CHESS Workshop Responses from Previous Years

Amy Dunagin (Music History and Renaissance Studies) response to Daniel Breslau (Virginia Tech, Science, Technology and Society), “The Pricing Machine: The Science and Politics of a Reflexive Market,” originally posted April 5, 2014

In his paper “The Pricing Machine: The Science and politics of a Reflexive Market,” Professor Breslau sets out to historicize the role of economics in the formation of designed markets. Designed markets, he claims, result from both the logic of political, legal, and technological processes of market formation, and from the logic of instrumental-rational state intervention.

Breslau notes that recent scholarship has “drawn attention to the role of economics in the constitution of economic institutions and markets in particular,” and some of this work focuses on the concept of ‘performativity,’ which casts the relationship between economics and the economy in a new light: specifically, he writes, in this view “economics is not of interest as a representation of the real economy…Rather, the economy performs economic theory.” Breslau finds that the literature on performativity has “not accounted for the novelty of market design,” but has rather “associated the performativity of economics with market formation in general.” He seeks to “isolate the specific contribution of economics, and what is distinctive about designed markets,” by distinguishing between generic legal, political, and technological market-building processes and the scientific formulation and justification of state intervention,” a process that he claims has promoted the dramatic growth in the economics profession.

Breslau observes that this new rationale for state intervention ran the risk of shattering “the belief in a depoliticized market,” and thus depended on a “re-depoliticization” of the economy, accomplished by “states aligning with scientific rationality, particularly that of economists.” This type of justification of state intervention developed in part in response to a particular set of problems facing electricity markets, and the result was a new type of institution: the reflexive market, which Breslau defines as “a concrete synthesis of the logic of just exchange and the logic of scientific instrumental-rational intervention, a synthesis of liberalism and technocracy. “These are markets that are interventions,” he writes. They are “legitimated,” he argues, “not by means of the inherent justice of equal exchanges, freely entered into, but by the economic logic of their aggregate efficiency.”

To describe the unique features of reflexive markets, he turns to a particular case: the introduction of Locational-Marginal Pricing, or LMP, in US electricity markets. In the mid-1990s, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission issued an order that would reorganize the power industry, which had been dominated by regulated monopolies – vertically-integrated companies that both produced and distributed power, to a new system in which “the transmission and distribution systems would remain natural monopolies subject to regulation,” while power generation would become subject to competitive markets. Because of the particular nature of electricity, however, pricing was a very difficult problem to solve. Electricity cannot be stored economically, and is therefore more prone to congestion, which affects price. And, electricity does not move in a discoverable path from producer to consumer, (as does, for example, gas), but is subject to loop flow, making the pricing problem even more complicated.

The solution, Breslau writes, relied on earlier work of a group of MIT engineers who developed “the first comprehensive model for pricing electricity on a real-time basis.” Their process “allows system operators to model the power flows on the transmission system at any moment in time,” in other words, as the load (or demand) for energy fluctuates, operators can respond to those changes in real time by adjusting the power output.

The MIT group’s pricing algorithms could work well in a situation in which a single monopoly utility calculated spot prices at regular intervals at thousands of nodes on the transmission system; but it was much less applicable to a newly deregulated system with multiple generators. Breslau gives a quote comparing this idea to giving everyone on a 747 a joystick and expecting them to be able to land the plane. [you need centralization to make this work] The solution to this problem, Breslau writes, “involved integrating centralized calculation of locational prices with centralized dispatch of power,” a system that is widely used today known as Locational Marginal Pricing, or LMP. LMP involves buyers and sellers of power projecting how much power they expect to buy or sell per hour, and on the basis of these bids an operator determines the lowest-cost way to balance supply and demand per hour, taking into account local prices for several thousand nodes.

Breslau describes the political conflict surrounding the introduction of LMP in the US, focusing on the first power system to adopt it, the Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Maryland Interconnection, or PJM. Those within PJM who supported it, Brelsau suggests, “probably understood [LMP] as a way to manage the political environment around their organizational field.” Federal regulators had a mandate to ensure that electricity prices were “just and reasonable,” and in the mid-1990s, Breslau argues, “they came to redefine ‘just and reasonable’ in economic terms”; they “showed their preference for a market that would yield prices consistent with the predictions of economic theory, rather than leave market pricing to a disorganized and decentralized bilateral trade.” Furthermore, he finds that “the reasons for the adoption of this design are simultaneously technical and political. The prices determined by this system yield optimum transactions for all the parties involved, making the market “unassailable in its aggregate effects.” This achieves the desired scientific-rational foundation that serves as a justification of state intervention.

Breslau concludes that we can expect to see reflexive markets where markets are expected not just to protect property rights and ensure just exchanges, but also to produce “aggregate social benefits.” “The neoliberal order,” he writes, “in light of the reflexive market hypothesis, is marked not only by the retreat of state intervention and the liberation of markets, but by the proliferation of markets as interventions.” Reflexive markets provide a “technical and apolitical framework” for state intervention in the economy. The imperative that these reflexive markets be efficient with regard to an impersonal standard,” he concludes, explains the growth of the field of market design.

In response to this very interesting paper, I had a couple of questions:

1) First, I am curious about how other examples of reflexive markets differ from the case study you describe in the paper?

2) You identify reflexive markets as a new institution, and contextualize the development of your case study of this new institution as a response to a particular set of problems having to do with the nature of electricity and how to price it, and a set of political and economic circumstances surrounding this industry. You also frame the development of this institution as a kind of theoretical solution to the problem of legitimizing state intervention in the economy. I’m curious about broader social or political reasons why a need was felt for this new kind of institution, and especially for a logic of instrumental-rational state intervention at this point in time. In response to what economic and political needs did this new institution develop?

Susan Morrow, (German Languages and Literatures) response to Mark Phillips (Carleton University, history), “History Painting Redistanced: from Benjamin West to David Wilkie,” originally posted April 4, 2014

Professor Phillips’s paper is driven by a central concern with what defined the historicity of British history painting. His core analytical tool is the concept of historical distance: by tracing the way history’s “distance” was represented in eighteenth and nineteenth century painting, Phillips is able to detect changing measures of historical truth within art and differing views of its relationship to historical writing.

The paper starts out from two complexities undergirding the issue of distance in history painting. First, while history painting occupied the highest rank among the hierarchically ordered genres of early modern British painting, the definition of this genre was itself unclear, since what distinguished it was not just its historical theme but also the premium it placed on what Prof. Phillips calls “grandeur” and “distance.” Second, the paper points to an ambiguous line between fact and fiction given by the term “history/istoria” in 18th century painting, so that the conventions of visual representations of history did not necessarily coincide with a history writing bound by documented fact until the 19th Century. Hence the paper’s central argument: as a representation itself subject to changing notions of history, history painting maintained the characteristic elevation of its genre by reorienting itself according to the “political needs and historical sensibilities of each age” (Phillips, 2). The paper’s argument is then structured by the contrast in historical sensibilities that it argues are visible in the work of Benjamin West and David Wilkie, two history painters a generation apart, and the effect of the argument is thus to show that historical distancing is present in their work not as a uniform relationship they both establish between the present and the past, but rather as the evolving conception of this relationship itself.

