Tuesday, Jul 20, 2010 09:15 ET
“Fur, Fortune, and Empire”: How the fur trade shaped America
Animal pelts helped create our nation — and spawn a global power
struggle. A fascinating new book explains how

By Chuck Leddy, Barnes & Noble Review

Fur, Fortune, and Empire by Eric Jay Dolin

Historian Eric Jay Dolin brilliantly argues that the trade in
animal skins turned colonial America into a tumultuous frontier
where global powers battled for control. From the 17th century
right on up to the Gilded Age, the developed world’s appetite for
fur and its unique qualities made the new continent, with its
wealth of fur-bearing wildlife, a seemingly inexhaustible
resource. The result, as laid out in Dolin’s new book “Fur,
Fortune, and Empire: The Epic History of the Fur Trade in
America,” was a major boost in the evolution of the colonies into
a powerful new player on the world stage.

Modern-day Manhattan, for example, owes its existence to the Dutch
eagerness to establish dominance in the fur trade: New Amsterdam
was first settled in the early 17th century as a trading post
where they could exchange European metal goods for beaver pelts
brought in by Native Americans. The Dutch wielded military power
to oust rival Sweden from the colonial fur trade, yet the
popularity of their wares proved their undoing. The intense
competition from the English colonies and from French fur traders
came with armed backing, and the English Navy ultimately ousted
the Dutch from New Amsterdam in 1664.

Dolin sheds insight on the ways the fur trade created
international tensions — in New England, the Great Lakes and the
expanding West. As traders clamored for access to land controlled
by Native Americans, tribes were pushed off their land, then given
guns and liquor, wreaking havoc on their traditional way of life.
The fur trade also triggered exploration more generally; fur
traders were often the first white men to map major rivers,
forests and mountains. The trade and the broader economy that
followed in its wake pulled people west, including Lewis and Clark
and Kit Carson, culminating in the monopoly of the 19th-century
fur trader and celebrated philanthropist John Jacob Astor, whose
American Fur Co. opened up trading posts across America (and whose
fortune would endow the library that became a national icon). For
all of fur’s contentious position in American culture today, Dolin
has skillfully illuminated its centrality in our nation’s
ever-surprising history.

Is Anti-Capitalism Enough? The New Crisis & the Left
— Howard Brick

The New Spirit of Capitalism
by Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello
translated by Gregory Elliott
Verso Books 2006, paperback edition 2007, 656 pages, $39.95.

WHETHER OR NOT the current economic crisis and a historic
presidential election open up hidden potentials for renewed
popular protest and collective action, it is obvious that the
radical Left has lost a great deal of its size, visibility, élan
and influence since the 1970s.

When French sociologists Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello commenced
their work together in the mid-1990s, resulting in this monumental
and inventive book, they saw not only that the Right had surged
and the Left declined since heady days of revolt in the late 1960s.

They also believed that “social critique has not seemed so
helpless for a century.” That is, the practical and theoretical
opposition to the status quo was weaker than at any time since the
beginnings of the modern mass labor and socialist movement.(1)

Why was the opposition so deep in the hole? After all, the signs
of growing inequality were evident, and activism persisted through
the 1980s and ’90s in addressing acute problems and grievances,
concerning AIDS, homelessness, the plight of the undocumented, or
the lack of modern medical care in the poor world at large. But
almost no one talked much any longer of the systemic framework —
of capitalism — that demanded a correspondingly systemic
challenge, thought Boltanski and Chiapello (hereafter B&C).

In this respect, things may have been different in the United
States than in France. Here, plenty of people were talking about
capitalism — in an overwhelming din of celebration.

While the remarkable energy signaled by the burst of the
“anti-globalization,” or global justice movement, promised to
“revive critique,” as B&C put it, those campaigns suffered a sharp
setback in the wake of a renewed Right turn following 9-11. Even
the momentous antiwar protests of 2003 lost energy steadily as the
Iraq war continued.

