him as the The All-Joking, All-Drunken Synod of Fools and Jesters) was also amply covered in the book.

The book gives one a sense, similar to how I felt after reading a book on the Medicis, of the severe limitation posed by having hereditary as the primary organizing structure for any kind of leadership (business or government). In this book we meet truly exceptional leaders like Peter the Great and Catherine the Great (actually a minor German noblewoman who succeeded in deposing her hapless husband and assuming the throne in her own right). Of both leaders, I can’t help but feel a high degree of admiration for Catherine the Great. This was a leader of high intelligence, clear-headed ambition (she organized a coup d’etat against her husband after all) and with a reformist bent, even if many of the reforms she sought to pursue by a renaissance-inspired constitution came to little effect. Her partnership with her long-time lover, Potemkin must count as one of the most productive power couples in history. Together, they led Russia to the height of its greatness, building many new cities and annexing the Crimea. While both Catherine the Great and Potemkin were not “exclusive” in modern romantic parlance, they shared a deep love and mutual respect for each other’s intelligence and ambition that they were essentially inseparable until Potemkin’s death.

However, this same dynasty which produced such leaders as Peter and Catherine also produced some veritable clunkers and one need not look further than the last two Tsars to run Russia (Alexander III and Nicholas II). Both men were noted for having happy marriages (uncommon for royals) and for being fundamentally good family men but they were so limited that in a meritocratic system they would hardly have been elected city councilors not to talk of autocrats of a major world power. Tsar Nicholas and his wife were greatly influenced by the mystic Rasputin in deciding state matters. Such was the influence of the illiterate Rasputin on state matters that many leading noblemen felt it necessary to have him eliminated. In the end, the limited abilities and narrow worldview of Nicholas II proved deeply insufficient for preserving the monarchy beyond its 300^th year.

Overall, I found this book to be very informative and engaging and that it succeeded in humanizing a family that has been largely clichéd in popular culture (we have all heard the stories, often apocryphal, about Catherine the Great’s appetites!)

A Magnificent Family – Review of The Medici: Power, Money, and Ambition in the Italian Renaissance by Paul Strathern

I had become vaguely aware of the Medici family a few years back from reading a very interesting book, The Artist, the Philosopher and the Warrior, that dealt with the intersection of the lives of three of the most interesting people of the renaissance period: the military commander and son of a pope, Cesare Borgia; the father of realpolitik, Niccolo Machiavelli; and one of history’s most brilliant minds, Leanardo da Vinci. In this book, the Medicis made various cameo appearances: as patrons of da Vinci or as rivals of the democratic / republican government that employed Machiavelli until it fell and Medici rule was restored. I found it quite interesting that one family had such an impact on the renaissance and filed it somewhere in my cluttered mind to read more about this family at some point.

This is why I was happy to come across this really interesting book that provides a very informative but highly accessible history of the Medici family. Starting from the generally accepted founder of the Medici family, Giovanni di Bicci and ending with Gian Gastone (the last male member of the line), we are taken on a whirlwind tour of the renaissance as this famous family faced its ups and downs in the notoriously fickle republican politics of Florence. We become acquainted with the Medicis’ active encouragement of artists of the high renaissance and their participation in, and moderating influence on, the tempestuous political environment that was pre-unification Italy. To read the history of the Medici family is to become acquainted with 350 years of Italian (and wider European) history.

I found a number of the Medicis to be particularly noteworthy. There’s Giovanni di Bicci, the founder of the family who came from humble roots but who through sheer tenacity and a great deal of shrewdness was able to establish a bank that was one of the few multinational enterprises of his day. His son, Cosimi pater patriae (father of the nation) extended the power and wealth of the family but there is no doubt that Giovanni was a very giant shoulder that he was able to stand on. Probably the Medici I found most fascinating is Giovanni di Lorenzo, better known as Pope Leo X. This second son of Lorenzo the Magnificent (and great-grandson of Cosimi pater patriae) became a Cardinal at the age of 13, had been thrown out of Florence with his elder brother by the age of 19 and had been elected pope at the age of 38 - partly on the hope that this famously overweight and unhealthy cardinal will be passive and will soon oblige everyone by passing on to heaven shortly. He shocked everyone by reigning for a very active eight years, during which he was an active patron of the arts, vigorously championed the military aspects of the papacy and managed to restore his family’s hold over Florence – something his incompetent older brother had managed to lose after the death of their father: Lorenzo the Magnificent. The urge by this possibly agnostic pope to raise huge sums of money for his public works projects (especially for reconstructing St. Peter’s Basilica) led to the aggressive and shameless sale of indulgences that drove a young German priest named Martin Luther to launch what came to be known as the Protestant Reformation.

The story of the Medici is not one of an unbroken chain of great men. The male line of the Medici essentially ended with Gian Gastone, the last Medici to be Grand Duke of Tuscany (the Medici ended up becoming along the way). This is a man that is as close to a poster child for the dangers of hereditary leadership as is possible to devise. Although Gian Gastone’s father had managed to preside over a long decline of the city over 50 years of a largely mediocre reign, under Gian Gastone’s reign Florence really came off the rails. During a visit to Florence during his reign, the French philosopher Montesquieu remarked that "there is no town where men live in less luxury than Florence" – this said about a city that brought enlightenment and splendor to Europe under the direction and patronage of his ancestors. He was said to spend the vast majority of his time in bed, entertained with the most debauched acts by the Ruspanti – a group of young men; hardly ever rose before noon and paid zero attention to affairs of state. He was so ineffectual a leader that the inheritance to his grand duchy was twice awarded by leading European powers during his lifetime with absolutely no input from him – they just told him which European prince he had to adopt as his heir and he simply just went along with it.

