The Volokh Conspiracy

I have just returned from a poetry reading at the Library of Congress, the awarding of the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt prize in poetry, hosted by Rebekah Bobbitt’s son, Columbia and UT law professor and my dear friend Philip Bobbitt.  It was great.  I was prepared for a (deadly) serious Encounter with the Arts, and Lucia Perillo turned out to have one of the most cheerfully witty sensibilities I’ve heard or read in a long time.  It took me completely out of my ordinary and somewhat tense and dreary space today – final exams, crazed students, rank and tenure faculty meetings, nothing life-threatening but still pressured.  I was charmed and provoked.  I also was pleased to buy a copy of the book, Inseminating the Elephant.

Confined to a wheelchair today with multiple sclerosis, Perillo trained originally in wildlife management – her first job was at a lab figuring out the doses for killing various varmints troubling farmers and ranchers, coyotes, vampire bats, lots of things.  Nothing pretentious, although a keen, keen intelligence lies beneath an apparently nonchalant exterior.  Her romp about her professor of Transcendentalism through to postmodernism was wonderful.  Great evening; my thanks to Philip for thinking to invite me.  And Philip gave a wonderful introduction, talking about how his parents had met in working in the Library of Congress in the 1930s.

In my last post, on microfinance, I mentioned toward the end a play by Bertolt Brecht, The Good Person of Szechuan.  In it, a young woman inherits a small shop in a village, but because of her generous heart, nearly runs it into the ground because she can’t say no to anyone.  So she goes away, and mysteriously her cousin arrives to run the shop in her absence – utterly unsentimentally, completely businesslike in his way, and returns the store to profitability.  The young woman returns, allows it to slide downhill again, and her cousin returns again to bring it back to profitability.  They are, of course, the same person, and Brecht implies this is the terrible condition of capitalism and why we need to embrace communism.  To someone like me today, as I suggest in the microfinance post, the play is more like a warning against mixing motives within capitalism – confusing profit and philanthropy might lead to the worst of both, rather than the best.

But now I have a question.  What are other plays – let’s say back to 1900 or thereabouts – that express or comment in some important way on the economic conditions of capitalism, which is to say, the economic condition of modernity, markets, and capitalism?  Brecht, of course, wrote several, including this one.  He wrote others in this vein, including a re-write of Shaw’s St. Joan.  I think probably the most important comment on capitalism that Brecht wrote was the musical, The Rise and Fall of the City Mahagonny, or alternatively its shorter version, The Mahagonny Song-Cycle.  It weirdly anticipates the founding of Las Vegas (Brecht penned this in the 1930s; for many people in the English-speaking world, it is thought of as a Kurt Weill musical); a group of gangsters on the run found a city of complete libertinism in the middle of nowhere, Mahagonny, in which you have anything for money, and anything goes until you run out of money.  (This operetta introduced the famous Alabama Song; here is Marianne Faithfull in a 1997 performance.  Many folks have noted that Faithfull fits almost hand to glove to Brecht/Weill, and I’d certainly agree.)

The most important play I can think of, however, one of far more than historical interest merely in its reflections on the market and commodification, is Friedrich Durrenmatt’s The Visit of the Old Lady.  The richest woman in the world returns as an old woman to her impoverished hometown, which anticipates a philanthropic windfall that will return it to prosperity.  She promises to deliver – a fortune to the town and to each inhabitant individually.  But she promises a fortune only if the now-elderly shopkeeper, Alfred, who got her pregnant but then denied it ... dies.  Everyone in town indignantly rejects such a terrible proposal, of course, and there is much talk about the Values of the Enlightenment and all.  To which the old lady shrugs and says, I’ll wait.  Then, somehow, everyone starts buying lots and lots of stuff on credit.  Charging everything, until it becomes evident that the only way out is for Alfred to die.  It’s both chilling and comic – Durrenmatt wrote in a famous essay that a play such as this, built around fate and the Chorus, a throwback deliberately to Greek tragedy, somehow comes out quite funny in our modern day.  (I wrote a little about this in a Wall Street Journal review of the three volume English translation of Durrenmatt’s writings that appeared a few years ago.)