Now, nearly ten years after B&C first ventured their judgment that
“capitalism has benefited from the enfeeblement of critique,” it
remains unclear if much is different.(2) Capitalism has suddenly
revealed its fragility for all to see, but it is quite another
matter whether the Left now has the standing or the poise to offer
the radical, democratic and transitional demands that would, one
would think, have a growing audience amidst the present crisis and
current calls for “change.”

It is the great ambition of The New Spirit of Capitalism to
diagnose the peculiar shape that capitalism has assumed since the
1970s, to explain how and why its new forms have eluded a
forceful, concentrated challenge, and to venture proposals for
reinvigorating, indeed reinventing an effective anticapitalist
critique.

It’s not as if everything is new: Capitalism, in B&C’s eyes,
remains a system for pursuing profits and limitless accumulation,
amidst the generalization of wage-labor; and anticapitalism —
critiques of the domination, alienation, inequality, and
antisocial egoism spawned by the system—has kept it company since
its very beginning. Yet there has been plenty of room for
shape-shifting along the way.

(clip)

The Life and Legend of Mithradates, Rome’s Deadliest Enemy
By Adrienne Mayor
Princeton Univ. 448 pp. $29.95
“The Poison King” is, as its subtitle makes clear, the story of the life of Mithradates, leader of the ancient Black Sea kingdom of Pontus, who, in the 1st century B.C., did everything he could to overthrow the Roman Empire. I read this biography as a layperson, not a scholar, but I can say without reservation that it’s a wonderful reading experience, as bracing as a tonic, the perfect holiday gift for adventure-loving men and women. A finalist for this week’s National Book Award, it’s drenched in imaginative violence and disaster, but it also wears the blameless vestments of culture and antiquity. You can have all the fun of reading about a greedy villain being put to death by being made to “drink” molten gold, but still hide safe behind the excuse that you’re just brushing up on your classics.

Mithradates, as the royal heir of Pontus, was trained in all the manly sports and modeled his life on heroes of yore like Alexander the Great and Hannibal. Perhaps because of his suspicious, murderous mother, he took a lively interest from his earliest years in poisons and their antidotes. Quite a few of his relatives had been or would be poisoned, so this was a sensible precaution.

The reader could be excused if they thought from the title of Le Fanu’s book that he has new scientific information which throws light on our existence: why we are here and if our story has a plot. But, alas, no. Le Fanu’s point is that science has set out to explain human life and its origins but has in fact failed in that quest and has succeeded only in emphasizing that life is indeed a mystery and we a mystery to ourselves. This, in turn, leaves us free to wonder at the astounding marvels of creation and, above all, at what a piece of work we humans are.

From the end of the Second World War to the start of the new millennium, with one discovery after another, it looked like science, as a discipline would sweep all before it. With the human genome project, it seemed we had reached the final frontier and we would unlock the crucial chromosomes that make us truly human and show why we differ from our primate cousins. On top of this scientists had also developed the technology to peer inside the human brain and record its activity. The mystery of the human mind, too, would be laid bare.

“Both the Human Genome Project and the Decade of the Brain (1991-2001) have transformed beyond measure , our understanding of ourselves — but in a way quite contrary to that anticipated”, says Le Fanu. (p14)

What the Human Genome Project discovered, among other things, was “the human genome is virtually interchangeable with that of our fellow vertebrates such as the mouse and the chimpanzee — to the tune of 98% or more. There is nothing to account for those very special attributes that so readily distinguish us from our primate cousins — our upright stance, our powers of reason and imagination, and the faculty of language”. (p15) Le Fanu says these findings were not just unexpected: they undermine the central premise of biology that the near-infinite diversity of form and attribute that so definitively distinguish living things one from the other must ‘lie in the genes’. (p16)

And, with the Decade of the Brain, we are no nearer finding out how the electric firing of the brain’s billions of nerves translate into our perception of the sights and sounds of the world around us, our thoughts and emotions and the rich inner landscape of personal memories. All that it has succeeded in doing, according to Le Fanu, is demonstrate how infinitely complex the human brain actually is.

