The True ''Common Core'' of English Literature

The Story-Killers:  A Common-Sense Case Against Common Core
by Dr Terrence O. Moore
CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, October 2013, 292 pages

Dr Terrence Moore's book, The Story-Killers:  A common-sense case against the Common Core, reveals how the teaching of the Western literary canon is being eroded in the United States by progressive educationalists.  The Common Core ― a government-funded school curriculum ― is currently operational in 46 American states.

Moore is deeply concerned that the truly great stories of Western Civilisation ― Homer, Shakespeare, and the rest ― may cease to be read or studied as whole works in schools across America.  Even now, a twelfth grade "Literature" textbook produced by major publisher Pearson/Prentice Hall teaches Mary Shelley's Frankenstein without setting it as a reading text.

The textbook provides students with page after glossy page of photographs, modern anecdotes and personal reflections on the Frankenstein mythos, but offers no excerpts from the original work or any suggestion that the students should actually read the classic novel.

Is this the future of literature in American schools?  Under the Common Core it might well be.

In a similar vein to the Australian Curriculum for English, the Common Core documents are written in dense educational jargon, and emphasise the development of skills over the acquisition of knowledge.  They provide little useful instruction to teachers, fail to mention many great works of the Western literary canon, and even impede good teaching practices.

In The Story-Killers, Moore proposes an alternative curriculum with classical literature at its core, in place of the progressive paradigm.  In plain language, Moore offers a clear outline of what a solid, classical, liberal curriculum for literature should contain.  He is eminently qualified for the task, having founded a classical charter school for K-12 students in Colorado.  Moore is now principal of the Atlanta Classical Academy, and acts as an advisor to several other classical charter schools via the Hillsdale College Barney Charter School Initiative.

According to Moore, literature should be treated, first and foremost, as a means to study human nature through investigating the thoughts and actions of seemingly real characters.  The motives, ambitions, faults and virtues of human characters are brought to the fore through careful observation and analysis.

The teacher should not be overly preoccupied with structural features in the text (such as its setting and plot trajectory), as these draw attention away from the study of characters and ruin the suspension of disbelief which allows students to truly lose themselves in good literature, as the author intended.

In the final chapter, Dr Moore presents his high school curriculum ― a curriculum which has been successfully implemented in classical charter schools across the US for years.  In essence, it consists of a list of books set for each semester from ninth to twelfth grade.  Arranged in chronological order, this list begins with the foundations of Western literature.  The whole of Homer's Iliad and Virgil's Aeneid are read in ninth grade, along with other Greek and Roman literature.

The tenth grade is devoted to British literature, including the works of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Austen and Dickens.

Classic American literature is studied in eleventh grade, requiring students to read the Scarlet Letter, Moby Dick, and Huckleberry Finn among other works.  The final year introduces the most recent works of the literary canon, including Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and Conrad's Heart of Darkness.  In all, Moore's literature curriculum is a sweeping overview of the greatest literary works of the Western Civilisation.

Moore provides extensive examples and commentary on progressive failures, but The Story-Killers goes far beyond exposing the intellectual bankruptcy and ideological underpinnings of progressive literature teaching in the United States.

Moore provides viable, positive instruction on how to create a true "Common Core" for literature.  The greatest literary works of our Western heritage should be at the heart of any literature curriculum that claims to provide the best education for young people.

These insights are particularly critical for us in Australia, as we likewise face up to the astounding neglect of literature in the Australian Curriculum for English.

Better to Ask For Forgiveness, Not Permission

Permissionless Innovation:  The continuing case for Comprehensive Technological Freedom
by Adam Thierer
Mercatus Center at George Mason University, 2014, 106 pages

The abundance of information available to us today would have been unimaginable to people living only twenty years ago.  Previous generations found themselves bound to a restricted group of information channels and distribution networks, which were often slow and with limited scope.  With the emergence of the internet everything changed.  Suddenly, the flow of information and the methods of exchange became seemingly limitless.

Through recent developments in mobile technologies ― laptops, tablets, and wearable digital devices such as glasses and watches ― the movement and exchange of ideas and knowledge has made information even more accessible and ubiquitous.

Underpinning this great leap forward has been the ability for anyone to participate.  The internet is a global platform which gives a high school student in Siberia or a university drop-out in Shepparton the same opportunity to experiment and create as a professor at Stanford University.

According to Adam Thierer, the author of a new book Permissionless Innovation:  The Continuing Case for Comprehensive Technological Freedom, it is this freedom to experiment and invent without asking permission that has underpinned the economic benefits of the internet.

Thierer argues:  "Permissionless innovation is about the creativity of the human mind to run wild in its inherent curiosity and inventiveness.  In a word, permissionless innovation is about freedom."  The key outcome of the freedom that results from permissionless innovation is not anarchy but openness.  It creates an environment in which entrepreneurs and innovators can flourish by removing the barriers to entry.

However, new technologies are disruptive.  Faced with the upheaval that they can cause, modern policy debates continue to revolve around one key question:  "Must the creators of new technologies seek the blessing of public officials before they develop and deploy their innovations?"

On the one side, those that espouse the importance of the precautionary principle argue that new inventions and technologies must be curtailed until an inventor can prove beyond all doubt that their inventions will not harm individuals, the environment, or damage cultural or social norms.

The other disposition, "permissionless innovation", refers to the notion that "experimentation with new technologies and business models should generally be allowed by default".

Of course, history is riddled with examples of regulators being precautious by default.  In the mid-nineteenth century, the British Parliament passed the "Red Flag Law" as part of the 1865 Locomotive Act, designed to limit the dangers caused by the development of the automobile.

As a result, early cars were restricted to a speed limit of two miles an hour in towns and cities and four miles on the open road.  The law also stipulated that three people were required to operate any automobile:  one to drive, one to stoke the engine, and one to walk fifty meters in front with a red flag or lantern and warn pedestrians of the approaching danger.

These laws, which were introduced because of heavy lobbying from stage coach and railroad companies, stifled the growth of the industry in Britain.  But in Germany and the United States (except the state of Vermont), who did not have any such laws, the industry flourished.  Britain finally repealed this law in 1896.

More recently, the regulatory reaction to the use of commercial drones, 3D printing, and autonomous cars offer interesting case studies which Thierer examines in an accessible fashion.  But it is tempting to think about restrictions that continue to be applied to GM crops and the onerous regulations that add millions of dollars to the cost of developing new pharmaceutical drugs and medications ― a cost that is inevitably passed onto the consumer.

The internet itself is the most poignant example of the dangers of the precautionary principle in practice.  Although permissionless innovation has been a pivotal element of the success of the platform in transforming our lives, few people realise that it was not always the default position.

Indeed, for many years commercial use of the internet was not allowed.  Drawing from the 1982 MIT handbook for the use of ARPAnet, the predecessor of the internet, Thierer highlights original restrictions that were placed on the technology:

It is considered illegal to use the ARPAnet for anything which is not in direct support of government business ... Sending electronic mail over the ARPAnet for commercial profit or political purposes is both anti-social and illegal.  By sending such messages, you can offend people, and it is possible to get MIT in serious trouble with the government agencies which manage the ARPAnet.

As a result of those restrictions, the internet remained, in its formative years, a closed club for selected university professors, government bureaucrats, and some engineers.  Although these restrictions were no doubt placed on the web with the best of intentions, in hindsight the opportunity costs of such restrictions were immense.

Once these restrictions were removed and commercial use was allowed to proceed, social and economic opportunities became apparent and the internet developed beyond most people's wildest expectations.

Yet despite the technological progress that has resulted from innovators who did not seek prior approval from regulatory bodies and the beneficial results that have emerged from the internet, social networks, and mobile technologies, there remains a prevalent disposition to be overly cautious about new things.  Groups that espouse this way of thinking seek to beat all imagined harms out of any new development before they will allow it to proceed, with intensely harmful consequences for innovation and economic growth.

Of course, that does not mean that problems that develop from disruptive technologies should be ignored.  But regulation should remain a last resort.  Bottom-up adjustment and integration will always be more effective than top-down bureaucratic controls.

Furthermore, Thierer argues that torts, common law, and class actions provide mechanisms that hold firms introducing potentially dangerous products in to the market accountable.  These instruments create an incentive for firms to make better, safer products over time.

The limited regulation placed on the internet has shown what entrepreneurs can achieve when government gets out of the way.  Thierer makes a powerful case for slow-moving and risk-averse regulators to take heed of this lesson and ensure the freedom to innovate without permission becomes the default position, rather than the rare exception.

The Father of History

The Histories by Herodotus
Translated by Tom Holland
Penguin Classics, 2013, 880 pages

"Herodotus", Tom Holland writes, "is the most entertaining of historians.  Indeed, he is as entertaining as anyone who has ever written ― historian or not."

A bold claim though this may be, it cannot be denied that Herodotus' work has influenced myriad writers that have come since.  His legacy has been both profound and long-lived, and continues to be felt today.