The biggest point I took away from reading the book was how difficult it is to maintain intergenerational competence and hence to sustain hereditary as a meaningful organizing principle for any kind of leadership (business, political or otherwise). Too many great family histories tend to start off with striving, disciplined men from relatively humble roots like Giovanni di Bicci and end with incompetent men like Gian Gastone, who no one would elect dog catcher if there weren’t born into the role.  

In defense of the scapegoat – A review of “Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence” by Karen Armstrong

In the course of my (largely disparate) reading over the past couple of years I have read a couple of books that could be described as ranging from being skeptical of organized religion’s influence on society to being basically anti-religion. These books range from “god is not great: how religion poisons everything” by the late Christopher Hitchens; “The God Delusion” by Richard Dawkins; and “The End of Faith” by Sam Harris. A common thread running through many of these books and those  of others in the field is that religion and religious faith has being a net negative in the world and that some of the darkest and lowest acts of man have not occurred in spite of adherence to some faith tradition but have largely occurred because of it. This viewpoint is definitely not lacking in justification: human history is replete with examples of instances where people were driven to commit the most horrifying violent crimes because they felt some divine impulse to commit such acts. Given this background, I was quite pleased when I come across this book by the noted author and former nun, Karen Armstrong that sought to advance an argument against this potentially simplistic view of religion’s impact on the history of violence.


If I took away a central argument from this book, it will be that i) humans have had violent interactions with members of their society for all of our history; ii) for most of history, religious activities and beliefs formed the principal organizing template for most societies and provided the main (/only) opportunity for people to give meaning to their lives; (iii) as a result all human activities, including violent ones, were layered with spiritual significance; and (iv) as a result of this religious significance, religion came to be somewhat unfairly viewed as the reason for these acts of violence when they would have happened anyway. The author’s argument is quite persuasive. For most of human history, people in most human societies would have been completely puzzled by phrases such as “religious life” or “separation of church and state” – people had one life and it was deeply religious in nature. Religion pervaded everything: agriculture (praying for rain and a good harvest); government (remember the “divine right of kings”); healthcare (remember all the stories about the healing of the sick in the bible?); family (only the church could sanction marriages); warfare and conquest (remember the divinely-ordained conquering of Canaan in biblical times and Pope Alexander’s splitting of the world into Spanish and Portuguese spheres of influence in the 15^th century). The list goes on and on, but the general point to be made is the ubiquity of religious symbols and significance in the pre-Enlightenment world. The author gives detailed examples of these historical trends in the areas most impacted by some of the world’s most prominent faith traditions (Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Zoroastrianism etc.) and the central roles these faith traditions played in the evolution of the societies in which they were dominant.  

In addition to the display of an encyclopedic understanding of the evolutions of the world’s major religions and societies, the author also advanced two important concepts that I found novel and compelling. The first is the necessary and foundational role of “structural violence” in creating the agrarian state: the precursor to modern states. The second concept is the redefinition of the sacred as something (an idea, a belief etc.) that people are willing to die for.

The author argues that in making a transition from hunter-gatherer societies, human beings had to embrace systematic and structural violence. Life was very simple and limited in hunter-gatherer societies: the rhythm of life was determined by the sporadic availability of wild plants and fruits for gathering and animals for hunting. The adults of each family gathered and hunted the food required at a given time. Everyone was involved in getting food and there was no surplus to speak of. In such a society wholly devoted to subsistence there could be no scientific, religious or aesthetic advancements. However, for civilization to advance a new class of thinking elite (priests, philosophers, architects etc.) had to develop and these people who are essentially “idlers”, in a strict agrarian sense, had to be maintained somehow. The only sure way to ensure this was to compel the peasant to do extra work in order to generate the surplus needed to maintain the elite. Since many humans are rational and will gladly stop working once their needs are met, “structural violence” became necessary to keep peasants in-line and busy generating the surplus required to keep the thinking elite fat and happy. Religion came in very handy as the hand maiden of this structural violence and from this unholy marriage came the birth of human progress.

While I found the idea of structural violence to be very interesting, I thought the related idea of defining the sacred as anything people are willing to die for to be the more novel of the two concepts. Redefining the sacred in this way allows a reader to see religion-inspired conflicts as only a subset of conflicts sparked by belief in sacred ideas and to identify secular sacred ideals as another big inspiration and motivator for conflict and bloodshed.

A good example of a time and place where secular ideals attained sacred status was in post-revolutionary France. The armies of Napoleonic France fought with as much fervor and fanaticism as any religiously inspired army led into battle by crucifix-bearing clergy. A flavor of the sacred nature that the Napoleonic armies attached to the ideals of their cause can be gleaned from the lyrics to the army’s main battle anthem, the Chant du Depart. The chorus of the song (below) could easily have come from a religious song and it shows that the believers in the revolution had essentially elevated the ideals of the republic to something akin to a sacred cult and for this cult the soldiers would gladly lay down their lives.
 

