Good morning. Let’s start the week with a few items on government intervention and world capitalism. First, does government intervention improve lives? Laura Ball reviews Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo’s Good Economics for Hard Times.

Next, Robert Skidelsky reviews Thomas Piketty’s Capital and Ideology: “The book culminates in a program for social democratic renewal to overcome the distempers of hyperglobalization. The whole trajectory of human history is compressed into this framework — if compression is the right word to describe this sprawling production of more than 1,000 pages Piketty has amassed a huge amount of learning in support of a single thesis: that ‘inequality societies’ have been the historical norm but they are not inevitable. Rather, they depend on ideologies of justification, and much of the book is devoted to examining these ideologies, showing how they have always been contested and how they might be transcended. It is impossible not to admire the skill and perseverance with which he deploys his massive arsenal of data and arguments. Still, what caused this reviewer to rub his eyes was Piketty’s audacious self-assurance. Despite much cosmetic homage to the daunting complexity of his subject matter, he really does believe that he has solved the riddle of history. The magic key is not Marx’s class struggle but ideological conflict over property systems. Property ownership, Piketty writes, always involves workers sacrificing ‘a substantial proportion of her [sic] wage to an owner’s profit or landlord’s rent …That is why property relations are always conflictual.’ Each new property-ownership system creates contradictions which lead to its demise. Conflict ceases when private property ceases to be important. Thus Piketty’s history too leads to the ‘end of history’.”

Last, Stuart Whatley reviews Martha Nussbaum’s history of cosmopolitanism: “Like globalist, cosmopolitan has become a freighted term, not least for its anti-Semitic undertones. On the right, it is an epithet for bleeding-heart liberals who support looser immigration policies, foreign aid, and multilateral efforts to confront climate change. On the left (and the nativist right), it is used to describe the Davos crowd and footloose capitalists. But as the philosopher Martha C. Nussbaum reminds us in The Cosmopolitan Tradition, cosmopolitanism has a rich history as a mode of political and ethical thought, one that ‘urges us to recognize the equal, and unconditional, worth of all human beings.’ The cosmopolitan tradition has its roots in the fourth century BCE, when Diogenes the Cynic declared himself a ‘citizen of the world’ (kosmopolitês), and insisted on the dignity of all people, no matter their origin or rank. His example would go on to inform Greek and Roman Stoicism, conceptions of international and natural law and human rights, and much else in Western political philosophy. Yet as Nussbaum shows, cosmopolitanism, owing to its origins, has always been vulnerable to a critique from within. ‘Precisely because they are so determined to insist that the basis for moral duties is never effaced by life’s contingencies and hierarchies,’ she writes, many exponents of cosmopolitanism refuse to acknowledge the extent to which penury can limit one’s capacity to exercise individual agency, moral or otherwise. As a result, to this day, cosmopolitanism—be it in the form of trade and capital market liberalization, the contemporary human-rights regime, or liberal internationalism—tends to make insufficient provision for the amelioration of poverty, inequality, malnutrition, and other socioeconomic deficiencies.”

In other news: Free speech is in trouble, Arthur Milikh argues in a review of a new edition of Must We Defend Nazis? Why the First Amendment Should Not Protect Hate Speech and White Supremacy.

Marly Youmans draws our attention to a project to create a new Decameron.

If George Washington was anything, he was an institutionalist, Nicole Penn writes: “The version of Washington that we need today is the same Washington we have needed since June 1775. It is the man who did his best to cultivate self-mastery in disposition and prudence in decision-making; who signed the final version of his will not as a Virginian but as ‘a citizen of the United States.’ Preserving the institutions that the Revolution created was his constant preoccupation, because he believed in the principles of the Declaration of Independence and trusted that they were best served by the political structure enshrined in the Constitution, however frustrating and turgid it appeared to outsiders.”

The blessed return of figuration in art: “Who says painting is dead? The curators of a new show at London’s Whitechapel Gallery would have us believe that painting had its last hurrah in the 1980s. The stock market boom, powered by the wolves of Wall Street and Square Mile wide-boys, was bankrolling the neo-expressionist swagger of artists like Julian Schnabel, Georg Baselitz and Philip Guston. That ‘hurrah’ was best exemplified by the seminal show at the Royal Academy in 1981, A New Spirit of Painting, which featured 38 artists—all, incidentally, white men—who broke free from the chains of minimalism and abstraction to champion figurative art. Since then, according to the Whitechapel curators, representational painting has lost its appeal, is past its sell-by date, and has been largely overtaken by photography and video produced by ambitious young artists. In a century dominated by digital photography (a jaw-dropping 1.8 billion images are uploaded every day) how can painting ever compete? For your answer, walk around Radical Figures: Painting in the New Millennium.”

Essay of the Day:

What happened to the brilliant Canadian poet and novelist A. M. Klein? Carmine Starnino tells the story in The New Criterion:

“In 1957, the biographer Leon Edel was passing through Montreal and decided to call on his old friend A. M. Klein. Then forty-eight, Klein had emerged from the immigrant streets of his ‘jargoning city’ to become the most prodigious poet at work in Canada. Raised in a Yiddish-speaking household, he studied Hebrew, was educated in English, and learned French. (In one poem, Klein wrote that the ships docked at Montreal’s harbor unloaded not just cargo but ‘lexicons.’) He channeled that polyglot upbringing into English-language poems of uncommon fluency, an eloquence fueled by an endlessly self-replenishing gift for arresting phrases. Klein’s prose, with its improbable range, was no less remarkable. He reeled off plays, lectures, speeches, editorials, book reviews, short stories, and novellas. He even took a stab at a spy thriller. This rhetorical largesse echoed in his baritone delivery. A gifted orator, Klein could quiet a packed hall. His poetry readings had a declamatory flow that mesmerized. His was the voice of a man who wrote for sound as much as sense, a man obsessed with the musicality of words.

“That man was nowhere to be found when Klein greeted Edel at the door. It had been decades since the two were undergraduates at McGill University, walking home together on winter evenings after class. As a student in the mid-1920s, Klein was driven, voluble, quick on the uptake. Two years his senior, Edel was awed by his friend’s precocity—Klein had appeared in Poetry magazine at the age of nineteen—and would go on to publish the first major article on his poetry. Edel eventually decamped to New York and, through their correspondence, kept tabs on his friend’s rapid development. Klein’s second book, The Hitleriad, was published by James Laughlin at New Directions; his third, Poems, was reviewed by Randall Jarrell. Two midlife breakthroughs then brought his brilliance into full view—a poetry volume called The Rocking Chair, which won Canada’s top prize, the Governor General’s Award, and a novel, The Second Scroll, published by Knopf and praised by The Nation as ‘profoundly important and certainly a work of genius.’

“Klein, in turn, had leaned heavily on ‘My dear Leon’ for help as he labored on a massive study of Ulysses. Their relationship was based on kindred obsessions and a fondness for debate—and that afternoon in 1957 Edel expected, as he later wrote, a ‘lively reunion.’ Instead, he was made to sit at one end of a room, while Klein, in a dark suit, stood at the other, staring out of a window. ‘There was no conversation though I tried many subjects,’ Edel recalled, describing Klein as ‘completely flattened out, as if in a living death.’

“We now know that Klein was in middle of one of the most brutal psychological unravelings in modern poetry. . . ”

Read the rest.

Photos: North Dakota

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