As with many Classical authors, very little is known of Herodotus' life.  We know that Herodotus was born in the Carian city of Halicarnassus in south-western Anatolia (now Bodrum, Turkey) at some point in the early fifth century BC, and we definitely know that he wrote a ἱστορία (historia, or "enquiry") in nine books.  Everything else is highly speculative.

Nevertheless, his great legacy ― the carefully-compiled historia ― gained a life of its own, and ultimately gave its name to a literary genre and academic discipline.  In the fifth century BC, he produced what was essentially the first prose non-fiction work in Greek ― apparently the product of tireless research and the cataloguing of many different accounts.  Its stated purpose was to ensure "that human achievement may be spared the ravages of time, and that everything great and astounding ... be kept alive".

In his treatise De Legibus in the first century BC, the Roman orator and statesman Cicero referred to Herodotus in passing as pater historiae ("the father of history").  Herodotus has likewise been dubbed "the father of history" by hosts of academics since.

If he was the "father of history", however, Herodotus was not the father of the political, scientific form of history;  that title more properly belongs to Thucydides, the Athenian historian who flourished in the generation after Herodotus.  Thucydides' history had a specific, clear focus:  his purpose was to recount the Peloponnesian War ― the brutal conflict between Athens and Sparta towards the end of the fifth century BC ― and to report only facts that related directly to his main topic.  Naturally, as an Athenian he was selective of the facts which were included.

Herodotus' work stands in bewildering contrast to that of Thucydides.  True:  the main topic of Herodotus' writing is essentially political, as it concerns the origins of the war between the Greeks and the Persians and the defeat of the Persian invasion of Greece in the early fifth century BC.

But his account entails a great deal more.  He begins with the story of Gyges, who was compelled to kill the king of the Lydians after being forced to see the queen naked.  This then leads to the story of Gyges' great-great-grandson Croesus, who foolishly declared war on the Persians and destroyed his kingdom in doing so.

Elsewhere, Herodotus' narrative digresses to discuss the explorations of the Phoenicians, the customs of the Egyptians, the source of the Nile, the geography of Scythia, and various dynastic struggles in Persia.  In fact, it is only half-way through his work ― in book five ― that Herodotus finally approaches the outbreak of the Persian wars with the Greeks, and only in book seven that Xerxes arrives on the Greek mainland.

Given the extremely broad interests of his work, it is perhaps unsurprising that Herodotus laid the foundations for many disciplines in addition to history.

As Holland argues in his new translation of the historia, Herodotus produced the earliest example of a work on geography, political discourse, and academic research in general.  "The process of researching and recording facts on a would-be encyclopaedic scale begins with his history", so Holland writes.  "Anyone who has ever used the internet to check up on a fact stands in a line of descent from him".

Holland is a London-based historian and prolific writer, whose main interests are ancient and early medieval history.  In addition to writing four historical novels, radio adaptations of important Classical works, plays and documentaries, he is the author of a series of non-fiction bestsellers which collectively explore some of history's most dramatic turning-points.  First, in 2004, was Rubicon, which charts the collapse of the Roman Republic in the first century BC.  This was followed in 2006 by Persian Fire, on the Persian invasion of mainland Greece in the fifth century BC.

His 2009 book, Millennium, explores the rise of medieval Western Christendom in the two centuries surrounding AD 1000, and his 2012 book, In the Shadow of the Sword, concerns the rise of Islam in the sixth and seventh centuries.  In his latest book, Holland has tried his hand at something different.  He provides a bold new translation of Herodotus.

For the most part, he succeeds, although he hardly provides a literal translation from the Greek language.  In the first book, for example, he has the reluctant regicide Gyges say to the Lydian queen,

"... now that you have twisted my arm, and made me swear to kill my master ― something I really do not wish to do, I can assure you ― answer me this:  how do we actually lay our hands on him?"

While this captures the sense of the original, the idiom "twisting the arm" would have been alien to Herodotus.  A more literal translation from the Greek would look something more like this:

"... since you compel me, not willing, to kill my master, please:  I will hear what manner we will lay our hands on him."

The pages of Holland's book are littered with other such modern English idioms that certainly were not in Herodotus' original ― including "to cut a long story short", "I haven't the foggiest idea", "nipping Persian greatness in the bud", and "crack open the wine and start partying".  Holland also has a tendency to turn statements into questions, and generally rephrases sections for dramatic effect.

While it isn't an accurate rendition of the Greek, Holland's version makes better English than a more literal translation would, and is a compelling read for anyone wanting a highly readable introduction to Herodotus' work.

Holland's translation is supplemented with useful notes by the Cambridge Classical historian Paul Cartledge.

In addition to providing much helpful background information on Herodotus' life and style, Cartledge makes some unusual observations on Herodotus' legacy in the contemporary era.

Traditionally, Cartledge notes, Thucydides was regarded as the model historian, not Herodotus.  Although both were essential school texts at various times, Thucydides was preferred both because of his Attic Greek and because of the extremely focused, political, and secular nature of his account.  Herodotus received some criticism because of his tendency to digress on irrelevant matters and the extremely broad interests of his work.

Even in antiquity, writers like Cicero could not help but be irked by Herodotus' tendency to incorporate mythology and local legends into his supposedly factual account;  indeed, in one very hostile essay from the first or second century AD, the historian Plutarch dubbed Herodotus the "father of lies".

In the twenty-first century, this perception of Herodotus has changed.  "The balance has tilted", Cartledge argues, "quite sharply away from Thucydides and towards Herodotus".  To this, Cartledge offers two explanations.  The first, he suggests, is the end of the "old East-West, Communist v. Free World, Cold War" dichotomy and a decline in interest in political history.

The second explanation that he gives relates to the way the historical discipline has reacted to the challenge of "postmodernism" ― namely, traditional historians have given more weight to the reliability of their sources.

According to Cartledge, this has made Herodotus, who took great care in citing his sources and weighing different accounts, preferable to Thucydides, who purports to state only the facts, and so rarely does either.

It should be seriously debated whether all of these changes to the history discipline have ultimately been good, and whether the wandering Herodotus is always a better model than the firm and focused Thucydides.

Nevertheless, it is indisputable that both produced works that were, in their own unique ways, earth-shattering.  Holland's most recent book provides a compelling introduction to one.

Australia's Bright Future

The Australian Century
by Asher Judah
Connor Court, 2014, 287 pages

An important contribution to the debate about Australia's future prosperity, The Australian Century ― a new book by Asher Judah ― sets out a roadmap that will ensure we remain a key economic and political actor over the twenty-first century.

It is easy for modern Australians to forget just how perilous it was for early Europeans undertaking the journey to establish the first Australian colonies so far from the civilised world.  As easily forgotten are the precarious conditions early settlers endured in a foreign and largely inhospitable environment.  Over time, the establishment of viable crops in the wetter regions around the South Eastern coast and later the foundation of livestock and wool industries were pivotal to creating a sustainable base for the economies to become self-sufficient and grow.

However, it was the discovery of coal in New South Wales and, more importantly, gold in Victoria that would revolutionise the settlements.  As a result Australia was able to attract migrants that would help create a thriving private sector and push GDP per capita to levels 40 per cent higher than that of the United States between 1870 and 1890.

Today, Australia stands on the cusp of an economic opportunity that has the capacity to once again revolutionise its economy and drive Australia into global prominence.  This is largely thanks to the predicted rise of 3.1 billion people into the global middle class over the next two decades.

This is the underlying thesis of Judah's refreshingly optimistic take on the huge opportunity that stands in front of Australia over the remainder of the twenty-first century.

Rather than seeing Australia as a support actor in a century dominated by rising prosperity in Asia, Judah prefers to place Australia in the lead role ― something he believes few politicians have done in recent years.

While Australia will not be the only nation to take advantage of this incredible growth in global prosperity, Judah believes it is best placed to do so.  Australia's advantageous position is affirmed as Judah methodically articulates the huge challenges emerging nations will face as they seek to modernise.

China and India best exemplify these challenges.  Over the next 40 years both countries will require an estimated $10 trillion worth of infrastructure to reach parity with the developed world.  China alone will need to build three cities the size of Sydney every year through to 2030 to support its drive to urbanisation.  India's current cities, already at bursting point, will need to accommodate another 500 million people in a similar time frame.

Judah is pessimistic about the long-term prosperity of nations once held to be core players, such as France, Germany, Italy and Japan, all of which face structural and demographic problems which will put a hand-break on their future progress.  Similarly, due to their geographic locations, all will confront the possibility of destabilising population movements as a result of regional conflicts and the real possibilities of territorial disputes.

Three nations in particular remain best placed ― through their geographic location and size, their demographics and their wealth of natural resources ― to take advantage of the huge opportunities that exist:  Australia, Canada, and the United States.

This is a rare opportunity for Australia.  High demand for raw materials, energy and agricultural products is predicted to grow with demand cycles reaching well into this century.  Australia, as a major supplier of these commodities, will consequently retain positive terms of trade and long-term strategic importance.

The services sector is also expected to benefit as Australia's expertise in education, wealth management, medicine and technology becomes increasingly important.  Just as the commodity boom has fuelled recent growth in Australia's economy, our services sector is predicted to drive the economy to even greater heights.

