#darren staloff

[yr-obedt-cicero]

Why do you think Hamilton was ambition crazy? Like what was his motive to rising to the top? Was he just unhappy with the way things were that he wanted a position in power? Because he still could have amended for his poor childhood and become a merchant or something, yet it seems like he strived for more

The desire for power and changing the country came later on in war. I feel like the true origin of Hamilton's ambitious spirit spurred from the treatment he got as a child for being born out of wedlock. As Darren Staloff puts it better;

“Fame and glory for Hamilton were the necessary salve for the wounds of his childhood. An exalted “station” would atone for his abandonment by his parents and finally answer the taunts of “whore child” that he had endured as a boy on the streets of Christiansted. Only extraordinary achievement could vindicate Hamilton. [...] Hamilton’s burning ambition spurred him to great accomplishments, much to the benefit of his adopted country. Hamilton’s remarkable efforts in the revolutionary and early national epochs were critical to the founding of American freedom, prosperity, and national greatness. Indeed, by the time he retired from public life, Hamilton had achieved everything a man of his age could dream of, much less hope for. He had married into one of the wealthiest and most illustrious families in North America, with a handsome wife who adored him and a brood of devoted children. He was the leader member of the New York bar whose services were eagerly sought by all who needed legal representation. His political career was an unqualified success. Short of the presidency, he had been honored with every high office and title, both military and civilian, that his country could bestow. Revered by his followers, admired by his colleagues, and respected by his foes, Hamilton in his lifetime climbed the summits of acclaim that are usually reserved for those long deceased. Yet he remained unsatisfied. Success never brought the relief he pined for. “Mine is an odd destiny,” he wrote to his friend and fellow Federalist Gouverneur Morris in 1802. “Perhaps no man in the United States has sacrificed or done more for the present Constitution than myself…Yet I have the murmurs of its friends no less than the curses of its foes for my reward.” This was the tragedy of Alexander Hamilton: no worldly success could remove the scars of his childhood wounds.”

(source — Hamilton, Adams, Jefferson: The Politics of Enlightenment and the American Founding, by Darren Staloff)

[grandhotelabyss]

Do you have any "must-read" literary magazines/book publishers/blogs, etc.?

I think the best literary coverage in magazines these days is in Compact and Tablet, because whoever's putting up the money and whatever their agenda has evidently and wisely decided to keep the cultural coverage much more free of overt politics than other venues. I'm not only talking about "wokeness" here but also the nonsense we find in the "anti-woke" venues, like, just to give an example, this tacky "Zombie Reagan" complaint in Quillette that English departments are dying because they teach, and I quote, "Foucault, Judith Butler, Kant, and Gloria Anzaldúa," yes, I repeat, Kant. Whereas Compact gives Gasda free rein to take it to the Oxfordians (not least Yarvin), and let the tech-adjacent neoreactionary politics fall where they may, just as Tablet lets Blake Smith chart the uncharted middle course in subtle essay after subtle essay on queer theory and politics, the very subtlety itself guaranteed to offend activists of all camps. Not to mention that both venues publish interesting free agents like Valerie Stivers and Naomi Tanakia. In the same vein, Unherd is good for political and cultural commentary—pretty unpredictable, if convergent upon what we might call the new center. The Mars Review of Books also seems interesting, but it's too soon to tell. There's still good material in the usual places like LRB, NYRB, The Nation and Harper's—Will Self almost (almost!) persuading me to read a book I've privately been calling Adenoid, for example—but it's been more mixed since the commanding heights crudely tried to requisition the whole of humane culture in reaction to Trump. (Full disclosure: I've written for Tablet a time or two myself.)

