The distinction between Falconer’s and Darwin’s predictions, a key ingredient in my analysis, rest upon our ability to define the central features of Darwinism (its autapomorphies, if you will), so that we may then discern whether the extent of alteration in our modern understanding of evolutionary mechanisms and causes remains within the central logic of this Darwinian foundation, or has now changed so profoundly that, by any fair criterion in vernacular understanding of language, or by any more formal account of departure from original premises, our current explanatory theory must be described as a different kind of mental “thing.” How, in short, can such an intellectual entity be defined? And what degree of change can be tolerated or accommodated within the structure of such an entity before we must alter the name and declare the entity invalid or overthrown? Or do such questions just represent a fool’s errand from the start, because intellectual positions can’t be reified into sufficient equivalents of buildings or organisms to bear the weight of such an inquiry?

As arrogant as I may be in general, I am not sufficiently doltish or vainglorious to imagine that I can meaningfully address the deep philosophical questions embedded within this general inquiry of our intellectual ages—that is, fruitful modes of analysis for the history of human thought. I shall therefore take refuge in an escape route that has traditionally been granted to scientists: the liberty to act as a practical philistine. Instead of suggesting a principled and general solution, I shall ask whether I can specify an operational way to define “Darwinism” (and other intellectual entities) in a manner specific enough to win shared agreement and understanding among readers, but broad enough to avoid the doctrinal quarrels about membership and allegiance that always seem to arise when we define intellectual commitments as pledges of fealty to lists of dogmata (not to mention initiation rites, secret handshakes and membership cards—in short, the intellectual paraphernalia that led Karl Marx to make his famous comment to a French journalist: “je ne suis pas marxiste”).

As a working proposal, and so often in this book (and in human affairs in general), a “Goldilocks solution” embodies the blessedly practical kind of approach that permits contentious and self-serving human beings (God love us) to break intellectual bread together in pursuit of common goals rather than personal triumph. (For this reason, I have always preferred, as guides to human action, messy hypothetical imperatives like the Golden Rule, based on negotiation, compromise and general respect, to the Kantian categorical imperatives of absolute righteousness, in whose name we so often murder and maim until we decide that we had followed the wrong instantiation of the right generality.) We must, in short and in this case, steer between the “too little” of refusing to grant any kind of “essence,” or hard anatomy of defining concepts, to a theory like Darwinism; and the “too much” of an identification so burdened with a long checklist of exigent criteria that we will either spend all our time debating the status of particular items (and never addressing the heart or central meaning of the theory), or we will waste our efforts, and poison our communities, with arguments about credentials and anathemata, applied to individual applicants for membership.

The post The Structure of Evolutionary Theory appeared first on Harvard University Press Centennial.

John Harrison presumably learned about clocks by fixing them; that is the way in places too small to enjoy the advantages (?) of specialization and division of labour. In a village like Barrow-on-Humber, the smith and the carpenter had to do a little of everything. From repairing, Harrison went to building. His first clocks were conventional, but after the announcement of the Great Prize, news of which reached even to Barrow, he set about with his brother James to build clocks of a higher degree of precision, clocks that would be a testing ground for ideas that might later be incorporated in a ship’s timekeeper. He was guided in this by common sense and feel; but it should not be thought that Harrison was ignorant of what we would call scientific principles. Someone, presumably a visiting minister, lent him a copy of Nicholas Saunderson’s lectures on natural philosophy at Cambridge University, and Harrison found these so valuable that he copied text and diagrams in extenso for his own use.

He had, then, some general knowledge of mechanics; also some mathematical skills. But the characteristic of his work that most impresses is his technical ingenuity and imagination. He could not afford to work in brass, but he did know how to cut and shape wood, and he made a virtue of what any London or Paris clockmaker would have seen as a totally inappropriate material. His plates and wheels were made of oak, carefully cut and glued so that it would not warp; the arbors and pinions were fashioned of boxwood; the bushings were originally of brass but later of lignum vitae, a superhard wood imported from the tropics. Thanks to the oils in the wood, no further lubrication was required, the movements stayed clean, and friction and wear were negligible. Further to reduce friction, he used anti-friction rollers and built his scape wheel with roller pinions (something like lantern pinions: but the leaves were spindles that turned as they meshed with the teeth of the train wheels). The escapement itself was a new one, of his invention, which has come to be known from the lifting motion of the pallets as the grasshopper escapement. And to compensate for hot and cold, Harrison made use of the different coefficients of expansion of brass and steel to build a composite pendulum rod that would maintain its length at different temperatures. The result was a clock (he actually made two) so accurate that Harrison had to check it by stellar transits, which he managed to track without any of the equipment of an observatory; and he had to use special tables of equation of time that allowed for small changes within the leap-year cycle. Harrison claimed that his clocks varied by no more than a second a month, which would make them, if his measures were correct, the most accurate timekeepers known until Siegmund Riefler’s regulator of 1889.