In order to understand West’s stance on historical distance, Phillips places it in the context of 18th century neoclassical history painting, whose exponent, Joshua Reynolds, viewed the truths of art as different in kind from those of history—that difference being that art’s general, ideal truth need not be faithful to particular facts and details. The ability to deviate from the historical record in pursuit of “sacred history, ancient myth, dynastic allegories, the memory of Rome and Greece”(3) was indeed the criterion of grandeur for Reynolds’s “Great Style.” West’s declaration that “the same truth that guides the pen of the historian should govern the pencil of the artist” (4) thus represents a break with Reynolds’s view of history painting as beholden solely to ideal truth. Nonetheless, Phillips maintains that West’s position was a moderate one whose incorporation of historical fact still relied heavily on heroic and sacred imagery to mediate the past and render its significance elevated.

Phillips identifies various mechanisms of such distancing in West’s Death of General Wolfe, whose depiction of contemporary dress was certainly a nod to historical fact. Chief among the painting’s other devices, however, is a formal arrangement including the figuration of the general as the dying Christ and of an indigenous warrior as his silent counterpart, himself both emblem of America’s past and witness of its future. As Philips puts it, such figures are “at once highly idealized and historically precise” (8) because they trade “the artificiality of traditional allegory” for “natural symbols”—finding within the very particulars of the historical event, as it were, the means of elevating its history to myth.

If West’s challenge to the neoclassical priority of idealization in fact still needed to transfigure historical particulars into recognizable icons and heroic symbols, then a history painting genuinely committed to facts rather than ideals, Phillips argues, is found not in West but in Wilkie. In works like Village Politicians and the Gazette of Waterloo, Wilkie combined faithfulness to quotidian detail with conceptual and formal devices linking the everyday to matters of national concern. In the Gazette, for instance, Phillips focuses on Wilkie’s composition, which suspends the bustling crowd in a moment of shared anticipation as they first hear the news of Napoleon’s defeat. The unity of this moment is embodied in the canvas’s focal point: the luminous document that delivers the news, a “natural symbol” like West’s indigenous warrior, yet one that no longer brings together historical precision and a heroic order but that rather combines the utterly familiar with an extraordinary outburst of patriotic sentiment.

Phillips devotes the remainder of the paper to a comparison of Wilkie’s reception by two of his contemporaries to illustrate their divergent views of history. One of these, John Burnet, was an artist and neoclassicist who nonetheless differed from earlier figures like Reynolds in that the nationalist political realities of the nineteenth-century led him to “plac[e] the secular state in the position once held by less worldly symbols of the ideal” (14). In his view, Wilkie’s work only sometimes rose above the level of genre painting onto that of “history,” and an abiding resistance to public art in Britain indeed made it difficult for any painter to successfully venture beyond private, domestic subject-matter. Wilkie’s Biographer, Allan Cunningham, tells a different story, celebrating Wilkie’s Village Politicians as the result of imagination, capable of expressing the highly consequential political sentiments of its ordinary figures. It was in virtue of such evident inventiveness that Cunningham classified Wilkie’s works as historical or not, maintaining the neoclassical hierarchy of genres but reinterpreting it with more romantic criteria.

With respect to the central problem of how to define the distance that gave history painting its status atop the hierarchy of genres, Phillips’s conclusion is thus that the concept of “history” and with it the measures of the relationship between past and present, public and private, ideal and fact were themselves undergoing reinterpretation in the context of secular, nationalist, political transitions in the 19th century. History painting maintained its distance despite changing its scene, because the conception of distance was itself in flux: Wilkie was, as Phillips puts it, “a product of the historiographical impulses of his times” (21). The paper’s contribution is thus to dispels the notion that history painting was a monolithic genre reflecting an allegorical, sacred, or idealized view of history that must be sharply distinguished from the factual commitments of historical writing, and to shows that changing conceptions of history were being worked out and expressed on canvas just as much as in writing. Furthermore, in connection to Professor Phillips’s own methodological reorientation of history from an emphasis on prose narrative to “history’s mediatory purpose,” this suggests that a range of representations other than written ones play a bigger role in mediating the past to us than might otherwise be acknowledged.

I’d like to finish by posing three questions. First, the paper alludes several times to historiographical thinking associated with Hume and the Scottish Enlightenment as preparing the way for Wilkie’s new brand of history painting. Here I’m just curious to hear more about these currents of historical thought and how they relate to Wilkie’s representations. Second, what exactly is the priority of visual versus written mediation of history? To what extent does history painting reflect the historiography of its time and to what extent does this historiography draw upon innovations in visual representation in order to rethink historical distance and the significance of the past? For example, I wonder how the changing notion of distance is related to the change from sacred or heroic allegory to what the paper calls “natural symbolism.” That leaves me with my final question: what conception of nature or naturalness do such symbols entail in contrast to a sacred or dynastic history whose symbols have come to appear artificial? 

Amanda Gregg (economics) response to Sigrun Kahl (Yale, political science), “Just Deserts: The Moral Economy of Welfare in Europe and the United States,” originally posted Feb. 28, 2014 

Thank you for inviting me to give this comment. I loved the paper, which is the beginning section of a book project.

The book’s goal is to understand how different societies view their impoverished citizens and how those societies then care for their most vulnerable. The focus is on welfare programs, which the book defines as “the means-tested and tax financed safety net of last resort for working age, able-bodied individuals who have no other source of income” (Kahl 32). Kahl explains variation in welfare provision by introducing what she calls the “moral economy theory of the welfare state,” in which “the source of variation is the judgment of need, ability, and willingness: who can make a claim, what they have to do in return, and whether they are indeed doing their part” (31).

The selection begins by introducing our two protagonists, Arno and Karl, whose stories frame much of the Introduction. Both German and both on welfare for much of their lives, Arno and Karl’s stories are completely different. Arno is pretty memorable. Perfectly able to work but evading his captors at every step, he has a great punch line dismissing the value of work, which I will not repeat. Karl, on the other, wants nothing more than the opportunity to work and stop depending on state assistance, but his illnesses and bad luck hold him back. Their stories motivate a key issue: “whether societies believe that welfare recipients are more like Arno or more like Karl – lazy freeloaders who should be punished, or victims of circumstances beyond their control who should be helped” (Kahl 3).

Arno and Karl, however, both fit into a particular moment in the history of welfare provision. After the Second World War, writes Kahl, the creation of unemployment insurance separated the poor from the unemployed, so welfare did not focus on reintroducing beneficiaries to the workforce (Kahl 5). However, this separation could only work in an economy without long-term, structural unemployment. When these programs encountered the problems of “outdated and eroding skills and lack of work experience,” they found themselves stuck between “a rock and a hard place” (6).