La République nous appellee	The Republic is calling us
Sachons vaincre ou sachons périr	Let's know how to vanquish or let's know how to perish
Un Français doit vivre pour elle	A Frenchman must live for her [the Republic]
Pour elle un Français doit mourir	For her [the Republic] a Frenchman must die

 Overall, I thought this was a very engaging and informative book that has led me to see the history of religion’s impact of society in a whole new light.

 

“Horseman of the Enlightenment” – A review of Napoleon: A Life by Andrew Roberts

 

Whatever name you may choose to call it, the period between the mid-17^th century and late 18^th century was very significant in Europe. Great minds such Baruch de Spinoza, Rene Descartes, Voltaire, John Locke, and many thinkers too numerous to list, advanced new ideas that revolutionized a person’s relationship with his fellow citizens, to his leaders (/rulers) and to his God. The broadly accepted name for the period which offered this new beginning in Western civilization is “The Enlightenment”. The late writer Christopher Hitchens once described the Enlightenment as the period when humans started to realize that “God is not going to help you and to that extent you are on your own. There may be a God but he doesn’t care about you and you have to take your own responsibility”. This was the period when the Western world started to make great strides to escape the stupefying chokehold of concepts such as divine rights of kings and the abject feudalism that had kept many societies from operating at anything close to their full potential. Essentially, the Enlightenment embodied a really awesome set of ideas that now sit as the foundation of our modern lives.  

 
However, thinking and writing of great ideas is not sufficient to cause change in society.  Ideas need their thinkers to be sure but it is crucial that they have their “enforcers”. Enforcers provide a “sword arm” to the quill of the writer. These enforcers (usually generals, politicians, diplomats, or some other form of statesman) are the ones who take the ideas of the great thinkers, codify them into laws and then ensure that society bends to the will of the laws inspired by these ideas. History is replete with examples of ideas that languished until enforcers showed up. Communism was little more than an interesting governing theory advanced in the writings of Marx and Engels until Vladimir Lenin showed up and led an uprising that threw off the Romanovs from the Russian throne in 1917 and Mao Zedong led his men to victory in the Chinese civil war that ended in 1949. Fabianism’s effect was also barely felt outside of select intellectual circles in London until it became the governing philosophy of the U.K.’s Labor Party for much of the first part of the 20^th century and until Jawaharlal Nehru essentially made it the organizing template for India’s post-independence economy (at least until the 1990s). On the other side of the aisle, the ideas around limited government didn’t travel much beyond the circles of Milton Friedman’s acolytes until the transatlantic duo of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan foisted this governing philosophy on their countries by sheer force of personality and political savvy. In this light it is quite safe to say that The Enlightenment needed its own enforcer before it could affect the lives of everyday people. In many ways, Napoleon Bonaparte was the enforcer of the Enlightenment.  He identified with many of the ideas espoused in the Enlightenment, codified them into laws and enforced them ruthlessly across Europe with the help of his formidable Grand Armee. The historian Andrew Roberts and author of the latest masterpiece on Napoleon captured this essence beautifully when he said “Napoleon represented the Enlightenment on horseback”.

Mr. Roberts’ book does a great job of restoring some sheen to a leader whose reputation has been sullied and distorted by deliberate misinformation of his successful adversaries and the simplistic lens of popular culture. However, to the author’s credit, he stops well short of penning a hagiography of the man. Many people when asked about great villains in history are often quick to list Napoleon alongside such certifiable monsters as Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin. Napoleon was no such person and this book does great justice to the man’s life by advancing a balanced view of his actions and impact on the world stage. And there is much that is attractive, and even admirable, about his life and the impact he had on the world stage.

Napoleon packed a lot into his short and productive life. At the personal level, his rise is a testament to the heights to which ambitious and resourceful people can rise under reasonably positive conditions. A minor nobleman from a provincial outpost of France (Corsica), Napoleon rose to become a talented young general in the post-revolution army, then first consul and finally emperor of an empire fashioned out of Bourbon-era France, parts of present-day Italy, Germany, Holland, Spain and Austria. As a statesman, he is probably unrivalled in European history for the sheer scale of the imprint he left on the continent’s character. As his armies swept through Europe, he liberated many Jewish populations from the ghettos that many longstanding European monarchies had confined them. It could also be argued that he delivered death (or at least coma) blows to feudalism in the various regions of Europe that came under his control or influence. He codified and streamlined the tangled affair that was post-revolutionary France’s laws into a set of legal codes immortalized as the Code Napoleon. The Code Napoleon was a huge first step in realizing the concept of equality before the law and still survives as the basis / template of the legal systems in places as diverse as the American state of Louisiana, to Senegal, Belgium, Japan and of course modern France. He created a whole educational system geared towards developing the best minds in France, regardless of their social background and supported meritocracy to a level not deemed possible in the various European monarchies of his day. For example, most of his marshals (i.e., his most important generals) were said to come from the working classes.