In our agitated and ever-shifting media environment, one would have to cover Twitter accounts, Substack and other newsletters, podcasts, and YouTube channels too, across the cultural and political spectrum, so I have both too much and not enough to recommend. I've always thought Katherine Dee had her finger on the pulse of the culture, so her work in various venues is a longstanding recommendation. The renegade and provocateur Justin Murphy is always interesting if often silly or willfully offensive. The aforementioned Matt Gasda's Substack "Writer's Diary" is always compelling. Lately I've been admiring Emmalea Russo's tour of the Divide Comedy with reference to cinema and astrology and modernism and theory and what have you, also on Substack. The collected 1990s-era YouTube lectures on great books and intellectual history by Michael Sugrue and Darren Staloff are also recommendations of long standing, and Sugrue and Staloff also now produce new material, if more casual. My favorite podcasts specifically for literature and the arts are Manifesto! and Art of Darkness.

Favorite book publishers? Not exactly. The go-to answer is NYRB Classics; they publish a lot of stuff that interests me, including things I didn't know would interest me until they published it, especially their nonfiction catalogue, whether Simon Leys's collected essays or Simone Weil on the Iliad or Gillian Rose's incomparable Love's Work, and their attention to major world fiction neglected by other publishers (Platonov, Jünger, Salih). But as I believe Ann Manov once Tweeted, some of those midcentury novels might have been deservedly forgotten; hate me if you must, but I never did finish Stoner. They should reprint the whole of Dorothy Richardson's Pilgrimage, though who knows what the copyright situation is there. Another publisher recommendation: you'll rarely go wrong reading a classic in the Norton Critical Edition.

[noriyukisuzuki]

Dr. Darren Staloff, Mircea Eliade's Cosmos and History and Cyclical Time

[thecoffeephilosopher]

Review: ‘Hamilton, Adams, Jefferson: The Politics Of Enlightenment And The American Founding‘ By Darren Staloff

Review: ‘Hamilton, Adams, Jefferson: The Politics Of Enlightenment And The American Founding‘ By Darren Staloff

My critique would be this: we must take him at his word. He devotes some two score pages to a description of the Enlightenment (primarily the French Enlightenment; in the sections about the individual Founders, the Scottish Enlightenment gets many nods, but not so much here, though the distinctly non-French Kant does get a few mentions). In the 80-100 pages each of the figures gets, he describes…

[thesoundofrust]

Marx—Historical Materialism

[grandhotelabyss]

I recently discovered Rick Roderick's lectures on YouTube. Above is the first in his Self Under Siege course, encompassing Heidegger, Sartre, Marcuse, Habermas, Foucault, Derrida, and Baudrillard. Being of a certain age, I especially enjoy his frequent recourse for examples to '90s popular and political culture.

As with Michael Sugrue and Darren Staloff, whom we've already seen on here, Roderick's lectures were produced in the 1990s for The Teaching Company. Roderick effectively completes a trinity, his plain-spoken and poppy radicalism a counterweight to Sugrue's eloquent conservative denunciations of "gnostic ressentiment" and to Staloff's nervous centrist defense of modern liberal civilization.

Superficially, and with the cruelty always involved in typing, he fits a type the Twitter reactionaries have lately named and shamed: the "shitlib yokel" or "hicklib," as his fans' application to him of the label "the Bill Hicks of philosophy" might imply. Conversely, Sugrue might fit the hicklib's antitype: the metrocon.

The hicklib, surrounded in the provinces by complacent conservatives, histrionically over-identifies with left critique, while the metrocon, beset by the "herd of independent minds" known as metropolitan left-liberals, deliberately adopts shocking reactionary rhetoric, each trying to feel free in an ideologically suffocating atmosphere. If the metrocon is too cavalier about what earlier eras of hierarchy and hegemony were actually like, the hicklib is equivalently casual about what toppling every hierarchy might actually cause or whose interests such rhetoric serves.

(I myself have elements of both sensibilities because I've had elements of both experiences—I notice that Roderick's mother, like my own, was a beautician—but am perhaps more the metrocon by temperament. The hicklib tends to have a Protestant background, the metrocon a Catholic or Jewish one.)

I think here of Roderick's calm acceptance, at the end of his excellent Derrida lecture, that philosophy is "white mythology," and that therefore a thousand other (indeed, Other) mythologies deserve to bloom; this may seem naive 30 years later, both about the epistemological chaos such a development occasioned and about anyone's willingness—white, black, other—not to believe their own myths.

