Another interesting trip to Spain, driving south from Santander, and visiting the site of the battle known to the Brits as Salamanca, but to the Spanish as Arapiles, that being the name of the little village to the south east of Salamanca near the two rocky hills that figured so prominently in the engagement. There is now a small information centre devoted to the battle that is well worth a visit.

On the way back to Santander another historical diversion – to the little town of Medellin in Estremadura, birthplace of Hernan Cortes the conquistador of Mexico, the story of whose exploits can be read on Wikipedia. The suggestion that Cortes was a bit of a bandido in the manner of Pizarro (who was born up the road in Trujillo) was not well received at the tourist office. The story goes that Cortes massacred thousands of unarmed Aztec nobility at Tenochtitlan. Whether the Spaniards were any more cruel, exploitative and ruthless than their Anglo-Saxon equivalents, and whether there is indeed something amounting to a black legend, or leyenda negra misrepresenting the situation and perpetuating a gringo cultural calumny is an interesting question. Clearly there were conflicting perspectives even at the time, as reflected in the Valladolid debate of 1550-51 between the humanistically inclined Bartolome de las Casas (author of the Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies) and Juan Gines de Sepulveda – who was of the opinion that native peoples were natural slaves.

Apart from the history, some kitesurfing enjoyed – though not as much as one would have liked, due to prevalence of the dreaded howling levante which (so Rafael assured me at the churreria) scrambles people’s brains by agitating the hairs on their head. Extraordinary how the storks seemed to cope, though, or rather those untidy looking nests they build on exposed roofs and telegraph poles. How come the most ferocious blasts don’t dislodge them?

Kiting in strong offshore levante winds is not for the faint hearted. On 14^th April watched Cesar Portas, the Spanish champion doing huge leaps on the Atlantic side of Punta Europa, along with Jo Castillas and the Brazilian Bruna Kajiya. Impressive stuff. Worth checking out the videos of these guys on Facebook.

Spanish studies didn’t advance as well as they might, due to having left dictionary at home. However, some little bits of colloquial Spanish taken on board, such as puto jefe and puto amo, epithets applied by the Barcelona coach, Pep Guardiola, to his Real Madrid counterpart, Jose Mourinho. In fact, the terms aren’t as offensive as they sound, and simply denote controlling personalities, as in the fairly neutral phrase “Ni Mourinho ni Guardiola. El puto jefe, el puto amo del derby, del futbol mundial, del universo, es Lionel Messi.” This (not surprisingly) from the Lionel Messi website.

To conclude on a sad note – learned of the untimely death of the Australian kiter Peter Toft – of a heart attack, apparently, aged only 46. Peter was a nice guy. Condolences to his family and friends.

If Ralph Waldo Emerson is to be believed, it’s not just the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse we should be worried about, i.e. Conquest, War, Famine and Death, but another one – not mentioned in the Apocrypha, namely Things.

The horseman serves the horse

The neat-herd serves the neat,

The merchant serves the purse,

The eater serves his meat;

Tis the day of the chattel

Web to weave, and corn to grind,

Things are in the saddle

And ride mankind.

There are two laws discrete

Not reconciled.

Law for man and law for thing;

The last builds town and fleet,

But it runs wild

And doth the man unking.

The lines are from Emerson’s Ode, Inscribed to William H. Channing – a poem not much read these days. But – and especially for those who live in consumerist societies - the lines about things being in the saddle and riding mankind are – arresting and thought-provoking. Which is no doubt why they are quoted from time to time in educated conversation – though rarely with certitude about the source.

The idea that human beings have forfeited their freedom in pursuit of unworthy materialistic goals is to be found in the writings of other Americans of that era. A dominant theme in the writings of Emerson’s friend, Henry David Thoreau, is that the conditions of life in rural New England are not conducive either to human happiness or human goodness. With its advocacy of austere self sufficiency Thoreau’s Walden is a text that has resonance in a world in which the condition of economic stringency, if not servitude, seems set to be the new norm for so many people. But Thoreau’s take on it is unexpected and may indeed be unwelcome inasmuch as he holds the view that people – or at least his fellow townsmen of Concord - are largely to blame for their own economic and existential misfortunes. Those “serfs of the soil” as he calls them, live lives of quiet desperation, crushed by a kind of economic slavery they have brought on themselves. “It is hard to have a Southern overseer; it is worse to have a Northern one; but worst of all when you are the slave-driver of yourself.”