Therefore, countries have to choose along the “welfare to work” spectrum, and their choices turn out to be relatively stable over time. In social democratic countries like Sweden and Denmark those classified as “difficult to place in employment” are provided with a wide array of services to get them back on their feet. The US, by contrast, has no federal program for those are simply poor and not working. French programs (which would fall along the conservative spectrum) seem the most generous. What explains these differences? Or, as the author puts it, “given that the problems in countries’ welfare systems and the characteristics of the least employable are very similar across countries, why is it that certain solutions are self-evident to policy makers and practitioners in one country but not in another country?” (Kahl 14) 

The key to explaining these differences is how societies view the “deservingness” of the poor. Generally, the most deserving are those who are willing but unable, and the least deserving are the able and unwilling. This idea has implications: differences in attitudes about deservingness should correspond to differences in welfare policy, which can be supported by exploring variation across countries, over time, within countries, and across policies. She breaks down this idea of “deservingness” into a few variables she can quantity: the characteristics of the poor themselves, how people perceive those characteristics, and how willing people are to support poor people. Economists would frame this issue as a moral hazard problem. The outcome, in this case income, depends on a combination of effort and chance, and it is difficult to distinguish which one is more important. Deservingness, in this sense, is a way to perhaps classify people’s gut reaction to problem of disentangling effort and luck.

The book will use four data sources: first, what I would call macro data on the size and provision of welfare programs across countries and relevant macroeconomic variables like unemployment; second, public opinion and survey data across countries; third, information from interviews, including interviews with politicians and administrators and results from focus groups; and fourth, published documents like speeches, laws, and debates (Kahl 37). Putting all of this information together in one place already represents a real accomplishment.

From here I move on to the first chapter, a theoretical exploration of the welfare state, drawing on political theory, history, and even economics experiments. The central goal of the chapter, as I see it, is to reconnect the ideas of rights and responsibilities, and show that they can exist at the same time. The key controversy is whether social rights can be conditional: in other words, whether it makes sense to say that we all have a certain right to a level of subsistence but that that “right” is conditional on seeking work.

The chapter begins with an account of the transition from the so-called moral economy to the market economy of the industrial age. Reflecting on this transition led Polanyi to advocate the de-commodification of labor, or what T.H. Marshall later calls this the social rights of citizenship. Welfare-to-work, to fans of Marshall, contradicts the theory of the welfare state, since rights cannot be made conditional. Kahl’s contribution here is to point out that “Marshall saw rights and duties as a union; Marshallians adopted only the rights.” (52) Further, evidence from economics experiments and anthropology shows, as she write, “how deeply embedded the principles of sharing, cooperation, and punishment are into both traditional and modern societies” (58). I do not have enough time to do this section justice, but the experiments are revealing, and they might be fun to try with your friends.

Let me leave the summary here and pose a few questions for the author.

First, a very small question: There is an interesting account in the Introduction of foreign observers coming to study the Wisconsin Works program. A German interviewee states that “`one can see’ the negative effects of the work first approach ‘very well in America.’” If you remember: what, exactly, were those “negative effects”? 

Second, the introduction seems to focus on differences across countries, but of course, within the same society, there can be both Arnos and Karls. You mention in the introduction that the book will also consider identifiable populations within the same country. Can you give us a preview of those results? 

Aaron T. Pratt (English) response to Sarah Kinkel (Yale, Lewis Walpole Library), “The Royal Navy and the modernization of the British Empire, 1740-1776,” originally posted Jan. 27, 2014 

Sarah’s paper, “The Royal Navy and the modernization of the British Empire, 1740-1776,” asks us to reconsider both the importance of the Royal Navy in the period before the Revolutionary War and its relationship to the larger ideological and discursive trends that led up to it. Sarah, ultimately, wants us to resist the critical tendency to reduce changes in the Navy to what she characterizes as “exogenous forces,” and instead see this branch of the military as developing from and alongside ideological currents that had already begun to produce resistance from colonists before the Seven Years’ War. For her, the increasing professionalization and authoritarian character of the Royal Navy had as much—or more—to do with the ways British subjects conceived of the proper relationship between the government and themselves as it did with the need to respond to particular exigencies that arose from the difficulty of maintaining an empire. As Sarah herself puts it, the battles over what the military should be and how it should be run originated from “an internal logic rather than an external catalyst.” If, as she says, a different political party had ended up in charge, the Royal Navy—and, I suspect she would want to suggest, the nature of the British Empire—would have “looked extremely different”; “it might or might not have played a role in sparking an imperial rebellion.” 

Sarah opens her paper with something of a polemic, arguing that scholarship to this point has either ignored or misunderstood the role of the Navy in the period leading up to the Revolution. Traditional accounts of the Revolution, Sarah suggests, divide roughly into two camps, the “whig” and the “progressive.” The former argues that the Revolution was caused by an ideological rift over the nature of the constitution: just as in a failed marriage, the two sides of the Atlantic developed “irreconcilable differences.” In this story, the Navy was a neutral force and was largely unrelated to the central issues: it just protected liberties, however conceived. In the latter camp, “the progressive,” the problem came down to money: who could and could not collect taxes. Here, the Navy was involved because it enforced the collection of customs, but animus toward it had nothing to do with it being the Navy in particular: it was just one of many tax collectors.

Against these positions—and against more recent accounts that assign a role in the drama to the army but not the Navy—Sarah tells us “that we […] need to understand what the Navy meant to American radicals, who were largely located in the very port cities the Navy was most able to affect directly.” Later she writes, “The Navy [was] a perceived barometer for the virtue and vitality of British Society”; to contemporaries, “it was a microcosm of the social order.” Sarah’s argument agrees, yes, that there were some “socioeconomic concerns at stake, but that they were mediated by ideology”; “when colonists resisted the navy, they were rejecting something larger than taxation.” This “something larger,” we learn, was an ideology that she labels the “authoritarian whig” ideology. The authoritarian whigs, who came to control the Royal Navy, saw the cause of problems, both in society at large and in the Navy in particular, as the result of a weakening of traditional hierarchies and obedience. The problem, for them, was the lower classes, who caused disorder. Against the authoritarian whigs were the “patriots” and the “radicals”, who believed that the hierarchy itself was the problem, that the solution was “popular” involvement, which would weed out things like corruption and class-based cronyism. Whereas the authoritarian whigs saw the problem as coming from below; the patriots and radicals saw it as coming from above. And they saw the professionalization of the Navy and its attendant hierarchy as giving too much power to government ministers.