But okay, these are pretty obscure to English-language theatergoers, I grant, dating back to a much earlier generation of the German-language theatre before and after the mid-century mark.  What are others?  Other dramatic works that take as their primary theme the condition of modern capitalism?  Explain in a few sentences not just the play but why it is relevant to this question.

Althouse notes the following, in a discussion of Megan McArdle criticizing a book while only half-way through it:

A rule against criticizing books you haven’t finished would overprotect authors, since you shouldn’t finish a bad book, and it would also underprotect authors, since the critics wouldn’t disclose that they hadn’t read the whole thing.

I think Althouse is right; she goes on to talk about the difference between blogging and a formal book review, and I think that’s right as well – although there are blogs and there are blogs when it comes to books, given the general collapse of the formal book review as a publication in newspapers.  Blogs are a large part of the critical review commentary still left standing.  And yet blogs, including my own blog posts, have this troubling tendency to switch back and forth at will (and too often at the intellectually laziest point, I have to say in my own case) from a certain formal rigor into deliberately informal, and suddenly indistinct and chatty mode that somehow never quite gets to the deep insight, or more precisely, the argument for the deep insight.

That’s about criticizing, though.  What about just plain reading?  The older I get, the fewer books I finish, and the more I read highly selectively – fast forward set on high.  This is either the getting of wisdom – or the gradual shutting down of (what to call it?) one’s social and engagement functions as one gets closer to in-turnedness of dying, the inability of the aging to take in new stuff because we are too occupied trying to process the accumulation of the previous decades.

But I am also reminded of that book from a couple of years ago, which I did read cover to cover, albeit quickly, by the literature professor in Paris who admitted that he hadn’t actually read nearly anything, including nearly everything in the canon for his classes.  How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read. Pierre Bayard.  He offered not just a tuquoque defense that no else actually read the things they claimed to read, either – but a ringing defense of not reading for its own sake, while still being more than willing to discuss it.  Including the argument that, at least in literature, since it was the argument, the criticism, the interpretation on its own that mattered, the actual text got in the way and also offered contra but frankly irrelevant bits.  The text at issue would only muck up the purity of the critical argument, I think that was Bayard’s point.

My Washington College of Law colleague Robert Tsai points me to an interesting Huffington Post article  by Anis Shivani on new directions for university presses.  I have a somewhat more critical take on this, in the sense of an interest in the economic and business models driving the presses as they move in different directions.

For example, I wonder how falling costs of producing books and different and cheaper distribution models via Amazon interacts with a relative decline, at least among senior law professors, in the prestige of law review articles in favor of books.  I wonder about shifts in the hiring, promotion, tenure, and lateral process and ways in which that drives a cycle of academic production – at least among law professors – of crank out articles, repackage as book, start cycle again – but without it being clear to me, at least, that there is great value added in putting the articles between hard or soft covers.  We tell ourselves that we are pulling together a handful of articles into a unified book-y whole, but, well, I wonder how much it is simply driven by a combined shift in the prestige markers within our academic world and shifts downward in the cost of production, along with dissatisfaction with the student law review publishing model.

Is that a bad thing?  The sometimes assumed frivolity and waste of publishing in humanities, social science, and law – the purely critical story is not all there is to it, by any means.  I, for one, do look forward to a revival of the humanities as a source of meaning.  The availability of an increasing number of scholarly books at a much cheaper price than, well, Cambridge UP’s sticker-shocker numbers is a terrific thing.  It takes into account lower productions costs, the idea that university libraries are not the only places to find these books, and a host of other things.  That many of these books are deliberately aimed at a wider audience than the university library is a feature of many of these new business models; that will inevitably mean more popular titles.  It will inevitably mean a certain amount of wishful marketing ... frankly unreadable academic tomes with exciting titles, cool covers, and misleading blurbs.  But I’m not convinced at all that these will crowd out traditional academic monographs.