Napoleon’s life was not, in any way, a wholly successful affair. For one, while he won the vast majority of the battles he fought, he managed to lose a crucial number of those that mattered the most. Not least is Waterloo: a defeat that led him to live out the rest of his life on an island (St. Helena) that gives true meaning to the phrase “middle of nowhere”. He also lost a lot of treasure and men in a head scratching and ultimately futile military campaign in Spain. The Spanish resistance to French occupation was aided by the clergy, attaining an almost religious fervor.

Napoleon was also not lacking in many substantial defects and the book lays many of these defects bare. He was a misogynist, not just by modern standards but also by the standards of his day. He was deeply disrespectful and dismissive of women in power. A situation that could have contributed to the peculiar loathing that powerful women (such as the Queens of Prussia, Naples and Russia) had for him. Essentially, one will be hard pressed to find any acts taken by Napoleon to improve the rights of women and this is particularly glaring because of the progressive views that he held on the rights of the working classes and those of confessional minorities. As much as he promoted excellence and meritocracy in the army and the civil service, he was also excessively zealous in promoting the careers of his largely mediocre (and often disloyal) siblings. He promoted his ne’er do well brothers into really important roles in his empire and they almost all failed abysmally in their roles and / or betrayed him when the going got tough. It may be interesting to speculate that in both of these failings (i.e., the misogyny and zeal in promoting his family) he may have betrayed his true roots as essentially a middle class product of the petite noblesse from an agrarian outpost of France. In fact on his dying bed this great man, who made the greatest monarchs of Europe quake in their boots at the thought of his approaching army,  spent a good deal of time in his will ensuring that his sons (legitimate and otherwise) were in a good position to inherit some relatively minor farmland and estates in his native Corsica.

Overall, the book is an engaging read and an excellent full portrait of a substantial man who is too often crudely caricatured.

 

“Take Honor from me, and my life is done” – A review of The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen by Kwame Anthony Appiah
 

Different people have different definitions and interpretations of what a revolution is. Looking up the word on Wikipedia, I see it defined as a drastic political or social change that usually occurs relatively quickly. I think that’s as good a definition as any. The concept of revolution, especially in politics and revolution, is embedded in most educated people’s knowledge of human history. Countless books have been devoted to examining political and economic revolutions over time. Every year in the United States many books are written and many reenactments staged to commemorate the political revolution of the late 18^th century that saw British monarchical rule terminated and a new sort of representative democracy established in what will become the United States. The American Revolution has been almost studied to death but every year some other scholar, or politician with a historical bent, manages to release one more book that promises a new twist on some obscure aspect of the whole saga. Same goes for the French revolution of 1789, which had a collateral effect of sending King Louis XVI to the guillotine. Revolutions in the economic / business sphere have also being studied and published about extensively. We all learn and talk about the historical significance and causes of the Industrial Revolution that started in Great Britain in the late 18^th century and spread across Europe and North America in the decades of the first half of the 19^th century. In more recent times we have all gotten used to speaking of the information / internet revolution that has swept the world since the early 1990’s with the commercialization of the internet and invention of the World Wide Web. Given the fascination with revolution in many parts of our lives, it is somewhat baffling that the concept of “moral revolutions” is not more central to our every-day vocabulary and historical consciousness. I think it is the absence of robust everyday discussion of the significance of, and requirements for, moral revolutions that this excellent book by the noted philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah is ideally placed to fill.

 

Why is the examination of honor important to understanding not just moral revolutions but human existence? I would say it is because honor is so central to human life. Most people desire, consciously or otherwise, to be regarded as honorable and not to have their honor diminished or maligned. This is something the great bard William Shakespeare realized and acknowledged when in the play Richard II he placed in the mouth of Thomas de Mowbray, the banished Duke of Norfolk, the following words “Mine honor is my life; both grow in one: Take honor from me, and my life is done: Then, dear my liege, mine honor let me try; In that I live and for that will I die”. There is nothing inherently wrong or right about the human sense of honor, it is just there in us. There are many times when the honor codes of individuals or particular societies are very congruent with what we can all agree to be morally upright or beneficial to society (e.g., ensuring protection for vulnerable children, selflessly working to free people stuck in burning buildings etc.). However, there are many situations when the honor codes conflict with what will be broadly accepted as being morally just and beneficial to society. A good contemporary example of this situation is the practice of “honor killing” of women by members of their own family in response to some behavior that they perceive to have brought disrepute to the family. Mr. Appiah’s book helps readers understand the factors that sustain such evidently harmful honor practices and the factors that were responsible for their decline (in cases where such practices are thankfully no more).

 

The author does a great job of explaining this phenomenon of harmful honor practices and the process of fomenting the moral revolutions that can end them by giving an excellent historical summary of three situations when morally repugnant honor practices were successfully ended. These include: the decline of the duel in 19^th century England; the move to stop the binding of the feet of young girls in turn-of-the-20^th century China and the movement in England in the first half of the 19^th century to abolish the transatlantic slave trade. The author also spends a good deal of time examining the unfortunate durability and the valiant efforts being made to eradicate the existing practice of honor killing.

