Tim Stuart-Buttle's "From Moral Theology to Moral Philosophy"

Tim Stuart-Buttle is Lecturer in the Department of Politics at the University of York, UK. The appallingly titled From Moral Theology to Moral Philosophy: Cicero and Visions of Humanity from Locke to Hume is his first book, and a revised and extended version of his doctoral thesis. He is currently at work on a monograph that reconstructs an early modern debate to which practically every philosopher of note contributed, but which has received relatively little scholarly attention: on mankind’s desire for esteem and its social, moral, theological and political consequences.

Stuart-Buttle applied the “Page 99 Test” to From Moral Theology to Moral Philosophy and reported the following:

The Page 99 Test finds us midway through Chapter 2, which explores the moral theory of Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd earl of Shaftesbury (1671-1713), the author of the highly influential Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1711; 1714). Page 99 invites us to consider Shaftesbury’s treatment of issues – whether the soul is immortal; whether a future state of rewards and punishments is required to motivate us to behave morally; and what the philosophers of ancient Greece and Rome had to say on these questions – that are central to the work as a whole. It explains that, in denying that virtue relies upon a belief in immortality and divine judgment, Shaftesbury’s primary objective was to repudiate the moral theory of his ‘friend and foster-father’: John Locke (1632-1704). Shaftesbury did so by labouring the superiority of the moral philosophy of the ancient Stoics (notably Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius and Horace) when compared to Christian moral theology. Like a number of more recent moral philosophers (such as Alasdair MacIntyre), Shaftesbury understood “modern” moral philosophy to have taken a horribly ‘wrong turn’ in the seventeenth century, as the methodologies of the new experimental sciences were increasingly applied to ethical subjects. Here, Thomas Hobbes was implicated alongside Locke: if recent natural philosophers reduced the world to atoms without any intelligent design, Locke and Hobbes stood accused of similarly denying any order and meaning in the moral universe. Shaftesbury claimed to find in the writings of the ancient Stoics a vision of human nature that was consistent with the existence of a truly good (non-Christian) God, who created man in such a way as to allow him to identify the good (through reason), and to discipline himself so as to pursue it. Philosophy, for the Stoics as for Shaftesbury, was a ‘way of life’ – a vision of philosophy recently revived by Pierre Hadot; and the truly virtuous individual does not require the sanctions of either civil law or divine judgment in order to live as they ought. They live virtuously because they recognise that it is only by doing so that they embrace what truly makes them human: moral autonomy, and the responsibility for making the right choices.

The page 99 test works well: it shows why early-modern philosophers identified their philosophies (and their antagonists’) with late Hellenistic philosophical traditions. Shaftesbury portrayed Locke and Hume as Epicureans of a degenerate kind: they deny that human beings are naturally sociable creatures, inclined to virtue; they portray mankind as captive to passions over which they have no rational control; and they depict God as a capricious being uninterested in human life and worthy only of fear, not love. Shaftesbury indicates the polemical advantages of identifying with an alternative philosophical tradition (Stoicism) to expose and correct such philosophical errors. But Shaftesbury’s interpretation of Locke was jaundiced: as Chapter 1 shows, Locke professed his admiration for an alternative late Hellenistic tradition – academic scepticism, identified with Cicero – which he presented as mediating between the rival errors of the Stoics and Epicureans. In Chapters 4 and 5, we see how two other influential eighteenth-century philosophers – the heterodox Anglican clergyman Conyers Middleton (1683-1750), and David Hume (1711-76) adopted a strikingly similar (Ciceronian) approach. Meanwhile Chapter 3 reveals how Shaftesbury’s most acute critic, Bernard Mandeville (1670-1733), employed Epicurean motifs and sources in his attack on Shaftesbury’s philosophy.

The central objective of the book is to show how the claim of moral theology – that the moral quality of human actions must be understood in the light of God’s intentions for His created beings – increasingly came under the microscope ca. 1650-1750. This is not a triumphalist origins story of secular modernity; nor is it a MacIntyre-style narrative of the pathogenesis of ‘modern’ moral philosophy. I am attentive to the losses, as well as gains, that this development involved: if it resulted in an emaciated conception of justice, it foregrounded the importance of social relations in the shaping of individual identity. Here, the book challenges the notion that the supposed forefathers of modern liberalism – Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Adam Smith – focused on the ‘atomised’ individual (to borrow from Charles Taylor). Instead, they offer us a much richer vision of human nature and human life than is often recognized. The richness and complexity of their thought might alert us to our own need to think rather harder about the challenges we face if we are to live together in such ways as contribute to our shared pursuit of happiness and meaning.