Those are mostly questions I have within the world of academic law publishing, however, while Shivani’s post is on university presses more broadly.  It is worth reading in part just to get a sense of the ways in which presses are extending themselves, and also because it might give some readers a sense of where to turn to for particular varieties of books, and for authors among us to get a sense of what presses might be suitable for what ventures.

Speaking of blurbs, I’m somewhat surprised that as a marketing strategy, academic writers do not take a page from the marketing of that great work of 1990s fiction, A.A. Gils Sap Rising. Reviews were either wildly positive or wildly negative ... so the publisher put them all on the back, including in alternation:

• “He writes so brilliantly.”
• “Extremely badly written, hideously and unamusingly obscene.”
• “A clever, sexy story.”
• “Frightful pile of garbage.”

And then it ended up with the laconic comment of the Times Literary Supplement (a venue for which I occasionally write, and for which this kind of plain, unadorned, Eric-Blair-would-approve-of-it prose makes me proud to be a TLS contributor):

• “This is a dirty book.”

In academic writing, however, one is not looking for this exactly, it is slightly different.  What one wants in academia is not a collection of wildly for and wildly against.  Because academic writers are generally trapped – self-stranded, to be precise – in cul-de-sacs of like-minded academics, no one is much impressed by the log-rolling blurbs of one’s confreres.  But for a converse (or do I mean ‘obverse’?) reason, no one will be much impressed by the attacks of one’s enemies, either.  What one wants is what so much of contemporary academia is out to deny – except when it comes to what people say about one’s own academic work – viz., that I utterly disagree with it and indeed at some profound level think it deeply mistaken and even wrong, but alas I cannot deny the sheer intellectual power, unaparalleled learning and erudition, and brilliance heft of this work.

Endorsement from outside one’s epistemic community, in other words, on the basis of an ideal of neutral, objective quality that we long for, when it comes to our own stuff, but within academia don’t really accept.  We deny its validity – but then want its validation.

Although only mid-August, school will be starting up for me only too soon ... during the summer months, I make a vow (at best half kept most years) to spend two hours a day reading stuff, anything that is not strictly driven by a current writing project.  I’ve found that if I can persuade myself to stop surfing the web, put aside the immediate reading for whatever I’m writing, and read across a wider range of things, I am storing up – marinating, possibly – ideas for the future.  I haven’t done so well on that assignment this summer, but I thought I would share a couple of items on the wandering list of summer reading, ranging from things that are about current writing projects, to beach reading – well, not actual beach reading, because I didn’t go to the beach, but books I read in California while on a not-quite vacation while daughter looked at colleges.  Also some things I was listening to.  Below the fold ... Continue reading ‘My Wandering Summer Reading’ »

One of these days I will take the plunge and compose a “greatest influences” books list, as some of the other Conspirators have done.  I have hesitated in part because my list would not tend to contain works of monumental ideas, but instead plays, works of fiction, poetry, and fragments that are not always  blockbusters in the history of ideas, as well major works of the left.

Part of this is generational.  I intellectually came of age in a period in which both Marx and Freud were still considered the giants, and in which the humanities had not yet collapsed into its current state of identity politics and post-modernist irrelevance; literature was still believed to shed light on something called the human condition – though these were by then on the way out.  Rational choice economics had not yet won over the academy, partly through its own intellectual strengths but also from being the ‘last man standing’ as the humanities sawed off the intellectual branch, as it were, it was sitting on.  I came from the peculiar position of what Larry Solum once called my “left Burkeanism” with a good bit of American libertarianism thrown in.

But it was not until quite recently that I read a long list of thinkers on the libertarian or conservative end of things – part of this was that I studied philosophy, not economics, and many of the leading thinkers pointed to by other Conspirators such as Hayek or Friedman did not figure into my intellectual education.  I am the classic case of one of the tangential but not unshrewd definitions sometimes given of a neoconservative – a leftwinger who has moved right.  For many of those “neoconservatives,”  including me, the core intellectual influences from early on come, not from the right or even centrist liberalism, but from the intellectual left.  Marx, the left Hegel, a long list of left European intellectuals such as Gramsci, etc., etc.  I am intellectually as much a product of the melding of a very traditional education in Anglo-American analytic philosophy of a certain period – Wittgenstein, Philippa Foot, Rogers Albritton – and the European critical theory and intellectual history of the great critical theory journal Telos.