 

Of the thankfully defunct practices that the author profiled, I found the history and practice of dueling to be the most interesting for a variety of reasons. Dueling was a colossal waste of human talent as the practice claimed the lives of many aristocratic men of means at the prime of their lives. A good example was the death of Alexander Hamilton, the first Treasury Secretary of the US, at a duel at the age of 47. Also, for most of the time that dueling was practiced across Europe it remained an unambiguously illegal activity that was frowned upon by governments and civil leaders. And these leaders had a good reason to be against dueling. European monarchs and civil servants had worked diligently over many centuries to establish the concept of a state as one in which the sovereign / government held a monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force and by so doing managed to drag Europe out of the fractious lawlessness that pervaded the continent in the dark ages. The quasi-execution aspect of duels flew against the monopoly power of the state to render judgment and deliver capital punishment. It was bad enough that this practice was illegal, it was also widely viewed as immoral by many. The practice was fundamentally immoral. It is reasonable to view a moral outcome as one in which the quest for truth is successful and the perpetrator of a lie or some other form of bad behavior is brought to justice. Given the varying quality of dueling pistols and differences in the quality of duelers’ marksmanship, this outcome was far from assured. A better marksman is much more likely to prevail in a duel than a bad marksman is, even if the great shot was the perpetrator of an offence. So let’s think about this: you impugn the honor of another man who then feels duty-bound to challenge you to a duel unless you do the honorable thing by apologizing for your statement or act. You refuse to apologize and you then show up on the day of the duel and because you are a better marksman you shoot him dead in broad daylight and you end up paying no price because there is a gentleman’s agreement that dueling gentlemen are not prosecuted for murder. By the way, all the religious authorities are also vehemently against this activity. In a nutshell, the practice made absolutely no sense. So why did all these educated upper class men keep participating in such a senseless activity? It’s simple, they thought dueling was necessary for them to defend and maintain their honor. If you went back and really quizzed some upper class type in early 19^th century England about his support for dueling you would probably not get a better answer than “this is what we do”.


So how did the duel fall out of favor in Victorian England? It was not because people pointed out to potential duelers that the practice was illegal, there were already well aware of the fact. The practice didn’t all of a sudden become immoral, it had always being immoral! What happened was that opponents of the duel worked within the confines of the honor code to redefine what honorable conduct meant for a gentleman such that it actually became dishonorable for an aristocrat to participate in a duel. A similar strategy was adopted by the brave members of the Chinese intelligentsia that formed the core of the resistance against foot binding. These people had a deep appreciation for the honor traditions of their society and took great pains not to impugn the honor code of the society. Rather, they succeeded in redefining the honor code such that it became a dishonorable thing to bind your daughters’ feet. These Chinese reformers couched their opposition to foot binding in terms of the honor of China (e.g., “this practice is making our country look bad in the world”, “all modern societies no longer do this” etc.).

 

These moral revolutions hold great promise for some of the moral challenges that confront us in the 21^st century, including the scourge of violence against women. If humanity will successfully beat back honor killings and other acts of violence against women, the movements will need to be led by local groups of committed people who live in the affected societies and have a deep appreciation for the culture of their people. Reformers are unlikely to meet with great success if they simply dismiss the honor codes of these societies as atavistic behavior. Rather they will need to work within the confines of their cultures to redefine what honor means and have the protection of the dignity and physically wellbeing of their wives, daughters and sisters be the highest consideration for the honor of the members of her family.

 

Overall, I found it to be a great and accessible book that should be read by politicians, social activists and anyone with an interest in seeing positive change in their society and the world at large. It also gives the lie to the view, held by some, that philosophers hardly write books with tangible real world practical value.

 

The Forgotten Empire – A review of “Lost to the West: The Forgotten Byzantine Empire That Rescued Western Civilization” by Lars Brownworth

If someone in a history class, or just an overly nerdy friend, asked the question: “when did the Roman Empire end?” the answer to the question is likely to be varied. Some may say that the empire ended in AD 476 when the commander Odoacer deposed Romulus Augustulus (the last Roman Emperor) and proclaimed himself King of Italy. Others may trace it even earlier to AD 410 when the Visigoth king Alaric sacked Rome and put paid to the myth of Roman invincibility. Others may even have more “out there” choices for a date of the empire’s demise. What is not very likely is that many people will say the Roman Empire ended in 1453 (a millennium after) when Constantine XI Palaiologos died defending Constantinople (present day Istanbul) during Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II’s conquest of the city. However, that choice is probably the closest to being the most factually correct answer, as it was technically the Western Roman Empire that fell in the 5^th Century AD. The eastern half of the empire lived on for another millennium until it was overthrown by the Ottoman Empire, which itself ended at the end of the First World War. That many history buffs will miss the date of the de

mise of the empire by a full 1,000 years goes to support the title of this excellent book (i.e., “Lost to the West”). In fact most people’s association with anything Byzantine is through the adjective used to describe a process that is overly complex and intricate but ultimately devious or duplicitous in nature - not sure who we should thank for the reduction of an illustrious empire into an uncharitable adjective! This book by Lars Brownworth, a speaker and author who happens to be a high school history teacher in his day job, is a laudable step in correcting this sorry state of affairs as it provides a great introduction into the fascinating world of this great but somewhat strange empire.