Harrison completed his two revolutionary clocks with the aid of his brother James, though he alone signed the instruments; wrote up his methods and results; then went to London to seek support for his next step, the building of a marine chronometer that would meet the conditions for the Great Prize. One can well imagine what a testing experience it must have been for this young man, gifted and self-confident as he was, to go from a tiny backwater village to the great metropolis and seek audiences with prominent and busy men. He saw Edmond Halley, of comet fame, who sent him to George Graham, the nation’s leading clockmaker. Harrison was reluctant: Graham might steal his ideas. But Halley more or less told him that if Graham was not interested, the Board of Longitude would not be. And he gave him some good advice: ‘Speak to the point.’ Harrison, in his nervousness, may have given an impression of loquacity.

Harrison got to Graham’s at about ten in the morning. The first moments of the interview were difficult. One can understand that Graham may have been sceptical, even suspicious, at the start. But once he realized that Harrison knew what he was talking about, indeed, that in making a proper gridiron pendulum he had accomplished something that Graham and his fellow clockmakers had essayed in vain, Graham gave him all the time he needed. The two men talked all day and into the evening. In the end, Graham gave Harrison funds without security or interest and put him in touch with others who were also ready to help. The episode says a great deal for ‘Honest George’ Graham as man and craftsman; but it also says something for the openness of British science and technology. The clockmakers of Paris would have been less generous.

Harrison went back to Barrow and spent six years building his first marine timekeeper, which can be seen working today at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich. It is something to see, especially if one goes there by water, down the Thames from Westminster, under Blackfriars Bridge and past St Paul’s and the Tower, under the Tower Bridge that millions have confused with the London Bridge of the children’s song, then left along the former London docks, and right again past the Isle of Dogs to Greenwich Reach to land hard by the Royal Naval College. I know of no better way to feel the immensity of old London and the greatness of Britain’s maritime and commercial achievements, which owe much to Harrison’s inventions.

The post Revolution in Time appeared first on Harvard University Press Centennial.

In the United States, it is acknowledged that the state is capitalist; it is not acknowledged that it is male. The law of sex equality, constitutional by interpretation and statutory by joke, erupts through this fissure, exposing the sex equality that the state purports to guarantee. If gender hierarchy and sexuality are reciprocally constituting—gender hierarchy providing the eroticism of sexuality and sexuality providing an enforcement mechanism for male dominance over women—a male state would predictably not make acts of sexual dominance actionable as gender inequality. Equality would be kept as far away from sexuality as possible. In fact, sexual force is not conventionally recognized to raise issues of sex inequality, either against those who commit the acts or against the state that condones them. Sexuality is regulated largely by criminal law, occasionally by tort law, neither on grounds of equality. Reproductive control, similarly, has been adjudicated primarily as an issue of privacy. It is as if a vacuum boundary demarcates sexual issues on the one hand from the law of equality on the other. Law, structurally, adopts the male point of view: sexuality concerns nature not social arbitrariness, interpersonal relations not social distributions of power, the sex difference not sex discrimination.

Sex discrimination law, with mainstream moral theory, sees equality and gender as issues of sameness and difference. According to this approach, which has dominated politics, law, and social perception, equality is an equivalence not a distinction, and gender is a distinction not an equivalence. The legal mandate of equal treatment—both a systemic norm and a specific legal doctrine—becomes a matter of treating likes alike and unlikes unlike, while the sexes are socially defined as such by their mutual unlikeness. That is, gender is socially constructed as difference epistemologically, and sex discrimination law bounds gender equality by difference doctrinally. Socially, one tells a woman from a man by their difference from each other, but a woman is legally recognized to be discriminated against on the basis of sex only when she can first be said to be the same as a man. A built-in tension thus exists between this concept of equality, which presupposes sameness, and this concept of sex, which presupposes difference. Difference defines the state’s approach to sex equality epistemologically and doctrinally. Sex equality becomes a contradiction in terms, something of an oxymoron. The deepest issues of sex inequality, in which the sexes are most constructed as socially different, are either excluded at the threshold or precluded from coverage once in. In this way, difference is inscribed on society as the meaning of gender and written into law as the limit on sex discrimination.

In sex discrimination law, sex inequality in life becomes “sex classification” in law, each category defined by its difference from the other. A classification in law or in fact is or is not a sex-based discrimination depending upon the accuracy of its “fit” with gender and upon the validity of its purpose for government or business. A classification, in the classic formulation of the “rational relation” test, “must be reasonable, not arbitrary, and must rest upon some ground of difference having a fair and substantial relation to the object of the legislation, so that all persons similarly circumstanced shall be treated alike.” Under the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, the line drawn by a rule or practice being challenged as discriminatory is required to track the gender line more closely than this. To be nondiscriminatory, the relation between gender and the line’s proper objectives must be more than rational but need not be perfect. In what has been termed “intermediate scrutiny”—a judicial standard of care for women only—gender lines are scrutinized more carefully than most, but not as strictly as some. They are not prohibited absolutely, as they would have been under the dominant interpretation of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). Seen on this doctrinal continuum, which scrutinizes the correlation between gender lines and the purposes of drawing them, the ERA was not a new departure but a proposal to take the standard equal protection approach to its conclusion.