Le Fanu initially chose to concentrate on the The Double Helix and the human brain because they represent the two forces that impose order on the world. The Double Helix imposes “the order of form on living things and the human brain and its mind imposing the order of understanding. (p71) Moreover, like Newton’s theory of gravity, these two explanations are non-materialist and fail the test of scientific knowability which holds that everything must be explicable in terms of material properties alone. According to Le Fanu it is biological science in general that has misled us into believing it can explain human life and its mysteries and Darwin in particular who offered an apparently all-encompassing and exclusive materialist explanation for the phenomena of life.

These are the two central planks Le Fanu wishes to establish upfront, because he thinks that they are crucial and have been overlooked in the general euphoria surrounding both projects. Having done this to his satisfaction, he goes on to make further objections to scientific materialism in the form of Darwinism which are more familiar, as they are still the matter of some contention.

For instance, he cannot see how evolution is a gradual process as Darwin and many of his latter day followers maintain, when the slow development of our enlarged brain and upright stance would put humans at a serious disadvantage in the survival stakes.

The ‘puzzle of perfection’ — where something, for example, the eye has to have all it parts fit for purpose all at once or not at all — and the failure of the fossil record to record the continuity of life — again cast doubt on this part of Darwin’s theory.

His aim is to demonstrate that what passes for established fact in Darwinism is still at the stage of hypothesis.

He is especially critical of the New Synthesis of Darwinism and Mendelism, with genetic mutation as a vehicle for natural selection and gradual change. He characterizes The Descent of Man as The Fall of Man, saying with the New Synthesis he is “no more than the plaything of his genes” and goes on to say that “the source of all this mischief lies in the necessity to portray man not as he is but as he has to be in order to incorporate him into an evolutionary theory that requires him to be different ‘only in degree not in kind’ from his primate cousins. We need, in short, a fuller, more rounded view that acknowledges the core reality of the human experience which sets us apart — the sense of the autonomous, independent ’self’ …”. (p175)

Although, it is, at times, hard to follow the thread of his argument, his final goal is to promote a Cartesian separation of reality into material and non-material realms, with the contention that humans uniquely inhabit both. And this he says can be established from the findings of the latest brain research. He shows how scientists between 1861 and 1950 mapped out all the significant areas of the brain and from then to 1980, conceived of the brain as an information processing machine at the time when computers where dominating the conceptual landscape. But from 1980 onwards the development of the PET scanner changed all that.

The PET scanner found with regard to the act of seeing, for instance, that “at every stage the information received and interpreted by the retina and transmitted down the highways of the optic nerves to the visual cortex is less than sufficient to capture the world ‘out there’. ” (p205) This must mean that the brain somehow actively constructs a visual image.

But we have no idea how the brain first deconstructs and then reconstructs the electrical patterns of activity generated by the miniscule forces of energy impacting on our senses: no idea how they are integrated together into a clear, coherent, instantaneous sense of being in the world and no idea of the physical basis in the brain of every simple fleeting moment of our life.

He says that the imaging studies illuminated the most significant attribute of the human mind namely ‘the freedom to choose’, otherwise known as ‘the problem of mental causation’. The simple act of paying attention shows different area of the brain lighting up on the PET scanner according to what is being attended to — sights, sounds, smells — and the electrical activity of adjacent areas are turned down. But just thinking about one’s thoughts can alter the neuronal circuits of the brain as happens in cognitive therapy where negative beliefs can be replaced by positive ones, with a resulting change in behavior. So our non-material thoughts can have physical effects. Therefore, argues Le Fanu, we are free to choose and with choice comes personal, moral responsibility.

Le Fanu goes on to outline the five cardinal mysteries of the mind which he says “the (unanticipated) legacy of the Decade of the Brain has brought to our attention…that taken together offer the profoundest insights into our understanding of ourselves.” (p225) The mysteries are subjective awareness, free will, memory, reason and imagination, and self, which he says are the properties contained by the traditional notion of the soul. “And that soul, freed of its theological connotations, is no mere construction of the human imagination, but rather a resilient entity that changes over time yet remains the same…” (p227)

Whilst Le Fanu’s arguments are well-constructed, they are colored by the particular school of thought in the ascendancy for the last fifty years that has come to redefine Darwinism in an exclusively reductionist way. He calls for a new paradigm but unfortunately because of its subjective and individualistic approach his paradigm would be just as lopsided.

