Arthur I. Miller's "The Artist in the Machine"

Arthur I. Miller is Emeritus Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at University College London. He is the author of Colliding Worlds: How Cutting-Edge Science is Redefining Contemporary Art and other books including Einstein, Picasso: Space, Time, and the Beauty That Causes Havoc.

Miller applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Artist in the Machine: The World of AI-Powered Creativity, and reported the following:

From page 99:

“Translating one image into another … is like translating between languages, like between English and French. They are two different representations of the same world,” says Phillip Isola.

Isola and his coworkers invented a variation on GANs that he calls conditional generative adversarial networks (CGANs). They are conditional because instead of starting the generator network (G) from noise, from nothing, they condition it by using an actual image. Rather than feeding the discriminator network (D) on huge caches of images, they use pairs of images, such as a black-and-white image of a scene and the same scene in color. Then, they input a new black-and-white scene into the generator network. Initially D rejects the new scene, so G colorizes it. In other words, the output is conditioned by the input, which is what GANs are all about. As a result, Pix2Pix, as Isola calls his system, requires a much smaller set of training data than other supervised learning algorithms.

Thus Isola discovered how to translate an image of one sort into another sort: Pix2Pix, pixels to pixels. As he puts it, all those “little problems in computer vision were just mapping of pixels to pixels.” While style transfer transfers the style of one image onto another, creating an image “in the style of” a painting by Picasso, for example, Pix2Pix goes further. Like Leon Gatys, who invented style transfer, Isola is interested in perception, how we see.

My personal litmus test for reading a book is to be gripped by the first sentence in the first substantive section. If I had to make this decision on the basis of page 99 of The Artist in the Machine I would be tempted to put it back on the shelf. While what is on this page is highly interesting – almost magical – the reader will have to have gone through preceding chapters to know, for example, what a GAN (Generative Adversarial Network) and style transfer are. Opening up to page 99 could give the prospective reader the impression that this is a book meant for a computer scientist. Not so. I wrote The Artist in the Machine for the educated layperson interested in learning about the up-to-date ways in which AIs (artificial intelligences) can amazingly create art, literature and music of a sort that we cannot imagine. My book focuses on concepts and uses no mathematics. So, the page 99 test does not work for my book.

Those aficionados of AI who open to page 99, will be struck by how an artificial network machine, trained on pairs of images, one in black and white and the other in colour, can colorize an image. The process is called Pix2Pix. Artists use it to create highly interesting works. Examples are in The Artist in the Machine. Pix2Pix also shows how a machine can take on its own creativity to produce an original work of art.

For some decades I have written about creativity in humans and touched on creativity in machines. In this book I have addressed both with focus on machines. I discuss how my own theory of creativity can apply to machines which, in the future, will create art, literature and music with emotions and consciousness. These works will interest us and their brethren too and perhaps will be even better than we can produce. In this way humans and machines can bootstrap each other’s creativity.

Visit Arthur I. Miller's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Cynthia A. Kierner's "Inventing Disaster"

Cynthia A. Kierner is professor of history at George Mason University and the author of Martha Jefferson Randolph, Daughter of Monticello.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Inventing Disaster: The Culture of Calamity from the Jamestown Colony to the Johnstown Flood, and reported the following:

Page 99 is the first page of the fourth of six chapters of Inventing Disaster. Titled "Benevolent Empire," this chapter examines how colonial Americans increasingly expected disaster relief from Britain after 1755, when the king and Parliament sent the impressive sum of £100,000 in aid to Portugal after a massive earthquake annihilated Lisbon, the Portuguese capital. The first page of this chapter reads as follows:

The Lisbon earthquake was more a turning point than a starting point in the history of British benevolence. In addition to local philanthropy to aid the poor and the sick at home, eighteenth-century Britons sometimes sent charitable gifts to the king’s American subjects. The most impressive case of British aid to colonists came in response to the Charleston fire of 1740, when the relief efforts of colonial governors, London merchants, and others were supplemented by a sizable contribution from the king and Parliament. Government relief for Charleston, which was not widely publicized, was an act of statecraft designed primarily to preserve order in a valuable colony that seemed vulnerable to slave insurrections and also to Spanish attacks from nearby Florida. In 1755, by contrast, disaster relief for Lisbon, whatever its other purposes, was presented and perceived as state-sponsored humanitarianism first and foremost.