My intellectual influences definitely included, however, the great figures of the British traditions in philosophy and political theory, Locke, Hume, Bentham, Mill, etc., and, probably at the top of my list, Hobbes.  Very much in an analytic philosophy tradition rather than a historical one; seeing these ancient political essays as political theory to be treated a-historically rather than as intellectual history.  I studied Locke’s Second Treatise as a pure system of intellectual propositions, and only much later gained an appreciation of the way in which Locke was deeply engaged in the political arguments of his day.  Leviathan was studied – I’m glancing at my first Leviathan text and my undergraduate marginalia (ouch, ouch ouch) – purely as a system of rational propositions, with no attention whatsoever to the religious wars of the day.

So, given the importance of Hobbes to my own intellectual formations, I welcome the notice and review in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal of a new Yale critical edition of the Leviathan, edited by Ian Shapiro, and aimed at a general rather than academically specialized audience.  It has four interpretive essays, all of which receive good notices from the WSJ reviewer, the historian and Hobbes scholar Jeffrey Collins.  The WSJ review essay is a fine piece of writing on its own, and raises the question, not just of Hobbes’ enduring importance, but why he has particularly been of interest in the past few years.  Collins puts the issue this way:

The question is why Hobbes’s account has enjoyed such popularity in recent decades. The likes of John Locke and James Madison long ago demonstrated the limits of Hobbes’s raw statism. But many thinkers and political actors, lately, seem to prefer Hobbes’s vision of society to theirs. Why should this be so?

One might point to several reasons. Hobbes’s snide irreligion, once the main complaint against him, may now commend him to those who perpetually fear the supposed return of theocracy. His tendency to portray humans as appetitive beasts flatters our present eagerness to explain every aspect of human conduct in biological terms. Hobbes was also acutely suspicious of democracy. He considered it a breeder of faction. When pundits such as Thomas Friedman decry “broken government” and fawn over China’s “enlightened” response to global warming, one wonders if the Hobbesian within the liberal breast is stirring.

Continue reading ‘Leviathan’ »

I like this.  HT Instapundit – I hadn’t heard of Lauren Leto and her blog before, but I found this enjoyable:

Stereotyping People by Their Favorite Author

(by the way – I respect every author on here, kind of)

J.D. Salinger

Kids who don’t fit in (duh).

Stephenie Meyer

People who type like this: OMG. Mah fAvvv <3 <3.

J.K. Rowling

Smart geeks.

Ms. Leto provides many, many examples more.  I’m mildly distressed at how many of the contemporary authors I had not heard of before, but then I don’t read much current fiction.

But there Is A Problem With This List, and the fact that I note it will not surprise regular readers of this blog.  It is missing a certain author, one of Great(est) Importance.  So, dear VC readers, in the spirit of the above – consult the blog for all the rest of the sampled authors, and then tell me how you fill in the Missing Author ... drumroll, Stendhal.

I’m on radio silence, as I’m at the Naval War College conference on international law, which is where all the cool people are this week.

I was last on radio silence finishing up my short policy manuscript on UN-US relations.  I’m not sure I’d describe it as “done,” but the editors took it away from me, saying that I’d keep fiddling forever.  Which is true, as the following bleg demonstrates.  I’m considering for an epigraph, if there’s room for one in a book so short, a riff on ... well, Stendhal.  (So sue me.)

There is a well-known (well, well-known if you’re me) line in The Red and the Black, “Could it be that she is a prude grown tired of her calling?” (This, in the context of advice to Julian on how to court her.)  In the original French, it is (I still can’t figure out how to do the marks on my Mac):  ”Ne serait-ce point une prude lasse de son metier?”

