Stop voting. Start sampling

And lots of other things from the last week

I enjoyed this exchange with Spencer Greenberg. As a man on a mission and a man with a message, I was pleased that I was quite lucid in this conversation. No prizes for guessing what it was about. If you, like me, fancy audio only - here it is on two popular platforms.

Ricardo Hausmann on Venezuela

A good piece in The Economist.

“TRISTEZA NÃO tem fim, felicidade sim.” Sadness has no end, though happiness does. The line, immortalised in a bossa nova song, captures how joy can be fragile, fleeting and precious.

For a few extraordinary hours on January 3rd, Venezuelans tasted it as news spread that Nicolás Maduro had been removed in a dramatic American military operation... Venezuelans allowed themselves to imagine a future full of dignity and hope.

Happiness swiftly gave way to concern when President Donald Trump held a press conference. America, he said, would now “run” Venezuela. He spoke much about oil but not democracy, dismissing María Corina Machado, Nobel peace laureate and leader of the democratic opposition... He spoke as if he owned the country. Venezuelans were to be beneficiaries of his benevolence, not agents of their destiny.

When Mr Maduro came to power in 2013, Venezuelans were roughly four times richer than today. What followed was the largest economic contraction ever recorded in peacetime, triggering the departure of 8m Venezuelans, a quarter of the population.

At the heart of the collapse was a systematic dismantling of rights. Property rights were hollowed out; contracts became meaningless; courts lost independence; elections ceased to matter and speaking out became a crime. As rights vanished, so did security, investment and trust.

The lesson is simple: prosperity comes from rights... Take rights away, and society withers. Restore them, and recovery is possible.

What Venezuelans need now is neither vengeance nor Trumpian improvisation, but democracy... Venezuela enjoyed it for much of the latter 20th century, and it remains the global formula for sustained prosperity.

Venezuelan society has already done the hardest bit. In 2023 Venezuelans rallied behind Ms Machado, only to see her barred from running. The following year they delivered a landslide win for her colleague, Edmundo González Urrutia...

The critical path forward begins with honouring that will. Venezuela needs a civilian government constrained by law, respectful of freedoms, accountable to voters and capable of rebuilding institutions.

Mr Trump appears not to understand this, speaking as if oil reserves made democracy unnecessary... Oil requires long-term investment, which requires legal certainty—property rights, enforceable contracts, predictable rules.

Venezuela must not become a colony or transactional project... Venezuela needs peace, justice, democracy and rights. Citizens’ desire for democracy must be harnessed, not sidelined.

Venezuela has endured more than its share [of sadness]. But those fleeting hours revealed something essential: Venezuelans have not given up. The task now is creating durable reality: not through force or oil fantasies, but by restoring the will of the people so they can start the hard work of restoring rights and rebuilding institutions. That is the only path by which happiness might finally last.

Jokes: Explained at last

I always like explaining jokes. Well, I don’t actually, but there you go. But I did wonder on encountering this cartoon what AI would make of this prompt.

Give a clear explanation of why this cartoon is funny, and what makes the difference between making the point in a way that’s not funny, and making it in a way that’s funny. Add any further deep insights you have about what makes things humorous here or elsewhere.

Turns out it did a creditable job. If you’d like to guess which AI it was, you can check it out here.

This cartoon works on multiple levels of irony and contradiction:

Why It’s Funny

The core joke: A financial advisor is literally describing reckless diversification—taking risk from multiple sources and concentrating it all in one client’s portfolio—while using language (”spreading risk around”) that sounds like the textbook definition of prudent risk management. The humor comes from the complete inversion of financial best practice presented with straight-faced professional language.

The visual reinforcement: The advisor looks pleased with himself, clearly thinking he’s done a good job. The setting is entirely conventional—professional office, certificates on the wall suggesting credentials and trustworthiness. This normalcy amplifies the absurdity of what he’s saying.

What Makes It Funny vs. Not Funny

If this weren’t funny, it would be: “My financial advisor put all my money in risky investments” or “My advisor gave me bad advice.” This states the problem directly—it’s a complaint, not a joke.

What makes it funny:

• Linguistic sleight of hand: “Spreading risk around” typically means distributing risk across different investments. Here it means gathering risk from various sources. The phrase does double duty.

• The advisor’s obliviousness: He seems proud of his work, suggesting either incompetence or cynicism masked by professional jargon

• The passive voice absurdity: “It all wound up in your portfolio” suggests risk has agency, as if it naturally flowed there rather than being deliberately placed

• Professional credibility undermining itself: The trappings of expertise make the incompetence more striking

Deeper Insights on Humor

This cartoon exemplifies several humor principles:

1. The “competence inversion”: Humor often comes from authority figures demonstrating spectacular incompetence while maintaining authoritative manner. The gap between how they should behave and how they do behave creates comedic tension.

2. Euphemistic language exposing reality: The financial industry is notorious for obscuring bad news in technical jargon. This cartoon catches someone accidentally (or cynically) telling the truth while thinking they’re using professional-sounding euphemisms. It’s the moment the mask slips.

3. Economic comedy’s special quality: Financial humor works particularly well because: (a) money matters viscerally to people, (b) the financial industry is simultaneously essential and deeply mistrusted, and (c) financial jargon is specifically designed to make things sound better than they are. This cartoon punctures that jargon.

4. The “explained too clearly” phenomenon: Often humor comes from someone explaining their wrongdoing in terms that make perfect logical sense if you don’t think about it, but become absurd upon reflection. The advisor’s explanation has an internal logic (”I spread risk around”) that collapses immediately when you consider what that means for the client.

5. Implied power dynamics: There’s a dark undercurrent here about principal-agent problems—the advisor’s interests aren’t aligned with the client’s. He might even benefit from this arrangement (clearing risky positions from other portfolios). The humor has a bitter edge because it hints at systemic issues.

The cartoon succeeds because it requires just enough cognitive work from the reader—you have to parse what “spreading risk around” normally means versus what it means here—to feel clever when you get it, while being simple enough that the joke lands immediately. That’s the sweet spot of New Yorker cartoon humor.

Faith and other casualties of modernity

A few months ago, I read chunks of The Degradation of the Academic Dogma by American conservative Robert Nisbet. The book arose from lectures given in 1970 and in many ways Nisbet’s critique of the direction universities took after 1945 foreshadows many more recent alarums and excursions about the woke takeover of higher education.

I’ve commented a few times in this newsletter about Western culture’s penchant for self-criticism. Self-criticism is great of course, but we seem not to understand that healthy self-criticism should be a kind of care for oneself. It should be part of making one better. And that starts with an appreciation of Western culture.

Be that as it may, rather than claiming the superiority of Western culture over other cultures, Nisbet puts it all rather differently. He uses a word I’ve highlighted before. “faith” in an unusual and compelling way.

Let us not conclude this treatment of the academic dogma without calling attention to the academic faith that has had to accompany it. I mean, of course, faith in the Western tradition: in the ideas, values, systems, and languages that belong to the tiny part of the world that is the promontory of the Eurasian continent known as Western Europe. Without faith, wrote Isaiah, the people perish. Without the faith I refer to here, the curriculum would perish; would have perished long ago.

A mighty act of faith is required, as one reflects on it, to sustain a curriculum century after century that scarcely deviates, and then under powerful pressure from the outside, from its commitment to the Aristotles, Augustines, Lockes, Rousseaus, Marxes, and John Deweys. I take nothing from the genius or stature of any of these. But I choose to attack, and hard, any supposition that our interest in these men, and their countless companions in the Western university tradition, rests upon our view of them sub specie aeternitatis; rests upon triumphant conclusion that, after careful comparison of these minds with others in other civilizations, they come out on top. It is faith alone that has enabled these men and their ideas to dominate large sectors of the university curriculum.

If an act of faith is required, century after century, to commit mind and scholarship to the titans, to Aristotle, Augustine, or Leibniz, to Homer, Shakespeare, or Goethe, how vastly greater must be the faith required to support commitment to the large number of minor figures that abound in the pages of university and college catalogues. Does rational judgment really support the existence of a year course on the minor poets of the English seventeenth century when perhaps no course at all is given in the university on the major poets of the entire history of the Asiatic continent? Plainly not. Dogma and faith are required. I prefer these words to, say, “insularity” or “ethnocentrism.”

Think only of the supreme acts of faith, and manifestation of Western dogma, required generation after generation to sustain history departments and their by now nearly ritualized curricula. I refer, of course, to their solemn divisions of courses into “ancient,” “medieval,” and “modern.” Whose ancient, medieval, and modern? The West’s, of course. All else is incidental.

But dogma and faith unsupported by the bonds of structure are, as comparative religion teaches us, notoriously fragile. And structure not served by some system of persisting authority is notoriously weak. And authority not undergirded by the sense of recognized function is notoriously tenuous. These are lessons derived not from sociology but from the wisdom of our grandmothers.