On the other hand, now that it's happened—I don't myself believe in any "white mythology," for example—then we have to get through it with the kind of impassioned good humor Roderick models. That's what a good teacher is: not a conveyor of information, which is readily available in books, but a model of sensibility.

Roderick's life ended badly. Duke denied him tenure, and about a decade later, he died in 2002 at age 52. I recommend his son Max's extraordinary elegy, especially for a glimpse of the early violence and horror with which he purchased his adult convictions, a price too high to be dismissed with the culture-war tropes of the essentially nihilistic online era he both did and not quite foresee in The Self Under Siege.

My generation doesn’t live beneath Rick’s empty, Godless sky. We live beneath a sky so full of Gods that they have become mundane and meaningless. Our heritage collapses by the generation; my grandfather had America, my father had Texas, I have my father – what could my children possibly receive?

[grandhotelabyss]

I linked a few times last year to Michael Sugrue’s Great Books lectures from the 1990s, which have become a sensation on YouTube. Sugrue’s channel also now features lectures in the same series by the historian Darren Staloff. The most recent upload, above, is Staloff’s lecture on the “outlaw Marxist” and sociologist of intellectuals, Alvin Gouldner. 

Everyone with any interest at all in the recent debates about the “post-left” should listen to this lecture, which, despite being almost three decades old, speaks with appalling clarity to the present.

In Staloff’s summary, Gouldner turns the Marxist lens on the Marxists, accounting for the veiled interests of this ideology’s exponents. These exponents, despite their meretricious claim to represent the working class, tend to be educated professionals. 

After noting that class struggle usually takes place not between owners and workers but between declining and rising elites, Gouldner uncovers two apparent flaws in Marxism that, considered together, are not so much errors as productive historical misreadings that empower Marxism’s elite partisans.

First, Marxism lacks an account of non-ownership classes, that is, classes not defined by the holding of material wealth. This prevents them from grasping the intelligentsia (to include what in premodern contexts would be called the clerisy, the mandarinate, etc.) as an independent social class—a class that is perhaps, alongside the peasantry, the oldest class in human history. Second, Marxism’s conviction that the state serves the owning class rather than being an autonomous bloc with its own interests makes it unable to properly account for state power as in itself oppressive.

Combine these two Marxist errors, says Staloff glossing Gouldner, and it’s no wonder that actually-existing Marxism produced Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot—and, I might add, our incipient new regime (supported by most left-wing parties in the west and by the left-wing intelligentsia) of global corporatist managerialism. The political unconscious of Marxism, a further development of Plato’s Republic, is a totalitarian state overseeing a social stasis managed by intellectuals. And if Platonism itself emerged to challenge Athenian democracy, a polity in which intellectuals were not in charge, then Marxism arose to battle modern capitalism and democracy, systems that likewise empower non-clerics in state, economy, and civil society.

How might we apply these ideas to the present? For one thing, to be post-left is to be a member of the intelligentsia who rebels against its power, either because it has in some way abused us or because we are not members of this class by birth and so do not owe it our primary loyalty—or both, as in my case. None of this cogent analysis, unfortunately, can solve that problem whose contemporary names are Donald Trump and Peter Thiel: the problem that the intelligentsia’s elite rival today is a somewhat decadent and attenuated alliance between the old capitalism (both owners and workers, as in Trump’s vaunted base) and the rising tech barons, themselves a new clerisy with authority premised on a different form of knowledge from the old intelligentsia’s. 

How badly has the left-wing clerisy misused its power that some of us could look with even a modicum of sympathy at this rival elite and its troubled alliances? So badly that I think back with nostalgia on last summer’s advocacy for permanent lockdownism. Two weeks ago their bright idea was self-immolation, while this week they’re celebrating “withdrawals of gestational labour-power,” which I take to include not only abortion but infanticide. Again I ask you: what are we without tenure supposed to do? I could think of all sorts of ideal phenomena to which I would prefer the present post-left, but this left—a death cult at either end of life, from “queer” infanticide to “green” suicide, with an intellectual career of “misinformation” policing and God knows what biological mandates in between for anyone who manages to live and to think—is the actual alternative.