The “authoritarian whigs” ended up getting their way when it came to the Navy, and their reforms, to use Sarah’s words, “reinvigorated the Navy’s fortunes.” It had suffered a number of defeats before them, and it saw increased victories after. So, quoting Sarah: “the authoritarian whigs saw their naval reforms as only part of a larger project of refashioning Anglo-imperial society into a unified but hierarchically organized whole. […] From the 1740s, the professional navy had ideological ties to a particular model of ordered, hierarchical governance and to a centralized disciplined empire. From 1760, authoritarian whigs used it to attempt to impose that model of governance on the empire.” It began to enforce controversial taxes, even after authorities on land gave up in the face of increasing resistance—the Navy became the empire’s police force. By controlling transportation to and from the colonies, the Navy “was more effective than other means of exerting colonial authority.” Again, Sarah reiterates, the “debate was not simply over paying increased taxes to Britain. At issue was whether to have a standing, professional navy, and how that might influence the relationship between government and society.” 

As the paper articulates them, the payoffs of this story are that the changes to the Royal Navy were very much a choice, part of a coherent political project to reassert hierarchies and instill obedience, a political project rooted in the first half of the eighteenth century and even earlier. And that this choice, as Sarah concludes, “led to the fracturing of the very empire it had helped to acquire.” 

I will end with two questions. Earlier, I mentioned two terms—“barometer” and “microcosm”—terms that Sarah uses to describe the relationship between the Navy and the larger political situation. They imply that the case of the Navy stands as a useful example or instance that helps us see or identify the central ideological tension of the period. Here there is not necessarily any strong causal claim: that is, the Navy qua Navy isn’t necessarily a particularly important agent of the changes we see. Later, though, as I quoted, Sarah says that the Navy was the strongest agent of colonial authority. And at the end she also says that the Navy was “at the heart of the authoritarian whig imperial project,” which suggests that it was quite central indeed. Sarah, could you make a little more clear just how strong of a causal role you think the reformations of the Royal Navy played in the story of the Revolution, in relation to other causes that historians have put forward? 

Finally, I’ll ask the “biggest” question I have, a question that brings us back to Sarah’s title, “The Royal Navy and the modernization of the British Empire, 1740-1776”: how does the story told about changes to the structure of Royal Navy and their connection to “authoritarian Whig” ideology impact our understanding of “the modernization of the British Empire”? 

“Modernization” is not a word that appears in the body of the paper itself, and as a non-specialist who works on the sixteenth and early to mid seventeenth centuries, I find myself wanting to know what precisely “modernization” means in this context. What about the professionalization of the Navy or the desire for a more authoritarian and hierarchical model of empire is “modern”? I offer this question not as a challenge to the paper, but rather as an opportunity to tease out its larger implications for how we understand historical change. Thank you.

Ryan Cecil Jobson (African American Studies and Anthropology) comment on Orlando Patterson, (Harvard, sociology), “Institutions, Colonialism, and Economic Development: The Acemoglu-Johnson-Robinson Thesis in Light of the Caribbean Experience, ”originally posted Jan. 25, 2014

On October 4, 2013, the landmark case of Shanique Myrie v. Barbados reached its conclusion when the Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ) ruled in favor of the plaintiff to the tune of $3.6m Jamaican dollars. Myrie, a Jamaican, brought the case before the court following her detainment and physical harassment by Barbadian border officials who effectively violated her “right of entry without harassment” as a CARICOM national under the Revised Treaty of Chaguaramas. In her testimony, Myrie contended that she was denied entry to Barbados without due process, subjected to a painful and demeaning body cavity search, and held overnight in an insanitary detention cell prior to her deportation. While the judgment cited insufficient evidence to substantiate Myrie’s claim that she was discriminated against due to her nationality, her testimony nonetheless recounted the verbal taunts of a female border officer who labeled Jamaicans as “liars,” and castigated Jamaican women who “only come here to steal our men and carry drugs into our country.” In the eyes of many, the case signaled the fracturing of regional unity in the Caribbean and the intensification of an anti-Jamaican sentiment. Yet as an anthropologist, my interest in the case was equally piqued by the quotidian ascription of cultural decency to Barbadians and abject moral and sexual pathology to Jamaicans. The alleged encounter between Myrie and the unnamed border official thus indexes a troubling thesis concerning a uniquely Jamaican culture of violence characterized, in the words of economist Cedric Wilson, by “a new breed of criminals without soul or conscience” (cited in Thomas 2011:54).[1] Today, it is common parlance in the Caribbean to hail Barbados for its successful transition into political independence and to posit Jamaica as a cautionary tale of a fragile postcolonial state—evinced most recently by the massacre of 73 civilians during the extradition of Tivoli Gardens don Christopher “Dudus” Coke to the U.S. on narcotics and arms trafficking charges in May 2010. However, as anthropologist Deborah Thomas opines, the viability of such culturalist arguments rests upon an equally disagreeable “epistemological violence” that “derails…a global political economic analysis that would frame violence in Jamaica within a more historical and relational context.”[2] In this instance, our capacity to evaluate the global political landscape remains hampered by a blackboxing of the postcolonial state, in which societies forged out of transoceanic markets of peoples and goods are wrested from their colonial origins and isolated as analytical units.

Among the primary offenders are to be found among proponents of a doctrine of “failed states,” which seeks to identify causal factors behind the erosion of state legitimacy and absence of a robust central government. The Failed States Index, published annually since 2005 by the think-tank Fund for Peace, is especially noteworthy in its unabashed privileging of endogenous indicators of state vulnerability, neglecting the geopolitical relationships between states and the historical legacies of colonialism that, for the many of the world’s nation-states, only formally dissolved in the past half century. One encouraging, albeit incomplete, stream of thought has emerged in the form of the institutionalist camp that Prof. Patterson generously interrogates in his paper. The Acemoglu-Johnson-Robinson (AJR) Thesis holds closely to the institutionalist view that better institutions correlate positively to economic performance, but differently posits exogenous factors derived from colonial era—in this instance, settler mortality rates—as a predictor of institutional development and, in turn, contemporary economic success. As Prof. Patterson notes, this thesis has proved resilient in the face of critics, but can be further nuanced. Ironically, it is the institutionalists that appear most unclear on what is meant by institutions, a shortcoming that bears noteworthy implications for the comparison he draws.