Despite the outpouring of support for Charleston in 1740, colonists’ routine and explicit expectation of relief from Britain in the aftermath of disasters was a post-Lisbon development. The king’s gift to Portugal was a grand gesture that resonated profoundly among subjects who cherished the ideal of a benevolent monarch. Fortified by the lessons of Lisbon, colonists sought help from the mother country in the wake of calamity. More often than not, Britons assisted colonial disaster victims but—like the £20,000 dispatched to Charleston, a city that had suffered some £250,000 in fire-related losses—the sums provided were less a practical remedy for a dire situation than a performance of benevolence…

In some ways, the Page 99 Test works for Inventing Disaster, but in others it does not. On the one hand, this page points readers to several important issues at the heart of my story, most notably the increasingly dependable spread of information about disasters across the Atlantic world, the clamor of affected populations for post-disaster assistance from both government officials and private charities, and the idea that humanitarian aid could be deployed both to relief suffering and to maintain order. (Spoiler alert: disaster survivors were less apt to expect, and even less likely to get, relief in post-revolutionary America.) On the other hand, because the material on page 99 is overwhelmingly argument and analysis, it is not really representative of the entire book, which is full of graphic and heart-wrenching disaster stories and also some terrific illustrations.

Inventing Disaster traces the gradual coalescence of the idea and culture of disaster over nearly three centuries. I argue that a new modern response to calamity grew out of three Enlightenment-inspired developments: the spread of information via trade, travel, and print; belief in science, human agency, and progress; and the growing influence of the culture of sensibility. Page 99 stands more or less midway between the beginning and end of my story. In the Jamestown colony (1607) famines, diseases, and other deadly things routinely happened, but few people knew about them and no one really sought to relieve the suffering or even to prevent it in the future. By the time we get to the Johnstown flood (1889), disaster relief and prevention, as well as the popular culture of calamity, looked in most respects much like it does in twenty-first-century America.

Learn more about Inventing Disaster at the University of North Carolina Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Christopher S. Wood's "A History of Art History"

Christopher S. Wood is a professor at New York University. He is the author of Forgery, Replica, Fiction: Temporalities of German Renaissance Art and Albrecht Altdorfer and the Origins of Landscape, the coauthor of Anachronic Renaissance, and the editor of The Vienna School Reader: Politics and Art Historical Method in the 1930s.

Wood applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, A History of Art History, and reported the following:

On page 99 I quote Giovanni Andrea Gilio, a sixteenth-century Italian cleric who disapproved of the sensuous, stylish Christian art of his time, what we now call Mannerist art. Gilio contrasted the modern pictures to the simple, austere art of early Christian times. I then suggest that in this historical period, generally, worries about the religious content of images tended to interfere with the appreciation of those images’ artistic qualities. So for example when European travelers came into contact with cult images in South Asia they were unable to see those images also as artworks, so confident were they that the Hindu gods were false gods, or demons.

This page is a window opening onto one of the main topics of my book: relativism, or the willingness to cast a sympathetic gaze on unfamiliar artistic styles. Gilio was able to appreciate the sincere but clumsy early Christian paintings, so preparing the ground for an affirmative history of medieval art. But he could do this because he still felt connected, by continuity of religious doctrine, to those primitive Christians. His contemporaries had no such sympathy for Hinduism, and so had no sympathy for Hindu art.