I sent this extract to a subscriber who I thought might be interested in it and received this reply:

Thanks Nicholas. I admire your openness of thought.

I followed up to see what Nisbett has to say in the paper you referenced. So...here is what i think: I regard his dogma as narrowly dogmatic and his faith misplaced when it comes to the ed research environment of today. His brand of faith might lead one to support the righteousness of maintaining funding and institutional support for the many thousands of ed. academics in Australia whose efforts cannot be said to have improved schooling, who never set foot in a school or really talked with teachers, who write arcane nonsense in the hunt for citations, and who resist the concept of metrics that indicate social benefit and impact. While I like the concepts of dogma and faith as explanatory variables, I think Nisbett’s particular brands of dogma and faith are not robust enough to support the institution of the university in the current era. My current views on this issue arise from being on the treadmill of discussion within [a university] on matters to do with judging academic performance. A dolorous topic comprising much dogma, little faith, and no inquiry as to the empirics of social benefit for schooling.

🙂 I look forward each week to your work.

To which I replied:

I agree with you.

I liked the passage I quoted because of the way it used the language (I don’t mean by that it’s literary style, but it’s use of concepts – particularly but not exclusively ‘faith’. It was a defence of the idea of studying the Western canon without claiming it is superior. I thought that was kind of lovely.)

On what else is in the book, I’d say two things. (They’re already getting to be more than two things, but noone expects the Spanish Inquisition).

1. It was written, in 1971 when the pathologies that are so evident today were barely a glint in the eye of Vice Chancellors. So that intrigued me.

2. Although in other texts, Nisbet seems to have the Conservative’s disregard for the damage markets can do (compared with their preoccupation with an over-expansive role for government) I was intrigued here with his notion of external money damaging the ethos of the university – and found it prophetic.

3. His way of framing his concern, and no doubt many of the policy positions that leads him to are also quixotic at least given the state of our universities, our culture and our political economy today. The turn things have taken all around the Western world mean that his specific recipes aren’t very practical.

4. In reading him sympathetically – which is to say trying to read him in his own context and with the system as it was when he was writing, I expect he’d have more sympathy with you than with the metric driven academic careerism you deplore.

More generally, I read for interest, and to be exposed to thoughtful people showing me how my own thinking is missing something.

I don’t read people because I agree with them. Or to put it a bit differently, I make large allowances for disagreeing with an author if I suspect they’ve got something to tell me. It’s the lesson I learned studying history (the only thing resembling an education I ever got) and, reading R. G. Collingwood.

I wandered lonely as a mature supercell thunderstorm

Stunning!

The politician and the ex-politician

Marxists pride themselves on their materialism. They’re wary of the ‘false consciousness’ that ideology can engender. And yet, this correspondent for Jacobin, one of the premier Marxist publications, wallows in false consciousness. He’s unhappy with Mitt Romney’s support of the rich throughout his political career in the light of his post-political thoughts - which are to tax the rich more LOL. So what’s the bottom line? Mitt just isn’t showing enough good, old middle-class honesty and authenticity.

Readers who know my schtick will appreciate that I see this as almost entirely the product of the way in which we’ve constructed our democracy around electoral competition. And electoral competition means that parties call the shots, that the pathway through which politicians get things done is through their party, their funders and so on. As a consequence, Damascene conversions on retirement are better seen as the transition from one regime to another.

Why does the author claim that the politicians it mentions had their chance in government and failed us? Barack Obama marginalised single-payer health care because, given the power of the interests stacked against him, it was the price of getting something good and possible rather than best and impossible.

And yet our Marxist friend is shocked, SHOCKED that politicians are ‘vaguely inauthentic’. Of course, all that having been said, it is true that politicians sometimes rise above this logic, but, if they do it, they have to do it very judiciously because if they voted on their beliefs, they wouldn’t be politicians very long. In that sense, both great and minor achievement arise from working within the grain of one’s institutional context. ‘Vague inauthenticity; is politicians’ full-time job. Some stick to it even after retirement. That’s pathological, but increasingly common - I’m looking at you Tony Abbott. Fortunately most have a more equivocal relationship with the fourth wall after they retire from the stage.

We see this happen so often. There were the Iraq War proponents renouncing their past actions. There was Barack Obama marginalizing single-payer health care as president and then touting Medicare for All after he left office. There was Dick Cheney creating the tyrannical executive power for someone like Donald Trump to use and then becoming a big critic of Trump...

Now comes Mitt Romney — who campaigned for president on tax cuts for the wealthy — publishing a New York Times op-ed arguing for higher taxes on the rich.

I believe in the politics of addition. I believe in welcoming converts to good causes in the spirit of “better late than never.” And yet these kinds of reversals often come off as both long overdue but also vaguely inauthentic.

Reversals held until after people leave positions of power seem less like genuine efforts to change policy and more like after-the-fact attempts to repair their personal legacies. Worse, our society rewards that not just with “better late than never” but with valorization — as if the politician who was so wrong for so long actually has more credibility than those who were right all along.

In doing that, we remove a deterrent against people doing horrible things when they have agency. They know they can use their power in venal ways in the here and now — and then still be celebrated as principled truth-tellers when they are later given space in fancy newspapers like the New York Times to fess up to their bad behavior...

Real legacies are forged not by what people say after the fact, but by what they actually do when they have power and when real stakes are involved.

John McCain’s legacy as a campaign finance reformer was earned not because he got singed by the Keating Five scandal and then wrote op-eds about corruption. He earned it because he remained in the Senate, changed his posture on corruption, and actually used his power to pass campaign finance legislation.

McCain stands out because he did the opposite of what we typically witness. When politicians have power and real stakes demand courage, they often don’t do the right thing. Instead, they champion the very policy they later try to cleanse from their brand.

When Romney was in a position to sculpt the national political discourse and tax policy, he ran for president on a tax cut plan that would “bestow most of its benefits on those with the highest incomes,” according to the Tax Policy Center...

During his Senate tenure, while Romney occasionally explored closing loopholes, I don’t recall him championing the tax-the-billionaires cause. When Romney had real power, he fortified the rigged tax system that he’s only now criticizing from the sidelines.

Notably, Romney doesn’t explicitly apologize for that. He doesn’t offer contrition because that might remind us of what he actually did when he had power and real stakes were involved.

When I think of that history, I find myself thinking: “Mitt Romney kinda looks like the hot-dog-guy saying he’s trying to find the guy who did this to our tax policy, and the real courageous heroes on taxes are those who had the guts to use their power in public office to push for a fairer tax system when it wasn’t cool to do so.”

But where is the courage from powerful people when they actually have power to do something? The answer is it’s often nowhere, because they derive their power by fortifying other elites’ power rather than challenging it. That is their real legacy, no matter what they say after the fact.

Some straight talk on equity from Scott Sumner

Some advice from a self-confessed pretty hard line neoliberal. You know that set of doctrines that we all hated and moved on to a much better place where masked thugs hired by the Government gun people down in their cars? Anyway, this one’s for the neoliberal nostalgia buffs. And those who’d like to see a fairer distribution of income.

There’s a great deal of recent discussion about how AI will affect the economy. Too often, the debate centers around the issue of who will profit from AI. I am much more interested in the question of what AI will do to output...

For many types of goods, gross output data provides a rough estimate of widely shared prosperity. You don’t hear people worrying “What would happen if 60 percent of the washing machines were owned by the top 1% of Americans?” That’s even more true of food consumption, given the constraints of stomach capacity.

But this generalization is not true of big yachts, which are rare and owned by a tiny elite...

Output requires automation

The key to higher living standards for average people is to produce lots more output, which requires more automation. When I was born back in 1955, there were about 300,000 people working as telephone operators... the decline in operator positions was offset by rapid growth of waitressing jobs in the restaurant industry.

Today, the unemployment rate in America is about the same as back in 1955, but we have much cheaper telephone service and many more (and higher quality) restaurant meals...

Structure over distribution

The real issue is not “Who will get the profits from AI?”; the most interesting question is whether AI will lead to the production of 130 million household servant robots, or the production of another 2000 mega-yachts. When examining issues of inequality, it often makes more sense to focus on the structure of output, not the distribution of income...

Economists who argue that total output is more important than distribution are often viewed as “right wing”... but I don’t believe this assumption applies to me. Like many utilitarian economists, I favor a steeply progressive consumption tax... In 1990, America enacted a tax on luxury consumption of goods such as expensive cars, yachts, furs and jewelry. A few years later, the tax was repealed by a coalition that included Democratic politicians worried about job loss in the yacht building industry. Any tax reform that fails to reduce luxury consumption by the rich will completely fail to reduce economic inequality.

... My point is that there is only one way to improve economic equality—you must change the structure of production. More washing machines and fewer yachts...