For Prof. Patterson, a lesson is to be derived from the divergent trajectories of Jamaica and Barbados in the aftermath of political independence in 1962 and 1966, respectively. While both Caribbean nation-states share a centuries-long history of British colonialism and plantation slavery, similar ethnic demographics, and membership in the CARICOM Single Market and Economy, their economic trajectories diverge sharply, with Barbados now boasting a near threefold advantage in per capita GDP. The key here lies in a unstated distinction between declaratory and procedural knowledge of institutions—amounting to the difference between “knowing the rules of” and “knowing how to play” the institutional game—with both nations holding the former, and Jamaica comparatively lacking in the latter. Prof. Patterson attributes this discrepancy to differences in functional management of formally similar institutions such as the plantation system due to marked differences in the geography of each island. The argument for geography provides, in my view, an especially innovative sociological critique of the institutionalists by calling a new and compelling variable into play. Here, Prof. Patterson rehearses an argument regarding the pervasiveness of autonomous maroon settlements in the mountainous hinterlands of Jamaica, and the stark absence of such communities in Barbados due to its flat topography. As a result, the enslaved population in Jamaica was reproduced primarily through import and often allocated provision grounds to cultivate its own crops for subsistence and limited sale in market. In Barbados, by contrast, complete surveillance of the plantation inaugurated an economy founded in slave rearing and the intensified transmission of European cultural and institutional norms among the enslaved. Put crudely, the technologies of plantation management in Jamaica led to the emergence of a substantial rural peasantry after emancipation, while the panoptic character of the Barbadian plantation complex allowed its structure to persist long after abolition and set the stage for a deeper proliferation of procedural knowledge of British colonial institutions.

I am quite convinced by Prof. Patterson’s argument, which ultimately credits “disciplined policy choices” implemented by Barbados in the wake of the oil spikes of 1973 and 1990 for its exceptional economic stability. But understanding discipline in its Foucaultian instantiation suggests that this perhaps constitutes a version of what scholars of Middle Eastern petrostates regard as a “ruling bargain,” in which draconian free market reforms are embraced in service of greater, yet provisional, access to international capital. Given that the key period of divergence between the two countries occurred during Michael Manley’s democratic socialist experiment in Jamaica, we might consider not simply why Barbados elected to make such “disciplined choices,” but also why democratic socialism took hold in Jamaica when it did. Despite frequent diagnoses of an absence of state legitimacy in Jamaica, which Prof. Patterson roundly dismisses in his article, I will belabor his observation that Jamaicans “are fervently nationalistic.” It is worth postulating, then, that the relative autonomy of a Jamaican peasantry after emancipation laid the foundation for an emergent nationalism prior to formal decolonization, one that later awarded Manley’s friendly gestures toward the Black Power and Rastafari movements and revolutionary socialist aphorisms of “Better Mus’ Come” and “Giving Power to the People” with popular currency in the elections of 1972. Conversely, even as an independent nation, Barbados continues to enjoy the sardonic title of “Little England,” colloquially implying an ersatz nationalism that thinly veils a neocolonial subservience to the free market interests of the metropole. Without submitting to regional stereotypes such as those enacted in the Myrie case recounted earlier, the influence of geography on the distinct manifestations of postcolonial nationalism, and nationalism more generally, may offer fruitful avenues for additional research.

I want to close my comments by considering another way in which the Caribbean experience that Prof. Patterson’s so usefully deploys may further inform, or perhaps complicate, contemporary indicators of economic development and state legitimacy. As plantation colonies, the Caribbean as we know it was born out of a capitalist imperative “to create a periphery,”[3] a periphery from which imperial powers could produce and extract necessary resources and commodities. On this note, my own research on the petroleum industry in Trinidad has led me to revisit the neglected insights of the New World Group, a cohort of Caribbean social scientists—to which Prof. Patterson was a contributor, I might add—that detailed a continuity between the logic of the plantation economy to perpetually “shift terrain” to new frontiers of agricultural production, and the contemporary pursuit of new resource frontiers and technologies of extraction such as tar sands and hydraulic fracturing.[4] Perhaps, heeding this line of thinking, a broad range of colonies may be understood as “extractive,” rather than simply “settlement” or “elite settlement” colonies. It is merely the technologies and institutional management of extraction that vary, as in the examples of Jamaica and Barbados.

What Prof. Patterson’s critique demands most centrally, I believe, is greater attention to the sociohistorical particulars of colonial projects and their sustained influence in the present. The Caribbean, perhaps more so than any other region, lays bare the bankrupt logic by which nation-states are sequestered as analytical units instead of probing the relations between them. In light of Prof. Patterson’s contribution, we might consider the ways in which invocations of “the state” come to obscure the historical conditions of its emergence and the specific institutions it is constituted by. Does “the state” as an object of social scientific inquiry constitute an abstraction that obscures more than it illuminates? And what are the stakes of this “epistemological violence,” per Deborah Thomas, that demands “disciplined policy choices” on the part of former colonies to secure a place within a global capitalist economy, while calls for historical accountability—such as the recent pursuit of reparations by CARICOM member governments for slavery and the underdevelopment in the region—continue to fall on deaf ears.  

[1] Cedric Wilson, “Broken Windows and Young Minds,” quoted in Deborah A. Thomas, Exceptional Violence: Embodied Citizenship in Transnational Jamaica (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 54.

[2] Thomas, Exceptional Violence: Embodied Citizenship in Transnational Jamaica (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 69.

[3] Daniel Miller, Capitalism: An Ethnographic Approach (Oxford: Berg, 1997), 5.

[4] Girvan, Norman. Corporate Imperialism: Conflict and Expropriation (New York & London: Monthly Review Press, 1976), 18.

Anurag Sinha (political science) response to Ayesha Ramachandran (Yale, comparative literature), originally posted Nov. 19, 2013 

Prof. Ramachandran’s paper urges us to reconsider “a lost history of cosmopolitanism in early modernity” (3) and offers “a new perspective on the struggle between the particular and the universal that informs much of the thinking around cosmopolitanism” (3), especially in the sixteenth century as well as our present moment. The paper argues that late twentieth- and early twenty-first century meditations on “rooted cosmopolitanism” (11, 14, 26) have a rich and complex lineage stretching back to sixteenth century humanism, particularly the writings of Guillame Postel. Against the Kantian perspective—taken as the predominant eighteenth century view—the paper provides an alternative genealogy of modern cosmopolitanisms by working through three (sets of) observations: (a) connections between those historical moments in which cosmopolitan thinking emerges or is revived, (b) the dissociation of the emergence of cosmopolitanism from political theories that take the state as its fundamental unit of analysis, and (c) cosmopolitanism as a sphere of individual rather than institutional action.

The Fool’s Cap Map, printed anonymously in 1590, is the centerpiece around which the paper develops its thesis. The image, it is argued, sets out the following claim: “the cosmopolitan both produces and is produced by a world on the brink of transformation, a world that simultaneously expands in unprecedented ways to take in a New World, but which also contracts into the body of a singular individual” (3). This is an allegory of a “project of mediation” (3), the paper argues, between the universal and the particular, the global and the local. This thematic gambit thus helps us understand the roots of cosmopolitan thought in the sixteenth century. What did it mean to be a ‘cosmopolite’ at the time? It was to have both national and global affiliations, to be, for instance, both French and a citizen of the world, transcending the bounds of the particular while being circumscribed by it—here, the nation or the state—a sentiment that resonates with our current discourse on cosmopolitanism. The Map, therefore, highlights the paradox of reconciling the particular and the universal.