My book is about art history as an intellectual project. The books asks: where, when, and why have people thought about art historically, or tried to write its history? In the Renaissance, the author of an art history was likely to be an artist, like the Italian painter Giorgio Vasari. In modern times, art history evolved into an academic discipline. Art history is written by cultures which cherish and protect art’s autonomy, its freedom from external pressures: mainly in China, and in Europe and beyond since the Renaissance.

Already Vasari had a strong sense of art’s independence, and of the primacy of form over content. The focus on form rather than content became the key to overcoming the European prejudices that clouded the vision of non-European art. By the nineteenth century art historians were ready to forgive the Hindus their doctrinal errors and so write inclusive, global art histories. Relativism—or the attempt to understand every culture and every artwork on its own terms—became the creed of the modern historiography of art.

Learn more about A History of Art History at the Princeton University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pradip Ninan Thomas's "Empire and Post-Empire Telecommunications in India"

Pradip Ninan Thomas is at the School of Communications and Arts, University of Queensland. He has written extensively on the media in India, the political economy of communications, communications and social change and the media and religion. He was the Vice President of the International Association for Media & Communication Research (2012-2016).

Thomas applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Empire and Post-Empire Telecommunications in India: A History, and reported the following:

Page 99 does highlight some key issues discussed in this volume. The expansion of the imperial chain of wired and wireless stations – the all Red Line was a project that was a stated ambition and that was dear to the heart of His Majesty’s Government (HMG). Relying on lines that routed through foreign territory was a bit of a gamble as both the forces of Nature and unfriendly foreign powers frequently destroyed these lines thus delaying the flow of imperial communications from London to India and vice versa. However, the issue of who was to pay for the establishment of these lines was a point of contention between HMG and the Government of India (GOI). Marconi’s monopoly over wireless had always been a sticking point for the HMG and the GOI had its own reasons for keeping Marconi at a distance.

This volume is a historical account of the establishment of the Victorian Internet – the telegraph, cable and wireless that was key to imperial communications. From the very beginning of this enterprise, private capital played an important role. John Pender was the first telecommunications czar who monopolised every aspect of the cable industry and for the most part his projects, while making money for his shareholders, also acted as conduits for imperial communications. For the most part, such synergies were mutually beneficial although the desire to nationalise imperial telecommunications was a policy objective of the HMG. The desire to have complete control over communications flows between London and the colonies and within the British Empire became a paramount concern after the take-over of the governance of India by HMG from the East India Company. It is telling that the Indian Telegraph Act of 1887 remains in force even today in post-independent India. This volume also explores the continuities between Empire and post-Empire telecommunications and makes a case for history to be acknowledged in any interpretation of the present. Even the landing stations for oceanic cables in India today, are for the most part, colonial in origin.

Based primarily on telecommunications archives located in the British Library, it tells a story of the growth and development of a key Victorian infrastructure – telecommunications in India. It also includes a substantive chapter on the challenges faced by the post-independent government of India to democratise access to what until then was an elite project.

Learn more about Empire and Post-Empire Telecommunications in India at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Douglas R. Egerton's "Heirs of an Honored Name"

Douglas R. Egerton is a professor of history at Le Moyne College. The award-winning author's books include Thunder at the Gates and The Wars of Reconstruction.

Egerton applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Heirs of an Honored Name: The Decline of the Adams Family and the Rise of Modern America, and reported the following:

By page 99, Charles Francis Adams Sr., the son and grandson of presidents, is deeply into antislavery politics. The year on this page is 1852, and four years earlier, Adams had run as the vice presidential nominee for the Free Soil Party, a new party dedicated to keeping slavery out of the lands in the Southwest taken from Mexico. Although himself not a candidate for office that year, the former state assemblyman campaigned for the party around his home state of Massachusetts, and he was gratified to see that the Free Soilers captured 22 percent of the vote in his state and came in just behind Whig candidate Winfield Scott. As much as he mourned the triumph of Democratic nominee Franklin Pierce, whom he derided as "an ultra pro-slavery" candidate, Adams took heart in the fact that his new party was "no longer the third party of the nation." In the coming years, Adams was to play a key role in the founding of the Republican Party.

