A correspondent who goes by the moniker “Gennadiy Gessen” emailed me on November 17
th and wanted to ask a litany of questions. What follows is the interaction, which is quite lengthy.
Gessen: I read with interest your article on Veterans Today on Putin and the “New World Order”. While you make some halfway sound points when you discuss objective morality and the transvaluation of values in the West, your reverence for Putin as the imagined vanguard against the “New World Order” seems to me to be incoherent, and flatly ignorant of many of Putin’s own positions. Your worldview is a strangely Manichaean fantasy permeated with an attitude towards Putin which approximates an unholy mix between idolatry and fascist servility. You would be wise to consider how this worldview squares with the facts.
Theory of the Novel
Instructors: Armstrong and Garréta
Intended for graduate students and advanced undergraduates who want to pursue some area of novel, fiction, or narrative studies, this course examines a set of concepts that should provide them access to 1) the modes of thinking that characterize novels across the modern and contemporary periods and several different national traditions, 2) the various ways that critical theory has defined those concepts, and 3) reading the novel as a concept-driven argument in relation to other disciplinary discourses, especially critical theory.
The course begins by considering a long and robust tradition of critical theory focused on the novel. Why does the attempt to think about the modern world in dialectical terms encounter some kind of historical limit where that thinking stalls or breaks down? On what basis do novels nevertheless continue to be written, taught in classrooms, and circulated for the pleasure and edification of literat
Prof. Joel Baden works widely in the field of Hebrew Bible, with special attention to the literary history of the Pentateuch. He is the author, most recently, of The Book of Exodus: A Biography (Princeton University Press, 2019). His other books include J, E, and the Redaction of the Pentateuch (Mohr Siebeck, 2009); The Composition of the Pentateuch: Renewing the Documentary Hypothesis (Yale University Press, 2012); The Promise to the Patriarchs (Oxford University Press, 2013); The Historical David: The Real Life of an Invented Hero (HarperOne, 2013); Reconceiving Infertility: Biblical Perspectives on Procreation and Childlessness (with Candida Moss; Princeton University Press, 2015); and Bible Nation: The United States of Hobby Lobby(with Candida Moss; Princeton University Press, 2017). He is the co-editor of the volumes The Strata of the Priestly Writings: Contemporary Debate and Future Directions (TVZ, 2009) and Sibyls, Scriptures, and Scrolls (Brill, 2017).
Stephen Broadberry 20 April 2021
As a result of recent work on historical national accounting, it is now possible to establish more firmly the timing of the Great Divergence of living standards between Europe and Asia in the 18th century. This column shows that there was a European Little Divergence as Britain and the Netherlands overtook Italy and Spain, and an Asian Little Divergence as Japan overtook China and India. The Great Divergence occurred because Japan grew more slowly than Britain and the Netherlands starting from a lower level, and because of a strong negative growth trend in Qing dynasty China.
Jan Luiten van Zanden
Francesca Borgonovi, Elodie Andrieu
Social scientists have long recognised that economic growth is not just a function of physical or human capital, but also of the ability of the population to collaborate and exchange knowledge. Places where people trust each other and form dense informal and formal networks can sometimes prosper and grow well beyond expectations. Putnam et al. (1993) classically explained differences in governance quality and prosperity between Northern and Southern Italy drawing on the stronger and sounder civic traditions of the North of the country. Later, Putnam argued that the erosion of social capital in the US represented a challenge for democracy and wellbeing (Putnam 2000). Various subsequent studies have shown that variations in social capital explain differences across regions (Beugelsdijk and Schaik 2005, (Storper 2013) and even in the spread of Covid-19 (Bartscher et al., 2020). It therefore comes as no surprise that the World Bank, the OECD and t