A comparison of this remarkable piece of iconography with the frontispiece of Leviathan, I think, is instructive, especially in differentiating between the units of analysis of sixteenth century cosmopolitanism and its later-day variants. Against the centripetal force of Hobbes’s sovereign, transforming the multitude into a single artificial person (or singular body politic), the Map gives us not precisely a reverse image but one where the world is contained within an individual mind, not body. This is an imaginative circumscription, one that allows the paradox of uniting the local and the global to arise sharply. And this is where I disagree slightly with the analysis of the Map offered in the paper—it does not seem exactly to be a mediation between “the vast abstraction of the world and the circumscribed particularity of the persons who inhabit it” (3). Instead, the world itself is being circumscribed by those who inhabit it, and it is this very imaginative exercise that supplies meaning and content to various particularities in an age of encounters and discovery. Unlike Hobbes’s leviathan, the Map is an outward-looking allegory, where the individual mind is the recipient of knowledge about the world, and, my suggestion is, that it is this reception that allows for the possibilities of producing cosmopolitan ideas. The conclusion in either case might be the same; however, to misunderstand the mechanisms that enable the conditions for creative particularities would lead to an underappreciation of the bases of cosmopolitanism thought.

Where the two images converge, however, is in the artifice that holds together each vision of common life: an absolute sovereign or an individual mind. A major theme of eighteenth century political thought was to give a theory of artificial society sustained neither by absolutism nor religion. In fact, the innovative aspect of Kant’s cosmopolitanism was not necessarily the triumph of the nation-state, but his story of sociability, what he called—to quote from the famous Fourth Proposition of universal history—the “unsocial sociability of men, that is, their tendency to come together in society, coupled, however, with a continual resistance which constantly threatens to break this society up.”[1] Such societies, moderated by a cosmopolitan right, could only be operative under “principles which one would believe to apply if one came to think of all human societies as in some way partaking in associative relations.”[2] What is the account of sociability deployed here if it is not the artifice of society always under the shadow of violent conflict? Since the essay also distances itself from the natural sociability of the Greek polis, what exactly is the cosmopolitan register of sociability? 

I was not sure if this is a genealogical project like Quentin Skinner’s Liberty before Liberalism, which excavates a ‘lost’ idea, or one that illuminates certain nuances that the existing intellectual histories of cosmopolitanism tend to miss. I take the paper to be arguing that ideas of “rooted cosmopolitanism” have always persisted but were largely obscured by the preeminence of the nation-state in our categories of analysis. There is a danger in the paper of conflating ‘nation’ and ‘state’ into ‘nation-state’, a process that was from complete—or certain—in the eighteenth century. Could it be that the eighteenth century idiom or vocabulary of ‘nation’ and ‘state’ reflect the historical and exigent imperatives to which political thinkers were responding to at the time? If so, how do we understand the differences between the sixteenth and eighteenth century versions of cosmopolitanism? 

Finally, a small (and general) question about literary cosmopolitanism: it seems to me that all intellectual endeavors are autobiographical, if not explicitly in form then at least in inspiration. If this is correct, what exactly is it about the autobiographical narratives of sixteenth century humanists that sets their cosmopolitanism apart?

Anurag Sinha Political Science Yale University

[1] Immanuel Kant, ‘The Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’, in Political Writings, ed. by H. S. Reiss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 44, emphasis in original.

[2] Richard Tuck, The Rights of War and Peace: Political Thought and the International Order from Grotius to Kant (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 220.

Yingyao Wang (Sociology) response to Steve Pincus (Yale, history), “Do Wars Make States,” originally posted Sept. 23, 2013 

In a nutshell, this paper argues that it was the political and economic commitment of politicians rather than the logic of inter-state warfare which shaped the British state formation and determined the interventionist character of the eighteen-century British state.

Explain two things? Two independent variables? 

1 (laid out in the first part of the paper) the eighteen century British state spent less proportion of their revenues (20% less compared to which other countries??) on military matters and more on economic and social capacity building than other states thanks to a new orientation and thinking with regard to the source of economic prosperity and national strength.

2 The Weberian process of state making, namely, the monopoly of violence, the emergence of bureaucracy, and the development of an effective fiscal system, is a result of voluntary political choices and innovations rather than the Darwinian imperatives for survival (via military conflicts?).

I am totally convinced by the argument that warfare and efforts of state building is minimally correlated. I was looking for more clear exposition on “what it is” perhaps out of my own sociological prejudice of searching for explanatory parsimony. Currently, the paper seems to offer two equally productive directions based on different assessments of motivations of historical actors and how war figures in their of political strategies and causal stories about state making.

One direction, I call it the strong version of the non-military argument, points to the rise of economic logic that might be replacing the military logic. In this explanatory picture, state elites were reorienting themselves onto a new path to national prosperity: war-making and territorial struggles were no longer the necessary means to achieve the ends of national prosperity. Economic growth takes precedence. What underpin this transformation is the process in which state makers came around to a non-territorial and non-zero-sum understanding of wealth. They discovered the importance of manufacturing and the labor theory of value while at the same time viewed the states as regimes of capital accumulation. Certainly British economists were spearheading the intellectual transformation in these regards, I wonder whether the political practitionerswere equally on board with this new program of economics and to what extent the rise of British economic or fiscal state was able to redefine the nature of international competition in economic terms. To further departure from the military logic and make this strong version stronger, it might be necessary and interesting to examine whether the semantic and institutional separation of civic and military was taking place and the civic development contained a purpose in its own right. If national insecurity still looms large on the political agenda, for example, in the Cold War era, we know that it is difficult to dissociate squarely military and economic developments in the calculus of state elites.

In the weak version of the non-military origin of state making, which some parts of the paper seems to imply, war still has a place. War-making, in parallel to industrialization and social engineering, is one of the means to achieve national prosperity (however defined); economic development may in turn lead to more effective war-marking. This weak version does not dispense with the state’s appetite for territorial expansion and military action. It is a more pragmatic and less programmatic explanation as it argues that how war is financed, how the aims of war was set and what social programs to choose vary with historical circumstances and political competition.

In order to decide between these two versions of explanations, one perhaps needs more empirical account of the actors’ own interpretation and justification on what they were doing and tried to accomplish. A choice between the two versions might be necessary because they have very different implications on our understandings of the ongoing process of, not state making, but empire building. For example, one might ask whether imperial expansion is economically driven as to search for overseas market, cheaper base of manufacture or expand the orbit of trade or imperial expansion was still dictated by a territorial notion of wealth.

Another point: 

I was fascinated by the full range of interventions by the British state. Although interventionism is such a normatively and conceptually controversial term, I can see the heuristic merit of applying this term to the eighteenth century. In my head, I was already translating and putting those projects that British state was undertaking into contemporary categories, such as public infrastructure building, R and D, industrial policies, public safety, public welfare, sanitation, education, poor relief. It is very tempting to see them as Keynesian programs in which spending, both public spending and the cultivation of healthy labor and consumers, is the engine of economic growth. But it could well be the case that states pursed these developments out of moral obligation, cultural patrimonialism or prevention of internal revolts. So I would like to know more about on what ground and for what purpose, the British state intervened.