So please don’t lecture me that I need to pay more attention of distribution... The real problem is people on both sides of the political spectrum that are brain dead on economics, favoring ... policies that reduce output...

We should spend more time thinking about what is or is not getting built (I’m looking at you NIMBYs) and spend less time worrying about who “profits” from housing development, AI or any other economic development.

The AI question

I often see discussions of AI that makes a similar error, failing to understand that the essential question is output, not distribution. Many worriers about AI don’t seem to understand that these two scenarios are almost identical:

1. What if AI replaces all jobs?

2. What if America becomes so rich that we can all live as billionaires?

Do you recall that meme of Pam from The Office—”They’re the same picture“? Some might respond “Oh come on, AI is not going to make America that rich.” Maybe not, indeed I’m also somewhat skeptical. But if it doesn’t, it would also fail to replace human jobs with machines. There’d still be plenty of human work to be done.

Noah Smith on the ebbs and flows of liberalism

Like lots of excellent economists - Paul Krugman, Brad Delong - Noah has a good knowledge of history which he often puts to good use.

Imagine being a French liberal in the year 1815. You spent your youth dreaming of an end to tyranny... reading the works of Voltaire... but you felt your heart leap when you heard the news [of the Bastille]... Imagine, then, standing in 1815... looking back at what it had all become. That first bright rush of freedom had given way... to the murderous insanity of the Terror... [and] the thuggish new imperialism... of Napoleon...

Would you think your dreams had failed? ... If so, you would be utterly wrong. ... Liberalism may have lost the first French Revolution, but it ended up winning the world — at least, for a while. I think about this a lot when I reflect on the liberal dreams of my own youth...

In my youth I believed... that America was a place of deep inequality... [that] could only be solved if we had the will to build a real welfare state. And was I wrong? Beginning in the 1990s, America became a more redistributive, generous nation... [and] the rate of after-tax poverty fell... The same can be said of so many other liberal dreams of my youth. ... We dreamed that one day gay Americans would have their love recognized... [and] by 2015, gay marriage was the law of the land...

When I look back at the long arc of American liberalism... I see a record of success that I believe will endure. And yet here I stand, in 2026, and America’s long arc of liberalism appears to have bent straight into the dirt... As the 2000s turned into the 2010s, I noticed that my fellow liberals had... begun to use “progressive” instead...

Like many liberals of the old school, I watched with concern as the quest to end discrimination against Black Americans evolved into a desire to institutionalize discrimination against White Americans... I watched as the gay rights movement gave way to a trans movement that was deeply out of step with both America’s beliefs and civil rights law...

I watched, too, as “progressive” governance hollowed out the great American metropolises... [Progressives] seemed to view anarchy as a form of welfare, believing that the best way to help the poor... was to allow the worst and most violent among them to terrorize the rest... And at the same time, progressive governance threw billions of dollars at unaccountable... NGOs... [and] failed to build housing, choosing instead to embrace the progressive myth that new construction fuels “gentrification”...

At this point, it would probably save time to ask what modern progressivism gets right. It’s a very short list... [and] it’s possible that the only answer is “We’re not Donald Trump.” ... American liberalism’s great historical successes were... based on [precedents like] the New Deal... But there came a point when those approaches... hit the point of diminishing returns... Allowing people with penises to change in women’s locker rooms... was not the natural extension of the abolition of slavery...

Every social and political movement, if unchecked, tends to take things too far. Ultimately it was the collapse of liberalism’s great rival [conservatism] that allowed it to overgrow its bounds... I’ve spent much of the year since Trump’s election constructing the litany of progressivism’s sins... [B]ut the question is: Where does a liberal go from here? ... America is conditions becoming a bit more favorable to liberalism...

So that’s what you do if you’re a French liberal in 1815. You try again. ... Even if you don’t know exactly where liberalism goes from here... You try again. ... This climb is long... We are not done.

Lovely

These are often good. This was particularly so.

How I didn’t spend 15 minutes I’ll never get back

One of my new routines is getting AI to summarise the argument in articles to decide whether or not to read them. Here’s the advice I got on this piece - recommended by the reading recommendation service The Browser.

please summarise the central arguments in this piece together with one or two core examples the author gives.

And tell me if it’s any good and whether it would be a good use of my time to read it

To which Claude replied:

Central Arguments

The essay argues that our cultural crisis stems not from lack of books or information, but from the loss of deep, contemplative reading practices that create shared meaning and cultural coherence. The solution lies in recovering “research as leisure”—directed, playful curiosity that moves between solitary contemplation and social engagement, transforming passive consumption into active knowledge creation. This practice, grounded in Islam’s divine command to “Read,” can reassemble the “pattern of society” necessary for higher civilization by empowering non-experts to pursue serious inquiry and contribute to living networks of knowledge exchange.

Core Examples

A century of reading anxiety (1926-1996): The author traces warnings from Virginia Woolf (cinema’s “audio-visual” undermining depth), E.B. White (television creating “opium parlor” languor), and Susan Sontag (interactive texts meaning “death of inwardness”). These prophets anticipated our current condition—not book scarcity but cultural fragmentation from passive, superficial engagement replacing immersive reading.

The author’s suburban research journey: What began as bad, sprawling questions during neighborhood walks—”how did these houses get built?”—crystallized through iterative refinement into specific inquiries about zoning history, parking minimums, and suburban rationality. This progression demonstrates the framework in practice: curiosity → question → evidence → answer → community, moving from passive observation to active knowledge contribution.

Assessment

Is it any good? Not particularly. The writing is earnest and well-intentioned but suffers from:

• Shallow intellectual foundations: Name-drops Pieper and Eliot without wrestling with their ideas

• Vague prescriptions: The five-step framework is banal self-help disguised as cultural criticism

• Strained religiosity: The Quranic framing feels grafted on rather than integrated

• Weak examples: The suburban research story proves only that someone learned to refine questions, not that “research as leisure” solves cultural fragmentation

Worth your time? No. It’s a long-winded pitch for what amounts to “read deeply, ask questions, join communities”—advice you already practice and could articulate more rigorously. The piece confuses describing a problem (cultural fragmentation) with solving it, and mistakes platform recommendations (Substack, Discord) for cultural restoration. Save your 15 minutes.

Beethoven’s 5th as a conversation: Great fun

Andrew O’Hagan on Tom Arnold-Forster on Walter Lipmann

And in case you’re concerned that AI might mislead me, here’s its advice on a great review of an excellent intellectual biography of Walter Lippmann, of which you’ll be hearing more from me. Keep your eyes peeled for Heaviosity half hour in future newsletters.

Central Arguments

Andrew O’Hagan’s essay reviews Tom Arnold-Forster’s intellectual biography of Walter Lippmann, using it to explore themes strikingly relevant to today’s media crisis. The core argument: Lippmann diagnosed democracy’s fundamental vulnerability a century ago - citizens don’t respond to reality but to powerful public fictions, “stereotypes” that become their interior representations of the world. These pseudo-environments can completely displace objective reality.

Key examples:

1. Lippmann’s 1920 New York Times study: With Charles Merz, Lippmann analyzed over 1,000 issues covering the Russian Revolution (1917-1920), finding the paper “guilty of having misled its readers on one of the most stupendous events in modern history,” failing its “primary responsibility to publish accurate, reliable information.”

2. Vietnam escalation: Johnson’s administration kept Lippmann sweet while he traveled Europe advocating for peace negotiations, then launched Operation Rolling Thunder. Lippmann warned: “we are being told by Secretary McNamara and others that this war is a decisive test for the future... This is a profoundly and dangerously false notion.”

O’Hagan frames Lippmann’s career arc as a tragedy: the liberal journalist who helped create America’s appetite for stately ambition in journalism, only to watch Vietnam represent “the disintegration of morale” and liberal overreach. The essay opens with Trump’s attack on Voice of America, suggesting history rhyming.

Assessment

1) Well written: Yes, exceptionally. O’Hagan writes with elegant authority, weaving biographical detail, intellectual history, and contemporary resonance. His prose has genuine literary quality - the metaphors land (Lippmann’s “fingers stroke the air and one imagines the typewriter keys”), the structure builds momentum, and he knows when to let a quote speak.

2) Interesting: Very. The piece illuminates how prescient Lippmann was about media manipulation, the manufacture of consent, and democracy’s epistemic crisis. The connections to our moment (Musk, Trump, disinformation) are implicit but unmistakable. O’Hagan makes intellectual biography feel urgent.

3) Worth your time: Absolutely. This speaks directly to your interests in democratic theory, institutional design, and how ideas shape governance. Lippmann’s insight that “news and truth are not the same thing” and his analysis of how fictional environments flood consciousness remains essential for understanding contemporary political dysfunction. The piece offers both historical depth and diagnostic power for present challenges.