Because my little US-UN policy essay, Returning to Earth, is about the appeal to “multilateralism” and “engagement” as mechanisms for US withdrawal from its role as security hegemon and, hence, provider of certain global public goods – what in the book I call “withdrawal into multilateralism” – you can see that the line “lasse de son metier” has appeal for me.  I want to re-work it slightly, and change “prude” to “America.”  My French is good enough for reading Stendhal and a few others with a dictionary, but help me be sure that I’ve handled the cases correctly.  Is this correct French?  Un Amerique?  Une Amerique?  Is “lasse” still the right form?  If not, how would you switch “prude” for “America” but leaving the rest as is except necessary grammatic corrections?:

Ne serait-ce point un Amerique lasse de son metier?

Help with the language only please, in the comments, we can discuss the substantive thesis when the book appears.  Which is to say, once I stop fiddling.

By the way, one reason I’m comfortable messing with the great Stendhal for my own American purposes is that he habitually headed chapters with epigraphs that he wrote from whole cloth and freely attributed as he liked.  When I get back to things, I’ll post the one from The Red and the Black about making one’s first appearance in society, panting with faintness like a young girl at a ball (from memory, I paraphrase), attributed to ... Immanuel Kant.  (“Needless to say,” drily said the editor in the footnotes to one school book edition, “Kant never wrote any such thing.”)

My congratulations to Tyler Cowen on his lovely essay in the TLS of February 26, 2010, a review of John Lanchester, “Whoops! – Why everyone owes everyone and no one can pay.” Behind the subscriber wall, alas, but it is an intriguing, elegant review and has caused me to go order the book.  (IOU rather than Whoops in the US.  Also, the Kindle edition is available since January in the US, but the physical book won’t be released until ... September!  Hmm.)

‘One never knows what to say in speaking to our great diplomats,’ said Julien.  ’They have a mania for starting serious discussions.  If one confines oneself to the commonplaces of the newspapers, one is reckoned a fool.  If one allows oneself to say something true and novel, they are astonished, they do not know how to answer, and next morning, at seven o’clock, they send word to one by the First Secretary, that one has been impolite.’

The Red and the Black, Volume 2, Chapter 37, “An Attack of Gout.”

From the online diary of Mr K, inhabitant of the snowbound city of W.

Day 1.15. As the snowdrifts begin to build, making it impossible to go about to Superfresh or Starbuck’s or Pain Quotidien or any other of the city W’s cherished Spring Valley locations, as it mounts just beyond the door, making it impossible even to go out, a slow sense of helplessness and frustration begins to build.  Good, dark Michel Cluizel chocolate helps calm the gnawing anxieties that we will never get out, we will never see the sun again, never get beyond the snowbanks – but the supply, which seemed adequate only yesterday, is now dwindling at an alarming rate.

Day 1.17. Whence this terrible stifled feeling?  The feeling that if I cannot get out, I shall go ... go mad!  I have read of this grim phenomenon, cabin fever.  I believe I have it.  Of course, we should not be surprised; after two or three hours cooped up in the house, who would not be in my condition?  Beloved wife and adorable daughter look on with concern.  I pace and pace.  Shall there be no respite from the weather?

Day 2.6.  I pick up my cello and endlessly play the Ricercars of Domenico Gabrielli.  Only a Renaissance Italian can soothe me.  Beloved wife and adorable daughter are mute with horror, particularly upon the many bad notes on Ricercars 3, 5, and 7, which I don’t know very well and play horribly out of tune.  I feel deeply for them.

Day 3.0.  I awaken to a brief weather report from a station that is signing off in the storm, wishing its listeners good luck and God bless.  More snow on the way.