A last related question: I am wondering whether what the British was doing, that is, the growth-minded and manufacture-oriented economic programs was really different from mercantilism. The British had definitely gone beyond the primitive stage of mercantilism, which saw the national wealth was measured by the possession of bullion. But and British French mercantilism in the eighteenth century seemed akin to each other especially during the administration of Jean-Baptiste Colbert, French Minister of Finance. Colbert equally pursed policies of promoting manufacture, population growth, imperial expansion and protectionism. So maybe a comparison will illuminate the significance of the British case.

Kristen Plys (Sociology) response to Emma Rothschild (Harvard, history), originally posted Sept. 23, 2013 

This paper makes important inroads in transnational history by describing the ties of the working class of Angouleme in the 18^th century, to the global economy. Professor Rothschild fills an important void in the literature in the historical social sciences of the linkages of working class Europeans in the early modern period to the global economy. Through the case study of Marie Aymard and her social network of relatives, neighbors, friends and associates, Prof. Rothschild demonstrates that even though Marie Aymard was indigent and illiterate she had economic ties to far flung places through her social network. Through the analysis of this network, Prof. Rothschild challenges the claim that French interior provinces were isolated and “untouched by the productive exchanges of modern life” (6). Through her detailed archival work, she is able to make everyday economic interactions come to life in her gripping narrative of Marie Aymard.

After reading the paper, I was left with several questions mainly pertaining to theory and method. These questions can be organized into three related comments for discussion. I’ll start first with the easy one on historical method, and then get into the more theoretical questions.

1 What exactly is “Poor Economics” doing in the story besides method? I was really surprised to see a historical analysis in which Poor Economics was the launch point, in an acritical way, especially since the book struck me as such an ahistorical approach to understanding development. More specifically, Banerjee and Duflo’s approach, in its plea for equality of opportunity (but not equality of destination) does not have any conceptualization of the development of the world-economic context over time. They like most contemporary development economists, reject macro theories or grand theories of development and instead seek to understand poverty on an individual or community level. So then, if we accept their premise, of understanding poverty on this more micro-level, then why look to historical examples in the first place? In other words, what exactly is the takeaway from this case of everyday economic insecurity in interior France in the 18^th century? One of the many things that I really love about Prof. Rothschild’s paper, is that she truly situates her case in place and time. There is no claim in the paper that the narrative of Marie Aymard is a lesson or cautionary tale for development economists working on the contemporary world. Alternately, one could think of Marie Aymard and her social network as demonstrating an aspect of the historical development of the global economy in one of its formative places and times. Or, perhaps this is history for the sake of history. However, my confusion about exactly how Prof. Rothschild employs Poor Economics, along with this question of if or in what way the case is generalizable beyond the context of 18^th century France, obscures my understanding of the pith of the paper.

Now I have two related comments on this issue of method: 

1 In reading the paper while keeping the title in mind, I found myself looking for the connection between economic downturn and the French Revolution as seen from the working class of the French interior. In the paper, I didn’t see such a strong connection to the French Revolution itself, and so, it left me wondering exactly what Prof. Rothschild’s comment is on the relationship between processes of economic downturn and processes of revolution. Just because some of the actors lived through the revolution, and a few were more directly involved – such as Abraham Robin’s three sons who participated in revolutionary politics, and the apprentice boy in the “Henriette Mulatresse” legal dispute died in prison in Paris after allegedly denouncing Robespierre – it doesn’t follow that a) they were involved and b) they related their experiences of economic insecurity to their experiences of Revolution. In my head, I kept resisting the urge to let macro-historical theory fill in this part of the story, since there is a significant literature that tells us that there is a connection between economic downturn and revolution. But this would probably be the kinds of structural macro-history that Prof. Rothschild is reacting against. So, how are we meant to reconcile this tension? 

2 And then, I have a suggestion on method. Because the theoretical power in the paper seems to be coming from the Annales school approach, Marc Bloch is mentioned briefly, Braudel could easily be brought in as well, because in the way the narrative is structured Professor Rothschild gives us glimpses of the many layers of social life that Braudel calls the historian’s attention to: the eventementelle – everyday life in Angouleme, there’s the conjoncture – the couple decades or so leading up to the French revolution, and then there’s also this implicit sense of the longue duree – but only in the framing of the paper as in dialogue with Poor Economics. And I would also find it really helpful if this discussion of the theoretical/methodological approach could come earlier in the paper, but that might just be my sociological imagination coming into play — but analytically, it would help me as a reader to better contextualize the narrative.

3 Now, as my second question, I want to get into what I found to be a larger issue with the paper, and that is the distinction between Transnational History and Global History (setting aside the other types of macro history such as cosmopolitan history, international history, world history, entangled history, and etc.). These distinctions weren’t addressed in the paper, and I believe that had they been, it would have given the paper far more theoretical power, which could be cashed in in order to insert this paper into broader debates within the historical social sciences. This “global turn” as some call it, is a reaction to the cultural turn having reached its limits as a tool of criticism and critique. I mean, there’s only so much one can tear apart an existing paradigm without building up a new research paradigm. And then, the events of the recent conjuncture, US wars of imperial aggression, the Economic crisis of 2008, occupy wall street and other cities across the world, mass protests in India against gender based violence, the unfortunately named Arab Spring, and the protests in Turkey, have social theorists once again looking to macro-structural explanations. Global and Transnational history is a part of this larger trend. The way I understand it, global history is the star gazing that Prof. Rothschild describes on pages 2-3, a narrative that rejects national histories and history from below in favor of macro political-economy approach. And it is this type of history that Sunil Amrith refers to in the article cited by Prof. Rothschild in the paper. Amrith uses the term ‘global’ 33 times in the article but ‘transnational’ comes up only once in the context of a list of the jargon used by historians and historical social scientists to indicate the scope of their analysis. But my understanding of transnational history, on the other hand, is more in line with the type of history that Prof. Rothschild actually does in the paper. IE Transnational history as a narrative that traces individuals or groups across the globe with the goal of looking at relationships among far flung places and people. An off hand example of this would be the growing literature on Transnational Ethnography that follows individuals as they migrate from country to country detailing their experiences as transnational citizens bringing their labor power from the global south to the global north. A good example of this type of scholarship would be Barbara Ehrenrich and Arlie Hochschild’s Global Woman. I’m sure some might dismiss this concern as simply an insignificant debate over jargon and terminology, but I’d push back and claim that it’s through our shared understanding of these terms, that one can truly make a significant intervention into the existing literature. You can’t take a stance unless you understand where you’re standing. And I believe that Prof. Rothschild’s critical intervention into many literatures will only benefit from discussion of the many types of ‘big’ history floating around the academy.