In spite of the fact that the popular press is quick to give anarchism a bad name, there is much to be admired in the stance of the American Transcendentalists who, far from being advocates of mindless violence and wanton destruction, were simply advocating a better way of life than that lived by people in general, a life (as Thoreau puts it) of simplicity, independence, magnanimity and trust. The fact that those values are so rarely celebrated in modern culture doesn’t mean that they have been altogether superseded, or that they are not there. They cannot, however, be said to figure prominently in public spaces. Which is a pity but no doubt it was ever thus.

Other bits of Emerson’s ode to Channing are a bit more problematical, e.g. the following:

The over-God

Who marries Right to Might,

Who peoples, unpeoples,

He who exterminates

Races by stronger races,

Black by white faces,

Knows to bring honey

Out of the lion,

Grafts gentlest scion

On Pirate and Turk.

This sounds uncomfortably like an anticipatory vindication of the doctrine which was later to cause so much grief for those perceived as lesser breeds, i.e. eugenics. On the face of it it sounds like a casual and offhand kind of racism – but then that was how they tended to talk about race in those days. And for the record it must be noted that at the time of the American Civil War Emerson was clear and consistent in his opposition to slavery. “The South calls slavery an institution…. I call it destitution…. Emancipation is the demand of civilization."

“Do you know C.S. Lewis? In case you don’t, let me offer a brief character-sketch. Envisage (if you can) a man who combines the face and figure of a hog-reeve or earth-stopper with the mind and thought of a Desert Father of the fifth century, preoccupied with meditations of inelegant theological obscenity: a powerful mind warped by erudite philistinism, blackened by systematic bigotry, and directed by a positive detestation of such profane frivolities as art, literature and (of course) poetry: a purple-faced bachelor and misogynist, living alone in rooms of inconceivable hideousness, secretly consuming vast quantities of his favourite dish – beefsteak-and-kidney-pudding; periodically trembling at the mere apprehension of a feminine footfall; and all the while distilling his morbid and illiberal thoughts into volumes of best-selling prurient religiosity and such reactionary nihilism as is indicated by the gleeful title, The Abolition of Man. Such is C.S. Lewis, whom Magdalen College have now put up to recapture their lost monopoly of the chair of Poetry. “

This is a quotation from a letter of Hugh Trevor-Roper to a fellow historian, the American Wallace Notestein, and, depending on your point of view, a specimen of his satirical style at its best – or its worst. Laura Cumming, reviewing HTR’s Letters from Oxford to the art historian Bernard Berenson, has barely a good word to say for him. See her Observer article of 6th August, 2006

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2006/aug/06/biography.historybooks

If Cumming is right, HTR has hardly a redeeming feature – other than apparently having written acutely about the differences between East and West Germany. He is variously described as exemplifying the viciousness of high-table Oxford, as being obsessed with status, as being parochial, philistine, grossly unobservant, patronizingly superior, gratuitously controversial, insufferably vain, humourless and entirely lacking in compassion, proportion, open-mindedness and a capacity for introspection. There is a grain of truth in this– HTR himself admitted to being a social snob – but he wasn’t that awful. A more balanced and intelligent appraisal is to be found in Neil Ascherson’s review, published last year in The London Review of Books, of Adam Sisman’s biography of Hugh Trevor-Roper

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v32/n16/neal-ascherson/liquidator

Ascherson rightly focuses on HTR as stylist who felt a close kinship with the Enlightenment historians Hume and Gibbon, and admired the satirical and ironical style so dear to the eighteenth century. He had no time for Scots nationalism (not so many did, in the 50’s) but felt a natural affinity for the Edinburgh of the Enlightenment. In one of his letters to Berenson he deplores the shifting of the centre of Scotch life “from the clear, dry, skeptical, eighteenth century city of Edinburgh to the morose, metaphysical, fuliginous air of Glasgow”. This is consistent with his general advocacy of clarity, openness and reason, and his chronic impatience with all that betrays those values whether it came from right or left – political demagoguery as exemplified by Lloyd George and Nye Bevan, political muddle as exemplified in that “vain, ineffectual man of Blood” Anthony Eden – whose folly over Suez in 1956 was endorsed by “the half-baked semi-fascist lower middle class (represented by the Queen and half the aristocracy”.