All of these factors are predicted to increase the value of Australia's exports, stimulate further foreign investment, encourage high employment and attract the best and brightest migrants from around the world as other nations struggle to overcome challenges Australia finds itself immune to.  Thus a virtuous circle will emerge in which Australia will continue to rise in prominence as the century unfolds.

Of course, this does not mean that future growth is a fait accompli.  Australia is not without its challenges.

Australia's future prosperity is reliant on the success and management of what Judah terms "population islands", of which he identifies five.  Located around the cities of Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth, and Adelaide, they make up 60 per cent of the nation's population and 63 per cent of its GDP.

Planning and encouraging the development and success of these disparate yet individually vital islands will be as pivotal to Australia's future success as the mines, gas wells, and farms whose products will be in such high demand.

This will require some difficult decisions, but a more sustained move toward privatisation of government assets, the introduction of user pays infrastructure, and asset transfers to the private sector must underpin any future development.

As Judah rightly notes in his book, our ongoing success is not a sure thing.  Although our natural endowments will ensure Australia is blessed with the best opportunity to succeed, any progress and development will be driven by enterprising individuals and businesses taking advantage of the opportunities that exist.

Recent history shows that Australia's economy is in the process of sustained transition, as our manufacturing sector increasingly slows and our mining investment plateaus.  Although many of the factors that Judah discusses are of vital importance to our future prosperity, the only way to ensure that prosperity ensues is by making Australia a competitive place to invest and do business.  Reforming Australia's taxation and regulatory regimes will therefore also be of vital importance.

Judah's book makes for fascinating reading, with conclusions built upon an extensive body of research.  The Australian Century makes for an informative and optimistic view of Australia's potential in the future.

Pirates and Bandits and Anarchy

Anarchy Unbound: Why Self-Governance Works Better Than You Think
by Peter Leeson
Cambridge University Press, 2014, 263 pages

Are there any circumstances where "good" anarchy can outperform "poor" government?  Peter Leeson's new book Anarchy Unbound:  Why Self-Governance Works Better Than You Think is the latest political analysis of anarchy ― that is, where self-governance and private institutions are producers of order.  Leeson uses empirical case studies ― from orderly pirates to curse-casting monks ― to explore how civil-society self-governance may be more efficient than their government alternative.  His overarching argument is that individuals, by developing private institutions and cooperating through them, can outperform the government alternative.

What is important about Leeson's approach, and that of scholars in his tradition, is that anarchy is much less about lack of government, and more to do with private institutions of governance.  Nobel Laureate Douglass North described institutions as the "humanly devised constraints that structure political, economic and social interactions".  Broadly speaking these are the "rules of the game" or the socially embedded rules in society, and includes marriage and democracy.  North stresses that these should not be confused with organisations:  "if institutions are the rules of the game, organizations and their entrepreneurs are the players".  That is, "organizations are made up of groups of individuals bound together by some common purpose to achieve certain objectives".  Within this context, Leeson's work still accepts Adam Smith's famous invisible hand.  Yet he expands upon this concept ― individuals no longer act only within institutions, they can create them.  What is now possible is the private production of orderly self-governing institutions.

An orderly society can be conceived of as an economic good.  Order is an economic good because it allows us to move from a state of lesser cooperation and conflict, to one of greater cooperation and trade.  The common story is that as governments are the only effective producers of order, we must choose governments.  However, this assumes that government is an efficient producer of order.  Sure, government may be the obvious choice, yet it is not controversial to suggest government is sometimes costly, inefficient, wasteful and corrupt.

If we were looking to produce any other good, we would shop around for better producers at a lower cost.  If we think of order in this way, it raises a number of questions.  What or who are the alternative producers of order?  Is there a producer that generates less order, but with a substantially lower cost?  What about a producer that actually outperforms government in terms of outcomes and cost?

As Leeson playfully notes on his blog, "if conventional wisdom is right then reality must be wrong".  Anarchy Unbound challenges the conventional wisdom that the potential range of self-governance mechanisms is extremely limited.  What is most impressive is the way Leeson systematically debunks situations where anarchy is already assumed to fail.  Rather than taking a hypothetical, philosophical or morality-based focus on anarchism, Leeson points to successful cases of anarchy in the middle three parts of his book.

Be ready to step away from two main assumptions.  The first is that governments are all-knowing, benevolent and upstanding producers of order.  The second assumption ― and one much harder to digest ― is that anarchy is a chaotic, messy and violent producer of order.  Only then can it be asked:  can good anarchy outperform bad government?  According to Leeson, the answer appears to be yes ― sometimes.

The shortcomings of government require little elaboration.  The unfortunate bad name of anarchy can be traced a long way back.  What about violent, plundering, and rowdy seventeenth and eighteenth century pirates?  Leeson demonstrates that while pirate ships enjoyed no state protection they formed orderly "floating societies" through voluntary cooperation.  Their private institutions (rules) were remarkably sophisticated ― through them the pirates developed and enforced constitutions before much of the world.  These often included compensation insurance to support crew members (for instance if you lost your right arm you would get six slaves, your left arm was worth only five).

What about when we have a strong powerful party against a helpless weak one?  Leeson describes the African merchant trade with this large power asymmetry.  The private institution developed out of all of this was credit.  The adoption of credit allowed the weak producers to keep inventories low.  By keeping inventories low, they reduced the incentive for the strong roving bandits to plunder them.  This avoided wasteful plunder, while increasing the incentive to make an agreement for trade at a future date (the bandits had travelled all that way, they wanted to make the trip worthwhile).

What if government is terrible, corrupt, inefficient and extractive?  There's a big difference between a government that creates a system where they extract value out of the citizens, and one that is conducive to economic growth and entrepreneurship.

The best chapter in the book (Chapter 9:  Better off Stateless) draws on the troubles in Somalia.  Though the situation is undoubtedly tragic, this is a population with recent data on both state and stateless rule.  In fourteen out of eighteen development indicators ― including life expectancy, infant mortality and extreme poverty ― Somalia actually performed better under anarchistic self-governance than under the corrupt and extractive state.  This is the pinnacle example of a bad government being trumped by not-as-bad anarchy ― ultimately a horrific comment on the state of Somalian government.

Self-governance literature focuses largely on the principle of continuous dealings, of which the underlying idea is that individuals are more likely to be cooperative if trade is repeated multiple times.  You're less likely to steal or cheat another person if you're going to rely on them for mutually beneficial trade in the future.  You're less likely to run off without paying for your coffee at your local cafe compared to one located in a foreign country.  Where there are continuous dealings, we have more cooperative outcomes.  Why?  The literature largely points to reputational mechanisms based on ostracism and boycott ― if another individual knows you have cheated them before, they are unlikely to take a chance and deal with you again.

What is unique about Leeson's book is that he specifically focuses on case studies, such as those above, where continuous dealings are thought to fail.  The conventional wisdom on continuous dealings suggests that the principle will fall down where there are large and diverse populations (because the number of repeated interactions falls), where people are impatient (valuing the rewards from cheating now more highly than rewards from continually trading in the future), or when violence is possible.

Without delving deep into the case studies ― although this is highly recommended ― there are two important underlying themes that emerge out of the book.

The first theme is that anarchy can outperform poor government.  Leeson suggests that we often fall into the trap of comparing bad anarchy with good government.  This is an example of Harold Demsetz's "Nirvana Fallacy" ― the mistake of comparing actual situations to unrealisable alternatives.  We should recognise that there are both good and bad governments, and good and bad self-governing mechanisms.  We should only compare available institutional alternatives.

The second theme is less pronounced.  Individuals are sometimes better than governments at crafting institutional solutions to the problems they face.  It is not the case that simply because government cannot think of a solution to a particular problem that freely-choosing individuals cannot coordinate and solve these problems themselves.  While not mentioned, this is largely the story of Hayek's local knowledge.  As Leeson eloquently states:

"... there is no 'blueprint' for how anarchy would or does work.  This, in fact, is the whole point.  Private institutional responses reflect the specific problems, time, places and other conditions that give rise to them ..."

Taking these two themes into account, the question becomes:  if we're not going to abandon the state, why talk about anarchy?  This comes in Leeson's discussion of "pockets of anarchy".  These pockets fill a void where government either cannot sit, or refuses to do so.  It is no coincidence that new peer-to-peer, collaborative, or "sharing" business models are largely based on reputation ― your eBay seller record, reliance on Urbanspoon food reviews, or Uber and Airbnb ratings.  These are all governance solutions that would be exceptionally hard, if not impossible, for government to match.  What drives cooperative outcomes in these markets is the threat of ostracism or boycott ― not the threat of government action.  Civil-society governance, not government, is the solution here.

Anarchy Unbound is not a call to abandon government in the developed world ― a suggestion that is neither feasible nor reasonable.  With every governance problem, there is a constraint on the quality and the scope of governing solutions.  Within this scope of possibilities, government is only one of the options.  Yet it is often the only place we look.