Equality is comparative in sex discrimination law. Sex in law is compared with sex in life, and women are compared with men. Relevant empirical similarity to men is the basis for the claim to equal treatment for women. For differential treatment to be discriminatory, the sexes must first be “similarly situated” by legislation, qualifications, circumstance, or physical endowment. This standard applies to sex the broader legal norm of neutrality, the law’s version of objectivity. To test for gender neutrality, reverse the sexes and compare. To see if a woman was discriminated against on the basis of sex, ask whether a similarly situated man would be or was so treated. Relevant difference supports different treatment, no matter how categorical, disadvantageous, or cumulative. Accurate reflections of situated disparities are thus rendered either noncomparable or rational, therefore differences not inequalities for legal purposes. In this view, normative equality derives from and refers to empirical equivalence. Situated differences produce differentiated outcomes without necessarily involving discrimination.

In this mainstream epistemologically liberal approach, the sexes are by nature biologically different, therefore socially properly differentiated for some purposes. Upon this natural, immutable, inherent, essential, just, and wonderful differentiation, society and law are thought to have erected some arbitrary, irrational, confining, and distorting distinctions. These are the inequalities the law against sex discrimination targets. As one scholar has put it, “any prohibition against sexual classifications must be flexible enough to accommodate two legitimate sources of distinctions on the basis of sex: biological differences between the sexes and the prevailing heterosexual ethic of American society.” The proposed federal ERA’s otherwise uncompromising prohibition on sex-based distinctions provides parallel exceptions for “unique physical characteristics” and “personal privacy.” Laws or practices that express or reflect sex “stereotypes,” understood as inaccurate overgeneralized attitudes often termed “archaic” or “outmoded,” are at the core of this definition of discrimination. Mistaken illusions about real differences are actionable, but any distinction that can be accurately traced to biology or heterosexuality is not a discrimination but a difference.

From women’s point of view, gender is more an inequality of power than a differentiation that is accurate or inaccurate. To women, sex is a social status based on who is permitted to do what to whom; only derivatively is it a difference. For example, one woman reflected on her gender: “I wish I had been born a doormat, or a man.” Being a doormat is definitely different from being a man. Differences between the sexes do descriptively exist. But the fact that these are a woman’s realistic options, and that they are so limiting, calls into question the perspective that considers this distinction a “difference.” Men are not called different because they are neither doormats nor women, but a woman is not socially permitted to be a woman and neither doormat nor man.

The post Toward a Feminist Theory of the State appeared first on Harvard University Press Centennial.

Clearly, though, happy people are sometimes sad, and chronically grumpy people sometimes manage a smile. The fact that happiness is partly heritable does not mean that people are stuck at one level of happiness that never varies. The trick is to explain why people return to their normal level of happiness relatively quickly after they experience events that make them happy or sad. Paul McNabb was ecstatic when he learned he had won a million dollars, but the thrill did not last very long. Why not?

One possibility is that the pursuit of a goal is as enjoyable as achieving it—if not more so. I often spend months or years collecting data on a research project, analyzing the data, writing an article reporting the results, and sending the article to a psychology journal. It might seem that the crowning moment would be when I get the letter in the mail saying that the article has been accepted for publication. After all, that is the culmination of a great deal of work and is what I’ve been working toward for all those months. And indeed, I am quite happy to receive such a letter—more so, certainly, than one saying that my article was rejected. But the pleasure does not last very long. I am happiest, I think, when I am making progress toward the goal—when one of my graduate students tells me that our most recent data look great or when I have had a good day of writing. Once the project is completed and the article accepted, my attention turns to the next project.

It is very important in life to have something to work toward, and once we achieve one goal, we shift our sights and work toward a new one. In fact when things are going really well, we achieve a state of “flow” in which we lose our sense of self and time. One composer described the experience of writing music like this: “You are in an ecstatic state to such a point that you feel as though you almost don’t exist . . . My hand seems devoid of itself, and I have nothing to do with what is happening. I just sit there watching in a state of awe and wonderment. And the music just flows out by itself.” It is not just artists who have these experiences; people can experience flow doing almost anything.

Imagine that you are part of a grand experiment in which you are provided with everything you need. At regular intervals you are given gifts of money, food, love, sex, fame—whatever you want. The only catch is that you can do nothing that increases or decreases the likelihood of obtaining these rewards. In fact, in order to receive the rewards, you have to spend eight hours a day in a room doing nothing—no career to occupy your time, no one to talk to, no books to read, no paintings to paint, no music to compose—in short, nothing to engage you. Even though you can get any reward you want, this would be a hellish life. Compare it to a quite different existence, in which the tangible rewards are modest. You make only enough money to meet your basic needs and have few luxuries. But you get to spend every day absorbed in activities you love.

In such extreme cases few of us would choose the first life over the second. In everyday life, however, I think people sometimes opt for lives more like the first one. I see undergraduates striving for careers that will pay them lots of money but doom them to mind-numbing daily routines (tax law comes to mind, but that might just be me). The second kind of life is that of a struggling artist, a social worker who loves to make a difference in people’s lives, or, I suppose, tax attorneys who are really turned on by the latest changes in Roth IRAs. Daily absorption is more important than the paycheck at the end of the month, as long as that paycheck covers our basic needs.