The redeeming feature of HTR’s acerbic barbs, apart from their high value as sheer entertainment (see the passage on CS Lewis, above) is that they are distributed without fear or favour to all and sundry. The gruesomely reactionary dons at Peterhouse, Cambridge, discovered to their dismay that in appointing him master they had mistaken their man. (Those gentlemen apparently dressed up in black on the anniversary of Franco’s death). Years earlier, writing to Berenson, HTR had concluded “that there is in England, as in other countries, a fascist world: the world of lower-middle-class conservatives who have no intelligence but a deep belief in violence as a sign of self-importance; who hate foreigners, especially if they come from ‘inferior’ races; and who, gratified with the spectacle of such violence against such people, even if it fails in its object, are prepared to shout, in unison, ‘il Duce ha siempre ragione’. In ordinary times, and given good politics by their leaders, these people remain below the level of public notice, quietly reading the Daily Telegraph and cultivating their gardens. But these are not ordinary times and the politics of our leaders are not good; and so out of frustration this extraordinary and disquieting spirit breaks forth.”

As Michael Postan intimated, HTR is indeed more Whig than Tory, ever ready to take on entrenched orthodoxies, whether of the left or right, anti-clerical (in the Enlightenment manner), ever ready to prick the bubble of clerical mumbo-jumbo (denouncing Jesuit charlatanism or as on TV ironically consoling a young man assailed by religious doubts), or messianic self-esteem (as in the case of Arnold Toynbee). It’s altogether characteristic that after briefly dabbling with Freemasonry he should have dropped his Masonic kit off a bridge.

There’s no denying that HTR had a special line in vitriolic invective – though that invective is sometimes curiously reminiscent of earlier models, as when in the manner of Byron he complains about the slovenliness of the Portuguese compared with “the ancient gravitas of even the poorest Spanish peasant.” And his invective is more qualified and nuanced than Cumming would have us believe. Take his use of the epithet “provincial” as a term of abuse which he seems to dish out de haut en bas to the Scots, the Irish and the Welsh as if from the lofty elevation of the Oxford high table. Nor does he simply have it in for the Celtic fringe. Helsinki is “this miserable parochial peasant-come-to-town northern backwater”. The Estonians and the Letts are “I suppose a sort of Welsh of the Baltic shores.”

But then, on closer inspection, the stance is ambivalent. What does it say about Oxford when it excludes the work of the French historian Fernand Braudel and the Annales school? It says – or rather HTR says - that it is a retrograde provincial backwater. The invective, too, is qualified. Just as there are Edinburgh Scots and Glasgow Scots, so there are on the one hand “the Black Welsh” (demagogues like Lloyd George and Bevan) and the presumably un-black, like King Arthur, and the poets George Herbert and Henry Vaughan.

It appears then, though one would hardly guess it from reading Laura Cumming’s review, that HTR held certain figures in very high esteem – people like the economist JM Keynes, the historian Braudel, the Hispanophile Gerald Brenan, and of course Bernard Berenson himself. Whether he was right to do so is another matter - Keynes is on record as remarking that Berenson – whom Ascherson drolly describes as “the maestro of highly paid authentication” was “rather a bad man”. Whether he was or wasn’t, one can well imagine that Berenson’s reprise of de Maistre grated somewhat on Keynes:

“As for men in the lump, the mass, they are about as rational as a drove of oxen or a stampede of buffaloes, and woe to him who tries to lead them by means of intelligible speech instead of brutish sounds and the skilful use of the lasso.”