The author’s decision to adopt a personality-driven historical narrative was a brilliant decision. Telling the history of an empire through the lives, actions and circumstances of its emperors certainly made the book a more engaging read than a straightforward chronological work would have been. The author’s thrilling narrative transports the reader back to an age largely lost to common memory, when men with large armies and even larger egos played geopolitics in such a way as to make even the most scheming 21^st century statesman seem like some dowdy old matron. The author describes colorful men such as Justinian the Great, the 6^th century emperor who reclaimed huge swathes of the lost western empire and ruled over a kingdom stretching from Constantinople to Rome and parts of present-day Gibraltar, Portugal and Spain. Not only did Justinian conquer vast lands and enact a uniform code of Roman law that still serves as the basis of civil law in many European states, he also embarked on massive building projects including the world famous Hagia Sophia: a building which served as a Greek Orthodox church for almost a thousand years, a Roman Catholic church for half a century, a mosque for about 500 years and a museum since 1935. We also meet Justinian’s most illustrious general, Belisarius: a man who is probably the most successful military commander in all of antiquity. A widely successful and popular man whose exploits on the warfront was perhaps only matched by his unwavering loyalty and commitment to a scheming emperor and bureaucracy that often tried to sabotage his best efforts.      

 

One of my favorite stories is that of Leo III the Syrian, the man we have to thank for the word “iconoclast” (literally translated as “icon breaking”). This was a man so wedded to a puritanical and fundamentalist reading of the Christian scriptures that he sought to rip out all graven images and icons in his empire and have them destroyed. Leo III and his band of original iconoclasts were so successful in their quest that they effectively tore apart their church and retarded the arts and culture of their society so badly that it took a very long time after the death of Leo III and his son for some semblance of the fine arts to germinate again in the empire.

 

Surprises also abound in this engaging read. Probably the most intriguing is that of Emperor Basil I “Basil the Macedonian”, if only because his rags to riches story is not something one would associate with monarchy. Born into a peasant family, he ended up ingratiating himself (due to his wrestling prowess) with the ne’er do well and perpetually drunk Emperor Michael III. Once in the emperor’s good graces, he merrily proceeded to murder the emperor’s uncle (obviously with the dim-witted emperor’s support). Since someone of Basil’s ambition could not possibly be expected to contend himself with getting rid of just an uncle of an emperor, he proceeded to dispatch the emperor in a particularly gruesome murder and usurped a throne for which he did not even have the most tenuous of legitimacy. Despite this particularly inauspicious start to his reign, Basil turned out to be a particularly effective emperor. Ruling for 19 years, a long time by Byzantine standards, he established a dynasty that was so enduring that over two centuries later one of his direct descendants still occupied the throne of Byzantium. Another interesting character was Basil II “the Bulgar Slayer”, who probably gets honors for having the most interesting nom de guerre of all the emperors. Orphaned at age five, Basil II spent most of his youth being pushed around by courtiers with the general consensus being that he was another timid and ineffective emperor in the making. However, upon managing to secure control he became a very effective emperor who ruled for almost 50 years. If Basil II had a fault, it was his penchant for excessive display of force and a ready willingness to be crushingly brutal towards its opponents. During a campaign against the Bulgarians (the source of the grotesque “Bulgar Slayer” nickname) he captured 15,000 prisoners and proceeded to blind 99 out of every 100, sparing the sight of only 1 man out of 100 so the “lucky” man could have the necessary task of leading his blinded colleagues back home to further inflict terror in the civilian population.

 

Reading this book is to become engrossed in the dozens of these stranger-than-fiction stories that showed how rich and tragic the history of this most fascinating empire is. All things considered, I found this book to be a very engaging and accessible introduction to the history of a place and era that I knew nothing about.  

Tinkering with Leviathan – Review of “The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State” by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge
 

“The ten most dangerous words in the English language are ‘Hi, I'm from the government, and I'm here to help’” – Ronald Reagan
 

Anyone following American politics will be familiar with quotes similar to the one from America’s 40th president. There is no shortage of people eager to echo sound bites like the above or the even simpler charge to “shrink government to a size that we can drown it in a bathtub”. While these statements make for effective campaign rhetoric, they do not make for elegant policy prescriptions and are also guaranteed to elicit reflexive opposition from their adversaries on the opposite political spectrum. A lot of air time is spent by the right in denouncing the “evils of big government” with their counterparts on the left responding in kind by describing any attempt to trim the government as an attempt to starve poor kids. What has been sorely lacking is a debate or examination of what the proper role of government should be in modern society, what the structural challenges are that prevent governments from being responsive to the needs of its citizens and, most importantly, what steps could be taken to right the ship. This excellent book by two journalists at The Economist goes beyond doing much needed justice to these essential topics, it also provides an intellectually coherent and beautifully written sweep of the evolution of what could be termed “western democracy”.

The authors’ essential point is that the values and governing structures of western democratic societies (broadly defined to include much of Europe and Anglophone North America) have undergone distinct dramatic changes or revolutions over the past half millennia. These changes have happened in response to the needs of society or to correct the excesses that result when successful revolutions are transformed into a staid status quo by the passage of time and the calcification of the governing elite.