The importance of flow and absorption helps explain why a positive event that people have worked toward—such as the publication of one of my articles—does not cause lasting pleasure: the goal is met, and my thoughts turn to a new problem. The absorption view should predict, however, that the failure to achieve a goal that people have worked toward should cause prolonged sadness, especially if this failure prevents people from becoming absorbed in everyday, pleasurable activities. Although such failures are painful, the distress does not last as long as people think it will. Daniel Gilbert and I, for example, found that assistant professors overestimated the duration of their unhappiness if they failed to achieve tenure at their university, which was a major life goal for many of them.

Further, some important life events would seem to facilitate goal-directed behavior and yet still do not cause lasting happiness. Winning a million dollars allows people to work toward many goals they could not previously pursue, such as traveling, going to law school and studying tax law, or sitting at home and learning to crochet. So why doesn’t it make people happier?

A quite different explanation of emotional evanescence is that people’s reactions to an event depend on how that event compares with their prior experiences to similar events. According to this view, we constantly compare our experiences with others like it and ask ourselves, “How does it compare?” The first meal we eat at a fancy three-star restaurant is wonderful. But after eating at a lot of fancy restaurants, we change our standard of comparison. A meal at a mere two-star restaurant now doesn’t seem that special, because it wasn’t as good as the cassoulet de mer at Chez Michel. The sad fact is that there may be a cost to extremely pleasurable experiences. They are wonderful when they occur, but they give us a new reference point against which all future experiences are compared, and many of them will suffer by comparison.

One study, for example, compared people who had won from $50,000 to $1 million in the Illinois State Lottery with a control group of nonwinners. The winners were no happier than the nonwinners; nor did they say they would be happier in two years. Even worse, the winners reported that they found several everyday activities, such as talking with a friend, watching television, and hearing a funny joke, less pleasurable than nonwinners did. Apparently, life’s everyday pleasures paled in comparison with the extreme high of winning a large sum of money.

Surely there is some truth to this notion. My wife and I share a beer at dinner most nights, and I think our standards have risen over the years. One inexpensive brand used to be as good as another, a Blatz or a Falstaff was as good as a Stroh’s. Then we spent a sabbatical in Seattle, which is microbrewery heaven. We had a great time sampling all the different brands, and would often choose restaurants on the basis of which beers they served rather than the kind of food they happened to have. Our standard of comparison increased considerably, such that we can no longer enjoy an inexpensive beer with dinner. But, if truth be told, we probably do not enjoy our daily microbrew any more than we used to enjoy a Stroh’s, before our standards were raised. What used to be special is now the norm.

A problem with the change-in-standards view, however, is understanding what people use as their comparison point at any given point in time. Sometimes we use our most extreme prior experience as the comparison point. After eating at Chez Michel’s, meals at Nick’s Diner might never be the same. But sometimes we compartmentalize our experiences and do not compare them with the extremes. A gourmet might have a quite enjoyable meal at Nick’s, because he is comparing it with the meal he had yesterday at McDonald’s, and not with his meal at Chez Michel in Paris last month.

The choice of a comparison point, and the way in which it influences emotional experiences, is a complex process that is probably determined by such things as how people define a category (e.g., “all meals” versus “meals in Greek diners”), how recent people’s experience is in a particular domain (how long ago they ate at Chez Michel), and the amount of experience they have in a particular domain (e.g., one meal or a hundred meals at Chez Michel). For our purposes, the point is that a change in the standard of comparison helps explain why people adapt to life events; the bar is raised, and what was pleasurable (or painful) before seems ordinary now. But it is not the full story.

The post Strangers to Ourselves appeared first on Harvard University Press Centennial.

In that day of slow and precarious travel, the peoples of the world had significant contacts only with close-by lands. The English might fight the French, but even Poland and Hungary were too far away to be of much concern to them, while India and China were little more than fairy-book lands. The Japanese might have dealings with Korea and China, but Java and India concerned them little, and they were blissfully ignorant of the very existence of Europe. Relations were largely between immediate neighbors and usually between peoples of the same cultural and historical background, who were bound together by far more that they shared in common than they were divided by elements that distinguished them.

But in the last five hundred years all this has changed. The oceans no longer are the great barriers they once were but have become instead the mortar holding the various pieces of the earth together in one economic whole. The world has undergone a cataclysmic shrinking, in the process of which the two ends of its once flat surface have curled up and come together. Man has circled the globe, first through extending long thin tentacles of exploration around its surface and then by slowly incorporating into the civilized world, through conquest and settlement, the lands which lay between the East and West on the far side of the earth. Europe, the Far West of the Old World, has straddled one ocean and then slowly spread across the land mass of the New World, until its cultural and racial offshoots have come to stand on the shores of the Pacific, facing the Far East across but a single body of water.

