Month: January 2012

Adam Smith on the Social Contract

Although they had read the exact same text I had, my students in Modern Europe seemed skeptical about my interpretation of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations.  Smith’s notion of the “Invisible Hand” of the market may be his most famous contribution to modern economic thought, but he also elaborates a role for the state in providing the necessary conditions for those free markets to emerge.  In order to bring the point to our own time, I related what he said in our excerpt (from our primary source reader Perspectives from the Past) to Elizabeth Warren’s defense of contemporary liberal politics.  I wanted to illustrate how Smith — associated with a particular vein of economic liberal thought and used to justify nonintervention in the industrializing economy — was taken up by people and reinterpreted according to a particular ideological agenda, rather than attention to the actual text.  So, just for the record, here’s what I was thinking of.

Smith:

The expence [sic] of defending the society, and that of supporting the dignity of the chief magistrate, are both laid out for the general benefit of the whole society.  It is reasonable, therefore, that they should be defrayed by the general contribution of the whole society, all the different members contributing, as nearly as possible, in proportion to their respective abilities (425).

Warren:

There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there – good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory… Now look. You built a factory and it turned into something terrific or a great idea – God Bless! Keep a Big Hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.

Smith actually mentions everything Warren does, but, then again, Adam Smith was a well known socialist.

P.S.  Students, by the by, should feel free to comment.

Using Evernote with Kindle Books

Via CNet, I received $10 to use on Kindle books.  I immediately realized that I could use a copy of Sheila Fitzpatrick’s Russian Revolution in order to brush up a bit before teaching the event this semester.  I’ve really enjoyed using the iPad to read and take notes on PDFs, but what had always held me back from turning to longer e-books for research was the difficulty in getting notes off the book and into Evernote, which I recently started using after getting fed up with the cumbersome note taking tools native to Zotero (still my preferred citation manager, however).  I still wish there was a way to simply capture the notes and send them directly to Evernote without leaving the iPad, but I did find this solution which is much more elegant than I expected would be possible.

Productivity Helpers

I’ve recently started reading both ProfHacker and GradHacker because I’m obsessed with trying out new digital research tools (a tendency not actually good for productivity, it should be said).  Today, Gradhacker provides a list of productivity helpers.  I’m particularly glad I checked out the post since, after clicking on the “Surviving the Lit Review” link (I thought it may be useful for the course I’m teaching this year requiring undergraduates to write a short review essay themselves, I cam across this fantastic post explaining how one can use Skim, a pdf annotator and viewer, with Scrivener, a writing program.  I have only recently started using both programs; both are excellent and I’m excited to try out a method of using them together.

Lessons from the History of Sexuality

Timothy Burke at Swarthmore shows why the history of sexuality is relevant to understanding the flaws contemporary political discourse on gay marriage.  He focuses on man of the hour Rick Santorum as a proxy for culturally conservative arguments, but it’s worthing noting that many gay marriage proponents make similarly ahistorical claims about the universality of monogamous marriage, sometimes reifying it into a type of biological need every person must indeed feel.  For instance, Andrew Sullivan not only rhetorically eliminates any future for the marriageless, but associates the desire to join the institution with the onset of puberty:

As a child, when I thought of the future, all I could see was black. I wasn’t miserable or depressed. I was a cheerful boy, as happy playing with my posse of male friends in elementary school as I was when I would occasionally take a day by myself in the woodlands that surrounded the small town I grew up in. But when I thought of the distant future, of what I would do and be as a grown-up, there was a blank. I simply didn’t know how I would live, where I would live, who I could live with. I knew one thing only: I couldn’t be like my dad. For some reason, I knew somewhere deep down that I couldn’t have a marriage like my parents…

And when puberty struck and I realized I might be “one of them,” I turned inward. It was a strange feeling—both the exhilaration of sexual desire and the simultaneous, soul-splintering panic that I was going to have to live alone my whole life, lying or euphemizing, concocting some public veneer to hide a private shame.

For Sullivan, sexuality and marriage are intimately linked because one can only fully appreciate and accept the former so long as one has access to the latter.  Such arguments in favor of gay marriage are just as one dimensional as those against it because they ascribe marriage to an essentialist urge that ignores the processes through which the institution developed as well as the social, political, and cultural pressures that made it seem so central and eternal in the first place.

Hello (Again)

When I think about how hard it is to get something onto that blank word document, I’m somewhat amazed that I ever thought I would have the energy to write for anything other than professional work.  Then I remember how enjoyable it was to write for a wider audience and on topics I otherwise wouldn’t have had the chance to address and I wonder why I ever stopped making the time.  This is the third time I’ve come back to the web with the intent of writing under the title of “air pollution,” but I have somewhat different goals in mind this time.

In the past, I approached my online work as simply another weblog, a way to improve and practice my writing while touching on subjects I wasn’t covering in my graduate courses or dissertation research.  This time, the blog is simply be one component of a broader space in which I can work digitally.  I keep the same address and same home, but see this space as my center of gravity for both my research and teaching.  Rather than put either aspect of my professional self behind closed doors — on a teaching platform like Blackboard or Moodle, for instance — this will be where I share what I can of what I’m doing as I’m doing it.

Right now, teaching will be the focus.  I’ve put up my first few syllabi from last semester as well as those I’m working on now.  The latter will be constantly updated with public links to PowerPoint slides and other resources my classes and I will be using throughout the semester.  Everything is licensed under a Creative Commons Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License, meaning that it can be freely used for non-commercial purposes with proper attribution.

Research will come later.  I have a few ideas about some cool digital projects — such as an interactive map of prostitution in nineteenth-century Paris — but I need a little more time to conceptualize them and lots more time getting oriented around the best tools for completing them.

So for now, here’s my latest attempt to integrate my original interests in digital tools (I did start out as a Computer Science major after all) and my new career as a professional historian.  Enjoy!