Learn more about From Moral Theology to Moral Philosophy at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Karen Stohr's "Minding the Gap"

Karen Stohr is the Ryan Family Term Associate Professor of Metaphysics and Moral Philosophy at Georgetown University and Senior Research Scholar in Georgetown's Kennedy Institute of Ethics. She works primarily in normative ethical theory, focusing on Aristotelian virtue ethics and Kantian ethics. She also writes on the ethical dimensions of civility, manners, and social interactions. She is author of On Manners (2011).

Stohr applied the “Page 99 Test” to her latest book, Minding the Gap: Moral Ideals and Moral Improvement, and reported the following:

A reader opening to page 99 would find themselves in the fourth chapter of the book, a chapter titled “Moral Aspirations.” As it happens, several concepts that are crucial to the book’s argument appear on that page. In the first paragraph, which carries over from page 98, I am drawing together two ideas – one from the 18th century Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant and the other from the contemporary American philosopher David Velleman. The idea from Kant is the idea of what he calls a “beautiful illusion of virtue,” which we create when we behave politely to each other in public. Kant thought we had a moral duty to cultivate the social graces on the grounds that they create an illusion of virtuous behavior. On his view, the illusion serves several important roles. It makes virtue appealing, and it also helps us develop habits of genuinely virtuous action. By behaving kindly and respectfully to people, we will turn ourselves into kind and respectful people. Moreover, the rules of polite behavior are mutually binding. In treating you respectfully, I create a social obligation for you to treat me in the same way. In abiding by these social norms, we jointly construct an illusion in which we behave as better versions of our actual selves. And this is where the idea from David Velleman comes in. Velleman coined the term ‘fictive’ to describe something that is part truth, part fiction. I argue that these better versions of ourselves should be understood as fictive moral selves. My fictive moral self is the moral self I am trying to become. Unless I am a moral saint, my actual self does not always resemble my fictive moral self. This is the part that is fiction. But it does express my moral aspirations. This is the part that is truth. In acting as our fictive moral selves, we become more like those selves. I call this inhabiting an aspirational moral identity.

On page 99 I argue that our ability to act as our fictive moral selves, or inhabit our aspirational moral identities, is dependent on the social environment in which we find ourselves. In order to act as my fictive moral self, I need other people to help hold me into the moral identity represented by that self. (I borrowed the idea of holding someone into an identity from another contemporary philosopher, Hilde Lindemann.) We hold people into identities by interacting with them in those terms. On page 99, I illustrate this idea with a literary example that runs throughout the book. The example is Stevens, the main character in Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel, Remains of the Day. Stevens is a butler undergoing a major identity crisis. His crisis has two dimensions, one internal and one external. The internal crisis is that he has come to doubt the value of his all-consuming identity as a butler, an identity that gives his whole life its character and meaning. On page 99, I am discussing the external dimension of his crisis, which is that the social world that supported his identity as a butler is collapsing around him. For the first time in decades, he has left Darlington Hall, the great house where he has spent his entire career, and gone on a road trip into the countryside. The further he gets from Darlington Hall, the less he is able to act as a butler. The people he encounters on his trip have no idea what a butler like him does, much less how that identity might shape his entire worldview. This means that they cannot hold him into that identity in their interactions with him. Since the identity of a butler is the only identity Stevens has, he struggles to interact at all.

I say on page 99 that “what I can be depends in part on what others make possible or impossible for me.” My ability to act as my fictive moral self, or inhabit my aspirational moral identity, depends on my social environment. At the bottom of page 99, I take up the positive side of this. When I struggle to act as my fictive moral self, others can help by holding me into that self. They can make it possible for me to act as I believe I should. Stevens experiences this himself when fellow members of the Darlington Hall staff help him act as a good son during an especially terrible night when his father is dying. More generally (and this is one of the central themes of the book), when other people hold me into my fictive moral self in the face of my own moral weaknesses and frailties, they make it possible for me to live up to my moral ideals.

I’d say that the test works quite well in the case of Minding the Gap. The ideas that appear on page 99 (Kant’s beautiful illusion of virtue, fictive moral selves, the social dimensions of our identities) are central to the book’s main arguments. And Ishiguro’s novel, which I discuss at some length in the book, shows up on page 99 as well. It’s a relatively representative snapshot of the whole book.