Even in this day of air travel and instantaneous communications, however, the Pacific remains a very broad expanse of water. Two weeks of plowing its long swells will prove this to the sea-voyager. A trip by air reduces the time but not the distance. With the magical aid of the international date line it is now possible to stand on Japanese and American soil on the same calendar day, but not even the motionless speed of a plane suspended above the unchanging waters of the Pacific reduces the vastness of that ocean. Your sense of time, if not your sense of sight, tells you that you have flown the distance from New York to San Francisco and then repeated it again and again. A nonstop flight from Seattle to Tokyo would be as long as a flight from Florida to Patagonia or one from Maine to the Ural Mountains.

Navigable water, however, is in no sense a barrier such as mountains, desert, ice, or even masses of people. There is no intervening obstacle to communication between us and the Japanese. No other people come between us to divert our attention from each other. We are not like two city dwellers living almost cheek by jowl, as do the peoples of Europe, but like two country dwellers living out of sight of each other but still contiguously with no one else between them. We are perhaps the world’s most distant neighbors, but neighbors nonetheless.

We have been slow and consciously reluctant to realize our special relationship to Japan, but it has been forced upon us by the irresistible sweep of history, culminating in war—the most traditional of all relationships between neighboring peoples. Though our trade with Japan ranked first in our trade with all Asia, though Japan was considered our only military rival in Asia and perhaps the chief military menace to us in the whole world, it took war and our subsequent occupation of Japan to make us realize how closely involved we had become in Japan and its problems. The Japanese, for their part, have been more conscious of what America meant to them. For many decades, the United States has been the country which more than any other represented the Occidental world to them. It had become the chief neighbor to the east, just as China had always been the major neighbor to the west. And since the war and its aftermath of American occupation, the United States has appeared to many Japanese to be the only foreign country of vital significance to them.

Man moving eastward and man moving westward have at last met on the far side of the world in the vast expanse of the Pacific and the lands that rim its shores. The recent war in a sense represented the final shock of that meeting of forces. In this naked confrontation of the peoples of the Far East and the Far West, we find epitomized the difficulties and also the challenge of the new world—the one world in which we all now live. Man, who has never been able to solve the frictions and conflicts between neighboring peoples of common racial and cultural background, is now faced with the problem of solving the still more basic conflicts between peoples of widely divergent racial and cultural heritage.

In the meeting of Japan and the United States, the two extremities of the world, the problems, the hazards, and, possibly, the benefits of this head-on convergence of races and cultures in a shrinking world stand out in a clearer, starker light than they do in other parts of the world, where the meeting has come about more slowly and has been between less spectacularly contrasting cultures. It is perhaps no mere coincidence that Japan, the easternmost country of the old civilized world, is now the most Westernized of Asiatic lands, or that America, the westerly extension of the westernmost part of the old civilized world, has taken the lead in bringing the Occident to Japan. America and Japan have for some time now been unconscious neighbors. The war and still more the occupation have brought home to us as well as to the Japanese the somewhat unhappy realization of what very close neighbors we really are.

The post The United States and Japan appeared first on Harvard University Press Centennial.

Such events are also a narrative necessity. Passages like the description of Bella’s housework in Our Mutual Friend clearly thrill Dickens (“Such weighing and mixing and chopping and grating,” he gushes, “such dusting and washing and polishing, such snipping and weeding and trowelling . . .”), but it is hard to imagine them being turned into a plot. The Cricket on the Hearth, similarly, opens with a scene in which the kettle “hum-hum-hums” and the cricket “chirp-chirp-chirps,” but their antics have about as much narrative interest as a lump of coal until Tackleton enters, dismissing home as “Four walls and a ceiling” and threatening to scrunch the cheery cricket underfoot. He is the real center of the story. Without him, none of the alternative narrative outcomes glimpsed in the pages that follow, such as infidelity and murder, would be available, and the reappearance of the kettle and cricket on the final page would be merely another performance of the same domestic ritual, rather than a noisy celebration of his failure to destroy their home. Like all of Dickens’s finest home-wreckers, he makes the happy ending possible by putting everything it represents at risk.

Different versions of the same idea can be found throughout Dickens’s fiction. Often they are hidden away in the corners of his writing, where they have a clear view of what the main plot is up to. Take Esther’s efforts in Bleak House to “establish some order” in the Jellybys’ slovenly home. Mr. Jellyby makes a start on the family’s storage problems:

But such wonderful things came tumbling out of the closets when they were opened—bits of mouldy pie, sour bottles, Mrs. Jellyby’s caps, letters, tea, forks, odd boots and shoes of children, firewood, wafers, saucepan-lids, damp sugar in odds and ends of paper bags, foot-stools, blacklead brushes, bread, Mrs. Jellyby’s bonnets, books with butter sticking to the binding, guttered candle-ends put out by being turned upside down in broken candlesticks, nutshells, heads and tails of shrimps, dinner-mats, gloves, coffee-grounds, umbrellas—that he looked frightened, and left off again.