For Heirs of an Honored Name, the page 99 tests works splendidly. Readers just glancing at the page will see Charles Francis Adams Sr. at the dawn of his illustrious career. Behind him were five years in the Massachusetts assembly, and by this page Adams was deeply involved in antislavery politics as one of the most famous free soil advocates in the nation. But one also sees his deep ambivalence--a longstanding family trait he would pass along to the fourth generation of Adamses--toward national greatness. Of all the early presidents, only John Adams and Martin Van Buren sired sons who lived to adulthood, making the Adams family the nation's first political dynasty. Charles Francis Sr. coveted fame and dedicated his life to the service of his country, but as an Adams, greatness had to come to him. He could not seek it out. One sees on this page that his friends hoped to nominate him for the House of Representatives, and Adams admitted to his diary that the nomination "would be agreeable" provided it was "spontaneous." He wished to his friends to understand, however, that he never "solicited a nomination." It was that refusal to seek out fame that would ultimately cost him the chance to become the third President Adams.

Heirs opens where most books on the Adams family end, with the 1848 death of Congressman John Quincy Adams, who was the first man ever to die in the Capitol building. Because they helped to found the American republic and held the nation's highest office, John and John Quincy have received the most attention from historians. Each year, it seems, sees the publication of a new biography or presidential study of the early Adamses. Yet the third and fourth generation of Adamses, if largely forgotten today, were nearly as important to American history. Charles Francis Sr. served five years in the Massachusetts legislature, where he succeeded in passing some of the most progressive legislation the state had ever seen. (At a time when new states, for example, banned interracial marriages, Adams drafted legislation that repealed his state's 1786 ban on interracial relationships.) He helped to create the 1848 Free Soil party, ran as its first vice presidential nominee, and then played a critical role in building the Republican Party. As a congressman, he served on the Committee of Thirty-three, which attempted to forge a compromise to halt southern secession, and after Abraham Lincoln was sworn in as president, Adams was tapped to become the third member of his family to serve as minister to Great Britain. During his seven years in London, Adams worked to keep Britain from siding with the Confederacy, and his skill at doing so marked him as one of the greatest diplomatists in his country's history. At the same time, however, Adams and his children reflected the troubled mood of the post-war nation. They mirrored the decay of the Republican Party's ideals as the party deteriorated from a progressive, free soil movement that spoke to the aspirations of the northern middle class, into a party of wealthy barons and railroad magnates.

Learn more about Heirs of an Honored Name at the Basic Books website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ann Durkin Keating's "The World of Juliette Kinzie"

Ann Durkin Keating is Dr. C. Frederick Toenniges Professor of History at North Central College in Naperville, Illinois.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The World of Juliette Kinzie: Chicago before the Fire, and reported the following

Opening to page 99 of The World of Juliette Kinzie, the reader is dropped not only into the middle of Juliette Magill Kinzie’s life, but also into the middle of her 1856 history of Chicago, Wau-Bun: The ‘Early Day’ in the Northwest. It is representative of the book in this way: At every turn, I wove together what Juliette was writing with her broader life experiences. So the page toggles back between early Chicago and 1856. In 1856, Juliette was 50 years old; it was thirty-five years after she had married and traveled west from Connecticut to Wisconsin and then to Chicago. Juliette still lived in the large brick house she and her husband John had built in 1835 on the north side of the Chicago River not far from what is today the Michigan Avenue Bridge. By 1856, the couple had helped to build Chicago from a small outpost in Indian Country to a growing industrial entrepot anchored by almost a dozen rail lines. Juliette Kinzie wrote her history of Chicago to solidify the place of the Kinzie family in that saga. We remember her because of her work as a historian; Wau-Bun remains in print down to the present.