But Darwin’s theory is not a single entity but a heterogeneous collection of ideas. In fact, as it is today, Darwinism has turned into a broad scientific movement embracing a variety of interpretations, because from its peculiar blend of fact and hypothesis, it can absorb new findings, and still maintain its general thrust.

A candidate for such integration is the idea of symbiosis, touched on by Le Fanu, but not pursued, and now being considered seriously by biologists. With its emphasis on mutual advantage and cooperation, it could explain the sudden emergence of new species in the fossil record. It might also account for our socially contrived progress as a species and that greatest of all collaborative endeavors, the social construction of the human mind.

But as we debate these issues in our little corner of the cosmos, the larger Darwinian question remains unaddressed: Is homo sapiens wise enough to survive as a species?

Despite the fact that the so-called ‘new military history’ is now fifty or more years old, no Russian specialist in Britain or the United States (or, for that matter, France or Germany) has ever seen fit to embark on a detailed monograph-length study of the Russian war effort in 1812, let alone the struggles of 1805-7 and 1813-14. Equally, while campaign histories exist by the score, in the main they rely almost entirely on French sources, the ‘other side of the hill’ being accessed, at best, via the accounts of a few foreigners who were present in Russia in 1812, together with such Russian sources as are available in translation. And, last but not least, there is the issue of coverage: military accounts of Russia’s wars tend to concentrate either on the years of French victory or the tragedy of 1812, with the exploits of Russia’s soldiers in the campaigns of 1813-14 tending to be discussed in the context of those of a broader coalition whose cutting edge is generally assumed to be the newly reformed Prussian army. Yet the gap is an extraordinary one: to cite just a few aspects of the situation, from 1805 onwards Russia was a key player – indeed, in some respects the key player – in the international relations of Napoleonic Europe; the campaign of 1812 was not just an episode of positively epic dimensions, but also a moment of seminal importance in the history of modern Russia, the echoes of which continued to reverberate throughout the life of the USSR, if not beyond; and finally in the bloody battles of 1813-14 it was Russian troops who made up the largest part of the Allied armies and, arguably at least, Russian leadership that ensured the overthrow of Napoleon.

Fortunately for all students of the Napoleonic era, this massive gap in the historiography has now been filled by a massive book. Crafted by Dominic Lieven, perhaps one of the most distinguished specialists in nineteenth-century Russia of his generation, Russia Against Napoleon truly reaches the parts that other works do not. Beginning with the failed alliance of Tilsit between Russia and France, which Lieven presents as an arrangement that was based on a cool and realistic appreciation of Russian interests, the author charts Alexander I’s steadily deteriorating relationship with Napoleon and explains how by 1810 the tsar had been forced into a position of open enmity with the French empire, in part because of the latter’s relentless aggression, but also because of growing internal pressure (throughout the book, indeed, great stress is placed on the importance of domestic Russian politics). Hostility to France, however, did not necessarily mean war and, as Lieven shows, in 1811 Alexander eschewed the idea of attacking Napoleon: rather, he would wait to be attacked and, initially at least, adopt a purely defensive strategy. When war came in 1812 it was therefore very much the responsibility of the French ruler, and in arguing thus Lieven places himself in the camp of those who argue that the struggles of 1803-15 were in the most literal sense Napoleonic wars.

Thoroughly Modern Marx
By Leo Panitch May/June 2009
Lights. Camera. Action. Das Kapital. Now.
The economic crisis has spawned a resurgence of interest in Karl Marx. Worldwide sales of Das Kapital have shot up (one lone German publisher sold thousands of copies in 2008, compared with 100 the year before), a measure of a crisis so broad in scope and devastation that it has global capitalism—and its high priests—in an ideological tailspin.
Yet even as faith in neoliberal orthodoxies has imploded, why resurrect Marx? To start, Marx was far ahead of his time in predicting the successful capitalist globalization of recent decades. He accurately foresaw many of the fateful factors that would give rise to today’s global economic crisis: what he called the “contradictions” inherent in a world comprised of competitive markets, commodity production, and financial speculation.