Anarchy Unbound is a fantastic exposition of the power of positive political anarchy.  It is a ground-breaking work, likely to spawn many of its type.  It will remain a lasting legacy not only for Peter Leeson, but for the many scholars before him.

A Convulsion of Nature

The Deluge: The Great War and the remaking of Global Order
by Adam Tooze
Viking Adult, 2014, 672 pages

One generally expects a book about the First World War to commence its narrative at, or before, 1914.  Adam Tooze starts his book The Deluge in 1916 ― or to be more precise, on the morning of Christmas Day in 1915 with a speech in Glasgow by British munitions minister, and soon to be prime minister, David Lloyd George.

The speech gives the book not just its starting point, but also its title.  On that winter's morning Lloyd George argued that the war, defying initial expectations that it would be over quickly, had now become "the deluge" ― an undertaking of such scale that it was "a convulsion of nature ... bringing unheard-of changes in the social and industrial fabric".

Lloyd George's prediction was certainly proved correct.  The sheer scale of the changes the Great War unleashed was mind-boggling.  They included the collapse of the Hapsburg, Ottoman and Tsarist empires;  nationalist uprisings in Eastern Europe, Ireland and India;  massive dislocation to the world's financial system;  and rapid social change.

It is this transformative effect of the war that interests Tooze.  However, he is also perceptive enough to recognise that the war did not represent a simple break point between a staid ancien regime and the 1920s modernity of American capitalism, Soviet communism and fascism.  As he comments, the imperialism which precipitated the war was itself "a radical and novel force, not an old-world hangover".  Indeed, it was so new that the word imperialism itself had only come into popular use around 1900.

Tooze skilfully shows that, while imperialism and militarism were key drivers of the war, there were still strong liberal elements within the participating countries, even in Germany.  For instance, in July 1917, the Reichstag called for a negotiated peace based on liberal principles of free trade, freedom of the seas, and the establishment of an international judicial organisation.

However, earlier that year, their more militaristic counterparts had taken a decision which made the prospect of a negotiated peace much less likely.  By escalating their U-boat attacks on American merchant vessels, the Kaiser's government made United States participation on the side of the entente almost inevitable.

Beginning his narrative in the middle of the war helps Tooze highlight the one change that stood out above all the others during and after the war:  the United States was now central to world affairs.  By 1916, the US was already financially crucial for the war effort and the key question was whether it would become militarily so as well.  The answer came in the aftermath of the U-boat attacks.

Wartime Democrat President Woodrow Wilson is a central character in this book and Tooze finds much to critique in his actions.  For most of the war, Wilson opposed US participation but, as Tooze explains, this was not because Wilson was a typical isolationist.

Rather, Tooze argues that Wilson had an even more inflated view of the destiny of his nation than did the likes of former President Teddy Roosevelt.  Roosevelt wanted the US to participate in the war to prove that it was the equal of other countries.  Wilson did not want America to be the equal of the old countries of Europe:  he wanted to prove that it was superior.  And the only way to be superior was to be above the fray.

A key aspect of Wilson's position was his desire that no European power should emerge from the war in a strengthened position.  Thus, for most of the war, Wilson wanted "peace without victory".  Having reluctantly been drawn into the war as a participant, Wilson often continued to act, as Roosevelt colourfully put it, more as an umpire than one of the Allies.

Wilson's problems often seemed to have related to his timing.  For instance, in 1917, after the first Russian Revolution, he lectured moderate leaders such as Alexander Kerensky on the need to continue the war.  By early the following year, after the Bolshevik coup, he was expressing sympathy for the Russian desire to end the war.

As Tooze comments, "we can only imagine how Russia's struggling provisional government might have acted if they had dreamt in June or July that a bid for an immediate peace would receive the kind of praise that Wilson was now showering on Trotsky".

Tooze takes issue with John Maynard Keynes' interpretation that the liberal peace Wilson proposed in early November 1918 had deceived the Germans into making peace while still highly competitive in the war.  According to Tooze, Keynes' assessment "inverts reality" as the Germans were in disarray by the start of November 1918 and were saved from implosion by Wilson's armistice proposal, which sought to secure a peace before Germany was routed.  Wilson continued in similar vein at the post war peace conference which culminated in the Treaty of Versailles, often taking a tougher approach to his allies Britain and France than to the enemy Germany.

Historians have tended to juxtapose Wilson's internationalism with the era of isolationism which followed.  Tooze argues that this dichotomy "perpetuates contemporary polemics as historical misunderstandings".  What is more striking to him is that both Wilson and his Republican successors were united in their espousal of American exceptionalism and pre-eminence.

Another historical error which Tooze is keen to expose is the serious underplaying of the significance of the recession of 1920, describing it as one of the most underrated events in the history of the twentieth century and demonstrating its political impact.  The Deluge has a strong economic history component, as one would probably expect from a historian whose previous book analysed the workings of the Nazi economy.

Tooze seamlessly melds the impact of the balance of payments, inflation and unemployment into his broader political and social narrative, with a theme highlighting the growing impact of the United States on the whole world.  As he comments, the US did not just replace the United Kingdom as the world's leading financial nation;  it put it in a position of "unprecedented dominance".

Another of the great strengths of Tooze's work is its breadth.  The Deluge covers a lot of countries and Tooze is as adept at describing the internal political battles in Beijing and Tokyo as on Capitol Hill or in Whitehall.  He describes the multitude of problems in the British Empire as the natives of countries as diverse as Ireland, India and Egypt grew restless in this period, all symptomatic of "the post-war crisis of liberalism".

However, despite this apparent crisis, Tooze demonstrates that, at a very basic level, liberal and democrat forms initially proved quite robust after the Great War.  Fears that Soviet communism would spread beyond Russia were not realised and, apart from the success of Mussolini in Italy, extremists such as Hitler failed in their initial efforts to seize control in the 1920s.

However, even in the democracies, pure liberalism was in retreat.  Two examples, relating to the free movement of people and goods, stand out.

In 1924, the United States cut immigration numbers from 800,000 to 150,000 which, as Tooze comments, was "the most decisive break between the liberal modernity of the nineteenth century and the increasing centrality of nation-state regulation in the twentieth century".  Across the Atlantic, in 1932, Britain decisively jettisoned the commitment to free trade which it had maintained since 1846 ― a move which Tooze sees as "initiating the death spiral of protectionism and beggar-thy-neighbour currency wars".

The one slightly odd aspect of this book is that it does end up taking its readers as far as 1932.  Having taken 460 pages to get from 1916 to 1924, the remaining sixty pages provide a quick dash to remind us that any optimism about the resilience of the post-Great War settlement and global financial situation by the mid-1920s was going to be crushed by the Depression.

Tooze highlights the scope of the world's failure by pointing out the sheer scale of the arms race that was taking place by the late 1930s which dwarfed what the imperialists and militarists had attempted prior to 1914.

Tooze has produced an outstanding work of history.  With nuanced writing and clever use of counterfactuals, he shows just how difficult the problems facing world leaders in this period were, and how often many of them made the wrong.

The Death Throes Of Democracy

Democracy in Decline:  Steps in the Wrong Direction
by James Allan
Connor Court Publishing, 2014, 198 pages

A 2012 Lowy Institute poll revealed only 60 per cent of Australians believed "democracy is preferable to any other kind of government".  Of the younger generation ― those aged between eighteen and 29 years ― this figure was only 39 per cent.  Professor James Allan's Democracy in Decline serves as a "part lament and part call to arms" for those of us who still believe that democracy is the best process we have to resolve disputed social policy issues.  People, though, are losing faith in their fellow citizens, giving rise to the undemocratic age of the "expert".  We are looking to government and bureaucrats to solve all our problems, irrespective of the values and processes we destroy along the way.

For Allan, it is a simple question of the value we place on process versus outcome:  does democracy refer simply to the process of majoritarian decision-making?  Or does it refer to the quality of these decisions?  Today's orthodoxy holds that decision-making must reflect some level of "goodness" or meet a moral threshold, even if it is at the expense of the democratic process.

Allan explores the primary causes and threats to majoritarian democracy in five of the world's oldest democracies ― the United States of America, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.  His conclusion is that all these countries are less inclined to use democratic means today to resolve contested social, political and moral issues than they were previously.

The first cause of decline is the increasing willingness of the judiciary to override, circumvent, and reinterpret legislation.  Allan demonstrates how this threatens democracy by exploring the hypothetical situation of a country looking to adopt a bill of rights.  His approach is persuasive because it exposes the undemocratic implications of a bill of rights.  That is, it empowers unelected judges because it makes them responsible for interpreting the vague language and amorphous rights in the document.  By looking at the adoption of a bill of rights from the view of a jurisdiction without one, Allan reveals the instrument for what it really is:  an abdication of power to the judiciary.

Allan is scathing and convincing in his opposition to a bill of rights, both the constitutionally-entrenched and statutory models.  It is a dangerous fallacy that a statutory bill of rights causes less damage and is not as harmful to democracy as a constitutionally-entrenched one.  In practice, both reduce the scope for democratic decision-making and increase the power of unelected judges.