On page 99, the reader learns that Juliette sought to shape the history of the city she called home. I suggest that:

Juliette set out to define a foundation story for Chicago that properly acknowledged the role of her family. Her history of Chicago began in 1804 with the arrival of John and Eleanor Kinzie, the same year the US government completed Fort Dearborn. Whatever happened before was simply a prequel. This allowed Juliette to acknowledge and then quickly diminish the earlier presence of others like Jean Baptiste Point de Sable, now widely understood to have been Chicago’s first settler. She shrewdly interjected race into her dismissal of his claim to primacy by repeating what she had heard from area Indians: “the first white man who settled here was a negro.” She assumed that her largely white readership would then simply discount his importance.

Juliette also skillfully downplayed the handful of métis families at the small trading outpost that emerged during the 1790s. Their houses, gardens, and outbuildings already dotted the riverbanks when Fort Dearborn was founded. In Wau-Bun, Juliette ignored them when she enumerated the residents of Chicago she encountered in her 1831 visit. By narrowing her field to “white inhabitants,” Juliette overlooked even the Kinzies’ longtime neighbors Antoine and Archange Ouilmette, who had lived alongside Point de Sable during his years at Chicago.

This selection also raises another issue that threads through my book. Juliette Kinzie believed in the supremacy of white New England society and tried to transplant it in Chicago. Alongside her sense of superiority, Juliette betrayed deep prejudices against Native Americans, African-Americans and European immigrants. While Juliette showed a deep interest in understanding the Ho-Chunk and Potawatomi who lived around her in the early 1830s, it was guided by her certainty that their world was disappearing in the face of the western expansion of American society. Metis people were simply written out of her story of “white inhabitants.” And African-Americans, enslaved or free, were relegated to subservient places in her deeply hierarchical and patriarchal world. Individual rights had very little meaning to her; household responsibilities were at the center of a worldview that she shared with many privileged white women. But changes were afoot. Even by 1856, challenges from abolitionists and women’s rights activists, as well as the rise of industrial capitalism, were challenging Kinzie’s world view. Not found on page 99 is the story of how Juliette Kinzie responded to these changes before her death in 1870. But it is part of The World of Juliette Kinzie!

Learn more about The World of Juliette Kinzie at the University of Chicago Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Matthew Gutmann's "Are Men Animals?"

Matthew Gutmann is a professor of anthropology at Brown University who has spent thirty years exploring notions of masculinity across the United States, Latin America, and China. He also has been a visiting professor at El Colegio de México and Nanjing University.

Guttman applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Are Men Animals?: How Modern Masculinity Sells Men Short, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Are Men Animals? is in a chapter called “The Male Libido.” It has part of a narrative on how men in Mexico (and elsewhere) were usually “planned out of family planning” global campaigns for modern forms of contraception and women’s health launched in the 1960s and 1970s. To quote directly from page 99:

In government, foundation, and family planning agency documents of the time, men were rarely mentioned as relevant to new population programs. Perhaps they were overlooked by accident. Perhaps this was an inadvertent consequence of women reasonably being made the highest priority. Or perhaps there were underlying assumptions about men, their biologies, and their essential interests and inclinations when it came to sex and babies that precluded making them central to campaigns around contraception, birth spacing, the optimal number of children, and sexual health.

Men’s sexuality is one of the key examples discussed in the book, and family planning in Mexico is a good case study on sexuality that highlights widespread and harmful assumptions about men and boys that exaggerate biological factors in explaining male behavior.

Are Men Animals? is a book about maleness and asks why, in common and scientific discourse, language about masculinity so often resorts to biological stereotypes about what makes men tick. As a cultural anthropologist I have carried out ethnographic fieldwork in Mexico, the United States, and China. I have documented and tried to understand everyday ways that men express themselves when it comes to sexuality and aggression, for example, noticing both tremendous variation from one locale to another, as well as significant changes over time—from one generation to another—in what it means to be a man. All these ideas about maleness and experiences with men are the stuff of daily life, for women as well as men.

