16974. (Van­ni Bel­tra­mi) Il Sahara cen­tro-ori­en­tale Dal­la Preis­to­ria ai tem­pi dei noma­di Tubu
. . . . . [The Cen­tral-Ori­en­tal Sahara From Pre­his­to­ry to the Times of the Nomadic Tubus]
16975. Hit­tite doc­u­ment: Apol­o­gy of Ḫattušili III [Dona­tion of the Estate of Arma-Tarḫunta to
. . . . . the Cult of Šauš­ga of Šamuḫa]
16976. (Françoise Thibaut) Le cheva­lier Jean Charles de Bor­da, sci­en­tifique et navigateur
. . . . . [arti­cle]
16977. (Doug Saun­ders) This is India’s 9/11? Think Again [arti­cle]
16978. (Ufuk Tavkul) A Good Sam­ple For Cul­tur­al Dif­fu­sion: A Hero Who Car­ries The
. . . . . Char­ac­ter­is­tics Of Prophet David In The Nart Epos Of Karachay-Balkar People ―
. . . . . Nart Debet, The Smith [arti­cle]
16979. (Arkady & Boris Stru­gats­ki) Hard to Be a God
Read more »

Using the frag­men­tary evi­dence of a tri­al which took place in Athens c.340 B.C., Debra Hamel cre­ates a vivid pic­ture of the place of women in Clas­si­cal Greek soci­ety. This book is entire­ly free of post-mod­ern plat­i­tudes and jar­gon, and con­cen­trates on help­ing the read­er visu­al­ize and empathize with the past. Along the way, many col­lat­er­al issues, such as just how ancient lit­i­ga­tion worked in real life, and what sex­u­al laws and cus­toms meant for real peo­ple, are illu­mi­nat­ed. I would strong­ly rec­om­mend this book to any­one who wants to dig deep­er than the stan­dard bat­tles-and-big-shots approach to Greek his­to­ry. This was a delight­ful Christ­mas gift from my friend Ruta Muhlberger.

It’s odd that I haven’t read Gene Sharp’s work until now. I’ve known about him for years, and I’ve been aware of his ideas at sec­ond hand. He has been pre­oc­cu­pied with the issue of how peo­ple can resist or over­throw dic­ta­tor­ships for longer than I have (and that’s say­ing quite a bit). His ideas are fair­ly close to my own, and come from sim­i­lar influ­ences. So I’m embar­rassed to say that I have neglect­ed read­ing his works, an error that I will hasti­ly correct.

Unlike most aca­d­e­mics, Sharp has a com­mon-sense grasp of what is pos­si­ble and what is not, what is rel­e­vant and what is not, and what works and what does not. This short work, which he keeps in the pub­lic domain and encour­ages to be trans­lat­ed, is an extreme­ly use­ful vade­me­cum for those who want to over­throw dic­ta­tor­ships. He urges the use of what he calls “Polit­i­cal Defi­ance”, a strate­gic form of planned non-vio­lent resis­tance. As he points out, over-reliance on vio­lence, rather than on more sophis­ti­cat­ed tech­niques of resis­tance, does not have a good record of suc­cess. This doc­u­ment has influ­enced democ­ra­cy advo­cates in a num­ber of quar­ters. I strong­ly rec­om­mend it.

I’ve been read­ing a lot of Con­dorcet, late­ly, in dribs and drabs. He was not a great writer, or par­tic­u­lar­ly enter­tain­ing, but what he had to say is worth pay­ing atten­tion to. He was pri­mar­i­ly a math­e­mati­cian and sci­en­tist, who found him­self con­tin­u­ous­ly caught up in polit­i­cal issues (for which he would ulti­mate­ly pay with his life, in Robe­spier­re’s ter­ror), and he was a shy, social­ly inept man with no tal­ent for cul­ti­vat­ing celebri­ty. Con­dorcet is a much more impor­tant fig­ure than most think. I have else­where com­plained that the actu­al bal­ance of intel­lec­tu­al influ­ences in the Enlight­en­ment and the peri­od of the Amer­i­can and French rev­o­lu­tions is prob­a­bly not much like the image of it that most of us have inher­it­ed from text­books, or old chest­nuts like Rousseau and Rev­o­lu­tion. The small atten­tion paid to Con­dorcet illus­trates this. Recent­ly there has been a mod­est growth of inter­est in him because of his writ­ings on the math­e­mat­i­cal the­o­ry of vot­ing, and its rel­e­vance to mod­ern bal­lot reform. In France, he is bet­ter known as a the­o­rist of pub­lic edu­ca­tion. But, still the inter­est is rel­a­tive­ly small, con­sid­er­ing the degree of his actu­al influ­ence. Read more »

This a work­ing doc­u­ment issued this week by the IMF. It’s essen­tial­ly an inter­nal report by their sta­tis­ti­cians ana­lyz­ing all nation­al liq­uid­i­ty crises that have occurred since 1970. There are things worth call­ing atten­tion to, in it: There were 124 “sys­temic bank­ing crises” spread across dozens of coun­tries between 1970 and 2007. Almost every nation on Earth is in the list — except Cana­da. We’ve nev­er had one. Read more »

Ramon Lull, Medieval poly­math from the Bal­aer­ic Islands

This impor­tant paper on medieval elec­toral the­o­ry does­n’t come from his­to­ri­ans, but from math­e­mati­cians. Their inter­est is that the medieval Cata­lan schol­ar Ramon Lull (or Llull) (b.1232‑d.1315) antic­i­pat­ed the math­e­mat­i­cal the­o­ries of elec­toral sys­tems of the eigh­teenth cen­tu­ry known to us through Bor­da and Con­dorcet. Appar­ent­ly, recent­ly dis­cov­ered medieval man­u­scripts reveal that Lull had devel­oped a quite sim­i­lar the­o­ry. This inter­ests me, of course, as the his­to­ry of elec­toral sys­tems is part of what I explore, but more impor­tant than the math­e­mat­i­cal accom­plish­ment is the impli­ca­tion that monas­tic insti­tu­tions in the Mid­dle Ages took elec­tion pro­ce­dures very seriously.