Day 5.0.  I have finished the collected works of Richard Posner.  I itch with the strange inactivity of it all.  Is that all he has written?  That’s it?  My head thrums with his conversion to Keynes.  Apparently nothing is certain in this world, not even Chicago Law & Economics; we are like dust in the wind.  Nothing can be seen beyond in our windows save for white drifts and gently falling snow.  We are reduced to tins of octopus in olive oil on crackers.  I chew gently on the cephalopod and wonder if this was one of the octopuses that dragged around coconut shells in a sign of non-mammal intelligence and tool-use.  Funny, when I think of tools these days, I somehow think of axes and hatchets, not coconut shells.

Day 6.4.  My Kindle!  My very, very strange Kindle!  It has mysteriously and unbidden delivered me a book by Stephen King.  Listed at 9.99 in the Kindle edition, and yet no charge showed up on my Amazon account – and shortly thereafter, the price shot up to 89.99, with an odd note saying if I wanted to know why this might be so, ask Virginia Postrel.

Day 7.67.  I cannot help myself, I am drawn into The Shining on my Kindle.  Everything about it seems ... so true!  So real!  Snowbound until the end of the semester!  I have never seen myself so clearly before or the world around me.

Day 8.9.  My beloved wife pleads with me to give up the Kindle.  Never!  Never!  It is filled with strange and peculiar graphics that are not the usual portraits of artists and writers.  I know not from whence.  Only that they bid me, they bid me ...

Day 9.5. I have prayed to St. Jobs for relief, but the words ominously drew themselves in the grayscale monochrome of the e-ink ... “It’s a Kindle, chump, not the IPad.”  Then I know all is lost, I cannot save myself – or them!  The messages on the Kindle, so compelling, so seductive, they insinuate themselves into my brain, and they cannot be resisted.

Day ... Jack’s back!

In honor of the DC snowstorm – it is still coming down! – this passage from On Love, Book 2, Chapter 50, Love in the United States:

In the Winter, which as in Russia is the festive season of the country, young people of both sexes drive about night and day over the snow in sleighs, gaily traveling distances of fifteen or twenty miles without anyone to look after them; and nothing untoward ever occurs.

Unchaperoned and “nothing untoward” happens ... does Stendhal here anticipate the courtship culture brought about by the automobile a century later?  (It is important to keep in mind both how little Stendhal actually knew about the United States, apart from thinking it even more a Nation of Shopkeepers than England, and how willing he was to imagine anything he didn’t actually know.  Still, at least for those of us who are Stendhal’s Happy Few, no less fun for all that.)

Instead of a Stendhal post this week – I missed Saturday lost in the DC snow – and further to my Foundation post below, which has garnered some very interesting comments ... do we have any fans of James Blish’s Cities in Flight novels?

As an exercise in future history social theory, I actually think they are deeper than the Foundation novels; certainly I found the characters more psychologically interesting and in many respects, the interplay of society with ideas from science deeper, too.  I used to think – and say below – that they are emotionally rather bleak, pessimistic.  I think today I would say it is not so much pessimism as a very adult sensibility of mortality.  The original Foundation series is aimed at cleverness in holding out on the ending; Blish was a surprisingly psychological writer, particularly for that era in science fiction.

Here is what I wrote about the series on a family blog in 2005, reading them with my daughter: Continue reading ‘Cities in Flight’ »

Peggy Noonan notes in her weekend column that President Obama’s SOTU address worked in a name for the new program – in the tradition of the “New Deal” or Kennedy’s “New Frontier.  For the Obama administration, it is the New Foundation.  She is skeptical:

They’ve chosen a phrase for the president’s program. They call it the “New Foundation.” They sneaked it in rather tentatively, probably not sure it would take off. It won’t. Such labels work when they clearly capture something that is already clear. “The New Deal” captured FDR’s historic shift to an increased governmental presence in individual American lives. It was a new deal. “The New Frontier”—we are a young and vibrant nation still, and adventures await us in space and elsewhere. It was a mood, not a program, but a mood well captured.

“The New Foundation” is solid and workmanlike, but it attempts to put form and order to a governing philosophy that is still too herky-jerky to be summed up.