1 And just as a sub-point, I am really intrigued by your mention of a literature consisting of “New Global Histories” of the French Revolution. I thought you could definitely add Immanuel Wallerstein’s Modern World System III to that list, as it does a brilliant job of placing the French Revolution in World-Historical perspective.

2 Okay, so now, I’ll pose my final question, shifting focus away from these methodological and theoretical questions relating to the principal takeaway of the paper, to one of the hingepoints for Prof. Rothschild — this historical question of Interior Europe as isolated and peripheral, or connected to a world-economy. And hopefully, this will help to further explain why I’ve been so insistent on a further theoretical and methodological conceptualization of the case of Marie Aymard and her social network. So, another question I found myself asking while reading the paper, is from what perspective are we looking at pre-Revolutionary France? What is the world-historical significance of the French Revolution according to Prof. Rothschild? And it’s this perspective one takes that essentially determines whether one sees Interior France as isolated or connected. And without these methodological and theoretical anchors, I found myself unsure of who is taking what perspective and to what end. So, let me step back for a moment. In my more world-historical work, I tend to take as a launching point the Arab-Islamic empires of the Safavids, Mughals and Ottomans, in order to situate European development in the early modern period. From this perspective, the puzzle isn’t so much that working class Europeans had connections to the global economy, but that Europe, particularly north of the Mediterranean, was so isolated from the global economy compared to Africa and Asia. This hingepoint of isolation/connectedness is complicated by its relativism. For some scholarly approaches — and here I’m thinking of Giovanni Arrighi’s the Long Twentieth Century, and to some extent Andre Gunder Frank’s ReOrient, and to the Sociology of Colonialism and Empires literature — it wouldn’t be at all surprising that these global networks developed through long-distance trade and Empire.

I’ll stop here, I’m sure everyone else has lots more comments and questions for our speaker, but I just want to reiterate how much I enjoyed the paper and how much I appreciated the opportunity to engage with it as commentator. So, thank you to Professor Rothschild and to Julia, Steve, and the organizers.

Jonathan Endelman (Sociology) response to Beverly Gage (Yale, history), originally posted Sept. 12, 2013 

When most of us think of Watergate, the image that immediately comes to mind is Robert Redford as Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward meeting with FBI informant Deep Throat in a parking garage, hot on the trail of a crooked president Richard Nixon. This image is attractive to us for its moral clarity with villains and heroes clearly differentiated together with an idealized muck-racking sense of justice of the kind that we would like to expect from the forth estate. The scandal is uncovered, the reporters are awarded their laurels, and the crooked Nixon leaves the White House in disgrace, boarding his helicopter never to return.

Unfortunately, as Beverly Gage reminds us in her paper “Deep Throat, Water Gate, and the Bureaucratic Politics of the FBI”, history rarely unfolds in such an unambiguously straightforward manner. Debunking so called “romanticized” accounts, Gage argues that the Watergate scandal can only be understood as an institutional power struggle between a hyper-politicized Nixon White House and a bureaucratized apolitical Federal Bureau of Investigation under the leadership of its director J. Edgar Hoover. Gage dismisses explanations that point to the ideological nature of Watergate as a conflict between liberals and conservatives as well as a structural one that sees it as a serious misstep of an over-zealous Nixon on the road to the modern imperial presidency. Instead, Gage asserts that her institutional approach provides a more accurate view of the mechanisms that lie behind the greatest scandal of modern American political history.

According to Gage’s narrative, J. Edgar Hoover developed the FBI into a strong and independent agency free from major interference by White House. Although Nixon and Hoover were originally close allies in the anti-Communist crusade, during the Nixon presidency the two men grew increasingly estranged due to differences in their views on how the executive Branch should be run. Whether in the leaking of the bombing of Cambodia and the subsequent Kissinger Wiretaps, the increased use of spying on the domestic anti-War left and the Huston Plan, or the surveillance of defense contractor Daniel Ellsberg after his leak of the Pentagon Papers, Nixon and Hoover repeatedly butted heads. According to Gage, Hoover bridled at Nixon’s increasing demands for the FBI to engage in increased espionage that violated individual privacy and could expose the bureau to bad publicity. Thus, Gage, in cooperating with Woodward and leaking details about the Watergate break-in to the press, was expressing his frustration at Nixon’s decision to trample over the FBI’s autonomy and outsource intelligence gathering to other agencies, particularly his in-house Plumbers who perpetrated it.

This paper succeeds in outlining how and why Hoover and Nixon, and consequently their respective agencies of the FBI and White House, gradually became estranged from one another. However, there is no magic bullet in the paper that directly connects the act of Mark Felt to the institutional conflict between the White House and the FBI. Gage makes two assumptions here: first, that Felt’s attitude represented a typical one at the Bureau as a whole, and, secondly, that Felt decided to leak the information because of this and not due to personal animosity at being passed over by Nixon for leadership of the Bureau. Even if we accept the institutional narrative there is still the question of how Felt thought his actions would enhance the FBI’s credibility, whereas in fact Gage tells us that the opposite occurred. In the paper, the author herself admits that there is no way we will ever know for sure since, by the time Deep Throat revealed himself in 2005, his mental state had already deteriorated somewhat. Still, it might be helpful if the author could offer more conclusive proof connecting the setting of the institutional conflict with the act of Felt’s leak.

Moreover, at the beginning there is some theoretical uncertainty as to what the paper’s central focus will turn out to be. What exactly is the question the paper is asking, and what is it trying to explain? Watergate is an extremely complex political scandal, so that searching for a single factor to explain everything seems like an unrealistic expectation. The paper does not try to explain why President Nixon decided to break into the Watergate hotel and install wiretaps. Neither does it explain why the Watergate scandal struck such a deep chord with the American public at large. However, it does offer a plausible reason as to why one individual, Mark Felt, met repeatedly with another, Bob Woodward, and disclosed embarrassing details about the Watergate scandal. The author cannot claim, however, to explain Watergate tout court without further elucidation as to what this means.

Finally, I think this paper could serve from further development of its theoretical framework both in terms of scholarship specifically relating to the Watergate scandal itself and as a comparative case. First, Gage presents the two alternative arguments to hers—the ideological and structural explanations—but she does not provide names to these views in the text nor does she really explore their logics. Therefore, it is difficult for the reader to know to what extent her bureaucratic institutional explanation represents an improvement over previous attempts. Is the author’s account meant to supplant these other explanations or only to supplement them as an additional factor to consider? Secondly, it might be helpful to illustrate the phenomenon that the author is talking about to bring in a few additional examples from a wider variety of contexts. This way, the American case can be judged against a variety of other contexts in order to assess its significance instead of simply being a story about bureaucracy in America. Thank you.