New Writing

I’ve had a few new pieces of writing come out over the past couple of months that I hope will be of interest to readers of this column. Here is a quick roundup. (You can find a full list of my recent publications on this page of my website).

In the spring issue of Liberties I have an essay called “The Life and Death of the Book Review.” Scholars have largely neglected the book review’s fascinating history. In the essay, I try to rectify the situation, going back to the first appearance of regular reviews in printed periodicals in the seventeenth century, and then taking the story up to the present. One of the largely forgotten journals I discuss is the amazing Acta Eruditorum, published in Leipzig (and in Latin!) for a century starting in 1682. It covered a wider range of books, in more detail, than any publication comes close to doing today. I also deal with such matters as the development of book reviewing into a profession in the nineteenth century, the British predilection for reviewing as blood sport, and the current crisis in reviewing. I also make the following argument: “The modern book review was born with the Enlightenment, and, indeed, expressed key Enlightenment values: a commitment to the exploration of new knowledge and new forms of artistic expression, free of censorship; a belief in open, passionate, critical debate; and, above all, an dedication to making the results of this exploration and debate accessible to a broad general public. It is no coincidence that the book review, as a cultural phenomenon, is in steep decline, at the moment when the last gleams of the Enlightenment itself increasingly recall the unsteady flickers of a guttering candle.”

Thankfully, one place where reviewing continues to flourish is The New York Review of Books, and I have pieces in a couple of recent issues. In the April 9 issue, I reviewed Mélanie Lamotte’s book By Flesh and Toil: How Sex, Race and Labor Shaped the Early French Empire. It is a fascinating, ambitious work that shows how greatly the construction of France’s first overseas empire depended on the cooperation, willing or unwilling, of indigenous and enslaved people, and of women. All the early European empires depended on this sort of cooperation, because the white men they sent out to the Americas and to what we now call the Global South mostly had few white female companions, and were hugely outnumbered by non-whites. The situation was most striking in the French empire. Although Britain had just one-third the population that France did, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it sent fourteen times as many people overseas. Lamotte has done remarkable research, and tries to read between the lines, “against the grain,” and “along the bias grain” of the archival sources. Even so, the book shows the limits of what historians can discover about this sort of subject. In many cases, crucial information simply never survived. Nor did the French—on whose records Lamotte largely depends—always devote much effort to understanding the people on whose labor their empire depended.

In the NYRB’s April 23 issue, I review the wonderful exhibition at the Bard Graduate School devoted to the nineteenth-century French architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, who spearheaded the restoration of Notre Dame cathedral in the nineteenth century. After the disastrous 2019 fire, the French government rejected proposals to do something new with Notre Dame (including one quasi-serious idea for building a swimming pool on the roof), but instead to restore it to its pre-fire state. This means, in essence, that Viollet-le-Duc has now restored it twice. Casual visitors mostly never realize how much the cathedral today owes to the nineteenth century as well as to the Middle Ages. This exhibition, the first major one ever devoted to Viollet-le-Duc in the United States, can’t by itself rectify the situation, but visitors (and still more, readers of the beautiful, copious catalog edited by curators Barry Bergdoll and Martin Bressani) will get a full, thoughtful introduction to the restoration. It sets Viollet-le-Duc’s work on Notre Dame within a sweeping reconsideration of his career, and especially the way he worked out his ideas in drawing, from early tours of France and Italy to late projects in the service of Emperor Napoleon III. Viollet-le-Duc emerges from it as a consummate Romantic, whose idea of architectural restoration (quite controversial, then and since) involved returning buildings to their “essential” form rather than to any particular moment in their history. His search for such an “essence” in Notre Dame and other medieval structures reflected his belief that the Gothic expressed, in a mystical way, the genius of the French race, and the exhibition does not shy away from a full consideration of his racial ideas, which were all too typical of his time. But at the same time, this visitor at least came away deeply admiring of how Viollet-le-Duc had transformed the cathedral that Victor Hugo memorably described as “a vast symphony of stone.”

Finally, in February, in the internet publication H-Diplo, I published a review of Dan Edelstein’s important new book The Revolution to Come: A History of an Idea from Thucydides to Lenin. It is not only the most complete and thoughtful history ever written of the idea of “revolution,” but also offers provocative new takes on several modern revolutions, including the American and the French. Although the name does not appear in the subtitle, the key figure for Edelstein is the ancient Greek historian Polybius, who used the word anacyclosis to describe violent change from one sort of regime to another, in what could potentially be an endless cycle. Early modern political thinkers rediscovered the concept, translating anacyclosis as revolution (or a cognate thereof). And they saw revolutions as problems, to which the Polybian solution lay in the construction of a stable, mixed constitution. In the Enlightenment, however, the emergence of a new vision of historical time, centered on the idea that societies could make steady progress, led to a startling change. Revolutions ceased to be problems and became solutions—the way to overcome conservative resistance and drive progress forward. For Edelstein, the American Revolution was the last great hurrah of “Polybianism”—its leading figures still hoped above all to develop a stable government that would prevent violent change in the future. The French Revolution, by contrast, he sees as the first great modern revolution, led by figures who defined themselves as “revolutionaries” (itself a new coinage of the period) and who hoped to make use of violent change to thrust their country into a glorious future. I had some quibbles with Edelstein’s interpretation but overall recommended the book very highly.