Minding the Gap is about how we make ourselves better people. The title is taken from the ubiquitous recording in London Tube stations warning passengers to pay attention to the gap between the platform and the train. In the book, the gap in question is the gap between our moral ideals and our actual moral selves. Most of us, most of the time, fall short of our moral ideals. To make matters worse, we’re not always all that clear on what our moral ideals are. Do we even know what we’re aiming to become? In the book I argue that we work out our moral ideals by cultivating and enacting fictive moral selves. The fictive moral selves represent our moral aspirations. Becoming better is a matter of developing a fictive moral self and trying to act in accordance with it. Crucially (and this is what I am trying to explain on page 99), this process of working out and enacting a fictive moral self is something we do with other people. In order to succeed in making ourselves better, we need a social and physical environment conducive to improving ourselves. I call this environment a moral neighborhood. Good moral neighborhoods are constructed through social practices and conventions that enable us to act as fictive moral selves in particular settings. In a good moral neighborhood, the norms of social interaction support and reinforce moral norms. This is how good moral neighborhoods help us improve—by generating social norms that obligate us to behave as morally better versions of ourselves. In the second half of the book I describe what good moral neighborhoods are like and how we can build them in the very imperfect world we actually inhabit.

Learn more about Minding the Gap at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

John Gribbin's "Six Impossible Things"

John Gribbin, described by the Spectator as “one of the finest and most prolific writers of popular science around,” is the author of In Search of Schrödinger's Cat, The Universe: A Biography, 13.8: The Quest to Find the True Age of the Universe and the Theory of Everything, and other books. He is a Visiting Fellow in Astronomy at the University of Sussex, UK.

His new book is Six Impossible Things: The Mystery of the Quantum World. Since the book has fewer than 99 pages, Gribbin tried the Page 66 Test instead of the “Page 99 Test" and reported the following:

From page 66:

The statistics are those of the ensembles. But the ensembles are not the kind that spring to the mind of most people when they hear the term. In everyday language, an ensemble is a group of things that have some common property, or are working together – such as a musical string ensemble. To a statistician, a collection of 600 identical dice could constitute an ensemble, and if all those dice were rolled together then the laws of probability would lead us to expect to see near enough 100 sixes, 100 fives, 100 fours, 100 threes, 100 twos and 100 ones. But there is another way to get the same statistical outcome. Take a single perfect die, and roll it 600 times. You would expect 6 to come up about a hundred times, 5 to come up about a hundred times, and so on. This is the kind of ensemble the quantum physicists are referring to. A box full of molecules of gas would not constitute an ensemble in this sense; but many identical boxes of gas each experimented on in the same way would. Ideally, you would carry out exactly the same experiment on exactly the same particle many times, and monitor the outcome of each of these ‘trials’. That is the ensemble. The results would follow a probability distribution in accordance with the rules developed by Max Born.

It would be very hard to carry out such an idealised experiment, but that isn’t really the point. Instead of, say, a million electrons going through the double slit experiment at the same time and being detected on the other side, think of the same electron going round and round a million times, with the position it arrives at on the other side being noted each time it goes past. The crucial point which proponents of this interpretation like is that the particles are always real particles in the everyday use of the term.

This isn’t really the best place to start getting to grips with my book. The six impossible things of my title are six different “explanations”, or interpretations, of quantum mechanics, and my aim is to show that they are all equally crazy (although in the quantum world being crazy does not necessarily mean being wrong). This particular section puts forward the point of view of proponents of the “ensemble interpretation”, and at first sight it looks quite reasonable. But individual systems do exist in the real world, and as is often the case in quantum theory, the waters become muddier once you try to work out what happens when the system – in this case the ensemble – is studied, or otherwise interacts with the outside world. Preparing the system involves a certain amount of randomness, and observing it involves another layer of randomness. An example of this interaction with the outside world that is the so-called ‘watched pot’ experiment. Quantum physics tells us that a system (such as an atom, or array of atoms, in an energetic state) cannot change its state (in this case by giving up energy) as long as it is being “watched”, or monitored. It was Alan Turing, back in 1954, who pointed this out:

It is easy to show using standard theory that if a system starts in an eigenstate of some observable, and measurements are made of that observable N times a second, then, even if the state is not a stationary one, the probability that the system will be in the same state after, say, one second, tends to one as N tends to infinity; that is, that continual observations will prevent motion. [endnotes omitted]

And experiments have now actually been carried out which prove this to be the case. A watched quantum pot never boils (or more accurately, never freezes). So if you are baffled by quantum physics, you are in good company. It puzzled Turing, as well.

Learn more about Six Impossible Things at the MIT Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Stephen F. Knott's "The Lost Soul of the American Presidency"

Prior to accepting his position at the Naval War College, Stephen F. Knott was Co-Chair of the Presidential Oral History Program at the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia. He also served for seven years as an Associate Professor in the Political Science Department at the United States Air Force Academy. His books include The Reagan Years; Alexander Hamilton and the Persistence of Myth; Secret and Sanctioned: Covert Operations and the American Presidency; At Reagan’s Side: Insiders’ Recollections from Sacramento to the White House; Rush to Judgment: George W. Bush, the War on Terror, and His Critics; and Washington and Hamilton: The Alliance That Forged America.