Allan contends that a bill of rights, more so than the political system, has the unbridled potential to lead to the judgements of the minority of voters transcending those of the majority.  Judges have embraced an interpretive approach giving them the power to overrule the democratic branches.  Parliament was once supreme, yes.  But judges now see themselves as the protectors of people's rights.  They are political actors.  They expect the legislature to defer and respond to them not the other way round, as it should be.

The second major cause of decline is international law, the quality of which is substandard and the process of making it lacks accountability, transparency and democratic legitimacy.  Allan discusses in detail the democratic deficiencies of treaties, the legal academics who construct customary international law, and the highly politicised and murky process of judicial appointments to the International Court of Justice.

Allan illustrates his argument with a case study on the United Nations Convention of the Rights of the Child (CRC).  Although written ambiguously and not explicitly stated, the United Nations (UN) argues that spanking a child, for example, violates the CRC.  So should a country outsource its opinion on the acceptability of spanking to the CRC committee and "experts", despite the fact that UN committees are not democratically appointed and often consist of non-democracies?  This proposition is laughable at best and dangerous at worst.  Allan is more convincing still when discussing how judges wrongly use international law to interpret statutes and constitutional provisions, even when it is not a part of domestic law.  This practice is grossly illegitimate and invalid.

The third threat to democracy is the rise of supranational organisations such as the United Nations (UN) and the European Union (EU).  Allan's analysis here is especially powerful as exemplified in his attack on the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC), a key source of democratic decline:

It is widely seen to be ... ineffective, overly politicised, controlled by voting blocs from the world's despotic regimes, anti-Israel, anti-American, or some combination of all of the above.

It is ludicrous that authoritarian and repressive states such as Libya have served on the Council, charged with assessing the human rights situation in all UN member states.  Since the Council's creation in 2006, Israel has been condemned in 50 resolutions ― more than the rest of the world combined.  The fact is that democracies, like Israel, accord citizens more freedom and human rights than non-democracies.  The "democratic" credentials and moral intelligence of the UNHRC are completely inferior to the elected representatives in any democracy.

Allan's critique of the EU is especially compelling.  He argues it is a bureaucratic, top-down, elitist organisation that lacks democratic legitimacy.  More than that, the EU has destroyed the UK's sovereignty.  It takes decisions out of the hands of the elected legislature and places them with the EU, essentially an unelected civil service.  The reality is that UK law is trumped by EU law whenever the two are inconsistent, creating a massive democratic deficiency.

Allan's final reason for democratic decline is the growing number of "undemocratic elites" who look to bypass democratic institutions, like parliament, in favour of courts and supranational bodies to get their desired outcome.  These are the lawyers, the human rights activists, the bureaucrats, and the special interest groups.  It is these people, Allan argues, that have lost faith in democracy and their peers.  They have contempt for democratic process, instead working to impose their preference on their fellow citizens without convincing a majority that it is the best one.  For Allan, they are a key driver of democratic decay.

Allan concludes his analysis by succinctly debunking opposing arguments and detailing the challenges threatening more decline.  His destruction of the "hate speech" movement is particularly enjoyable.  For democratic decision-making to be possible, people must be free to speak their minds and debate issues openly.  Any attempt to stifle free speech, as does Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act, poses a significant threat to democracy.

Ultimately, Allan argues, the traditional concept of democracy has been hijacked:  it is no longer about how decisions are made, but the goodness of these decisions.  We place too little faith and confidence in the capacity and opinions of our fellow citizens.  Sometimes in a democracy, you will lose.  You may be right and still not win in the court of public opinion.  Allan's argument is that this is no reason to change the process.

Democracy in Decline is a timely reminder that democracy is not about what is good, or right, or fair.  It is about the value we place on the process, and the rights of all citizens to have a say in shaping the society in which we live.

Sweating Out Third-World Poverty

Out of Poverty: Sweat shops in the Global Economy
by Professor Benjamin Powell
Cambridge University Press, 2014, 193 pages

Benjamin Powell's latest book, Out of Poverty, is a brilliant culmination of a decade's worth of research on sweatshops.  Powell, who is director of the Free Market Institute at Texas Tech University and a Senior Fellow at the Independent Institute, provides not just the economically and morally sound defence of third world sweatshops;  he refreshingly offers an alternative course of action for anti-sweatshop activists, rather than just dismissing their concerns out of hand.

Powell's argument in favour of sweatshops is simple:  as reprehensible as the pay and conditions workers receive in sweatshops may be, the fact that people choose to work in them indicates they provide a better option for poor people than the existing alternatives.  He finds that not only do sweatshops pay wages well above the alternatives available to workers (mostly in agriculture or the service sector), but in many cases sweatshop wages are even higher than the country's national average income.

To illustrate this point, he highlights a key moment of the anti-sweatshop movement.  In 1996 Wendy Diaz, a fifteen-year-old Honduran garment worker, confronted Kathie Lee Gifford on American television regarding her wage of 31 cents an hour to produce Gifford's clothing range.  Gifford burst into tears and promised to increase wages.  However, Powell's research shows that Diaz's remuneration was well above the national average income in Honduras that year.

Indeed, Powell's indictment of the anti-sweatshop movement is a key feature of Out of Poverty.  He demonstrates how the minimum or "living" wages campaigns that are often the goals of anti-sweatshop activists end up costing jobs and forcing people into even worse situations.

For example, in 2003 the Fair Labor Association and the Worker Rights Consortium pressured Korean firm Yupoong into an agreement with a union at their factory in the Dominican Republic.  It promised to give the factory's 2000 workers "a 10 per cent wage increase, educational scholarships, paid holidays, and the establishment of a workers' committee to deal with health and safety concerns at the factory".  It was hailed as "a sign of the success of transnational organizing".  Four years later, the factory had closed.

He also shows that calls to force factory owners to improve health and safety conditions result in lower wages and that workers, if given the choice between conditions and wages, almost always choose higher wages.

Out of Poverty highlights the sinister and disturbing behaviour of the US labour movement which has underhandedly used the antisweatshop lobby, often comprising of naïve college students, to protect manufacturing in the United States at the expense of third world workers.  In support of a failed bill which would have banned the import of sweatshop goods into the US, the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organisations said the bill would be "a powerful vehicle ... to take back our economy".

Powell also promotes the idea that the antidote to sweatshops is economic development.  He charts the historical economic development of Western nations, all of whom accommodated sweatshops in the past, like the infamous workhouses of nineteenth-century Britain.  He notes that in Western countries, anti-sweatshop labour laws did not exist until economic development had consigned sweatshops to history.

If given enough time, sweatshops drive technology transfer and human capital development, and actually play a key role in economic development.

This occurred in the Asian tiger economies after World War II where textiles and simple consumer plastics sweatshops were the precursor to much more technologically advanced manufacturing such as electrical appliances.  This drove the huge growth and improvement in living standards in these countries, where sweatshops no longer exist.  Even free market sceptic Jeffrey Sachs calls sweatshops the "lowest rung" on the ladder of development.

Apart from outlining the traditional economic and moral arguments for sweatshops ― and conveniently compiling the best and latest research to support them ― what's different about this book is that Powell takes the time to spell out a new plan of attack for anti-sweatshop activists.

Powell believes that the low-hanging fruit for activists is slave labour.  Clearly slave labour is an egregious violation of an individual's rights.  The book's support for sweatshops is based on the premise that if people choose to work in them, they must be a better choice than the alternatives available to them.

Obviously this is not the case with slave labour where workers are forced into the factory by threat of violence or some other threat.  Although Out of Poverty shows that slave labour in sweatshops is actually extremely rare, where it does occur Powell wholeheartedly supports and encourages boycotts, law enforcement, legal changes, and other measures from activists.

Powell also traverses the thorny issue of child labour.  He approaches child labour in the same way he deals with adult sweatshop workers ― even though children working long hours in factories is morally outrageous, preventing them from doing so means they will be forced into something worse.  This usually means long, unprofitable hours in the fields, but it can also force children into scavenging, begging or ― even worse ― prostitution.  The key to countering this is to expand the options of children (and their parents) ― not reduce them.  To do this, he advocates that activists create non-government organisations that pay children to go to school.

He also notes that child labour rates fall dramatically as incomes rise above the poverty line.  Once again, his argument illustrates that economic development is the real key to improving lives and ending sweatshops.

Out of Poverty offers heavily qualified support for so-called "ethical" branding where garments and other products are marketed as being produced in factories where workers are paid a so-called "living" wage and employment conditions are similar to those found in rich countries.  Fair Trade coffee and chocolate are two great examples of this type of "ethical" branding.  Clearly, many consumers care about the wages and conditions of the people who make the products they buy.  To the point where they impact on consumer choices, it is in companies' interests to address these concerns with improved conditions.

However, when the improvements demanded by activists mean the company can no longer employ the worker, "ethical" branding is obviously counter-productive.  Activists can educate the public on this reality, help find the balance, and assist companies in discovering new ways to improve workers lives that appeal to consumers but don't end up with job losses.