The slightly labored joke is that Mrs. Jellyby is too busy worrying about overseas missions to put her own house in order, just as Esther’s attempt to tackle the family’s clutter reflects her desire to establish harmony wherever she goes. Dickens’s narrative technique is like a hybrid of both characters, as he amasses details into joyfully indiscriminate piles before rearranging them into meaningful patterns. He told one correspondent in 1839 that he kept his ideas “on different shelves of my brain, ready ticketed and labelled, to be brought out when I want them,” and his skill in Bleak House lies in his ability to mess up these shelves before, like the bustling Esther, he puts them “a little to rights.” Yet throughout the novel, there is the fear that writing may not be able to keep chaos at bay, any more than Jo can keep his crossing clean. Words on the page may look like objects sitting on neat rows of shelves, but in a world where they struggle to remain distinct from each other, so that “M’lud” is only one further contraction away from becoming “mud,” they are always in danger of collapsing back into a shapeless pool of ink. Dickens’s scenes of domestic happiness are equally fragile. No matter how loudly Esther jingles her housekeeping keys, she cannot drown out the sound of the ballad that Skimpole sings about Jo after he has effectively encouraged him to go and die in the streets: “Thrown on the wide world, doomed to wander and roam, / Bereft of his parents, bereft of a home.”

The post Becoming Dickens appeared first on Harvard University Press Centennial.

All of which is to say that slavery, though imposed and maintained by violence, was a negotiated relationship. To be sure, the struggle between master and slave never proceeded on the basis of equality and was always informed by the master’s near monopoly of force. By definition, slaves had less choice than any other people, as slaveholders set the conditions upon which slaves worked and lived. Indeed, the relation between master and slave was so profoundly asymmetrical that many have concluded that the notion of negotiation—often freighted in our own society with the rhetoric of the level playing field—has no value to the study of slavery. Although the playing field was never level, the master-slave relationship was nevertheless subject to continual negotiation. The failure to recognize the ubiquity of those negotiations derives neither from an overestimation of the power of the master (which was awesome indeed), nor from an underestimation of the power of the slave (which rarely amounted to much), but from a misconstruing of the limitations humanity placed upon both master and slave. For while slaveowners held most of the good cards in this meanest of all contests, slaves held cards of their own. And even when their cards were reduced to near worthlessness, slaves still held that last card, which, as their owners well understood, they might play at any time.

A number of corollaries follow from a recognition that even in slavery’s cramped quarters there was room for negotiation. First, even as they confronted one another, master and slave had to concede, however grudgingly, a degree of legitimacy to the other. No matter how reluctantly it was given (or, more likely, extracted), such a concession was difficult for either party to acknowledge, for masters presumed their own absolute sovereignty and slaves never relinquished the right to control their own destiny. But no matter how adamant the denials, nearly every interaction of master and slave forced such recognition, for the web of interconnections between master and slave necessitated a coexistence that fostered cooperation as well as contestation.

Second, because the circumstances of such contestation and cooperation continually changed, slavery itself continually changed. The refusal of either party to concede the realities of master-slave relations meant that slavery was intrinsically unstable. No bargain could last for very long, for as power slipped from master to slave and back to master, the terms of slavery would again be renegotiated. Slavery was never made, but instead was continually remade, for power—no matter how great—was never absolute, but always contingent.

Thus, understanding that a person was a slave is not the end of the story but the beginning, for the slaves’ history was derived from experiences that differed from place to place and time to time and not from some unchanging transhistorical verity. In some sense, this truism has become a staple of recent histories of all subordinate classes, not only slaves but also servants, serfs, and wage workers. Surely, it would come as no surprise to say that all wage workers at any particular moment had much in common, both in shared experiences and in opposition to their employers; but the lives of steel workers and cigar makers differed, as did their languages, institutions, and relationships with their employers, their fellow workers, and their families. If at times steel workers and cigar makers stood together against their employers on matters of compensation, working conditions, and political allegiance, few would expect their opposition to take precisely the same form. Yet, because slavery was such a powerful, all-encompassing relationship, scholars have often been transfixed by the commonalities that slavery produced, by the dynamics of the relationship between master and slave, and by the personality traits this most extreme form of domination appears to have generated.

Slavery’s distinctiveness has been reinforced by its historic confrontation with free labor, a battle in which slavery—for good and ill—came to embody traditional society. The slave master’s domination of the plantation order was seen as nothing less than monarchy writ small and patriarchy writ large. By extension, it represented hierarchy, discipline, and corporate control. Slaveholders understood their rule to be the incarnation of the well-ordered society, which mirrored the well-ordered family. By the same token, their slaves’ interminable insubordination represented not only a loss of labor and a threat of insurrection but also a direct assault on order itself.

Such an interpretation has propelled the relationship between master and slave, generally in the guise of the question of paternalism (or sometimes patriarchalism or seigneuralism) to the center of the debate over slavery, and has given the history of slavery a significance that reaches beyond the bounds of the subject itself. The destruction of slavery and its corporate ethos—as a means of organizing society as well as a means of extracting labor—was a central event in the rise of capitalism and the triumph of liberalism, certainly in the West and in other parts of the world as well. Little wonder, then, that the discussions of the nature—and sometimes the existence—of paternalism has preoccupied historians during the last four decades.