And these ideas and experiences with men have everyday practical implications not only for families but for public policies as well. In Mexico City, women can ride in separate subway cars at rush hour. In the United States, only 18 year old men register for a possible future draft. Men in UN Peacekeeping forces, some say, cannot go longer than six months before they “need” sex. In China, the government preaches that men can marry whenever they like, but women who are not married 27 years old are to be officially labeled “leftover women.” In each of these cases, erroneous assumptions about men’s (and women’s) natures are at least influential in the policies.

To the extent these beliefs about men and maleness go unquestioned we can inadvertently let men off the hook. After all, boys will be boys, right? For anyone who supports gender equality, such thinking and language needs to be challenged. We live in an age of gender confusion with the possibility of serious renegotiation of what it means to be a man. That process will be infinitely easier once we understand that men’s fate does not reside in their biology.

Learn more about Are Men Animals? at the Basic Books website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Miriam Kingsberg Kadia's "Into the Field"

Miriam Kingsberg Kadia is Associate Professor of History at the University of Colorado Boulder. She is the author of Moral Nation, which won the Eugene M. Kayden Book Award in 2015.

Kadia applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Into the Field: Human Scientists of Transwar Japan, and reported the following:

Page 99 falls almost at the midpoint of Into the Field, at the beginning of the fourth of eight chapters. This chapter examines the institutions that generated a new, post-imperial understanding of concepts such as “race” and “culture” in early postwar Japan. The first of these was UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Social, and Cultural Organization), founded in 1945 to deploy knowledge as a means of preventing another world war. As I argue on page 99, despite—or because—of their recent contributions to militarism and fascism, Japanese scholars were among the most enthusiastic supporters of the organization in the world. In the words of one observer, they became “kamikaze for UNESCO” (this is one of my favorite quotes in the book!). UNESCO also exemplifies the importance of global influences, engagement, and above all funding to human science in early postwar Japan. In the 1950s it sponsored the nation’s first field expedition to Brazil (the subject of Chapter 6).

Page 99 is one of a minority of pages in Into the Field that does not mention the transwar Japanese ethnologist, anthropologist, and archaeologist Izumi Seiichi (1915-1970), around whose career the book is structured. In researching this project, I adopted an ethnographic approach, visiting Izumi’s former field sites from the Andes to the Amazon and from Manchuria to West Papua. But because page 99 deals with a background development at home, it is based on more conventional sources for historians: library and archival materials. It lacks some of the intimate personal detail and drama that appear in the rest of the book.

Yet in fact, Into the Field is not intended as an intellectual biography of one extraordinary individual, but rather as a collective biography (prosopography) of his cohort. Izumi belonged to a generation of human scientists who created knowledge to serve the Japanese empire before 1945, and who subsequently revised that knowledge to suit an aspiring democratic, capitalist, peaceful postwar state. In writing this book, I struggled to strike a balance between following Izumi’s incredible professional life on the one hand, and showing him as representative of larger trends and ideas on the other. Page 99 is an example of how I periodically pause my narration of Izumi’s career to zoom in on the wider context of domestic and global developments.

Learn more about Into the Field at the Stanford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Julia Maskivker's "The Duty to Vote"

Julia Maskivker is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida. Her research focuses on ethical and political philosophy, in particular, on theories of justice and equality. Much of her research concerns the political theory of the welfare state and issues of distributive justice. Other more recent work focuses on democracy and citizen participation, including the ethics of voting and civic obligation.

Maskivker applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Duty to Vote, and reported the following:

The page 99 test does not work for my book. It is in the middle of the most "technical" chapter that deals with an objection that is not central to my argument and not illustrative of the book's claims in general. Anyone using the page 99 test would get the wrong idea about the book.

