Adam Kirsch on Engels

Many of Engels' lurid details and damning statistics come from official reports like Edwin Chadwick's "Report on the Sanitary Conditions of the Labouring Population of Great Britain", which was commissioned by a Whig government and published under a Tory one. Indeed, while Engels insists that the workers cannot hope for redress from a bourgeois-aristocratic Parliament, he can't help but note that "although the middle classes at the moment are the main - indeed the only - power in Parliament, nevertheless the last session (1844) was in effect a continuous debate on working-class conditions. All this suggests that fare from being obdurate, England's ruling class were taking action - slowly and as yet inadequately - to solve the problems caused by the industrial revolution. These problems were, it is useful to remember, totally unprecedented, not just in English but in human history. The sudden eruption of vast polluted slums in the North of England baffled both the institutions of government and the prevailing theories of economics and society.

Hilary Mantel on Keith Thomas' The Ends of Life

Warfare was an aristocratic business, and young men trained for nothing else: then along came firearms, which made any low-class fool into a killing machine.

Hilary Mantel on starsuckers

We live in a society basted in self-regard, our moralists tell us: fat and dozy on the lion's share of the world's resources, polluting the seas and burning fossil fuels, we gaze in loving torpor at our own reflection, and the gnat-bite of recession barely disturbs our narcissistic trance. More than any generation before us, we command the resources for self-realisation - a "life well lived", as Keith Thomas puts it. But do we want to be artists, philosophers, pioneers of the natural sciences? No: we want to be celebrities. We dream of instant, global fame. We expect it to enrich us, gratify us, but are less concerned that it outlast us. Once, priorities were different.

Zizek on Berlusconi

Berlusconi is a significant figure and Italy an experimental laboratory where our future is being worked out. If our political choice is between permissive-liberal technocratism and fundamentalist poplarism, Berlusconi's great achievement has been to reconcile the two.  The wager behind Berlusconi's vulgarities is that the people will identify with him as embodying the mythic image of the average Italian: I am one of you, a little bit corrupt, in trouble with the law, in trouble with my wife because I'm attracted to other women. Yet we shouldn't be fooled: behind the clownish mask there is a state power that functions with ruthless efficiency.

Zizek on Ahmadinejad

Ahmadinejad is not the hero of the Islamist poor but a corrupt Islamofascist populist, a kind of Iranian Berlusconi whose mixture of clowning posturing and ruthless power politics is causing unease even among the ayatollahs. His demagogic distribution of crumbs to the poor shouldn't deceive us: he has the backing not only of the organs of police repression and a very Westernised PR apparatus.  He is also supported by a powerful new class of Iranians who have become rich thanks to the regime's corruption - the Revolutionary Guard is not a working class militia but a mega-corporation, the most powerful centre of wealth in the country.

Wilde's Preface to Dorian Gray

The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim. The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things.

The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography. Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.

Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only beauty.

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.

The nineteenth century dislike of realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass.

The nineteenth century dislike of romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass. The moral life of man forms part of the subject-matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium. No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are true can be proved. No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style. No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything. Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art. Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art. From the point of view of form, the type of all the arts is the art of the musician. From the point of view of feeling, the actor's craft is the type. All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital. When critics disagree, the artist is in accord with himself. We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.

All art is quite useless.

Buiter slags off Summers

There are several reasons why Summers would be an inappropriate choice as chairman of the Fed. Let’s start with Fed-relevant knowledge and expertise. Summers is not a monetary economist or macroeconomist. He has never shown any serious interest in researching and understanding the workings of the kind of complex, interdependent dynamic systems that represent the environment a central bank operates in. He is the arch-typical quick and dirty partial equilibrium man, full of clever isolated micro-insights, but incapable of grasping the whole. His macroeconomics stalled at the Keynesian cross. As a monetary economist he has never seen a Federal Funds rate target so low he did not want it just a bit lower.

As regards the regulatory and supervisory functions of the Fed, Summers would be a disaster. During his time in the Clinton administration, culminating in his stint as Treasury Secretary, he was, with Greenspan, the main official apostle of full-speed ahead financial sector deregulation. The same naive trust in self-regulation and market discipline that has tarnished Greenspan’s reputation has been a trademark of Summers in action, both at home and abroad. Summers remains cognitively captured by old Wall Street and a prisoner of its culture and views.

Even before Summers went to the US Treasury, his approach to financial crises (in emerging markets and developing countries) never got beyond the putting out of immediate fires. The impact of the bail-outs and rescue efforts advocated and promoted by Summers on the likelihood and severity of future crises was either not considered or not given any weight.

The only time Summers mentions moral hazard is when he asserts that now is not the time to worry about it. And of course, it is always now. Well, now is always the time to worry about moral hazard. There is always more than one way of skinning the cat, and different ways will have different implications for moral hazard. Just one example. Bank of America and Citigroup did have an effective special resolution regime (administered by the FDIC) throughout the crisis. Why was the tax payer called on to recapitalise the banks when it was perfectly feasible to make the unsecured creditors pay instead?

Once the immediate crisis is over, the highest priority should be attached to designing and creating institutional arrangements and incentive structures that will minimize the likelihood and severity of future systemic crises. Summers has never shown any interest in creating institutions that enable policy makers (in the Fed, in the Treasury and in the regulatory agencies) to make credible, long-term commitments. He invariable favours opportunistic discretion over rule-bound flexibility. The last thing the US needs today is a chairman of the Fed with the long-term perspective and attention span of a fruit fly.