Regina Pilawuk Wilson, Durrmu, 2018

The spirit of liberty?

“The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right”

I was taken by the line above and tracked down the very famous Gettysburg Address-length speech of which I was utterly ignorant. It was given by Learned Hand on "I Am an American Day" in Central Park, New York City, on May 21, 1944.

We have gathered here to affirm a faith, a faith in a common purpose, a common conviction, a common devotion. Some of us have chosen America as the land of our adoption; the rest have come from those who did the same. For this reason we have some right to consider ourselves a picked group, a group of those who had the courage to break from the past and brave the dangers and the loneliness of a strange land. What was the object that nerved us, or those who went before us, to this choice? We sought liberty; freedom from oppression, freedom from want, freedom to be ourselves. This we then sought; this we now believe that we are by way of winning.

What do we mean when we say that first of all we seek liberty? I often wonder whether we do not rest our hopes too much upon constitutions, upon laws and upon courts. These are false hopes; believe me, these are false hopes. Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it; no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it. While it lies there it needs no constitution, no law, no court to save it. And what is this liberty which must lie in the hearts of men and women? It is not the ruthless, the unbridled will; it is not freedom to do as one likes. That is the denial of liberty, and leads straight to its overthrow. A society in which men recognize no check upon their freedom soon becomes a society where freedom is the possession of only a savage few; as we have learned to our sorrow.

What then is the spirit of liberty? I cannot define it; I can only tell you my own faith. The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understand the minds of other men and women; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which weighs their interests alongside its own without bias; the spirit of liberty remembers that not even a sparrow falls to earth unheeded; the spirit of liberty is the spirit of Him who, near two thousand years ago, taught mankind that lesson it has never learned, but has never quite forgotten; that there may be a kingdom where the least shall be heard and considered side by side with the greatest. And now in that spirit, that spirit of an America which has never been, and which may never be; nay, which never will be except as the conscience and courage of Americans create it; yet in the spirit of that America which lies hidden in some form in the aspirations of us all; in the spirit of that America for which our young men are at this moment fighting and dying; in that spirit of liberty and of America I ask you to rise and with me pledge our faith in the glorious destiny of our beloved country.

India Mark, Morandi Bottle XI, 2025

Heaviosity half-hour

Biographical extract from Alasdair MacIntyre’s last book, Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity : An Essay on Desire, Practical Reasoning, and Narrative. I asked Claude to set the scene and explain what the point of the narrative is.

MacIntyre’s four biographical sketches in the final chapter serve three main purposes:

First, they demonstrate rather than merely argue for his central claim: that practical reasoning always has a narrative dimension—a sense of what people have been and what they want to become. After four chapters of philosophical argument, he gives us four narratives as test cases. Does the framework actually illuminate how people deliberate and act?

Second, the biographies show people “acting against modernity from within modernity”—pursuing genuine flourishing while embedded in modern institutions (Soviet state, American law, colonial politics, Northern Irish conflict) that embody the contradictions he’s diagnosed. All four had to develop what he calls “sociological self-understanding”—learning to see their social roles with enough detachment to reason well about them.

Third, Grossman’s case illustrates MacIntyre’s controversial claim about eudaimonia. Despite his many difficulties, Grossman is to be accounted a eudaimon—a flourishing agent—because his concern for truthfulness gave his life purposefulness and served as a good he directed his life toward, even if his life is “unhappy in the modern sense.” Following Aquinas rather than Aristotle, MacIntyre argues flourishing doesn’t require good fortune—only the pursuit of genuine goods ordered toward a proper end.

MacIntyre is practicing what he preaches: if ethics requires narrative understanding, a book on ethics needs actual narratives, not just theoretical arguments about narrative.

Over to Alasdair MacIntyre.

Vasily Grossman

Berdichev had been a center of Jewish culture for centuries, home to notable rabbis and home too to an educated class of secularized Jews. Grossman’s parents belonged to that class, spoke Russian, not Yiddish, and gave their son a secular upbringing. His father was a chemical engineer, his mother a teacher of French. At some early point his parents separated and from to his mother took him to live in Switzerland. Like his mother he became a fluent French speaker. He was not yet twelve years old when the October revolution occurred and only fifteen at the close of the Civil War. From until the end of, Grossman was a student of chemistry at Moscow State University, a period in which the Soviet leadership struggled over issues of agricultural collectivization and industrialization. The political history of those struggles was also the history of Stalin’s rise to supreme dictatorial power. Some aspects of that rise to power and of Stalin’s subsequent exercise of that power are notable. The first is the exclusion of any dissenting voices not only from the Central Committee of the Communist Party, but from all the leadership positions in both party and state... Secondly, the ruthless use of terror against Stalin’s rivals extended into a wider system of purges and punishments, institutionalized in the OGPU and the Gulag. But if we are impressed by this ruthlessness and by the scale of Stalin’s crimes, as we certainly should be, we may fail to notice that Stalin’s Russia could not have functioned as it did if it had been a society only of the terrified and of self-serving cynics. An immense number of Soviet citizens came to understand themselves and their everyday tasks, at least for the most part, just as Stalin intended them to understand them, among them the young Grossman. What did this entail? The claim made by the party leadership was that the path to future human flourishing was that taken by the Soviet Union, that human goods were to be ordered as the party ordered them. It was because and insofar as Soviet citizens assented to this, because and insofar as their practical reasoning conformed to the norms laid down by the party, that Stalin’s Russia became to a remarkable extent Stalinist Russia.

Thirdly, because Stalin presented himself as the legitimate heir of Marx, Engels, and Lenin, the rhetoric through which he and his apologists presented their theoretical stances, the policies that embodied those stances, and the effects on Soviet daily life of those policies had to employ the same terms by which Marx, Engels, and Lenin had defined their commitments. But because Stalinism was in crucial respects at odds with the Marxism of Lenin, let alone with that of Marx and Engels, its rhetoric functioned so as to conceal the gap between Soviet realities and any truthful Marxist account of them, such as that supplied by Trotsky. Hence, the need for recurrent and obsessive denunciations of Trotskyism. Hence also some of the peculiar problems that confronted Soviet writers. Writers had been assigned the task of shaping the Soviet imagination, so that their readers would come to understand themselves in Stalinist terms. “The production of souls is more important than the production of tanks,” declared Stalin in, proposing a toast to writers as “the engineers of human souls.” Grossman was to become just such a writer.

During his studies he had decided that it was not his vocation to become a chemical engineer. Already married when he graduated – the marriage lasted only until – and with a daughter born in, a daughter at first brought up by his mother, he took a series of jobs, in a soap factory, as an inspector of mines, as a teacher of chemistry in a medical school in the Donbass region, and in the Sacco and Vanzetti Factory in Moscow. But already, before he graduated, he had been publishing articles in magazines and newspapers and his reading and thinking now became a counterpart to his writing. In he had read Tolstoy’s Death of Ivan Ilyich, and the questions that Tolstoy asks about the relationship of death to everyday life became Grossman’s questions. They are posed in the short story that first made Grossman well known, “V gorode Berdicheve” (”In the Town of Berdichev”), published in Literaturnaya gazeta in April.

The setting for the story is Yatki, home of the poorest Jews in Berdichev, during the war between the Bolsheviks and the Poles. It has two heroines, the political commissar of a Red Army cavalry unit, whose pregnancy by a fellow soldier is too advanced for an abortion, and the Jewish wife and mother in whose home she gives birth. The political commissar is no longer the one who gives the orders, the one on whose skill and steadfastness others depend. She and her child are now dependent on the skills and steadfastness of the mother and the midwife. So how is she to be both good mother and good soldier? When her child is one week old, the Red Army unit has to move out of Berdichev, because the Poles are advancing, and she finds that she cannot refuse to go with them, even though it means abandoning her child. The Jewish wife and mother is at once dismayed and baffled: how could any mother act like this? Her husband sees and admires the political commissar’s resoluteness. But neither has the last word. That is voiced in the crying of the child.

So Grossman leaves his readers with two unanswered questions. More generally, when they have to choose between goods of such very different kinds, how are they to do it? And, more particularly, when the choice is between the goods of children and family on the one hand and the good of the Soviet state on the other, what regrets and griefs must they put behind them? These were questions to which many of Grossman’s readers must have had to give answers by choosing as they did in the course of their everyday lives, by the weight which they had given to various conflicting considerations in making those choices. What Grossman’s story suggests is that those choices were sometimes deeply problematic, that some dilemmas of practical reasoning always remained unresolved. Yet it was a presupposition of Stalinist thinking that the good Soviet citizen’s choices in ordering goods were unproblematic. What Stalin’s leadership had provided was a way to think about oneself and one’s choices as serving the goals set by that leadership, so that hard moral and metaphysical questions did not arise.