Before Staloff’s lecture, I knew Gouldner dimly as a name in the bibliography of my doctoral advisor’s book, which I’ve cited here before. She wrote an incipiently post-left sociological critique of the high modernists for professionalizing literature in the interests of the expert managerial class and thereby confiscating culture from its prior superintendent: the much (and on this account unfairly) maligned Victorian matriarch, domestic woman, the so-called angel in the house. I found and still find this overstated as an objection to the likes of Woolf and Joyce, as opposed, say, to Marx and Freud. (My own dissertation ended up being a riposte to my advisor’s thesis, not the customary extension. And people wonder why I don’t have a career in academia! Actually, no one wonders.) 

Art’s polysemy and irony make it available to multiple classes or none—even to the individual in existential confrontation with life below and above all social contexts. Matthew Arnold and Northrop Frye were right: true art, true culture, does away with classes. Art is what Marxism only pretends to be. 

The proof? Look no further than Plato’s Republic itself. Primordial manifesto of the totalitarian intelligentsia or prose-poem, closet drama, and novel of ideas meant as ironic therapy for this intelligentsia’s will-to-power? In other words, philosophy or poetry? The latter, the latter, the latter.

[geopolicraticus]

If I Lectured on the Philosophy of History...

On my other blog I have several times mentioned Darren Staloff's Teaching Company lectures on the philosophy of history, The Search for a Meaningful Past: Philosophy, Theories and Interpretations. I enjoyed these lectures a lot. In fact, I enjoyed them so much that when I discovered that the Teaching Company had discontinued them, I bought a used backup copy so that I would be able to continue to listen to this on a regular basis.

Despite my enjoyment of the lectures, I have been bothered by what I consider to be significant ellipses. Of course, professor Staloff doesn't make claims about the comprehensiveness or completeness of his presentation. No series of lectures can cover everything. Nevertheless, the ellipses of Staloff's approach to the philosophy of history suggested an interesting exercise to me: design a course of lectures on the philosophy of history that was similarly comprehensive, but without discussing those philosophers discussed by Staloff, while discussing only those philosophers of history passed over by Staloff.

A course of lectures based on such a premise would, of course, probably involve more yawning ellipses than the lectures to which it is constructed as kind of an intellectual reaction or reflex. One could hardly give an adequate presentation of the philosophy of history while skipping Kant, Hegel, and Marx. Yet it remains an interesting idea. Moreover, Staloff takes the opposition between idealism and naturalism as the leitmotif of his lectures, which strikes me as a bit strained at times, and another course of lectures could adopt an entirely different motif as the touchstone of exposition.

Here are the titles of Staloff's lectures:

Lecture 1: Issues and Problems Lecture 2: Mircea Eliade's Cosmos and History and Cyclical Time Lecture 3: The Early Enlightenment and the Search for the Laws of History—Vico's New Science of History Lecture 4: The High Enlightenment's Cult of Progress: Kant's Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View Lecture 5: Hegel's Philosophy of History Lecture 6: Marx's Historical Materialism Lecture 7: Nietzsche's Critique of Historical Consciousness—On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life Lecture 8: Weber's Historical Sociology Lecture 9: Taking the Long View—Arnold Toynbee and World Historical Speculation Lecture 10: Twentieth-Century Neo-Idealism—R.G. Collingwood's The Idea of History Lecture 11: The Positivist Conception of Historical Knowledge—Carl Hempel's The Function of General Laws in History Lecture 12: Analytic Musings—Arthur Danto's Narration and Knowledge Lecture 13: Social History, Structuralism, and the Long Duree—Fernand Braudel's On History Lecture 14: Post-Structuralism and the Linguistic Turn—Hayden White's Introduction to Metahistory Lecture 15: Naturalism Revisited—William McNeill's Plagues and Peoples Lecture 16: The Heterogeneity of Historical Understanding

Here is an outline of what I would do to present a countervailing set of lectures on the philosophy of history, in the same number of lectures as employed by Staloff:

1) Introduction: the nature of the philosophy of history; like the study of religion, which does not seek to teach religion but to teach about religion, so too with the philosophy of history, which does not seek to teach history but to teach about history; the lessons of history and the philosophical lessons of history.