Knott applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, The Lost Soul of the American Presidency: The Decline into Demagoguery and the Prospects for Renewal, and reported the following:

Page 99 of my book briefly discusses the destructive presidency of Andrew Johnson and contrasts it with the underrated presidency of Ulysses S. Grant, who along with Abraham Lincoln, took halting, but nonetheless significant steps toward fulfilling the principles of the Declaration of Independence. Andrew Johnson was motivated by racism and resentment, lacked any sense of magnanimity, and practiced the politics of divisiveness. In short, Johnson, one of the most prominent demagogues to hold the office, was patently unfit for the job of president. By glimpsing at page 99, the reader would get a partial sense of the gist of my book, which traces the descent of the presidency into an office frequently inhabited by demagogues like Johnson. Flattering the majority and ostracizing an unpopular minority is standard practice for demagogues, as is the absence of magnanimity and humility in their character.

The Lost Soul of the American Presidency is a clarion call for the restoration of the founders presidency. The president was to serve as a head of state who stood above the partisan fray, representing the entire nation. The president would act as a check on public passions, prevent the tyranny of the majority, and promote the rule of law. But today we prefer presidents who are "passionate" and excite their "base" by practicing, as Alexander Hamilton put it, “the little arts of popularity.” This is a complete reversal of the intentions of the framers of the Constitution. Throughout our nation’s history, this type of presidential leadership imposed costs on racial and political minorities -- a phenomenon utterly predictable to the founders, who would have warned that a president’s primary obligation was to the rule of law, to the Constitution – not to public opinion.

The American presidency envisioned by George Washington and Alexander Hamilton was to serve as a source of national pride and unity. Instead, the office has devolved into a force for division and discord. The manner in which presidents conduct themselves affects the entire body politic. Presidents can choose to unite or divide, to appeal to something higher or practice "the little arts of popularity." But presidents cannot do this alone. The effort to restore the presidency will require Americans to move beyond the parochial, beyond the immediate, and reject the siren call of those who appeal to their base instincts. It will be difficult to recover the lost soul of the American presidency, but we can take solace from the fact that the past offers an alternative to the debased presidency of the present.

Learn more about The Lost Soul of the American Presidency at the University Press of Kansas website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Anne Nelson's "Shadow Network"

Anne Nelson is an author and lecturer in the fields of international affairs, media and human rights. As a journalist she covered the conflicts in El Salvador and Guatemala, and won the Livingston Award for best international reporting from the Philippines. She served as the director of the Committee to Protect Journalists. In 1995 she became the director the international program at the Columbia School of Journalism, where she created the first curriculum in human rights reporting.

Since 2003 Nelson has been teaching at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA), where her classes and research explore how digital media can support the underserved populations of the world through public health, education and culture.

Nelson applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Shadow Network: Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right, and reported the following:

From page 99:

"Liberals in the media failed to defeat you," he added. "now they will use carrots and sticks to tempt and to intimidate you. They will define any betrayal of your coalition as a sign of 'growth.' Don't fall for that nonsense."

Your constituency is the coalition. Avoid the filter of the media. It was a winning formula. The CNP could turn to the NRA for a prototype for face-to-face social networking that would be emulated by other organization. In the future the NRA would pioneer new technologies to link Blackwell's trainees and leverage their political activism. The NRA had come a long way from the gentlemen's shooting club cofounded by Mr. Conant in 1871, and it was in good company.

Page 99 is the end of a chapter, so it only contains one paragraph. That said, the paragraph isn't a bad summary of the techniques developed by Morton Blackwell and others connected to the Council for National Policy, to create a multi-pronged political movement to advance the Radical Right in Washington. The National Rifle Association was one of the early organizations to be co-opted. Fundamentalist churches, the Koch brothers donor networks, and the DeVos family are other major players in the movement.

Later chapters of Shadow Network describe how these forces came together with the support of fundamentalist broadcasters, sophisticated data platforms and apps to mobilize millions of conservative voters in swing states. They have effectively installed minority rule, and are seeking ways through judicial appointments and state law to make their position permanent. Along the way, this movement is rolling back LGBT civil rights, women's access to health care, and foiling gun control legislation.

Page 99--quoting a letter from a strategist to a newly elected Congressman--illustrates the way this movement bypassed the professional news media in favor of creating self-contained social networks. As a result, the current political playing field is far from level. Shadow Network lays out the strategy and the mechanics that have made it work. The next year will tell whether it will be ultimately successful.