The year also saw the publication of Grossman’s Glyukauf, a short novel about hardships endured by coal miners under the leadership of a Communist Party official who drives them to exhaustion and himself to death. It was published in the quarterly review, Almanakh, edited by Maxim Gorky, then the chief ornament of Stalin’s cultural policies. Gorky’s positive view of Grossman’s writing was qualified by his criticism of what he took to be Grossman’s naturalism. The naturalist supposes that by telling the truth about how things are, about present reality, she or he tells the truth simpliciter. But what matters is not so much this as the truth about what things are becoming, about the reality that will be, but is not yet. So Gorky, enunciating the doctrine of Socialist Realism, complained that “in Glyukauf the material governs the author and not the other way round.” Grossman should, on Gorky’s view, have asked “Which truth am I confirming? Which truth do I wish to triumph?” The truth about Soviet realities to be confirmed by artists in general and writers in particular is that affirmed by the Central Committee of the Communist Party, that of the not yet. So Grossman still had to prove himself by showing that what he presented in imaginative terms gave expression to the Stalinist understanding of Russian social life. That he had done so became clear when in September he was admitted to membership in the Union of Soviet writers, which carried with it material rewards, including a large apartment in Moscow.

It would be a bad mistake to suppose that Grossman could only have achieved this by sacrificing his integrity. The genuine achievements of the Soviet regime and the worldview inculcated by Soviet journalism provided him and his contemporaries with a number of ways of justifying and excusing what were from any external point of view, among them of course that of Trotsky, moral crimes and irrationalities... As to what was involved in accusations of Trotskyism Grossman was well aware. In March his cousin, Nadya Almaz, who had worked in Moscow as assistant to the head of Profitern, the international Communist trade union organization, had been arrested by the OGPU and charged with Trotskyism, probably because she was in touch with Victor Serge, custodian of the ideals of, who was arrested in, sentenced to three years in exile, and then allowed to leave the Soviet Union. Nadya Almaz was similarly expelled from the Party and exiled for three years to Astrakhan. A few years later both would have been sent to the Gulag or executed. Grossman was among those questioned by an OGPU agent dealing with his cousin’s case, so he could not have been unaware of the travesties that were being perpetrated. But what writers such as Grossman characteristically argued – how Grossman himself argued we do not know – was that great and rapid social change always involves some errors and injustices, that what matters overridingly is the end to which that change is directed, and that, if she or he contributes to that end by imaginative writing informed by the truth as she or he sees it, then she or he will contribute both to the achievement of that end and to overcoming error and injustice.

For some writers whose art and insight was such that they could only see Soviet realities as they in fact were, that argument was never compelling. And for every writer who for a time found that argument genuinely compelling there would come some moment at which it became impossible any longer both to tell the truth with imaginative power and integrity and to remain in good standing with the Writers’ Union and indeed with Stalin, some moment of radical choice. In that moment had not yet arrived for Grossman. His practical reasoning proceeded from premises that were answers to questions of the form: ‘By doing such and such will I develop my literary powers?’ ‘By doing such and such will I further my career as a writer?’ ‘By doing such and such will I further the good of my family members and friends?’ ‘By doing such and such will I contribute to achieving the goals of Soviet society, as the Party defines them?’ and ‘By doing such and such will I act as a good human being would act?’ but questions posed not in these general and abstract terms, but in terms of the concrete detail of his own everyday life and circumstances. What always matters, both about individuals and about social orders, are the resources that they have within themselves for resolving dilemmas or for living with unresolved dilemmas, when considerations of these various kinds conflict. What Stalinist society imposed on those of its writers who over considerable periods of time attempted both to express their own imaginative vision and to secure the approval of the bureaucrats of the Writers’ Union, the Party, and Stalin, was a double life, a life of oscillation, a life sometimes of dangerous risk taking, sometimes of self-serving silences, sometimes of self-serving speech. Such was Grossman’s life.

How different from us, we may think. But in one respect this type of life is not unfamiliar. I noted earlier how in the contemporary social order our lives are compartmentalized, so that in one area of our lives, the workplace, say, we may allow ourselves to be governed by a very different set of norms from those to which we conform in another. Sometimes indeed those norms may be incompatible, but even in those cases we often move with remarkable ease between one area and another, without any loss of sincerity. So it seems to have been with those writers who were at once creative and Stalinist, such as Grossman.

Some of his friends among former members of the literary and philosophical group Pereval began reading more widely in philosophy. That group had been forced to dissolve in, because of the challenge that it had mounted to Gorky-style Socialist Realism. The key ideas of Pereval were those of Alexander Voronsky... It was Voronsky’s claim that the arts are independent sources of knowledge and that theorists have to be open to learning from artists. He advanced this claim as a Marxist, taking it that what the arts disclose about the ugliness and the beauty of human realities and what Marx’s theory discloses complement and reinforce one another.”The artist does not invent the beautiful, he finds it in reality with his special sensitivity.” The criteria by which the artist judges intuitively, the criteria that guide the artist in creating, are objective. “The beautiful is anything that gives us joy through its life, its abundance, unruliness, growth, and development.” The implication was clear. The party needs on occasion to learn from the artist and always to respect the artist’s independence and integrity. Voronsky was expelled from the party in, recanted, and was readmitted, later was expelled again, and was then executed in. His achievement was to make it impossible for writers and other artists to ignore his challenge. They were at least for a time unable to define their commitments without reference to his as well as to Stalin’s and Gorky’s. So Voronsky played a key part both in defining the double life of the Soviet writer and in keeping writers aware of their duplicity. Grossman’s duplicity was especially notable when in, at the time of the trials of the old Bolshevik leaders, he signed a letter, published in Literaturnaya gazeta, denouncing the “Trotsky-Bukharin conspiracy” and calling for the death penalty for those on trial. In February at the height of the Stalinist terror, Grossman’s wife – his second wife – was arrested by the NKVD. Her former husband, Boris Guber, had been a member of Pereval and a number of Perevaltsy were either executed, as Guber was, or sent to the Gulag. Grossman’s silence in the case of his Perevaltsy friends contrasted with his courage in the case of his wife. He not only went to the NKVD offices to argue for her innocence and her release, but appealed by letter directly to Yezhov, the head of the NKVD, actions that could well have led to his own arrest. In fact he was successful and Olga Mikhailovna was set free in the late summer of so that they could resume their privileged lives as members of the Stalinist literary elite.

I spoke earlier of Grossman – and others – as leading a double life. It is now possible to characterize that duplicity a little further. For much of the time he lives, thinks, and acts as if a wholly convinced Stalinist, not someone on whom Stalinism has been imposed. Yet for some of the time he thinks, acts, and writes as if Voronsky’s teaching were true, as if his own perceptive vision of how things are enabled him to recognize aspects of social reality that were deeply incompatible with Stalinism’s claims. Something turns on how that ‘as if’ is to be understood. Was Grossman, even while apparently an undoubting Stalinist, troubled by aesthetically grounded doubts? Or did he move easily between his two standpoints, for most of the time an undoubting Stalinist, for some of the time something very different, yet able to fend off awareness of his duplicity?

Those leading such a double life argue to practical conclusions at this or that particular time from premises incompatible with those from which they argue at certain other times. The goods that provide them with their reasons for concluding as they do at this or that particular time are at other times dismissed as apparent, but not real goods, as desired, but not genuinely desirable. Such agents may be consistent, even inflexibly consistent rational agents in each part of their divided lives. It is in respect of those lives as a whole that they fail in practical rationality, something that they may disguise from themselves over long periods. But they are always liable to encounter situations in which the compartmentalization of their lives breaks down, moments when choices between incompatible goods become inescapable. Responses to such situations may be of at least three kinds.

They may simply choose that alternative, if there is one, that will allow them to continue as comfortably as possible in their duplicity, although no longer able to disguise their incoherence from themselves. From now on they are cynical hypocrites. Or they may instead choose between the alternatives in such a way as to render their lives coherent, although only in this particular area in which choice has become inescapable. Or they may, perhaps with difficulty, in pondering this particular choice, recognize the overall duplicity of their lives and by the choice that they make put an end to their duplicity. There were Stalinists of all three kinds alongside the self-deceived Stalinist faithful. It was Grossman’s fate to survive the years of terror in the late s and to discover such moments of existential choice only during his war service from onwards and in the aftermath of the war.

During those years of terror, writers, like composers and painters, were peculiarly vulnerable because of the strong personal interest that Stalin took in their work... When Grossman’s novel Stepan Kol’chugin, a portrayal of revolutionary life in Russia from –, was widely praised and selected as a finalist for the Stalin Prize in, Stalin intervened to veto any award to Grossman, calling his standpoint Menshevik.