The first revolution identified by the authors is the emergence of the modern European state in the 1600s. This is a revolution personified by its intellectual godfather, Thomas Hobbes who in his seminal work: Leviathan (or The Matter, Forme and Power of a Common Wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil) advanced for the first time the concept of a social contract between the governed and their (absolute) sovereign. While modern readers may wince at the powers that Hobbes sought as ideal to bestow on the sovereign - essentially a call for dictatorship - it is important to put the work in its proper context. Europe in Hobbes’ day was a place where life was truly nasty, brutish and short. The entire continent was a relative backwater (compared to China) that was been torn apart by senseless wars started by every petty lord or minor aristocrat who could muster men under arms and proceed to find something to be offended about. The most important thing that 1600 Europeans needed was order and security, so the first revolution in government occurred to grant them the much needed order. In the 1600s and subsequent centuries, Europe’s monarchs grew much more powerful. Gaining greater control or successfully co-opting previously troublesome noblemen and establishing dominance over religious activities within their realms through the concept of cuius regio, eius religio (“whose realm, his religion”). They effectively succeeded, in many cases, in establishing a monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force within their kingdoms. France’s monarchs went to such great length to keep tabs on their country’s nobility that they come up with the concept of “The whole of France around the king”, keeping anywhere from 1,000 to 10,000 noblemen as hangers on at court and occupied with frivolities to keep them from dangerous thoughts of war. The net effect of these moves was the emergence of a stronger and more prosperous Europe that was able to shift its attention and resources away from the wasting competition of civil wars to the productive competition of commerce.

Like every innovation, the move to more powerful governments embodied by the sovereigns - while serving a real need at that time to tame the fractious tendencies of petty nobles - soon became long in the tooth and self-serving. Government, especially in the UK, became largely a vehicle through which elites extracted rents from the economy and society. This was the era of “rotten boroughs”: parliamentary constituencies so small (one had 3 houses and 7 votes) that wealthy landowners basically treated them as heirlooms that were passed from father to son and in that way secured an absurdly disproportionate influence on the legislative process. This concentration and abuse of privilege was not only restricted to the legislature. What counted as a civil service was little more than a system of sinecures, with stories of privileged appointees to government offices not showing up for a single day of work for decades. To correct this unfortunate turn of events, the 2^nd revolution identified by the writers was launched by thinkers such as John Stewart Mill and politicians like William Gladstone, a Liberal politician who served as Prime Minister and Chancellor of Exchequer on four separate occasions each. William Gladstone was a man so committed to reforming the corrupt and inefficient public service of his time that he earned the nickname “The People’s William” and had a most famous parsimonious quote: “No Chancellor of the Exchequer is worth his salt who is not ready to save what are meant by candle-ends and cheese-parings in the cause of his country”. If Gladstone is the political embodiment of this movement, its intellectual godfather will be John Stuart Mill: a thinker who championed the rights of the individual in opposition to unlimited state control. These liberal reformers made important tweaks to the apparatus of the state: instituting competitive exams for civil service roles; reforming the parliamentary process and laying the foundation for a laissez faire economic system.

This trend towards utilitarianism however met with its inevitable reversal as 19^th century England became an increasingly harsh place. This was the era of workhouses, debtors’ prisons and other cringe-worthy mainstays of life now immortalized in the great works of Charles Dickens. By the dawn of the 20^th century, many people had come to find the situation untenable and the authors did a masterful job of explaining how the yearnings of the citizenry for a more humane society led to some deemphasizing of utilitarianism as a governing philosophy and the advent of Fabianism (in the UK) and Social Democracy (in much of Scandinavia and Northern Europe). This movement, embodied by intellectual and organizer extraordinaire Beatrice Webb, had the establishment of a universal welfare state coupled with strong workers’ rights at the core of its governing structure and philosophy. Proponents of this philosophy often viewed government control of “the commanding heights of the economy” as a necessary condition for an ideal society. This thinking led to the establishment of social security in the US in 1935 and universal health care in the UK through the founding of the NHS in 1948. Governments all over the western world become more assertive in the economy and more willing to intervene in the markets when they felt the markets were not helping to achieve desired public policy. Franklin Roosevelt established the Tennessee Valley Authority (“TVA”) to electrify America’s deep south when it appeared profit-maximizing utilities were more than happy to ignore the, often poor inhabitants, of these sparsely populated farms in favor of the North’s more industrialized centers. In the UK, the post-World War II government of Clement Attlee proceeded to establish the foundations of the British welfare state and embarked on a vast nationalization agenda that covered coal mining, railways, telecoms, road haulage, electricity and the steel industry. The Swedes went much further in putting a safety net under their citizens and a paternalistic glow on their nation by coming up with the concept of Folkhemmet (“the people’s home”). A concept that says society should effectively function like a small family with everyone’s needs taken care of and the richer members subjected to the crushing taxes required to maintain such a generous “cradle to the grave” style welfare system. The social democrats’ long unbroken tenure running Sweden’s government (from 1932 to 1976) gave them enough time to put this concept into action that people started to refer to a Swedish “middle way” between socialism and capitalism.
 