HTR was less despairing of intelligible speech. To say that he was overflowing with the milk of human kindness would be overstating it, but he was certainly possessed of gaiety, an ancillary quality that entitles even those who administer vitriol to associate membership of the human race. The remarks on CS Lewis may not be impartial, but when did fun ever have much to do with impartiality? One is reminded of HTR’s comment on Keynes’s essay on Lloyd George “which for sheer irresponsible gaiety and brilliant euphoria out-logans Logan”. Logan Pearsall Smith, that is. It is this very same gaiety and euphoria that make HTR himself such an entertaining letter writer, whether he is describing the contest for the Regius chair of history at Oxford (which he eventually won) or the contest some years later for the Chancellorship of the University of Oxford which was won by HTR’s candidate, Harold Macmillan.

What he had to say about that contest shows not only that HTR had a heart, but that his heart was in the right place.

“Altogether, I am convinced that the real division, as it worked out was not political: it was a battle between the Establishment and the Rebels, between, on one hand, the solemn, pompous, dreary, respectable Times reading world which hates elections (indeed, hates life) and thinks that everything should be left to the experts, the professionals, themselves and, on the other hand, the gay, irreverent, genial, unpompous world which holds exactly opposite views, the world of the educated laity who do not see why they should be excluded from politics because they are not politicians, nor from intellectual matters because they are not scholars, nor from the university because they are not academics.”

Last Friday visited the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester, where they have seven sketchbooks by the eighteenth century English watercolour painter, John Robert Cozens. It so happened that the sketchbooks were being displayed in a glass case in an exhibition entitled The Land Between Us – place, power and dislocation but what was on display was well worth the trip – in particular an especially mouth-watering pencil and wash sketch of Vesuvius as glimpsed from the myrtle plantation at Sir William Hamilton’s villa at Portici, and dated August 18^th, 1782.

In common with other great British watercolourists such as Francis Towne, Thomas Girtin, John Frederick Lewis, John Sell Cotman and Edward Lear – but with the notable exception of Turner - John Robert Cozens is a chronically under appreciated artist. Turner had the grace to say that had Tom Girtin lived he should have starved, and Constable paid a similarly handsome compliment to John Robert Cozens, calling him the greatest genius that ever touched landscape.

John Robert was fortunate to be the son of another artist of originality and distinction, Alexander Cozens, but less fortunate perhaps in his personal demeanour - “of a silent, hesitating disposition, and grave manners” as a contemporary described him. He visited Italy twice, firstly, in 1778, under the patronage of Richard Payne Knight, and secondly in the entourage of the “sensitive, spoiled and unconventional” writer, William Beckford, whose keen sensibility to the scenery and the artistic treasures of Italy were perhaps as much of a trial as an inspiration to the young Cozens. At all events Cozens’s friend the Welsh artist Thomas Jones (another highly original talent, though not in water colour) spoke of Beckford’s departure from Naples in September 1782 as having left Cousins (as he spells the name) “once more a free Agent and loosed from the Shackles of fantastic folly and Caprice.” Beckford later referred to Cozens as an ungrateful scoundrel, for what reason we do not know.

What distinguishes the Portici sketch is the entirely convincing way in which a huge panorama of mountain scenery and flat middle distance has been captured on two leaves of a sketchbook measuring about 18 inches by 9 – with the centrefold running down the middle. It consists of light pencil markings (including words like “woods” and “green & rock”) on laid paper, and then quickly washed over with a grayish wash. Part of its attraction is the speed with which it was evidently executed. There are no signs of erasures or corrections; this is the seemingly effortless work of a superb observer and executant at the top of his form.

If there was one word to describe this sketch it would be the epithet so beloved of the hippy generation, “cool”, a value which was well understood in the eighteenth century, though they preferred to speak in terms of irony, understatement and in general the classical pose of “nil admirari”. You come across it all over the place, in Swift, in Pope, in Fielding, in Gibbon, and in the cut and thrust of daily conversation: “Pray, Mr Quin, do you ever make love?” the Duchess of Queensberry asked the actor James Quin. “No, Madam, I always buy it ready made.”