Furthermore, activists can expose fraudulent versions of "ethical" branding such as the "Shop with a Conscience Consumer Guide".  Most of the factories identified in this guide are actually located in the USA and Canada:  rather than helping poor sweatshop workers, it is a tool that directs income into the hands of wealthy Western union workers.

Activists could also instigate a campaign for a new "ethical" branding called "Made in the Third World".  Economic development is, as noted throughout the book, the true antidote to sweatshops.  Purchasing sweatshop goods actually instigates the process of technology transfer and human capital development that will eventually see their demise.  At the very least, keeping sweatshops viable enables a poor person in a poor country to take up a better employment option than they might otherwise have.

Apart from these specific recommendations, Powell believes those concerned with the plight of third world sweatshop workers should agitate for change that helps poor countries more generally.  These include encouraging free trade by removing trade barriers to western markets, opening up prosperous nations to increased immigration, and spreading the ideas of free market economics and individual liberty to poor countries that currently don't have the institutional environment to support them.

For those who despair at global poverty, Powell sets a fantastic example to help readers understand that free economics and individual liberty are the keys to ending global poverty.  Rather than scorning other compassionate people as economically illiterate, Powell invites them into the tent.  And instead of viewing the institutional malaise of most poor countries as intractable, he offers a modest, workable, but nonetheless impactful set of actions that meet William Easterly's test of what humanitarian activities should aim to achieve:  help "some people, some of the time".

Don't Speak Don't Think

Unlearning Liberty: Campus censorship and the end of American debate
by Greg Lukianoff
Encounter Books, 2012, 336 pages

Keith John Sampson, a mature-aged student from a university in Indianapolis, did nothing more than read a book in public.  But in 2007, it cost him his reputation and employment prospects.

Following a complaint by his peers, he was found guilty of "racial harassment" for openly reading a book that was "related to a historically and racially abhorrent subject".  The book was titled Notre Dame vs. the Klan and had a grainy black and white image of Klan members on its cover.  Never mind that the book actually opposed the organisation, or that the subtitle clearly printed on the book's cover read "How the fighting Irish defeated the Ku Klux Klan", or that it was available in the college's library.  With chilling disregard for due process or any semblance of freedom of expression, the campus judiciary pronounced him guilty of racial harassment.

Unlearning Liberty by Greg Lukianoff of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) is full to the brim with a decade's worth of case studies concerning serious infringements of individual liberties in universities across the United States.  Every time you think you've read the worst of these, an even more outrageous one rears its head.

In 2012, the University of Missouri-St. Louis required its students to give six weeks' notice of any demonstrations and banned criticism of the university by prohibiting anything which would "discredit the student body or UM-St. Louis".  In 2005, Washington State University actually bought theatre tickets for an angry mob of students and coached them on how best to disrupt a provocative stage show which the university considered too controversial.  Several universities in the last decade have erected tiny, out-of-the-way "free speech zones", sometimes dubbed "free speech cages", where all campus pamphleteering, demonstrations and expressions of political views must be confined.

Lukianoff does not write as a conservative, but from a left-wing perspective.  Nevertheless he mounts a powerful defence for classical liberal rights ― especially freedom of speech.

To Lukianoff, literally everything collapses if freedom of speech is taken away.  The unique economic and political systems of Western society (along with countless advances in modern science) could not have come into existence without the support of a culture that valued freedom of speech.  Our preference for free enquiry rather than blunt force in disputes has saved our society, unlike so many before us, from descending into stagnation, ignorance, and oppression.

The value of free speech must be learned, as it is otherwise very difficult for students to understand why it is so important to protect dissent.  But when schools, colleges and universities punish students for speaking their minds, they teach students the very opposite of what our society needs to survive and flourish.  They teach students to shy away from voicing dissent, to be thin-skinned, and to accept censorship as a valid means for promoting an officially held cause.  Hence the main concern of this book is that many universities strongly encourage students to unlearn liberty, to discount fundamental rights as mere legalisms, and to be apathetic when these rights are threatened.

The University of Delaware's Residence Life program (which was suspended in 2007) was perhaps the worst and most flagrant violation of the students' freedom of conscience.  Students were required to attend one-on-one sessions with their Residence Assistant, in which they would be asked such prying questions as "When did you discover your sexual identity?" and "Would you be comfortable dating ... a person with different religious beliefs than yours?"  It was aimed at promoting diversity, but it punished nonconformity.  In clinical, Orwellian fashion, the Residence Life officials referred to this mandatory four-year program as a "treatment" which should "leave a mental footprint on [students'] consciousness".  It was an indoctrination program, mandatory and partly state-sponsored, as the University of Delaware receives both private and public funding.  Such a program deserved much wider public condemnation than it ever got.

Lukianoff's findings should be deeply troubling to anyone who cherishes freedom of speech, as well as freedom of conscience, freedom of religion, freedom of association, and the right of due process.  The students who graduate from university believing that advocating free speech is equivalent to advocating hate speech will be the country's voters, politicians, lawyers and general citizens of years to come.  Already, as the author noted in the afterword, the universities' growing disdain for the freedom of speech has left its mark on the mindset of the younger generation.

According to a 2013 survey, while only 23 per cent of Americans over the age of 60 believe that "the first amendment goes too far", a whopping 47 per cent of individuals between the ages of eighteen and 30 hold that view.

The one consolation that weaves throughout this book is that whenever students have prosecuted the universities for violating their constitutional rights, the overwhelming majority of court decisions ruled in favour of the students and not the authoritarian universities.  The universities' power trips simply could not stand up to external scrutiny.

Let's be wary that the culture at our Australian universities doesn't reproduce the same ideal of a "diverse" campus in which dissent and alternate opinions are quashed.

America in the 70's

The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan
by Rick Perlstein
Simon & Schuster, 2014, 880 pages

Rick Perlstein is a writer from the political left who wants to know why, in America in the 60s and 70s, the growing conservative movement was not taken seriously by the liberal establishment.  At the time, most pundits agreed with the assessment of leading political scientist Warren Miller, who argued that the rapid social change of the period meant "both parties would be wise to move their ideological centres of gravity in a liberal, left-of-centre direction".

Perlstein has been grappling with the rise of American conservatism for some time.  In his 2001 book Before the Storm, he explained the rise of Barry Goldwater to the 1964 Republican presidential nomination and subsequent general election defeat.

In 2008, Nixonland, the second volume in the series, covered the social upheaval of the Vietnam era and the electoral success of Richard Nixon.

In The Invisible Bridge, Perlstein tells the story of the years from 1973 to 1976 ― a period in which, as per the sub-title, Nixon certainly fell.  Yet it was less clear that Ronald Reagan had risen.

Reagan did come close to winning the Republican Party nomination in 1976, only losing to incumbent President Gerald Ford on the floor of the convention by 1187 votes to 1070.  At the time, however, this was commonly viewed as the end of Reagan's political career, for, as the New York Times commented, Reagan was "too old to consider seriously another run at the Presidency".

Of course, Perlstein's readers know that Reagan went onto triumph in 1980 and thus understand why Reagan is the main character in this book, and not Ford, nor Democrat Jimmy Carter who actually won the Presidency in 1976.  It is why the narrative of the book is interrupted by chapters which provide a biography of Reagan from his childhood, youth and time in Hollywood.

The fact that Reagan did not win in 1976 means that Perlstein has not yet had to provide a definitive answer to his question about how the conservatives triumphed when the progressives of the era were so dismissive of the possibility.  However, in this volume he shows us where the seeds of the conservative revival were starting to flourish and along the way provides vivid descriptions of the economic, social and political malaise which seemed to be overwhelming America in the mid-1970s.

There was the crisis in national confidence engendered by the failure in Vietnam and Watergate, a scandal which seemed to symbolise all that was rotten with the political system.  At the time, it was quite logical to assume that both would contribute further to a leftward shift in politics and society.

The author makes much of the fact that Reagan made less effort than most other Republicans to distance himself from Nixon over Watergate.  Perlstein clearly sees this as a black mark on Reagan, but also acknowledges that this stance did him minimal political harm.  While Perlstein emphasises the lack of distance over Watergate, one can also see glimpses of the areas where Nixon and Reagan were furthest apart and it was these that were to have far more lasting significance.

One was Reagan's scepticism about détente.  Another was the fact that Reagan regularly talked about the size of government being a problem ― clearly not something that had ever concerned the Nixon Administration.

In 1971, Nixon had expanded government control of the economy by imposing price and wage controls.  In contrast, Reagan regularly made the case for smaller government.  Perlstein cites a meeting in 1973, where state governors were asked about the main national priorities.  The common answers related to the environment, planning, and transport, but Reagan said it was "to halt the trend toward bigger, more expensive government at all levels before it is too late".  As Perlstein comments, it was as if Reagan was speaking from "a different political planet".

However, as Perlstein demonstrates, the common answers from 1973 seemed a bit facile by 1976.  It became apparent in the intervening years that the Keynesian economic consensus, which had been in place since the Second World War, no longer had easy answers for fixing the economy.  Even before the oil price shock following the Arab-Israeli war in late 1973, the cost of items such as meat was skyrocketing.  By 1975, inflation seemed out of control but the economy was growing at negative 5 per cent.  A new word was coined ― stagflation ― to describe the situation where there was stagnation and inflation at the same time, which ― according to the prevailing consensus ― was impossible.