I am equally skeptical, but my interest here is a different one.  We here at Volokh Conspiracy tend to be well aware of the Foundation novels – only too aware, possibly.  But I recall reading here or somewhere that Paul Krugman and several other leading economic and legal academic-policymakers had come to their professions wanting to be ... Hari Seldon.  Deeply attracted to the idea of a mathematically-based psychohistory.  Certainly includes me.  I am the son of a physical scientist; I spent my early years playing with dangerous chemicals in my father’s lab.  But from the time I read the Foundation books, I was lost to physical sciences – I wanted the vision of a science of mass behavior.

This is not a liberal versus conservative thing although, it bears noting, nothing about Asimov’s Foundation vision suggested anything very liberal or libertarian.  It was all galactic social engineering.  At least so far as I could ever tell.  However, it does lead me to wonder whether any obscure, deeply buried, unconscious Jungian archtype of the Foundation entered somehow into this New Foundation framing.  This is an administration of academics, in love with design and social engineering, not so much the execution and carry-through part.  Yeah, yeah, the social engineering is supposed to be all nudgy and liberal paternalism, not coercive and bad.  It’s an administration of New Class elites especially in love with its peculiar combination of disinterested technocracy married to the most aggressive ideological remake of, well, the foundations of American society in a long time, and almost entirely from the top down.  But in that case, who is the Hari Seldon of this New Foundation?  (Alert commenter says, more important ... “Who is the Mule?”)

Well, at least the SOTU catchphrase was not ... Second Foundation!   Although, for all we know, it might have started out, before the rewrite as ... Foundation and Empire.  I don’t have one of those clever poll apps, so let me  just ask our readers:

If you had to pick a catch phrase among the following that most accurately described the administration and its program, which of the following would it be?

• New Foundation,
• Foundation,
• Foundation and Empire,
• Second Foundation
• Or some other Foundation series related theme.  Please try to keep ideas for names within the Foundation universe, or anyway no broader than Asimov era “classic sci fi.”

Update:  An alert commenter observes that although the term New Foundation appeared in 2009 in the administration’s issue framing, sufficient to spark a NYT article on it, the term doesn’t seem to actually appear in SOTU, at least on my quick scan.  Let me know in the comments if I’m wrong  Presumably this is why Noonan phrases it slightly carefully, so as to not say that it did.  Anyway, my basic point is the same.

Update 2:  Thanks, Glenn, for the Instalanche!  It’s a pretty long list of folks in important positions, at least of a certain generation, who are Foundation fans – and some, including my daughter, of the next.  Glenn says ...  ”I’ll note that both Newt Gingrich and Osama bin Laden are supposed to be Foundation fans, for whatever that’s worth . . . .”

The Red and the Black, Volume 1, Chapter 26, “The World, Or What the Rich Lack.”

After several months of application kept up at every moment, Julien still had the air of a thinker. His way of moving his eyes and opening his lips did not reveal an implicit faith ready to believe everything and uphold everything, even by martyrdom.  It was with anger that Julien saw himself surpassed in this respect by the most boorish peasants.  They had good reasons for not having the air of thinkers.

Or in the French (corrected, with thanks to Sasha Volokh):

Après plusieurs mois d’application de tous les instants, Julien avait encore l’air de penser. Sa façon de remuer les yeux et de porter la bouche n’annonçait pas la foi implicite et prête à tout croire et à tout soutenir, même par le martyre. C’était avec colère que Julien se voyait primé dans ce genre par les paysans les plus grossiers. Il y avait de bonnes raisons pour qu’ils n’eussent pas l’air penseur.

I feel strangely compelled to add the following confession.  I just finished re-reading The Charterhouse of Parma.  I have always supposed, following everyone else so far as I can tell, that it is a greater work than The Red and the Black.  But it has been a very long time since I read Charterhouse.  And, I’m slightly embarrassed to say, I find upon re-reading that I much prefer The Red and the Black.  Fabrizio seems so much less interesting than Julien, and fond as I am of Clelia, I am much, much more fond of Mathilde and Madame de Renal.  (I have, since I was young, been in love with Mathilde de la Mole, and always will be.)