Up until reading his observations about Cozens in his book Landscape and Memory I’d always been a bit of a fan of Simon Schama’s, but now I’m beginning to have reservations… Quite simply Schama’s version of John Robert is (in my view anyway) almost ludicrously overcooked and over elaborate. The artist comes across as transcendentally self-absorbed and angst-ridden, and his works seen as eerie, surreal, hallucinated, unearthly. Disorientation and the scrambling of perception is the key to it: “We have been pulled into a universe of representation where something has got in the way between art and its ostensible object.” To which the skeptical reader (as well as wondering what that something might be) is tempted to respond, “scrambling of perception, indeed.”

This kind of overheated language may be appropriate for the likes of that “bona fide ecstatic” as Schama terms Beckford, but it is not appropriate for J.R. Cozens – even when he is painting his stunning representations of the Alps, or his equally stunning caverns in the Campagna. Schama chooses to dwell on “creative disordering”, but the term “creative ordering” would appear to be just as appropriate. Schama himself is perhaps open to the charge of creative disordering by implying that the artist’s eventual succumbing to mental illness was a natural sequel of an alleged “sensory brinkmanship” brought on by staring into sublimity without wearing sunglasses.

“When John Robert actually faced the mountain summit from the ledges, the imperial prospect that ought to have been yielded up to any confident eighteenth-century enlightened mind rushed past him. His head swam. His brush floated vaporously over the page. His art soared. And when his masterpieces had been accomplished, he went mad.”

Here is vaporous brushwork with a vengeance. Or the kind of swaggering, overconfident verbal pyrotechnics that offer an entertaining caricature of Cozens as yet another unstable, tormented Romantic loony, rather than giving us the real artist who, as Constable said, "touched" landscape. Touched, not twisted be it noted.

By way of postscript it’s worth noting that when Cozens painted the Portici sketch he had just recovered from a bout of malaria. Only a week or two later that amiable and musical lady, Catherine, Sir William Hamilton’s first wife, died. Nine months later her body was brought back to Wales for burial on the family estate at Slebech.

Alain de Botton presented an interesting “Point of View “ on Radio 4 yesterday (Sunday) – a sort of “Thought for the Day” on wheels. The general gist of it was that, largely due to gadgets and modern technology, and a relentless obsession with news and current events, we have lost the ability to concentrate. Well, if concentration, as it no doubt is, is such a good thing, then let’s start by concentrating on what Alain has to say.

I don’t profess to be a philosopher, but some of his arguments seem questionable. To start with, his notion that the news occupies in the secular sphere much the same position of authority that the liturgical calendar has in the religious one. Is that really so? I’m a news junkie myself, but 24 hour news, while it may command attention, doesn’t have authority as such. Can a commodity which is so shifting and variable be said to occupy the niche filled by public worship in accordance with a prescribed form, which is what liturgy is? For religious believers there is no doubt as to what constitutes liturgy. Some news sources are regarded as more reliable than others, but what constitutes news is largely a matter of opinion and personal preference. News for the Sun reader is not news for the Guardian reader, and vice versa. Same goes for BBC World Service news and (say) Fox news. We freely pick and choose, which (whatever other virtues they may have) is not what the creyentes do.

Alain says that religious faith seldom has the need “to alter insights or harvest them incrementally through news bulletins. The great stable truths can be written down on vellum or carved into stone, rather than swirling malleably across hand-held screens.”

You don’t have to be a card-carrying humanist to wonder about these “great stable truths” which might be better described as grand categorical assertions, with plenty of potential to create interdenominational, inter-faith and indeed international conflict. Maybe the human project is better served by less in the way of dogma and more in the way of intellectual and moral independence, agnosticism, openness and fluidity. If the liberal view is right, and that you are best trying to figure philosophical stuff out for yourself , then Google and Wikipedia are probably going to be more of a help than recourse to the Bible, the Torah or the Koran.