The response from much of the political class was to propose even more of the same type of Keynesian policies.  For instance, Republican legislator Jacob Javits and his Democrat colleague Hubert Humphrey proposed setting up an Office of National Economic Planning, which would submit six year plans to regulate areas of the economy such as factory production.  However, as Perlstein documents, many others, even Nixon's Treasury Secretary John Connally, began to have second thoughts and started using more pro-market rhetoric.  Reagan's voice seemed not to be so extra-terrestrial after all.

A key part of the book's appeal is its use of social history which, in a similar manner to Dominic Sandbrook's works about Britain in the 1970s, Perlstein links to the political crisis of Watergate and the economic crisis of stagflation.  The popular culture of the period featured horror movies such as The Exorcist and Jaws and people began joining all manner of weird self-help and spiritualist schemes, such as transcendental meditation and scientology.  One of the strangest, which Perlstein describes, was "est".  It involved paying $250 for weekends where participants were not allowed to eat, drink, or go to the toilet for twelve hours while instructors screamed abuse at them.

For many at the time, "American morality seemed all but to disintegrate", as social mores changed rapidly and crime rates soared.  To illustrate the sense of social chaos that many Americans felt, Perlstein cites a single day's stories in the Milwaukee Journal which cover kidnappings, bribery, and purse-snatchings from old ladies.  Perlstein observes that what made the sense of chaos even more pervasive was that "crime and social movements seemed almost to merge", underscored most graphically by the case of the heiress Paddy Hearst.  She appeared to be a victim of crime when kidnapped by the radical leftist Symbionese Liberation Army, but then became a perpetrator when she turned up seemingly happy to rob banks with her captors.

With Watergate, stagflation, crime, horror movies, and wacky social movements, there seemed to be no place in mid-70s America for the sunny optimism of a Reagan.  Perlstein writes cynically about Reagan spinning tales of doubtful veracity to show that things always work out for the best in the end.  He also paints Reagan's personal behaviour in a negative light, describing him exaggerating achievements, bedding Hollywood starlets, and having dysfunctional relationships with his children.

However, Perlstein also genuinely seeks to understand how Reagan was able to garner so much support.  He recognises that Reagan was a "political genius".  An example he provides comes from when Reagan first stood to be Governor of California in 1966, a time when it was fashionable to take a benign view of campus militancy.  Reagan's own advisers, armed with some of the most advanced opinion polling then available, told him that as someone perceived as an anti-intellectual, he should definitely avoid criticising students.  However, Reagan instinctively understood that mainstream America hated campus violence.  As Perlstein comments, "one of the things at which brilliant politicians are better than mediocre ones is smelling new public concerns over the horizon before they are picked up by polls".

As well as its focus on the battle between Ford and Reagan in the Republican primaries, The Invisible Bridge also explains how Carter got the Democrat nomination despite being such a demonstrable phoney.  Perlstein describes how the crisis of confidence in institutions, triggered by Watergate, had created a situation where normal positives for prospective candidates, such as extensive experience in Congress, were negatives in the 1976 campaign.

As he ranges across his subject, Perlstein finds developments on the Right which were scarcely noticed at the time and that have failed to be fully appreciated since.  He introduces his readers to General Electric executive Lemuel Boulware, "the most influential American most people have never heard of".  Boulware's mission was to make all the company's employees, and the communities in which they lived, supporters of capitalism.  Perlstein analyses such seemingly obscure matters as the battle over school curriculums in West Virginia and explains how this was a key foundation issue for the Heritage Foundation.

The Invisible Bridge has been a controversial book in the United States, with many conservatives taking issue with Perlstein's treatment of Reagan.  Reagan biographer Craig Shirley has accused Perlstein of plagiarism and there have been complaints that the book is not sufficiently scholarly.  Many readers, including this one, have not appreciated the decision to put the endnotes online rather than at the back of the printed volume.

However, this is an eminently readable and informative book.  Perlstein's writing style has become more assured in each volume of the series and so one can only await with anticipation the next instalment.  In it, as the ever-optimistic Reagan would have predicted, the good guys might finally win.  Not that Perlstein will be celebrating.

The Missing Foundation Of Development: Individual Rights

The Tyranny of Experts:  Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor
by William Easterly
Basic Books, 2014, 416 pages

The major contribution of William Easterly's new book, The Tyranny of Experts, is simple and profound.  For the poor, individual rights isn't just the most effective path to development for poverty-stricken countries.  No, for the poor, individual rights is development.

Plenty has been written about the inefficiency of foreign aid.  Easterly's previous book ― The White Man's Burden, a practical "how-to" guide for reforming foreign aid ― is arguably the most prominent.  And plenty has been written about the instrumental role of individual rights along with free markets, property rights, the rule of law and democracy to achieve economic growth in poor countries.  But the intrinsic value of individual rights for poor people has for too long been overlooked.  What's more, it's completely foreign territory for the vast majority of those in the foreign aid industry.

Most foreign aid agencies don't acknowledge the instrumental, let alone the intrinsic value of individual rights.  They believe poverty is a technical problem to be solved by experts.  They implement their expert plans through and with authoritarian central governments, strengthening and legitimising those governments in the process.  Easterly's thesis is that it is these authoritarian governments that are causing poverty in the first place and from whom poor people need protection through individual rights.

The Tyranny of Experts charts the history of the philosophical underpinnings of foreign aid through the twentieth century.  It reaches the damning conclusion that the foreign aid status quo doesn't just place the rights of poor people second, it often places them last.

Easterly recalls one such tragic example in 2010.  The World Bank (where Easterly was previously employed as an economist ― he is now a professor at New York University) wished to implement a forestation project in Uganda.  To make way for the project, villagers were violently removed from their land at gunpoint by government troops, their villages and farms burnt to the ground with one child dying in the process.  The farmers were told to never come back because the land was no longer theirs.

While no one is suggesting the World Bank would have sanctioned such activity, it is a graphic indication of where the individual rights of poor people sits on aid agencies' and authoritarian governments' list of priorities.  The point being that the foreign aid status quo doesn't simply neglect to consider individual rights, but often acts in direct competition to them.

Easterly couches the philosophy of foreign aid into three central issues.  Firstly, he believes the foreign aid status quo views recipient nations as if they are a "blank slate" instead of learning from the history of that country.  It pays no heed to how a county came to be poor and seeks only to shoe-horn its pre-determined solutions regardless of the circumstances.

Easterly highlights the absurdity of this approach by outlining the incredibly long-running causes of poverty.  For example, he cites one study that shows that the Aja people in Benin, Togo and Nigeria today display less trust towards their neighbours than similar ethnic groups in the same area because they were victimised by slave traders and betrayed by fellow African tribes in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

This is a hindrance to them today in engaging in many activities predicated on norms of trust, such as commerce with strangers.

In fact, Easterly claims Italians from the north of Italy are more likely to be organ donors than those in the south because of the presence of "free cities" in the country's north in the twelfth century, compared to the absolutist regime in the south.  The implication being that individual rights have the long run effect of normalising behaviour that benefits strangers outside an individual's family or localised cultural groupings.

The blank slate view has negative ramifications for individuals in two ways.  Firstly, it allows foreign aid experts to ignore the effectiveness of individual rights in generating economic growth in other countries.  Secondly, because foreign aid experts ignore existing institutions and cultures, they require the coercive power of autocratic states to implement their plans.

The second part of Easterly's analysis focuses on the pre-eminence of nations over individuals in the foreign aid status quo.  That is, not only are nation states thought to be the goal of development but the vehicle through which development is meant to be achieved.  Clearly the advent of "national goals" proposed by organisations such as the World Bank are the antithesis of individual rights as it is impossible to aggregate all the choices and preferences of individuals, as famously demonstrated by Nobel laureate Kenneth Arrow.

Easterly quotes Friedrich Hayek in this regard, who once wrote of this view, "the individual is merely a means to serve the ends of the higher entity called ... the nation".  Easterly also notes that Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal, the socialist economist who shared the economics Nobel in 1974 with Hayek, summed up the view of the foreign aid status quo perfectly when he said national governments needed to achieve development in spite of, "a largely illiterate and apathetic citizenry".  (The Tyranny of Experts is worth reading if nothing else for the imagined debate Easterly recreates between Hayek and Myrdal.)

The third area of the foreign aid status quo Easterly shines a light on is the preference for consciously designing solutions to poverty as opposed to those that spontaneously emerge.  Easterly stresses this is not a standard government intervention against free market argument.  Indeed, he asks readers to leave their domestic political allegiances at the door by drawing very little distinction between countries as economically and politically diverse as Norway and the United States when compared to a poor country like the Democratic Republic of Congo.  Whilst Easterly is very much in favour of free markets, he says the blunt feedback system and the checks on government provided by individual political rights and democracy are equally as important.