2) Philosophy of history (or, rather, its absence) in classical Greek philosophy (by which is meant Plato and Aristotle); Greek historiography and historical thought; the implicit philosophies of history present in the Greek Historians; Herodotus; Thucydides, Polybius.

3) St. Augustine; Augustine's City of God as the first full-dress philosophy of history in the Western tradition; intimations of Divine providence in early Greek philosophy; Christian cosmogony and cosmology; how Augustine's thought shaped the medieval world.

4) Medieval historiography and historical thought; influences from the Islamic world; the continuity of medieval history with modern history; how the medieval world shaped modern thought; intimations of modernity in Philippe de Comines.

5) The shift from the medieval to the modern world view; the renaissance in Italy; Machiavelli as a philosopher of history;The Prince; The Discourses on Livy.

6) The Reformation, or Europe's Agony: how Europe tore itself apart over soteriology and eschatology; the ongoing legacy of medieval Christendom; philosophies of history in the Religious Wars and the origin of the modern nation-state (and the nation-state system). 

7) Extremism in the philosophy of history is no vice: Hobbes; Filmer's Patriarchia; theoreticians of state power and the Divine right of kings. Royal government as a microcosm of Divinely ordained cosmology; the mirror of heaven on earth.

8) Hume and the Enlightenment; a philosopher's history and an historian's philosophy; doing away with miracles; a thoroughgoing naturalism in history (breaking with the Augustinian tradition of Divine providence); philosophy of history as a thought experiment (the Augustinian tradition of non-naturalism is reasserted); state-of-nature thought experiments and artificial histories: Locke, Pufendorf, Rousseau.

9) The idea of progress dawns; Herder; the idea of progress at the flood tide: Whiggish history.

10) The critique of progress; Karl Löwith and the idea of secularization; the secularization debate; descriptive or prescriptive; The Secular City; a response to the critique of progress; Hans Blumenberg on The Legitimacy of the Modern Age; Blumenberg's Copernicanism; the ongoing Enlightenment project; Habermas.

11) Karl Jaspers on The Origin and Goal of History; universal philosophical history; the idea of an Axial Age; Jaspers on "The Bomb"; philosophers grapple with a secularized, man-made apocalypse.

12) Hannah Arendt on "The Bomb" and the Holocaust; how the Second World War changed the way philosophers thought about history; the banality of evil: a new form of historical naturalism; the traumatic twentieth century; Arendt and Jaspers in their correspondence.

13) A new ahistorical philosophy emerges: phenomenology; Husserl and time; time and history; phenomenologists tackle the problem of history.

14) New voices from outside the Western tradition demand a hearing; Franz Fanon; popular revolt and discontent with the "canon"; 1968; Sartre on colonialism; structuralism; post-colonialism; post-structuralism; the "Culture Wars" in the US.

15) Foucault's geneologies; a "new" way of doing history; the history of madness; the history of the clinic; the history of prisons; the history of sexuality; Foucault's ongoing influence.

16) The expanding Western tradition: from the preconceptions and preoccupations of Augustine to the diversity and heterogeneity of historical thought today; relearning the philosophical lessons of history; philosophies of the future and future philosophies of history; the horizon of history.

One more thing: I noted above that Staloff takes the contrast between idealism and naturalism as the theme of his lectures; I would structure my lectures around the idea that historical thought has gradually shifted from being past-focused to being present-focused, and ultimately has come to be future-focused. This has profound implications for human self-understanding and our conception of our place in history.

So there you have it -- my course of sixteen lectures on the philosophy of history, as constrained by avoiding discussion of the thinkers who figure in Darren Staloff's sixteen lectures on the philosophy of history. What did I miss that Staloff also missed?