Visit Anne Nelson's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Stuart Schrader's "Badges without Borders"

Stuart Schrader is Associate Director of the Program in Racism, Immigration, and Citizenship and Lecturer at Johns Hopkins University.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Badges without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing, and reported the following:

Re-reading page 99 of Badges Without Borders was fun. Revising a text for years is almost like leaving a water-based solution out in the sun. The liquid evaporates, leaving dense residue behind. You encounter strong arguments here, but the urgency or even ire that inspired them is gone. Two arguments appear on this page, which is in chapter 3.

Page 99 examines debates within the national security bureaucracy over how to allocate resources for overseas counterinsurgency at the outset of the John F. Kennedy administration. I focus on a speech about guerrilla warfare given to soldiers (from the United States and elsewhere) by modernization theorist Walt W. Rostow at Fort Bragg.

First, I’m arguing that, among scholars, the widespread identification of counterinsurgency with U.S. army special forces, who would engage in offensive guerrilla warfare and covert operations, does not withstand empirical scrutiny. These efforts certainly occurred, but, as inaugurated globally by the Kennedy administration, counterinsurgency entailed a much wider set of operations that focused on preventive methods that used local civilian policing and development assistance. There were two reasons: first, offensive guerrilla operations did not work (e.g., the Bay of Pigs invasion); second, after these guerrillas lost actual battles, the officials pushing the tactics lost bureaucratic battles. The winner, instead, was National Security Council staffer Robert W. Komer, this chapter’s prime mover. This is one of the key arguments of the book.

Second, I’m arguing counterinsurgency was not the product of modernization theory as formulated by the likes of Rostow per se, but counterinsurgency experts and lower-ranking security officials influenced Rostow and even shaped his ideas. Scholars of both modernization and counterinsurgency have emphasized the contributions of Rostow (among other intellectuals), but I am suggesting here that the causal arrows might run in the other direction, away from the primacy of the intellectuals. I was reading a good deal of intellectual history, particularly of modernization, when I started to work on this project, but the book veers away from that subfield, except in this and the final chapter.

Instead of intellectuals, Badges Without Borders highlights the policymaking influence of a more hidden stratum of security and law-enforcement figures. I must say that I did relish finding that Komer shaped Rostow’s widely reprinted 1961 speech, which contains the misleading but incandescent description of communists as “scavengers of the modernization process.” Rostow was a good writer. Rostow was learned. But Rostow was a dilettante when it came to guerrilla warfare. The speech is typically read as signaling Kennedy commitment’s to special forces, but Komer’s pugnacity meant that the bureaucracy was moving in another direction by the time Rostow gave it, toward the foreign police assistance program that is a focus of my book.

Visit Stuart Schrader's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kari Marie Norgaard's "Salmon and Acorns Feed Our People"

Kari Marie Norgaard (non-Native Professor of Sociology/Environmental Studies at University of Oregon) has engaged in environmental justice policy work with the Karuk Tribe since 2003. She is author of Living in Denial: Climate Change, Emotions and Everyday Life and other publications on gender, race, and the sociology of emotions.

Norgaard applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Salmon and Acorns Feed Our People: Colonialism, Nature, and Social Action, and reported the following:

Page 99 comes in the second chapter, “The Ecological Dynamics of Settler-Colonialism: Smokey Bear and Fire Suppression as Colonial Violence.” On this page in particular I am in the middle of an in-depth account of U.S. Forest Service views on Indigenous fire management. Page 99 showcases Forest Service documents from 1928 through 1950 to illustrate how language of “malicious motives” and “uncivilized” were used to discredit the sophisticated Indigenous ecological systems of fire management that the Forest Service had recently disrupted through their policy of fire suppression. Here I draw on research compiled by a number of my colleagues, especially Dr. Frank Lake whose doctoral dissertation provides a detailed review of early documents, alongside interviews with Karuk elders:

Lightning ignitions were an “act of nature” which could not be prevented or controlled like incendiarism, described as “selfish or malicious motives.” ... The incendiary problem, however, is not a fire hunt but a man hunt; not fire, but the owner of the hand that lights it, is the public’s enemy.... The hand of the incendiary is set against the public welfare and it is the duty of every citizen to help apprehend those who willfully set fires and to see that they are punished as they justly deserve (Klamath National Forest 1928:14–15). (Cited in Lake 2007, 273)