What Grossman cared about during the s, what gave him reasons for choosing and acting as he did, was at least fourfold. There were his personal ties: to his second wife and his stepson, to his mother who, though far from well-to-do, had brought up his daughter, to his daughter, to his father, to his cousin Nadya, who returned embittered from her exile in, and to a variety of friends. Secondly, there was his genuine devotion to the Soviet project of building socialism, a devotion shared by the huge majority of Soviet citizens, even when sharply critical or cynical about this or that aspect of their lives. Thirdly, there was his commitment to his career as a writer and his deep reluctance to act so as to hinder that career. And, finally, there was his commitment to his art, the art of the short story writer and the novelist. What would happen if he had to choose between any one of these and one or more of the others? This he was to find out in stages. One notable failure was in prudence. Soon after Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union on June,, Grossman must have realized that Berdichev, where his mother lived, would soon be occupied, and he had the resources to move her and her mentally disabled niece to a place of safety. His wife had argued that there was no room for anyone else in their tiny Moscow apartment and, perhaps because of this, Grossman failed to act before the Germans occupied Berdichev. His mother, her niece, and all his relatives there suffered the common fate of the, Jews of Berdichev in September. For this Grossman never forgave himself, and it was immediately after the occupation of Berdichev that he volunteered as a private soldier. What the military made of him was a journalist, a war correspondent for Krasnaya zvezda, Red Star, moving with frontline troops from battle to battle. It was to Red Star that millions of Russians, both civilian readers and the troops themselves, went for their daily war news, and Grossman was notable among those journalists who acquired avid readers. As both journalist and soldier, he consistently acted with great courage and was decorated both for his journalistic achievements and for his actions in combat.

Stalin had refused to believe that Hitler was about to invade the Soviet Union and had left his armed forces unprepared. His insistence on the control of the military by the party had further hindered the military response to the invasion... What Grossman observed and reported as the war progressed through two epic battles, those of Stalingrad and Kursk, and hundreds of lesser engagements were example after example of the exercise of the virtues, of resourcefulness and judgment in the face of the unexpected, of courage and self-sacrifice as everyday virtues, of justice and friendship in conditions of great difficulty and hazard, and of these as exercised toward a common overriding end, while at the same time brutality, ruthlessness, self-serving avoidance of danger, and bureaucratic stupidity were also part of the fabric of life. Notably, he recorded the crimes of Soviet troops against German civilians in the closing phases of the war as faithfully as he had the crimes of German troops against Russian civilians. All this Grossman communicated without moralism through his reports from the frontline – some later published as Stalingrad Sketches – and in a novel, The People are Immortal, published in installments in Red Star.

It was as the Red Army recovered the lost territories that Grossman discovered the facts of the Holocaust, of the systematic mass murder of Jews, first when he returned to Berdichev, later when he reported on Treblinka. That report, “The Hell of Treblinka,” first published in Znamya in, was introduced as evidence at the Nuremburg trials. Stalin had allowed the creation of a Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee in for propaganda purposes. Grossman had contributed to its Yiddish newspaper, Einigkeit, and in, as a member of its Literary Commission, joined with Ilya Ehrenburg in compiling a record of the Holocaust on Russian territory, which they planned to publish as The Black Book. Grossman’s Jewish identity now found expression in a deeply felt responsibility to all the Jewish dead. He later expressed a desire to be buried in a Jewish cemetery. It is one of the paradoxes of war that, at least for those fighting in wars that they take to be just, the disciplines and constraints of war can be felt as liberating. There is a shared overriding good to which all other goods have to be subordinated. The role and the responsibilities of each member of a unit are well defined. What each owes to others and can expect from others is generally not matter for debate. So, given the final goal and the set of constraints that are shared, individuals act as rational agents and do so in solidarity not only with those close to them in action, but with all those engaged in the same enterprise. It is when wars end and the tasks imposed by victory or defeat are confronted that some individuals find themselves with questions that, to their surprise, they are no longer sure how to answer. So it was in a number of countries in. So it was notably in the Soviet Union and not only because the war had ended.

It was among Stalin’s central concerns that the history of the war should be written so as to disguise some key realities of that war. Any memory of Stalin’s own military bungling or of those episodes in the war which had put in question Stalin’s actions or the role of the Party was to be erased, so far as possible, from Soviet consciousness. The policies which gave expression to Stalin’s postwar concerns had an effect on Grossman in three ways. First, the doctrines of Socialist Realism in their crudest form were reasserted and imposed on writers, composers, and painters by A. A. Zhdanov, to whom, until his death in, Stalin entrusted the implementation of his cultural policies. Here Grossman was not made an object of public humiliation, as were Akhmatova and Zoschenko, now denied publication altogether, but he had to negotiate his way carefully toward publication, exposed to the criticism of Stalinist hacks. Secondly, the publication of The Black Book was first delayed and then prohibited. All attempts to commemorate the fate of Soviet Jews were met by declarations that no group in Russia deserved distinctive commemoration, declarations that were a mask for Stalin’s anti-Semitism and the growing anti-Semitism of the Party. Members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee were arrested or killed and the Committee itself dissolved. Yiddish books were no longer published and the Writers’ Union disowned its Yiddish writers. Jews increasingly became victims, most notably and finally in the prosecution of Jewish physicians for the so-called Doctors’ Plot in the months before Stalin’s death in March. Had Stalin not died, Grossman too might have become such a victim, something that he no doubt had in mind when he allowed his name to be added to a letter calling for the severest punishment of the falsely accused physicians. In spite of his awareness of his Jewish identity, conformism to the Stalinist norms was a price for survival that he was still prepared to pay.

At stake was not only his life, but also the publication of his novel, For a Just Cause, at first titled Stalingrad, now retitled at the suggestion of Alexander Fadeyev, head of the Writers’ Union. For a third area in which Grossman encountered the negative effects of Stalin’s determination to control Soviet memory was as a chronicler of the battle of Stalingrad. Parts of his novel had already been published in Novy Mir in,, and, when he submitted the novel as a whole for publication. Rewriting after rewriting was demanded. And rewriting after rewriting took place. At one point Grossman was telephoned by General Rodimtsev, who had commanded the th Guards at Stalingrad, the unit to which Grossman had been attached, to warn him that Mikhail Suslov had invited him to comment on the manuscript, evidence that the scrutiny of Grossman’s narrative was from the highest level. But when the final section of For a Just Cause was published, an initially favorable response was followed by denunciations. Fadeyev reversed himself and the consequences for Grossman appeared grim. But at this point Stalin died. and although attacks on Grossman continued – Fadeyev now accused him, among other things, of having underestimated the part played by the Party at Stalingrad and of identifying with the antiMarxist views of two of his characters – Grossman was able to continue with his career.

How then should For a Just Cause in its final version be read? Both Russian and Western readers have been divided in their verdicts, some dismissing it as no more than a conventional Soviet novel, some seeing in it an anticipation of the radical critique of Soviet society delivered in Life and Fate. Who is right? The answer is that both are right in some measure, that the novel, like Grossman himself up to this point, is ambiguous. Grossman had been and was both a conformist and a rebel, oscillating and compromising. But as he began to write Life and Fate, he disambiguated both his work and himself. I do not mean by this that he now deliberately set himself at odds with the regime – far from it. For one thing the regime changed after Stalin’s death, from a brief period of collective leadership to Khrushchev’s ascendancy, marked dramatically by his speech denouncing Stalin, to the rehabilitations and releases of many thousands from the Gulag and the resultant hopes for cultural openness, to the reaction against Khrushchev in the Party leadership and the death of those hopes. So too in the Writers’ Union there was corresponding change, marked dramatically at the outset by Fadeyev’s apology for the wrongs that he had done to other writers, including Grossman, and by subsequent reflections of the changing attitudes of the Party leadership. Through all this Grossman continued to live and work in a way that deferred to the limitations imposed by the regime, except, from now on, in one crucial respect.

He had now committed himself unconditionally to writing a novel about the war that would be truthful from beginning to end. What then is it for an historical novelist to be truthful? It is first of all to be careful that her or his narrative is not merely consistent with, but informed by the best historical knowledge available as to how things were at the relevant times and places. It is, secondly, to be imaginatively faithful in communicating how things were variously seen and felt by those inhabiting that particular past, so that characters who are fictions, who are imagined, enable the reader to understand what it would have been to be just such an actual inhabitant of that past. It is, thirdly, to avoid sentimentality, to refuse to allow irrelevant feeling to romanticize or to vulgarize or to domesticate the past. Such novels give expression both to the feelings of the characters portrayed and to the novelist’s own feelings. Those feelings cannot but embody or presuppose judgments about what it is most important to care about and why it is important so to care. Given these requirements, the truthful historical novelist will always do more than merely describe, or rather her or his descriptions will be such that, once they have been grasped, there is no further task of evaluation. His descriptions are evaluations. The realism of the truthful historical novelist is more and other than naturalism.