Easterly is at pains to point out that those in favour of individual rights for poor people have been misunderstood as zealots of the free market by the foreign aid status quo for six decades.  He wryly notes that foreign aid stalwart Owen Barder in 2013 called development "an emergent property of a complex adaptive system", meaning that genuine development emerged from a whole system that was too complex to be run by any one leader.  But the system was adaptive as it generated decentralised feedback and responses that enabled it to self-correct.  Barder's talk generated a positive buzz on development blogs and "nobody called him a free market extremist".

Easterly's book comes at an important stage for foreign aid.  Following The White Man's Burden, criticism of the status quo has mounted in the form of books such as Dead Aid by Dambiso Moyo, The Idealist by Nina Munk and Poor Economics by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo.  The emergence of New Institutional Economics (think Why Nations Fail by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson) has sharpened academic focus on the individual rights of poor people.

And budgetary pressures have meant many governments are open to the idea of a new way of fighting poverty that may potentially require less public funding.

The Tyranny of Experts is not about aid effectiveness.  It is about aid philosophy.  Foreign aid has failed because it is based on a philosophy that believes poor people are incapable of making decisions for themselves.  For too long those who value individual rights have dismissed aid as a misguided sideshow.  The Tyranny of Experts is a call for those people to re-imagine aid's task as claiming the individual rights for poor people that will enable them to transform their own destinies.

The Christian Realisation Of Liberty

Inventing the Individual:  The Origins of Western Liberalism
by Larry Siedentop
Allen Lane, 2014, 448 pages

Since at least the Enlightenment, it has been popular to regard the medieval period as a kind of "dark age" that isn't worth studying.  After the collapse of Rome in the West in the fifth century AD, so the popular story goes, Western Europe plunged into a period of crushing superstition, in which society was utterly dominated by the Church and "secular" learning was lost.  Western Europe was saved only by the Renaissance, when a sudden resurgence of Classical learning slackened the grip of the Church and awakened the West to secular modernity.

Oxford Professor Larry Siedentop's latest book ― Inventing the Individual:  The Origins of Western Liberalism ― seeks to address this imbalance.  Christian morals and the medieval developments of the Church were integral to the development of Western liberalism, natural rights, and ― ironically ― the modern secular state.  Without Christianity, we wouldn't be benefitting from any of these now.

Siedentop's account begins with ancient Greece and Rome, where he makes an important point:  that the pagans had no concept of the "individual".  Greek and Roman society was composed not of individuals, but of various tribes or familiae governed by a semi-religious heads (the Roman paterfamilias), who were subordinated to the city or state.  An assumption of "natural inequality" prevailed;  it was accepted that some people were born to rule, others to be ruled.  Many people ― including women and slaves ― could not be citizens, and so were denied rights and regarded as "sub-humans".  There were no governing religious morals, and was no concept of individual liberty.

Enter Saul of Tarsus, aka Saint Paul:  a thinker who turned the Roman world upside-down.  Siedentop ― who takes an unapologetically technical view of Christianity ― argues that Paul, inspired by his conception of Jesus, essentially overturned the idea of natural inequality.  With his innovative philosophy ― "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female;  for you are all one in Christ Jesus" ― Paul made a controversial argument:  that all humans possess a soul, and all are equal before Christ, regardless of birth and gender.

Siedentop describes how early Christian thinkers like Irenaeus of Lyons and Tertullian developed ideas of moral equality and religious liberty, the development of monasticism in Egypt and its spread throughout the east and west, and the transformation of the ancient hero from the wily, "Odysseus-like" aristocrat to the defiant Christian martyr.  He also describes the important fifth-century debate between Augustine and Pelagius over human nature.  While Pelagius believed perfection of humans, the law, and the church was possible, Augustine emphasised "that human weakness and vices beset all societies", and that no single human or institution could achieve perfection.  Through his emphasis on the imperfection of the human soul, Augustine "became the greatest single influence on Western theology for the next thousand years".

Siedentop then outlines the developments that occurred in the West after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire.  The Western church ― usually headed by descendants of powerful Roman families ― played a crucial role in converting their new barbarian overlords to Nicene Christianity, and thereafter the "Christianisation" of barbarian law codes.  Christianity also saw the disappearance of the religious basis for the paterfamilias, a change in attitudes towards slavery ― which was increasingly frowned upon by the church ― and the emergence of monasteries as centres of learning.

For some three centuries after 476, Siedentop argues, the church was the only unifying moral institution in Western Europe.  The situation temporarily changed with the rise of the Frankish Carolingian dynasty at the end of the eighth century.  Their most formidable figurehead, Charlemagne, aimed to establish a Christian power in the west to rival the persisting one in the east.  Inspired by earlier thinkers like Pope Gregory the Great, who had claimed a ruler's primary responsibility was the "care of souls", Charlemagne frequently requested that oaths of allegiance from his subjects ― sometimes including women as well as men ― should be taken in the local vernacular.  For Siedentop, "that emphasis on individual will ... represents a momentous moral step".

At the same time, Siedentop argues that Charlemagne's efforts to establish a permanent governing class gave rise to feudalism, and after the disintegration of the Carolingian empire in the late ninth century, power was increasingly localised and anarchy abounded.  Yet the church proved determined to assert its morals even here:  in the late tenth century, the "Peace of God" movement developed across Western Europe, compelling powerful knights and lords to respect the property of the church and the powerless ― including paupers, pilgrims, women, children, and various others.  A concept of natural rights was lurking beneath the surface.

The true turning point came with the Papal Revolution in the later eleventh century, when Rome ― during the Pontificate of Gregory VII ― made its "declaration of independence".  Though it acknowledged power of kings in secular matters, Rome now considered itself to hold supreme authority over affairs of the church.

The declaration heralded the drafting of copious canonical laws founded on ideas of natural justice and moral equality.  These were important in the development of natural rights, and Rome's "declaration" resulted in the division between church and state.  The latter reform made the modern secular state possible.

The final section of Siedentop's book examines how the later medieval era laid the foundations for the concept of natural rights.  The High Middle Ages were characterised by the growing power of the papacy, of which the crusades is an especially powerful expression.  This had unintended consequences.  Not only was there ongoing conflict between the Popes and secular rulers, but suspicion of the papacy began to trigger urban and rural uprisings, and the foundation of two popular monastic movements:  the Dominican and Franciscan.  The latter ― which spread more rapidly and was the more populist of the two ― was especially important for the history of rights;  the Franciscan order generally supported individual liberty, and throughout the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries was at the forefront of a debate over the nature of rights.  Especially notable was the Franciscan Friar William of Ockham, whom Siedentop describes as an especially powerful defender of "both natural rights and the limitations of human reason".

The story ends with the fifteenth-century conciliar movement ― a pre-Reformation movement which, inspired by theories of natural rights by Ockham and the canonist writers, aimed to restore a more representative and legitimate government in the papacy.  At this point, Siedentop spells out the main conclusions of the book:  "in its basic assumptions, liberal thought is the offspring of Christianity ... the roots of liberalism were firmly established in the arguments of philosophers and canon lawyers by the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries".

Given how little regard academia currently has for medieval history, Inventing the Individual is a book that certainly needed to be written.  Siedentop makes a compelling argument ― that liberalism owes much to Christianity ― and offers convincing primary and secondary evidence in support.

Nevertheless, some criticisms must be made.

Siedentop takes a pan-European approach, and tends to treat all regions of Western Europe ― France, Italy, Germany, Christian Spain, and England ― as a whole.  Yet modern liberalism, as a distinct political ideology championing legitimacy of government and natural rights, is generally believed to have emerged out of the British Isles between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries.  Siedentop does not attempt to explain why modern political liberalism ultimately emerged in England and then spread to France, and not vice-versa.

While Siedentop certainly makes an excellent point about the absence of the concept of the individual in the pre-Christian world, he does not always give Greece and Rome credit where it is due.  His tendency to dismiss them as "default" ancient societies is perhaps unjustified;  while the Athenians and Republican Romans lacked a concept of individual liberty, they did dabble with ideas of (primitive) democracy, legitimate government, the rights of citizens, and the rule of law ― ideas important to modern liberalism.  This book would have been more satisfying if it had taken a more even-handed approach to Greece and Rome in the opening chapters.

The book also tends to disregard the other half of medieval Christendom ― the eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire.  This is a pity, given that eastern Christendom was also influenced by the doctrine of the equality of souls, and although it also saw some of the most extraordinary expressions of Christian values, it took a very different path to the West.  Perhaps because the eastern central government did not collapse in the fifth century, an ideology gradually developed whereby "individuals" were subordinated to the semi-religious figure of the emperor.  Unlike the West, therefore, the east never developed a strong division between church and state, ideas of individual liberty, or the rule of law.

Though he does touch on this issue occasionally, Siedentop largely misses the opportunity for an interesting discussion on the growing divide between the "autocratic" Christian east and the more "liberal" Christian West throughout the early medieval period ― crucial though it was for the West's identity.

Nevertheless, this is an important book which addresses many common misconceptions of the role Christianity played in making the modern world.  Though sometimes dense, it is an informative read, and might well turn your understanding of medieval world upside-down.