Like everything conceived by man, the appeal of Social Democracy / Fabianism / The Welfare State - or whatever term can be used to describe the intellectual justification of the brand of activist government popular in much of the western world in the post-war years – soon began to fade and its warts became all too apparent in the 1970s. And if the backlash against the welfare or corporatist state has a guardian angel, it will be Margaret Thatcher, a grocer’s daughter made good, who decided she was going to force a sought of striver’s thriftiness on her countrymen. To put into perspective how much of a trailblazer she was, it is important to think about how involved the government was in the lives of ordinary Brits when she came on the scene. A Briton getting up to catch a flight to America in the late 1970s, would have put on his bed lamp with electricity from the state; left a message for his superiors on a phone line provided by the state; fixed himself breakfast on a stove using gas supplied by the state; rode to the airport on a train owned by the state; arrived at an airport owned by the state and travelled on a wide bodied aircraft owned by an airline controlled by the state. And this is all before 10am in the morning! Margaret Thatcher was not going to put up with this for much longer and proceeded to launch a major privatization program, which ensured that by the end of her tenure almost all of the services earlier referred to would have been provided by private firms. Her kindred spirit across the Atlantic, Ronald Reagan also embarked on a task to shrink the state. Although he had much less to cut because the state in  America was never as big (in relative terms) as it was in the UK. These reforms were not limited to the western world. India, a nation in love with Fabianism as any, also embarked on a series of lauded liberalization programs in the early 1990s that effectively put the “License Raj” to a well-deserved death. The Brazilians also launched a series of ambitious privatizations in the early 1990s and the Russian privatizations, though seriously flawed, achieved a real objective of shrinking the state.  

So why, one may ask, was the Thatcherite / Reaganite only described as a “half revolution” by the authors? The answer lies in the lack of durability of their revolution. After a lull in the 1990s, the governments of the western world have continued to grow at a fast clip. Both conservatives and liberals continue to find things to spend money on (e.g., defense and homeland security for conservatives, education and other welfare spending for liberals). Essentially, the authors argue, in much of the western world there is no real party of small government. Each party is perfectly willing to be big spenders when it comes to favored constituencies or projects and often times unwilling to raise the tax revenue necessary to fund this expenditure, leading to deepening fiscal problems.  

If the authors of this book did an admirable job of explaining the evolution of government in western democracies, they did a much more outstanding job in examining and distilling the current ills that plague western democracies. Of the “Seven Deadly Sins” of modern government that the authors raised, using California as an example, the two that resonated the most with me are: Olson’s Law and the problem of the “Overactive State”. Olson’s law, first proposed by American economist Mancur Olson, essentially states that because lobbying and collective action in a democracy is inherently time-consuming and expensive only the people with the most interest in a topic or issue will be sufficiently motivated to organize to effect change on that issue. This “law” provides a good explanation for why so many issues that affect society at large are effectively controlled by a few people. Examples of this abound and they range from the influence the National Rifle Association (“NRA”) has on US gun policy; the impact of the teachers’ union on shaping public K-12 education and the very significant role that the prison guards’ unions have played (especially in California) in advocating harsh criminal law policies of questionable value such as the “three strikes” law. For these constituencies the issues they care about are “voting issues” and they can effectively dictate the agenda since most of citizens don’t pay enough attention.

One doesn’t have to be a “small government conservative” to be sufficiently miffed by the overactive state and the move to ever more licensing and regulation. When Hippocrates was hanging out in ancient Greece around 400 BC and codifying some of the early precepts of medicine or Benjamin Rush was helping to lay the foundation of modern American medicine in 18^th century Pennsylvania, they may have contemplated a situation where the practice of medicine will require a state license obtained after rigorous examinations and many years of postgraduate medical education. What both men will probably find deeply ridiculous is that it takes about 300 hours of coursework to work in the wig trade in Texas or that many American states require multiple hours of coursework, exams and licenses for people wishing to be barbers, florists and even fortune tellers. While it is important for government to protect the unsuspecting from an unqualified brain surgeon, I think it should not be a high priority for the state to protect citizens from receiving a terrible haircut, or from buying an incompetently arranged bouquet of flowers; or from wearing wigs that are just not cut exactly right or receiving an inaccurate forecast of their future. People are perfectly capable of dealing with these things. While consumer protection may be the headline reason for the proliferation of licenses, the net effect of this excessive licensing is increased costs to consumers as prices are kept artificially low due to the barriers to entry that licensing provides. You could wake up a medieval guildsman in the 21^st century and he will quickly recognize much of occupational licensing as basically the same stuff they did back in the day. Liberals, with an interest in protecting the poor and striving, should have an interest in taming the overactive state as it increases costs to the people least likely to afford the extra cost. This is one area of reform in which liberals and conservatives can make common cause.

In concluding the book, the authors laid out a series of common sense reforms that could go a long way in improving governance and providing an avenue for western democracies to regain the edge in the competition with alternative Eastern governance models (notably those of Singapore and China). The idea I find most appealing is setting a sunset clause for every new law that is passed. Every law that is passed should have an expiry date, at which time it would be reexamined for relevance and if there is sufficient public support it will be reaffirmed and if not, the law will be struck off. That seems like a good antidote for anachronistic laws.

Overall, I believe this is a great book that should be read by every politician or person interested in how people organize themselves for effective governance in a democracy. And if you are just a history buff, the sweeping history of western political philosophy and organization should tick some boxes as well!