In contrasting the relations of slave labor to those of free labor, just as in contrasting republicanism to monarchism or the patriarchal family to the companionate one, historians have frozen their subject in time. While they have captured an essential aspect of chattel bondage, they have lost something of the dynamic that constantly made and remade the lives of slaves, changing them from time to time and place to place. The static model reified and reinforced the masters’ vision of their hegemonic power and the slaves’ willing acceptance by removing from public view the contingencies upon which power rested. The minuet between master and slave, when played to the contrapuntal music of paternalism, was a constant, as master and slave continually renegotiated the small space allotted them. But the stylized movements—the staccato gyrations, the seductive feints, the swift withdrawals, and the hateful embraces—represented just one of many dances of domination and subordination, resistance and accommodation. The essence of the slaves’ history can be found in the ever-changing music to which slaves were forced to dance and in their ability to superimpose their own rhythms by ever so slight changes of cadence, accent, and beat.

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We shall finally try to round off our picture of the entrepreneur in the same manner in which we always, in science as well as in practical life, try to understand human behavior, viz. by analysing the characteristic motives of his conduct. Any attempt to do this must of course meet with all those objections against the economist’s intrusion into “psychology” which have been made familiar by a long series of writers. We cannot here enter into the fundamental question of the relation between psychology and economics. It is enough to state that those who on principle object to any psychological considerations in an economic argument may leave out what we are about to say without thereby losing contact with the argument of the following chapters. For none of the results to which our analysis is intended to lead stands or falls with our “psychology of the entrepreneur,” or could be vitiated by any errors in it. Nowhere is there, as the reader will easily satisfy himself, any necessity for us to overstep the frontiers of observable behavior. Those who do not object to all psychology but only to the kind of psychology which we know from the traditional textbook, will see that we do not adopt any part of the time honored picture of the motivation of the “economic man.”

In the theory of the circular flow, the importance of examining motives is very much reduced by the fact that the equations of the system of equilibrium may be so interpreted as not to imply any psychic magnitudes at all, as shown by the analysis of Pareto and of Barone. This is the reason why even very defective psychology interferes much less with results than one would expect. There may be rational conduct even in the absence of rational motive. But as soon as we really wish to penetrate into motivation, the problem proves by no means simple. Within given social circumstances and habits, most of what people do every day will appear to them primarily from the point of view of duty carrying a social or a superhuman sanction. There is very little of conscious rationality, still less of hedonism and of individual egoism about it, and so much of it as may safely be said to exist is of comparatively recent growth. Nevertheless, as long as we confine ourselves to the great outlines of constantly repeated economic action, we may link it up with wants and the desire to satisfy them, on condition that we are careful to recognise that economic motive so defined varies in intensity very much in time; that it is society that shapes the particular desires we observe; that wants must be taken with reference to the group which the individual thinks of when deciding his course of action—the family or any other group, smaller or larger than the family; that action does not promptly follow upon desire but only more or less imperfectly corresponds to it; that the field of individual choice is always, though in very different ways and to very different degrees, fenced in by social habits or conventions and the like: it still remains broadly true that, within the circular flow, everyone adapts himself to his environment so as to satisfy certain given wants—of himself or others—as best he can. In all cases, the meaning of economic action is the satisfaction of wants in the sense that there would be no economic action if there were no wants. In the case of the circular flow, we may also think of satisfaction of wants as the normal motive.

The latter is not true for our type. In one sense, he may indeed be called the most rational and the most egotistical of all. For, as we have seen, conscious rationality enters much more into the carrying out of new plans, which themselves have to be worked out before they can be acted upon, than into the mere running of an established business, which is largely a matter of routine. And the typical entrepreneur is more self-centred than other types, because he relies less than they do on tradition and connection and because his characteristic task—theoretically as well as historically—consists precisely in breaking up old, and creating new, tradition. Although this applies primarily to his economic action, it also extends to the moral, cultural, and social consequences of it. It is, of course, no mere coincidence that the period of the rise of the entrepreneur type also gave birth to Utilitarianism.

But his conduct and his motive are “rational” in no other sense. And in no sense is his characteristic motivation of the hedonist kind. If we define hedonist motive of action as the wish to satisfy one’s wants, we may indeed make “wants” include any impulse whatsoever, just as we may define egoism so as to include all altruistic values too, on the strength of the fact that they also mean something in the way of self-gratification. But this would reduce our definition to tautology. If we wish to give it meaning, we must restrict it to such wants as are capable of being satisfied by the consumption of goods, and to that kind of satisfaction which is expected from it. Then it is no longer true that our type is acting on a wish to satisfy his wants.

For unless we assume that individuals of our type are driven along by an insatiable craving for hedonist satisfaction, the operations of Gossen’s law would in the case of business leaders soon put a stop to further effort. Experience teaches, however, that typical entrepreneurs retire from the arena only when and because their strength is spent and they feel no longer equal to their task. This does not seem to verify the picture of the economic man, balancing probable results against disutility of effort and reaching in due course a point of equilibrium beyond which he is not willing to go. Effort, in our case, does not seem to weigh at all in the sense of being felt as a reason to stop. And activity of the entrepreneurial type is obviously an obstacle to hedonist enjoyment of those kinds of commodity which are usually acquired by incomes beyond a certain size, because their “consumption” presupposes leisure. Hedonistically, therefore, the conduct which we usually observe in individuals of our type would be irrational.