In saying this, I am of course so far concurring with the proponents of socialist realism. Writing in, Lukacs argued that what the naturalist lacks is a sense of perspective. It is the perspective of the writer that determines “the course and content” of her or his narrative, “the direction in which characters develop, the possibilities that are realized or left unrealized.” What Lukacs did not say and perhaps could not have said is that such a perspective requires commitment to an evaluative standpoint, an ability to distinguish not only the good and the better from the bad and the worse, but also the various kinds and degrees of badness, deceit, and self-deceit, incompetence and thoughtlessness, deliberate evil and weakness in collaborating with evil, and the masks which each of these on occasion wears. For Lukacs had in his time carefully averted his eyes from a great many evils. Grossman no longer averted his eyes.

So what is the relevance of all this to his practical reasoning? Grossman could not be truthful in his novel without becoming truthful about the narrative of his own life. Too many episodes in that life coincided with episodes in his novel. What the novel put on record was how he had learned to order goods in particular situations during his war service, something learned often enough from failures and mistakes. He had learned what he had good reason to desire and to do, and this knowledge informed his choices and his activities during the years when he was writing his novel. His practical arguments and decisions as a writer reproduce and reiterate the practical arguments and decisions of those from whom he had learned most as journalist and soldier. So all else became subordinated to a single aim. If and insofar as he now compromises with the regime, it is no longer because he is a divided self, but because he has accepted one overriding responsibility, that of completing his novel in the service of the good of truthfulness.

I have spoken of Grossman’s novel as an historical novel and such it was and is. But it could not escape also being a novel about the Soviet present. For in spite of their repudiation of Stalin, the leadership of the USSR legitimated itself by appeal to an often fictitious history of how things had developed after Lenin’s death and of the Party’s role throughout. So although the regime was anxious not to appear repressive, there were strongly enforced limits to cultural openness. It became part of Soviet academic and literary culture to know how far one could go, not just in respect of what was said, but with regard to those to whom one spoke or within whose hearing one spoke. The smuggling of the text of Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago out of Russia, its publication in Italy, its translations, and the Nobel Prize that was awarded to Pasternak both alarmed and outraged the regime’s ideological caretakers. Life and Fate was well designed to alarm them even more. Why so?

First and most obviously because it catalogues fully the crimes and defects of the Soviet regime, the monstrous mass murders and cruelties of Stalinism, the dishonesties, indeed the bureaucratization of dishonesty, the crippling of the Red Army by Stalin’s purge of the officer corps, the ineptitude of Stalin and of the Party in the first months of the war, the viciousness of Russian and especially Ukrainian anti-Semitism, the viciousness of Russian and especially Ukrainian collaboration with the Germans. Nothing is omitted, and all these evils are presented in memorably vivid terms and through telling examples. Grossman goes very much further than Khrushchev had done. It might therefore seem that Life and Fate is a straightforwardly anti-Soviet novel. But to reads it as such would also be to make a serious mistake. This was not what Grossman intended and indeed this is not how the authorities read his novel. Grossman had looked forward to its publication and was surprised and disappointed by the response of the regime. So what did elicit that response?

What the authorities could not allow was the publication of Life and Fate at that particular time or in any future foreseeable by them. For while Khrushchev’s revisionism had unleashed a new kind of questioning and an openness to rethinking a wide range of social and cultural issues, those in authority were at best ambivalent about this, recognizing some measure of questioning as inevitable and even welcome, but only insofar as it remained under their control and within the increasingly narrow limits that they imposed. Life and Fate by contrast invited its readers to engage in open and radical questioning of the whole Soviet enterprise. It did not and does not prescribe any particular set of answers – proSoviet or antiSoviet – to its questions and it leaves open the possibility of a newly critical form of Soviet life and thought still inspired by and directed toward some version of the goals of the October revolution. But what Life and Fate would have undermined was anything close to the official Khrushchevite version of Soviet life and Soviet history. Its remarkable imaginative power was therefore an immediate danger to the regime.

Critics have compared its overall scope and ambition to Tolstoy’s in War and Peace and Grossman’s art in portraying character to Chekhov’s. But the readers whom he addressed were very different from Tolstoy’s or Chekhov’s, scarred by experiences unknown to their readers, and invited by Grossman to see themselves in his characters while asking his, Grossman’s, questions. The novel begins in a Nazi concentration camp, where Russian prisoners of war are held alongside political prisoners and common criminals. That camp, where things are so contrived by the SS that it is the prisoners themselves who administer the camp and cooperate in sustaining the evil, is an image of the power of evil. When, later on, Liss, the camp commandant, argues compellingly to the still faithful old Bolshevik, Mostovskoy, who had been captured at Stalingrad, that Stalin’s Russia is the mirror image of Hitler’s Germany, that each values what the other values, the case that has to be answered has been made. But Mostovskoy also has to respond to the arguments of other Russian prisoners, of Chernetsov, the former Menshevik, and of Ikonnikov, the disillusioned Tolstoyan, whose pursuit of the questions “What is ‘good’? ‘Good’ for whom? Is there a common good – the same for all... ? Or is my good your evil?” had led him to dismiss all philosophical and religious answers, while discovering that when evil is defeated it can only be by “the powerlessness of kindness, of senseless kindness.”

Life and Fate is not a work of philosophy, of abstraction. The reader moves through many different kinds of scene, responds to many different kinds of character, in the street by street fighting of Stalingrad, in the discussions of staff officers behind the lines, in the theoretical and experimental enquiries of physicists, in the political intrigues of Soviet science, in a discussion of the merits of Chekhov, in love affairs that go well and love affairs that go badly, in police interrogations that go badly and walks in the countryside that go well, in jokes and sneers and memories and griefs and deaths. Remember that the reader is to engage in questioning, not to assent to conclusions, but some conclusions are inescapable. “Let’s begin with respect, compassion and love for the individual,” says the mathematician, Sokolov, in the course of his praise of Chekhov.

Alexandra Vladimirovna, whom we first meet early in Part One, we last encounter nearly eight hundred pages later (in the English translation), as an old woman “wondering why the future of those she loved was so obscure and the past so full of mistakes, not realizing that this very obscurity and unhappiness concealed a strange hope and clarity, not realizing that in the depths of her soul she already knew the meaning of both her own life and the lives of her nearest and dearest.” What she already knew was that it is in living and dying as human beings that we achieve an “eternal and bitter victory” over the destructive forces of history. But what, then, are the qualities that enable us to live and die as human beings? They are certainly not just “respect, compassion and love for the individual.” For one thing it matters enormously who won the battle of Stalingrad. “Stalingrad was to determine future social systems and philosophies of history.” It matters too how the battle was won and that the story should be told truthfully. So the virtues of the soldier’s life and the virtues of the writer’s life must be among those qualities. But, given this, what then is the Russian reader to make of the social system and the philosophy of history that had in fact resulted from Stalingrad eighteen years later?

Grossman had already published extracts from Life and Fate, when he submitted it for publication to the editor of Znamya – he already had a contract with Znamya – in October,. In January,, he finally learned not only that it had been rejected, but that the editorial board had unanimously characterized it as “anti-Soviet.” In February three KGB officers came to Grossman’s apartment with a warrant authorizing them to seize every copy of his novel, together with rough drafts, typewriters, and carbons. Grossman himself was left at liberty. He appealed first to the Writers’ Union and then to Khrushchev himself. It is a mark of the importance that the ideological guardians of the Soviet Union attached to Grossman’s novel that he was summoned to meet with Mikhail Suslov, member of the Politburo and soon to become, after Khrushchev’s fall in, Second Secretary of the Communist Party. Suslov, admitting that he had not read the book, but only reports of it, told Grossman that publication of his book would do only serious harm to the Soviet state and that it must go unpublished. Grossman was devastated and remained deeply unhappy until his death from cancer in. He was not to know that a copy left with a friend would much later be smuggled out of Russia and later still be published in Switzerland.

This unhappiness did not prevent him from continuing to write. In late he visited Armenia and left a lively record of his visit – and of reflections on himself as a visitor – in I Wish you Well, to be published only after his death and then in a version in which what he had had to say about Soviet anti-Semitism had been deleted. But his greatest achievement was to continue working on his final novel, Everything Flows, begun as long ago as and unfinished at Grossman’s death. It is the story of the return to Soviet society of Ivan Grigoryevich after thirty years in the Gulag and of his reckoning with both the past and the present. He encounters the informer responsible for his own imprisonment and, in a play within the novel, four informers of different types tell their stories. Grigoryevich’s landlady turned lover confesses to her part in inflicting deadly famine on her Ukrainian neighbors. But it is not only a novel of confessions, but also of extended reflections, reflections on Stalin, on Lenin, and on their relationship to the prerevolutionary Russian past. Confessions and reflections serve a single unifying purpose, that of presenting an unqualifiedly negative verdict on Soviet society. Everything Flows is the straightforwardly antiSoviet novel that Suslov had supposed Life and Fate to be. What then is its central thesis?