Alain says that we pay a price for our promiscuous involvement with morality, whereas religion reminds us of the same old things – eternal quieter truths that we know about in theory, but don’t practise. There are two unwarrantable assumptions here – 1. That those who know about these allegedly eternal quieter truths necessarily practise them, and 2. that those who don’t have religious faith have no proper engagement with morality, and are deprived of access to such truths. It’s not entirely accidental, perhaps that Alain uses terms like guilt (“guilty for all that we’ve not yet read”) and “decadence” –from which the secular apparently need to be purged.

Give people enough rope and they will hang themselves, seems to be the thought. “How free secular society leaves us by contrast. It expects that we will spontaneously find our way to the ideas that matter to us... “ Like science, “it privileges discovery, it associates repetition with punitive shortage, presenting us with an incessant stream of novelty.” This is a scenario that’s difficult to recognize. Does the modern entertainment industry work in that way? On the contrary, most of what it produces, far from privileging discovery, seems to privilege fatuous repetition of tired formulae.

“We’re reluctant to admit that we’re simply swamped with information, and have lost the ability to make sense of it.”

Well, yes and no. There is certainly more information out there than any individual could possibly use, but Alain underestimates people’s ability to navigate their way around all that stuff and harvest information for their own purposes, thus making themselves potentially freer and better informed than any other generation in history. The internet is far from perfect (Wikipedia articles on 18^th century writers are all too often items pillaged directly from the 11^th edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica) but it gets better all the time. What educated users of it do, almost by second nature, is to customize the thing – to bookmark their favourite sites, and fabricate their own hierarchy of values. This is what intelligent people have always done. Before the internet they were collecting their favourite books and organizing them in a certain way. For every sad soul that is lost and floundering in a fathomless sea of electronic information, I bet you there are ten whose understanding of real-life issues has been much enhanced, and whose contact with like-minded souls, has been greatly facilitated.

“Our minds, no less than our bodies, require periods of fasting”, says Alain. Not a bad idea, from time to time. But we don’t necessarily have to do that in a religious context - though it would be a mistake to take too narrow a view of religious contexts. It’s a long time since I visited in the cloisters of Rabelais’s Abbey of Thelema, but from what I recollect, it was a lot of fun. I admit, it wasn’t your conventional idea of a religious establishment.

Alain needs to cut down on Tolstoy and Chekhov, and cheer up a bit. The Rabelaisian abbey might do the trick. If not, he should just try and get out and about a bit more.

More about Bernard Mandeville - in my opinion sadly misrepresented in the Wikipedia entry on BM, which is itself largely derived from the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica article on the same, written by John Malcolm Mitchell. Mitchell says that "Mandeville's philosophy gave great offence at the time, and has always been stigmatised as false, cynical and degrading." The second part of this remark is simply not true. In his book Pioneer Humanists (1905) J.M. Robertson had already written a lengthy and intelligent defence of Mandeville against attacks from Bishop Berkeley, Hutcheson and others in the religious establishment to the effect that he was an apologist for libertinism and vice in general - and indeed this article is referred to in the notes to the Wikipedia entry. Robertson quotes with approval a passage in Richard Whatley's Introductory Lectures on Political Economy (1831) which make it clear that even as early as the 19th century there were those who understood what he was getting at.

"He was indeed a man of an acute and original, though not very systematic or comprehensive, turn of mind; but his originality was shown chiefly in bringing into juxtaposition notions which, separately, had long been current (and indeed are not yet quite obsolete), but whose inconsistency had escaped detection. It is sufficient to remark, that he is arguing all along on an hypothesis, and on one not framed gratuitously by himself, but furnished him by others; and on that hypothesis, he is certainly triumphant... His argument does not go to show categorically that vice ought to be encouraged, but hypothetically that, if the notions which were afloat were admitted, respecting the character of virtue and vice, and respecting the causes and consequences of wealth, than national virtue and national wealth must be irreconcilable... and consequently, that of two incompatible objects, we must be content to take one or the other..."