This would not, of course, prove the absence of hedonistic motive. Yet it points to another psychology of non-hedonist character, especially if we take into account the indifference to hedonist enjoyment which is often conspicuous in outstanding specimens of the type and which is not difficult to understand.

First of all, there is the dream and the will to found a private kingdom, usually, though not necessarily, also a dynasty. The modern world really does not know any such positions, but what may be attained by industrial or commercial success is still the nearest approach to medieval lordship possible to modern man. Its fascination is specially strong for people who have no other chance of achieving social distinction. The sensation of power and independence loses nothing by the fact that both are largely illusions. Closer analysis would lead to discovering an endless variety within this group of motives, from spiritual ambition down to mere snobbery. But this need not detain us. Let it suffice to point out that motives of this kind, although they stand nearest to consumers’ satisfaction, do not coincide with it.

Then there is the will to conquer: the impulse to fight, to prove oneself superior to others, to succeed for the sake, not of the fruits of success, but of success itself. From this aspect, economic action becomes akin to sport—there are financial races, or rather boxing-matches. The financial result is a secondary consideration, or, at all events, mainly valued as an index of success and as a symptom of victory, the displaying of which very often is more important as a motive of large expenditure than the wish for the consumers’ goods themselves. Again we should find countless nuances, some of which, like social ambition, shade into the first group of motives. And again we are faced with a motivation characteristically different from that of “satisfaction of wants” in the sense defined above, or from, to put the same thing into other words, “hedonistic adaptation.”

Finally, there is the joy of creating, of getting things done, or simply of exercising one’s energy and ingenuity. This is akin to a ubiquitous motive, but nowhere else does it stand out as an independent factor of behavior with anything like the clearness with which it obtrudes itself in our case. Our type seeks out difficulties, changes in order to change, delights in ventures. This group of motives is the most distinctly anti-hedonist of the three.

Only with the first groups of motives is private property as the result of entrepreneurial activity an essential factor in making it operative. With the other two it is not. Pecuniary gain is indeed a very accurate expression of success, especially of relative success, and from the standpoint of the man who strives for it, it has the additional advantage of being an objective fact and largely independent of the opinion of others. These and other peculiarities incident to the mechanism of “acquisitive” society make it very difficult to replace it as a motor of industrial development, even if we would discard the importance it has for creating a fund ready for investment. Nevertheless it is true that the second and third groups of entrepreneurial motives may in principle be taken care of by other social arrangements not involving private gain from economic innovation. What other stimuli could be provided, and how they could be made to work as well as the “capitalistic” ones do, are questions which are beyond our theme. They are taken too lightly by social reformers, and are altogether ignored by fiscal radicalism. But they are not insoluble, and may be answered by detailed observation of the psychology of entrepreneurial activity, at least for given times and places.

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One such plateau runs from Boston to Washington. At the universities and laboratories situated along this range are found 46 percent of the American Nobel Prize winners in the sciences and 40 percent of the members of the National Academy of Sciences. A second range with its peaks runs along the California coast. C. P. Snow has written: “And now the scientific achievement of the United States is moving at a rate we all ought to marvel at. Think of the astonishing constellation of talent, particularly in the physical sciences, all down the California coast, from Berkeley and Stanford to Pasadena and Los Angeles. There is nothing like that concentration of talent anywhere in the world. It sometimes surprises Europeans to realize how much of the pure science of the entire West is being carried out in the United States. Curiously enough, it often surprises Americans too. At a guess, the figure is something like 80 percent, and might easily be higher.

The California mountain range has 36 percent of the Nobel laureates in science and 20 percent of the members of the National Academy of Sciences. The Big Ten and Chicago constitute a third range of academic peaks, with 10 percent of the Nobel laureates and 14 percent of the members of the National Academy of Sciences. These three groupings of universities—the East Coast, California, and the Big Ten and Chicago—currently produce over three quarters of the doctorates conferred in the United States. Another range may be in the process of development in the Texas-Louisiana area.

This concentration of talent partly follows history—the location of the older private and public universities. Partly it follows industrial strengths and population centers. But it also has its own logic. No one university can cover all specialties, or cover them well enough so that there is a sufficient cluster of close intellectual colleagues. The scholar dislikes intellectual isolation and good scholars tend to swarm together. These swarms are extraordinarily productive environments. No library can be complete; nor any graduate curriculum. Some laboratories, to be well used, must be used by more than one university. Thus the Big Ten and Chicago, through their Committee on Institutional Cooperation, are merging their library resources, creating a “common market” for graduate students, diversifying their research laboratories on a common-use basis, and parceling out foreign language specializations. Something similar is happening in the University of California system, and between Berkeley and Stanford. Harvard and M.I.T., Princeton and Pennsylvania, among others, run joint research enterprises.

These clustering universities, in turn, have clustering around them scientifically oriented industrial and governmental enterprises. To match the drawing power of the great metropolis, there now arrives the new Ideopolis. The isolated mountain can no longer dominate the landscape; the constellation is greater than the single star and adds to the brightness of the sky.

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