The classical approach to voting in the literature is that it is irrational to do it. Anthony Downs, in his groundbreaking book, An Economic Theory of Democracy, famously argued that individuals, if rational, will not bother to vote because one single vote will get lost in a proverbial ocean of votes and will have no impact on the election. But this understanding of human rationality is shortsighted.

We can see voting as a collectively rational act. When many people vote with a modicum of information, we can expect that elections will result in the establishment of fair minded governments—or the ousting of inept and immoral ones. Why not think that we have a duty to help our fellow citizens, and society, by contributing to justice in this way? If voting will not get in the way of important personal goals and plans of life we may have-- we do not need to be a Homos Politicus as Aristotle would have wanted us to-- why not view it as a duty of “common pursuit”—that is, a duty that requires that we act in concert with others in order to be effective?

In the book, I argue that we can see voting as a contribution to a larger collective endeavor, and an act of justice in the light of a Samaritan duty of aid towards society. We have a duty of conscience to vote with care, i.e., with information and a sense of the common good, in order to help our fellow-citizens prevent injustice and ensure decently good governance. The latter can be achieved, partly but importantly, if voters manage to elect acceptably fair-minded governments and vote out corrupt or inept ones. On this view, the benefit that comes about for everybody that cooperates out weights the personal cost of doing our share of the cooperation. There is nothing irrational in partaking of a collective activity from which many others, including ourselves, may benefit. Free-riding, on this logic, is not attractive because we commit to the goodness of the result we seek to further with others. Individuals do this all the time in other realms of social life such as when they give to charity or when they take pains to minimize their carbon footprint. Why should voting be any different?

Visit Julia Maskivker's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jessica Whyte's "The Morals of the Market"

Jessica Whyte is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of New South Wales. She is the author of Catastrophe and Redemption: The Political Thought of Giorgio Agamben.

Whyte applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights and the Rise of Neoliberalism, and reported the following:

In 1966, the Austrian neoliberal economist Friedrich Hayek described the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as an incoherent attempt to fuse a Western liberal tradition with the Marxist ideals of the Russian Revolution. Hayek singled out the Universal Declaration’s social and economic rights, arguing that they were a threat to the competitive market order and to ‘civilisation’ itself.

Page 99 of The Morals of the Market takes us to the centre of the book’s argument for why the social and economic rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration ultimately proved to be far less threatening to the market order than Hayek and his neoliberal collaborators assumed. It returns us to the late 1940s, when United Nations delegates argued over the best means to achieve these rights. While some argued that states should be legally required to provide their citizens with food, clothing, housing and medical care, the United States promoted a minimalist and privatized conception of social and economic rights, best realized through private consumption.

This gives us a good sense of my book’s broader argument that the seeds of what I call ‘neoliberal human rights’ were planted in the 1940s, even if they only flourished decades later. In the case of social and economic rights, I show that early neoliberal thinkers were also consumed with the question of how to respond to poverty in ways compatible with a competitive market order. They insisted that the provision of a vital minimum must not interfere with familial and individual responsibility and the will to work for a living. Poverty relief, the neoliberals believed, must not interfere with the inequalities of civil society.

Throughout the book, I show that while neoliberal thinkers looked with despair at attempts to enshrine new rights to social welfare, racial equality and self-determination, they also developed their own account of human rights as moral and legal supports for a liberal market order. The role of neoliberal human rights was less to protect the individual than to protect the market order and inherited status hierarchies in the face of political challenge. The neoliberals saw human rights as necessary to protect ‘civil society’ – understood as a realm of freedom, voluntary interaction, and distributed, private power – from the violence, conflict and coercion they insisted was endemic to politics.

This conception of human rights, I show, has been much more influential than most contemporary human rights defenders would like to admit—and not only on the political right or in the halls of power. Without coming to terms with that influence, social movements and struggles that wield the language of human rights to contest neoliberalism may find themselves strengthening its hold.

Learn more about The Morals of the Market at the publisher's website.

--Marshal Zeringue