A second passage from the 1928 report illustrates not only the need the agency felt to defend the policy of fire exclusion but also the use of scientific rhetoric and discourses of “practicality” rooted in a Taylorist managerial mind-set of efficiency to justify their actions: “The existing policy of the Forest Service in fire prevention and suppression has not been reached on the basis of guesswork. It represents continuous and critical study of forest fires. Fire exclusion is the only practical principle on which our forests can be handled, if we are to protect what we have and insure new and more fully stocked forests for the future (Klamath National Forest 1928:17–18)” (cited in Lake 2007, 302). Note that it was not only a military structure but also the rhetoric of Western “science” that has been used to enact and justify state actions. Seth Suman (2009) writes, “The idea that science and technology were among the gifts that Western imperial powers brought to their colonies was an integral part of the discourse of the ‘civilizing mission,’ one vaunted by both proponents and critics of the methods of colonialism” (373, see also Adas 1989). While many advocates of indigenous burning practices now make use of Western scientific frameworks, the Western ideas of ecology that justified fire exclusion have themselves been instruments of colonialism. By 1938, the extent of burning had declined: “It is reported that in the past it was a general practice to burn timber and browse lands with the expectation that annual burnings would promote grass growth. Although this practice has been discouraged and is rarely followed now, there is still a degree of sentiment in its favor. It is believed that much of the browse cover has developed as the result of fires, and that most of the brush areas would eventually produce a fine stand of fir timber if fires were prevented and suppressed and grazing properly managed” (1938 report, quoted in Huntsinger and McCaffrey 1995, 62). Indigenous use of fire was nonetheless ongoing in the decades that followed, and this activity was a continued source of consternation for the Forest Service. The 1950 Six Rivers General Inspection Report included a focus on what they term the “Indian Incendiary Problem” and included this passage regarding the issue:

One problem area exists; the “river strip.” ... There is a fairly large Indian population here and the area is still “west of the Pecos.” The State has apparently not yet decided to take fire control laws across the river. Previous attempts brought a threat of bloodshed.... It looks as if we will have to live with this problem a while longer—until the area becomes more civilized, lending the State any assistance needed in developing an attitude toward protection among the local people. Perhaps the burning of basket grass areas and doe pastures would do the job. (USDA, Six Rivers National Forest 1950: 27–28, cited in Busam 2006, 60)

This page is certainly representative of one of the major themes in the book, namely the ways that colonialism is ongoing today through land management policies, and more specifically how profoundly negative characterizations of Indigenous sciences and management practices form justifications for fire suppression. So yes, readers would get a decent view of the book as a whole from this page. This page is less representative of other important aspects of the book in that it doesn’t have any quotes from Karuk people, or any descriptions of either the social impacts of present-day Western land management, or of the many actions Karuk people are taking to create change. First person accounts of both present circumstances and the many positive ways people are moving forward are also major parts of the book.

Nor would readers know that the book as a whole is a call to action for sociology and the other social sciences to better engage Indigenous peoples’ perspectives. To that end, another key ongoing theme concerns the relationships between racism, colonialism, capitalism, patriarchy, and environmental degradation—especially as theorized within sociology.

Learn more about Salmon and Acorns Feed Our People at the Rutgers University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Malcolm Fairbrother's "Free Traders"

Malcolm Fairbrother is a professor of sociology at Umeå University, Sweden, and the University of Graz, Austria. He is also a researcher at the Institute for Futures Studies, Stockholm.

Fairbrother applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Free Traders: Elites, Democracy, and the Rise of Globalization in North America, and reported the following:

For Free Traders, the Page 99 Test performs weakly, though not terribly. Page 99 describes some core issues in the negotiations that established the 1989 Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement, and later the 1994 NAFTA (with Mexico). The book is certainly about those negotiations, but it's also about a lot more.

To be specific, page 99 includes this:

The NAFTA investment chapter (Chapter 11) brought together commitments that had never been combined before. First, Chapter 11 stipulated the elimination of many regulations that Mexico had previously used to shape the behaviors of foreign investors, such as local content rules and foreign exchange balancing requirements. The definition of investment for the purposes of Chapter 11 would be very broad, and parties could never introduce any new performance requirements. The Americans wanted to eliminate any sectoral restrictions on foreign investment in Mexico, and also to encourage the privatization of state-owned enterprises; the Mexicans insisted on excluding the energy sector, for the most part, but otherwise they excluded very few sectors. Given their enthusiasm for free markets (see Chapter 4), as one of them said, “It’s hard to think of any sector in which foreign investment had no reason to be.”