This hypothesis is especially relevant in times of credit crunch and banking crisis. Mandeville would have maintained that you cannot have a flourishing stock market or merchant banking sector if you set about extirpating greed and acquisitiveness. He would have argued, no doubt, that it is the business of politicians to harness creatively those powerful forces in a way that benefits society as a whole. It can be done, he says, although the language in which he frames the proposition is so urbanely flippant as to prompt the suspicion that he has his tongue in his cheek, and that he may even be having a dig at facile theodicy - doing in the domain of economics what Voltaire did in a wider sphere, in his celebrated demolition of the view that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.

"The short-sighted Vulgar in the Chain of Causes seldom can see further than one Link; but those who can enlarge their View, and will give themselves the Leisure of gazing on the Prospect of concatenated Events, may, in a hundred Places see Good spring up, and pullulate from Evil, as naturally as Chickens do from Eggs.

This Mandeville is certainly one cool dude.

Just been reading Francis Wheen's informative and entertaining biography of Karl Marx, in which we are reminded that Marx was far more than a plunderer of government Blue Books, statistical tables and factory inspectors' reports - the kind of information to be found in Engels's Condition of the Working Class in England. Literary fiction was also a significant source, and Marx also employed the literary devices more associated with the eighteenth century literature. Wheen quotes Edmund Wilson's remark that Marx was "certainly the greatest ironist since Swift," and illustrates this by quoting a passage from the fourth volume of Capital where Marx puts forward the paradoxical proposition that crime may be seen as a legitimate branch of production rather than as a form of social deviancy:

"A philosopher produces ideas, a poet poems, a clergyman sermons, a professor compendia and so on. A criminal produces crimes. If we take a closer look at the connection between the latter branch of production and society as a whole, we shall rid ourselves of many prejudices. The criminal produces not only crime but also criminal law, and with this also the professor who gives lectures on criminal law and in addition to this the inevitable compendium in which this same professor throws his lectures on to the general market as 'commodities'... The criminal moreover produces the whole of the police and of criminal justice, constable, judges, hangmen, juries, et. and all these different lines of business, which form just as many categories of the social division of labour, develop different capacities of the human mind, create new needs and new ways of satisfying them... The criminal produces an impression, partly moral and partly tragic, as the case may be, and in this way renders a 'service' by arousing the moral and aesthetic feelings of the public. He produces not only compendia on Criminal Law, not only penal codes and along with them legislators in this field, but also art, belles-lettres, novels, and even tragedies.... The effects of the criminal on he development of productive power can be shown in detail. Would locks ever have reached their present degree of excellence had there been no thieves? Would the making of banknotes have reached its present perfection had there been no forgers? ... And if one leaves the sphere of private crime, would the world market ever have come into being but for national crime? Indeed, would even the nations have arisen? And has not the Tree of Sin been at the same time the Tree of Knowledge ever since the time of Adam?"

Wheen says that this stands comparison with Swift's proposal for curing the misery of Ireland by persuading the starving poor to eat their surplus babies. Indeed, but there is a much closer parallel with another eighteenth century writer, namely Bernard Mandeville. In his Fable of the Bees - which bears the subtitle "Private Vices, Public Benefits" Mandeville takes the very same view of criminality as does Marx, namely that it is a very considerable branch of industry, and that well-meaning efforts to rid society of it run counter to the dynamic of resourcefulness and inventiveness upon which selfish, consumerist market-driven society relies.

Of course Mandeville, no more than Marx, is not advocating carte blanche for criminality - but he is performing the useful service of pointing out that you can't simultaneously have incompatible things. The Christian virtues of self denial are fundamentally incompatible with market society - or capitalism as they called it later. The buzzing, productive hive of bees will become a sterile colony of drones if self denial and strict morality prevails.

Mandeville's insight is as apropos now as it was 200 years ago. We still hanker after incompatible things - exponential economic growth at the same time as prudent stewardship of the earth's resources or care for the welfare of future generations Common sense tells us this, but politicians don't. Or won't. Or can't. Which suggests that we should rely less on politicians, and more on common sense.

Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose. It's a 19th century quotation (Alphonse Karr in Les Guepes, 1849) but an eighteenth century sentiment.