That Stalin was indeed Lenin’s true heir, that Stalin gave expression to “what was most essential in Lenin,” and that Lenin was the true heir of a Russian tradition, exemplified by Peter the Great, in which “Russian progress and Russian slavery were shackled together.” In the nineteenth century the emancipation of the serfs and the struggles of revolutionary thinkers had opened up the possibility of freedom, of progress without slavery. But that possibility was foreclosed in. It was not that Lenin willed the continuation of Russian slavery.”It is, indeed, tragic that a man who so sincerely loved Tolstoy and Beethoven should have furthered a new enslavement of the peasants and workers.” However, the reimposition of slavery to the state was the inevitable result of his love of power and his “frenzied, unyielding strength of will.” That state still lives. The state founded by Lenin and constructed by Stalin has now entered upon a third stage. So in these last years Grossman finally avows himself an enemy of the regime, finally becomes what Suslov had taken him to be, but to an extent unimagined even by Suslov.

The contrast with Life and Fate is important. There Grossman had put in question all philosophies of history. Here he advances his own philosophy of Russian history. There he invites his readers to question. Here he invites their assent. There nothing turns on his own philosophical commitments. Here a great deal of his argument invokes a never spelled out conception of freedom, one that seems closely akin to Isaiah Berlin’s conception of negative liberty. The theses that he now advances require a great deal more argument than he supplies. Indeed, he nowhere recognizes adequately that there is a case to be made against him... So his rhetorically powerful, but argumentatively weak book expresses his final stance. Yet it is important to remember that he was already writing Everything Flows while he was writing Life and Fate, and, insofar as they express very different attitudes, they express once again a divided self. What, then, are we to say in conclusion about Grossman as a practical reasoner?

I have said almost nothing about the fabric of his everyday life both before and after the war, his relationships with his wives, his daughter, other family members, his friends – and he had some very good friends – and his collaborators. And I have said nothing at all about the structure of his everyday life as a writer, of the routines that governed his day, his week, his month. For Grossman, as for everyone else, most of his practical reasoning would have concerned the ways in which he lived out those routines and sustained or failed to sustain those relationships. And for Grossman, as for everyone else, others would have formed fixed expectations about his actions and his reactions and formed beliefs about what it was that he cared for. It is, however, when everyday routines are interrupted and familial and other relationships disturbed, especially by unexpected events, that individuals have to reflect and to identify what they take to be good reasons for acting in one way rather than another, so that they discover, perhaps for the first time, to what course of action they are committed by their rank ordering of goods, and then have to decide whether that rank ordering stands in need of revision. It is on such occasions that an agent’s practical reasoning becomes evident and open to evaluation by that agent or by others. Some very different occasions or sets of occasions were crucial in determining the course of Grossman’s life.

The first were all those episodes in which Grossman was invited to and agreed to endorse and collaborate with the agencies of the Stalinist state, beginning with his interrogation by an OGPU agent after his cousin’s arrest in, continuing with his call, as a member of the Writer’s Union, for the infliction of the death penalty on Bukharin and others in the monstrous show trial of, and still continuing in when he once again endorsed a call for the infliction of the death penalty, this time on the physicians accused in the so-called Doctors’ Plot. What motivated Grossman? Doubtless to some extent fear of the consequences of acting otherwise. But for most of his life at least, it also mattered to him that he should act as a good Soviet citizen, and he believed that the goods which he chiefly valued, excellence in his writing and success as a writer, were goods recognized by and sustained by the Soviet state. Hence his acceptance of the tasks of rewriting so as to achieve publication, and hence his apparent lack of any concern for the treatment of Akhmatova and Pasternak. He structures his life as on the one hand his career requires, and on the other as the Stalinist state requires and, like millions of others, he finds no good reason to do otherwise. But this necessarily involved him, like them, in not raising certain questions, in closing their minds, so far as possible, to certain dreadful possibilities. And this necessarily involved him, like them, in not caring too much about the truth, in not letting a concern for the truth interfere with his life.

This is the stance from which Grossman begins as a practical reasoner. We all of us, whatever the time and place that we inhabit, begin as practical reasoners from some received view of things into which we have been initiated and educated, adopt some stance that provides us with a starting point. What differentiates us is whether or not and how we move forward from it. June and July,, were dates that marked a first radical change in Grossman. Those are the dates on which Hitler’s Germany invaded Russia and the th Panzer Division reached Berdichev, making it impossible for Grossman to rescue his mother. What he then recognized was the relative insignificance of the reasons that he had had for not moving his mother and his niece to Moscow. It was not that they carried no weight as reasons. Like the vast majority of Muscovites, his living space was small and cramped, there was little privacy, his wife was understandably unwilling to have things made worse. But his failure to respond immediately to the German threat had fatal consequences, and he at once understood it as a failure in his responsibility for his mother and his family, a responsibility which became in time a responsibility to all those Jewish dead at the hands of the Nazis and then to all those Jews who had suffered as a consequence of anti-Semitism, whether, German or Russian, Polish or Ukrainian. This commitment became so central and so consistent that his lapses from it during the hysteria before Stalin’s death can only be understood as expressions of a fear that he and his could not otherwise survive, a fear that was fully justified. So from then on Grossman was committed to discharging his responsibility to the Jewish dead as soon as possible, for acting on the reasons that he already had for providing a truthful account of the war.

I spoke earlier of Grossman as having disambiguated his work and himself as he began to write Life and Fate. But this disambiguation began earlier with those experiences of war that were seminal for the later writing of the novel. It was in the war that he had discovered what it was to live a life with an overriding goal, to which all else had to be subordinated, that of victory. But of victory over what enemy? Much Soviet wartime rhetoric, that of Ilya Ehrenburg, for example, took the enemy to be Germany and the Germans. But increasingly the enemy was identified as National Socialism. What Grossman came to understand was that the enemy had indeed been National Socialism, but National Socialism as one of the forms taken by human evil and that truthfulness about what it is that you are against, if evil in some of its various forms is what you are against, is a condition of discovering what it is that you are for. So the achievement of truthfulness became Grossman’s overriding goal, providing major premises for his practical reasoning. The obstacles to the achievement of truthfulness in the years in which he was writing Life and Fate were considerable.

The repudiation of Stalin and Stalinism by Khrushchev and his colleagues had been, as we already noted, only partial. And it took some time for Soviet thinkers and writers, let alone for ordinary citizens, to find out how the line between what it was now permissible to say and what remained impermissible was now drawn... Someone may remark that this is something that children learn in all societies, and this is true. What distinguished Khrushchevite and postKrushchevite Russia from, say, California or Sweden either then or now is that conformity in respect of the norms of truthtelling and lying was politically enforced, that one’s and one’s family’s livelihood was at stake, and that enforcing as well as observing such conformity was required. So dissembling became a widely valued quality and unconditional regard for truthfulness dangerous. But this led to other moral deformations. Because successful dissembling was rewarded, those who were prepared to dissemble on behalf of others – their superiors in the workplace, those who allocated housing and other benefits, those who controlled the outcomes of bureaucratic processes – looked for rewards from those others. So in many areas of Soviet life patronage, corruption, and cynicism, those marks of the later Brezhnev era, increasingly flourished alongside continuing Soviet patriotism and devotion to ideals.

Grossman’s concern for truthfulness was far from unique among Soviet citizens. But his vocation as a writer, especially a writer with a wellestablished reputation, gave it a peculiar importance. His aim was no less than to elicit from as wide a range of readers as possible the kind of questioning, about their own forms of social life, about how the virtues and the vices, including the virtue of truthfulness, flourish or fail to flourish, that can be satisfied by nothing less than the truth. Was this a task in which he could have succeeded? The answer is clearly ‘No’, and this for two very different kinds of reason. The political condition of Soviet society in the s made it certain that Grossman would be defeated. Yet, had that condition been very different, Grossman would still have been unlikely to succeed, except in as limited way. For the condition of life in every modern society is inimical to the kind of ruthlessly truthful self-questioning that Grossman attempted to elicit. So his task was one that could not have been completed. Yet it was a task that completed Grossman’s own life.

I do not mean by this that Grossman understood his life to have been thus completed. He died a dissatisfied and unhappy man. Nonetheless, what was crucial was his now unwavering commitment to a task that gave point and purpose to everything in his life that had, after so many vicissitudes and uncertainties, issued in that commitment. It was insofar as his practical reasoning directed his actions toward the ends mandated by his task that he showed himself a rational agent. It was the pursuit of those ends that gave finality to his life, so making it unhappy in the modern sense, but in fact eudaimon.