There are nods here to some of the book's broader themes. NAFTA's contents were unprecedented for an agreement spanning developed and developing countries, and it reflected a dramatic recent change in Mexico's whole economic development strategy. That change came from a newfound enthusiasm for free-market policies on the part of the country's (evolving) political elite. U.S. officials, on the other hand, were asking for much the same kinds of things they had been trying to get from developing countries for decades--but which the latter had previously denied them.

In a sense, all of this historical material about NAFTA's creation is a means to another, broader end: explaining the rise of economic globalization generally, and identifying the people and ideas behind it. To what extent should we think about globalization as a project of elites? And (given that the book mostly argues globalization was an elitist project) how were elites able to get their way? How were different kinds of free-trader elites able to cooperate, given that (the book shows) there were subtle and sometimes not-so-subtle conflicts among their priorities and worldviews?

Page 99 does show how Free Traders relies a lot on quotes from people who were directly involved in creating NAFTA (plus all kinds of official and unofficial archival records about what they did, said, and thought). Existing academic research on globalization has tended to be either quite stylized and abstracted, or atheoretical and specific to individual countries. What I tried to do in the book was to highlight gritty details that were telling about the bigger forces at work, while emphasizing patterns and building a big-picture theory of globalization's history (with implications for the future).

Visit Malcolm Fairbrother's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

W. Caleb McDaniel's "Sweet Taste of Liberty"

W. Caleb McDaniel is an Associate Professor of History at Rice University, where he also serves as magister of Duncan College. His first book, The Problem of Democracy in the Age of Slavery, won the Merle Curti prize from the Organization of American Historians and the James Broussard Prize from the Society of Historians of the Early American Republic.

McDaniel applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Sweet Taste of Liberty: A True Story of Slavery and Restitution in America, and reported the following:

Sweet Taste of Liberty tells the story of Henrietta Wood, a woman who was born enslaved in Kentucky, freed in Cincinnati before the Civil War, and then kidnapped and reenslaved in 1853 by a man named Zebulon Ward, who soon sold her away to Mississippi. In 1869, after being freed again, this time by the Thirteenth Amendment, Wood returned to the Cincinnati area, where she filed a lawsuit against Zeb Ward. Finally, in 1878, she won a judgment of $2,500 from a federal jury, perhaps the largest such sum ever awarded by a U.S. court in restitution for slavery.

The Page 99 Test doesn't work perfectly for Sweet Taste of Liberty because that page does not talk about Henrietta Wood at all, but it does give readers an impression of her adversary Ward. It introduces a major theme of the book: the intertwined histories of slavery and incarceration. And it also relates to a major question raised by the story: despite Wood's extraordinary victory in court, did Zebulon Ward actually get off cheap in the end?

In 1855, not long after he enslaved Wood, Zebulon Ward became the keeper of the Kentucky state penitentiary in Frankfort. As in many other state prisons at the time, Kentucky's state prisoners were held in isolation at night but forced to work during the day. They manufactured goods for sale---mostly hemp products such as the bagging used to bale cotton. And instead of paying the keeper of the prison a salary, the state allowed him to organize the convicts' work and then keep as much as half the profits from their labor. By the time Zeb Ward started the job in 1855, the position was known, as one newspaper put it, as "the most lucrative one in the State of Kentucky."

Ward came to Frankfort as a fortune-seeker, too. One of his prisoners was an abolitionist named Calvin Fairbank who had been convicted of aiding fugitive slaves, and Fairbank remembered a frank speech given by Ward shortly after his inauguration as keeper. "I came here to make money," Ward told the inmates, "and I'm going to do it if I kill you all."

From page 99:

The result was what Fairbank described as a "rigorous, murderous rule."
Though he had his problems with Craig as a keeper, too, Fairbank concluded that Ward "cared nothing for human life. Money was his religion." The abolitionist remembered being flogged "never less than twice" a day, usually with the kind of strap "commonly used by overseers of slaves." To avoid the punishing pace of work, more than one prisoner cut off his own hand, preferring to be sent to the infirmary as a partial amputee. Before Ward had even completed a year in the new post, thirteen convicts had died by the keeper's own report---a startling and unprecedented increase. In sum, Fairbank wrote, the lease by which Ward obtained control of the inmates "was virtually a sale, with very little difference between the condition of the prisoner and that of an actual slave."

An "actual slave" might have questioned the comparison, but Ward might not have refused it. By July 1856, he was the owner of four slaves, seven by the following year---a rising number that signaled his increasing wealth. Zeb was growing accustomed to earning his bread from other men's sweat. The keeper and his employees also seemed to specially delight in persecuting antislavery convicts such as Fairbank or James Blackburn, a married "mulatto" man who had been convicted of assisting slaves to run away and who was identified in the register of inmates by the lash marks on his back. Thomas Brown, an alleged abolitionist who had moved from Cincinnati to Kentucky in 1850 and was sent to prison on May 8, 1855, later recalled being "stripped, and flogged" with a cat-o'-nine-tails, all while the guards joked that "'Old Brown had worn himself out stealing negroes, and would not work.'" Brown also recalled something Ward himself had said upon his arrival at the jail. "The head keeper was extremely glad to get another 'Abolitionist,' as he called him, in his power, expressing with an oath, a wish to be permitted to hang all such."

After the Civil War, Ward also took over prisons in Tennessee and Arkansas, serving as an architect of the convict leasing systems that those and other southern states used to force emancipated slaves into what Douglas A. Blackmon has described as "slavery by another name."

By the end of his life, Ward's use of convict labor had helped him build an estate worth at least \$600,000, making him a multi-millionaire in today's dollars. It was a fortune built, as Page 99 begins to show, by a man who valued making money more than human life.

Visit W. Caleb McDaniel's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Carol Faulkner's "Unfaithful"

Carol Faulkner is Professor of History at Syracuse University. She is author of Lucretia Mott's Heresy: Abolition and Women's Rights in Nineteenth-Century America and Women's Radical Reconstruction: The Freedmen's Aid Movement.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Unfaithful: Love, Adultery, and Marriage Reform in Nineteenth-Century America, and reported the following:

From page 99:

Lyman Case’s generosity extended to other men. Although a twice-married man, he was an opponent of the institution. According to another habitué of the Unitary Home, Case “not only did not believe in marriage as an institution, but professed to be entirely free from the selfishness which prompts men to claim the exclusive right of the affection and person of the women they love.” When Henry Clapp Jr. brought his Saturday Press partner Edward Howland—a southerner, former cotton merchant, and a Harvard man—to the Unitary Home, Marie was smitten. After Edward and Marie danced, Lyman told her “Marie, you have met your destiny.” When she responded, “I thought I had met my destiny,” he replied, “No lying, Marie. You have met the man of all men whom you need.”

Not everyone remembered Case’s treatment of Marie so positively. In a later attempt to undermine Case’s reputation, William S. Andrews, Stephen Pearl’s son, wrote that Case made a mockery of his marriage. To prove his “extreme liberality,” Case invited the teenage William “to sleep with his wife, in her presence, and told her that she must initiate me into the delights and mysteries of love (or words to that effect).” William Andrews did not take him up on the offer, and Marie apparently told him that “Mr. Case did not mean what he said. . . . he desired to lead her into some indiscretion that would enable him to obtain a divorce.” Case, William Andrews concluded, “was utterly devoid of moral sense.”

Given Marie’s warm memories of Lyman Case, William Andrews’s record of this exchange, particularly Lyman’s intent to manufacture grounds for divorce, is questionable. Marie and Lyman did divorce, but his benevolence was evident in this act as well. The Cases’ marriage ended in New York on July 11, 1865. With adultery the only possible cause, Marie’s complaint detailed her husband’s disregard for the “solemnity of the marriage vow” and charged him with having “carnal connections” with “several persons to this plaintiff unknown” as well as with a prostitute named Antoinette Muller. Two attorneys investigated this charge, interviewing Muller and a man named Leon Whiting, who had apparently accompanied Lyman Case to the brothel. The open marriages at the Unitary Home should have provided ample evidence for adultery, so it is likely that Lyman Case cooperated in constructing this particular incident.

Page 99 works well for my book because it gives readers an example of an “open” marriage, one of the novel romantic arrangements favored by the subjects of Unfaithful. In the nineteenth century, radicals like Lyman and Marie Case (later Howland) tried to reimagine the institution of marriage. With approximately twenty-five other journalists, utopians, bohemians, and free lovers, they lived in a Manhattan brownstone called the Unitary Home. In this utopian domestic experiment, the residents slept in private apartments but shared the public rooms and expenses. Even married members of the Unitary Home, such as Lyman and Marie Case, had love affairs with other residents and visitors. They allowed their affections to be their guide.

My book traces this broad movement to reform marriage from its origins in the 1830s through the Beecher-Tilton scandal of the 1870s. In restrictive New York State, where adultery was the only cause for divorce, Lyman and Marie Case manufactured a charge of adultery so that Marie could marry her true love. For these activists, love was more powerful than any law. A variety of activists, including feminists, spiritualists, and free lovers, redefined adultery as a way to reimagine marriage as more voluntary, equal, and loving. These critics launched public attacks on marriage and divorce laws, viewing them as an obstacle to individual freedom and happiness.

Learn more about Unfaithful at the University of Pennsylvania Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue