In Conversation: An OUP Podcast

My grandfather joined up when the Second World War broke out, but he was soon returned to civvy street as he was much more valuable employing his mechanic’s skills to fight the Nazis from a factory in Newcastle. He ended up making the parts of the spot lights that were used to guide anti-aircraft batteries (and my grandmother made parachutes, just over the River Tyne in Gateshead). Although this was not half as exciting to find out about as a young boy as discovering that he was in fact a Commando or part of the Long Range Desert Group, what my grandfather was part of was vital to the defeat of Nazism. In his excellent book, Britain’s War Machine: Weapons, Resources and Experts in the Second World War (Oxford University Press, 2011), David Edgerton is all about this crucial non-military part of Britain’s war with Germany, and it sets about challenges perceptions almost from the front page. His argument is that Britain was actually far more able and well resourced than commonly thought. It entered the war as the richest per-capita nation in the world, a ‘world island’ interconnected with markets across the globe. It had industry and it had a formidable military. Even after France fell, Britain still had its empire to fall back on, and that is before the economic (and then military) assistance of the USA is taken into account. It had the luxury of fighting a war that it was comfortable with, through Bomber Command and in North Africa and the Mediterranean: not for Britain the mass bloodshed that characterized the Eastern Front. Even by the end of the war, an exhausted Britain was still in enviable shape, although – especially in comparison to the USA – it did not seem to be. The book is full of fascinating information, facts and arguments. I did not realize that (again, contrary to accepted opinion) British tanks were actually extremely highly rated, or that British units were extremely well equipped with armour. The bombing campaign was extremely well suited to statistical analysis. In 1939 the Admiralty was sent around a thousand letters a day from garden-shed inventors, each promising that his amateur tinkering had produced an invention that might win the war against the Germans. I also appreciated that this book explained to me exactly how my grandfather (and grandmother) had done so much to win the war, without having to fire a shot. It was not risk free: I remember my grandfather telling me how a bomb had scored a direct hit on the factory’s toilet, just after one of his colleagues had disappeared inside with his morning newspaper. But it was also vital, and I thoroughly recommend the book, especially to those who want to know a little bit more about how war was fought, beyond the simple matter of bullets and blood.

A thing I enjoy about this job is being encouraged to read books that unexpectedly turn out to be profoundly relevant to my own interests. Jeanne Fahnestock‘s new book, Rhetorical Style: The Uses of Language in Persuasion (Oxford University Press, 2011), turns out to be just such a volume. I read it with a constant sense of surprise that this long and distinguished tradition provides insights on many objects of current linguistic enquiry (and indeed a sense of embarrassment that I didn’t already know that). But there is plenty in this book for readers who don’t share my eccentric obsessions. On the one hand, there’s a careful and very readable account of the numerous techniques identified by rhetoricians, from amphiboly to antimetabole. On the other, there’s vivid exemplification of the rhetorical effects that can be achieved, with examples from influential literary, political and scientific texts. The reader is left in no doubt that rhetoric is alive, well, and perhaps more powerful than ever. In this interview, we talk about the status of rhetoric as an object of study, and its recent renaissance. We discuss the usefulness of the exhaustive distinctions identified by rhetoricians of the past, and their relevance to users and analysts of language today. And we consider the ultimate goal of persuasive language use, the attainment of the (rhetorical) sublime.

It’s standard in philosophy of mind to distinguish between two basic kinds of mental phenomena: intentional states, which are about or represent other items or themselves, such as beliefs about your mother’s new hairdo, and phenomenal states, such as feelings of pain or visual experiences of seeing red. It’s also hotly debated how to explain how both kinds of mental phenomena are part of a purely physical world. The dominant approach in recent decades is to explain the phenomenal in terms of the intentional and the intentional in terms of the physical causal – that is, to explain conscious experience in terms of intentionality and to explain intentionality in terms of causal relations between thinkers and what they are thinking about. In his new book, The Sources of Intentionality (Oxford University Press), Uriah Kriegel, associate professor of philosophy at the University of Arizona, argues for a reversal of this order of explanation. On his view, conscious experience is basic to the explanation of all mental phenomena. In this erudite, stylish and provocative volume, Kriegel weighs the relative virtues of higher-order tracking and adverbial theories of experiential intentionality, and defends an interpretivist account of non-experiential intentionality.

Nineteenth-century observers would say that the British Empire was an Islamic one; be that as it may, before Empire there was trade- and lots of it. Nabil Matar and Gerald MacLean‘s book, Britain and the Islamic World, 1558-1713 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), though, goes beyond trade- there was also lots of curiosity, in Britain and abroad, about the strange new peoples and products beginning to move more freely across the world than ever before. It is this aspect of British-Muslim interaction – (or more accurately interactions; the Islamic world was vast and encompassed a dizzying diversity of peoples and cultures) that Matar and MacLean emphasise- the wondering, bemused, gleeful, fascinated, at times despairing accounts of travellers, diplomats, traders -and pirates and their captives- as they sought to convey their impressions of the new worlds they encountered. Nor did everyone think the same; not every factor in Surat went fantee, and not every potentate and cleric disapproved of tobacco and coffee, which North Africans and Britons were wont to accuse each other of having introduced to their lands- and some people tried both lifestyles before settling on one- or neither. It was this celebration of the exotic that made the trading ports and cities of early modern Britain and the Islamic powers such fascinating places to be in- and MacLean and Matar’s book evokes perfectly the heady atmosphere of the contemporary world.

Popular culture is replete with warnings about the dangers of technology. One finds in recent films, literature, and music cautions about the myriad ways in which technology threatens our very humanity; most frequently, the lesson is that the attempt to harness technology for the betterment of the world always backfires. It’s no wonder, then, that when it comes to biomedical technologies that promise to enhance human physical and cognitive capacities, many people tend to express deep unease or opposition. But once one recognizes that technological enhancement, including biomedical enhancement, is ubiquitous throughout human history (from the technologies involved with cooking and storing food, to medicine and therapy, to even literacy itself), one wonders whether the common concerns are warranted. In Better than Human: The Promise and Perils of Enhancing Ourselves (Oxford University Press, 2011), Allen Buchanan surveys the contemporary enhancement debate, offers a diagnosis of what drives some of the views that he finds untenable, and proposes a nuanced view that fully recognizes the moral risks inherent in the enhancement enterprise.

When I was a kid I loved movies about Nazis who had escaped justice after the war. There was “The Marathon Man” (“Oh, don’t worry. I’m not going into that cavity. That nerve’s already dying.”). There was “The Boys from Brazil” (“The right Hitler for the right future! A Hitler tailor-made for the 1980s, 90s, 2000!”). And there was “The ODESSA File” (“Germany believes she doesn’t need us now…but one day she’ll know that she does!”). “The ODESSA File” was my favorite because it explained what really happened, how the evil Nazis formed a super-secret group (Organisation der Ehemaligen SS-Angeheorigen) to get themselves out of Germany so they could one day return to power. The trouble is that’s not what happened at all. In fact, there was no ODESSA. In 1947, someone tricked Nazi-hunter Simon Weisenthal into believing “ODESSA” existed (he was quite willing to be tricked). Then Fredrick Forsyth amplified the myth in his book “The ODESSA File” (1972). Then Hollywood gave the story the full Hollywood treatment in movie “The ODESSA File” (1974). Hollywood tricked me into believing it existed (I was quite willing to be tricked). If you want to know the truth about how the Nazis got away, read Gerald Steinacher remarkably thorough Nazis on the Run: How Hitler’s Henchmen Fled Justice (Oxford University Press, 2011). He shows that there was a sort of conspiracy to get the Nazis out, it just wasn’t very conspiratorial. Even before the war the Nazis (and the SS particularly) were thinking about how to get away from the crumbling Reich. They talked to one an other, made contacts abroad, and traded tips. After some experimenting with various routes, they determined one was far and away most effective: through Austria, into Italy, and then overseas. They had a lot of help. Some of it was for hire, for example in South Tyrol where a kind of Nazi-smuggling industry arose. Some was gratis, for example that offered by a German bishop in Rome. Add some bungling by the International Red Cross, some skullduggery by the OSS, some complicity by foreign powers (e.g., Argentina) seeking German “experts,” and–just like that–the “Ratlines” were clear and known to anyone paying attention. Steinacher shows that no ODESSA-like organization was necessary for the Nazis to escape. All they had to do was follow the well-trodden, clearly marked path that lead away from justice in Europe and into safety abroad. That’s more disturbing than ODESSA.  

The founding fathers–and mothers, sons and daughters–were British. Sort of. It’s true that they were subjects of the British crown, and that they looked, talked, acted and had the tastes of folks in London. But they were always different. Though they carried with them a sort of “British cultural package,” what they changed that cultural package, sometimes intentionally and sometimes accidentally. To draw an evolutionary analogy, they “speciated,” that is, evolved into something new. But just what it was they did not know, not before the Revolution and for a long time after it. In her enlightening Unbecoming British: How Revolutionary America Became a Postcolonial Nation (Oxford UP, 2011), Kariann Akemi Yokota tells us how early “Americans” dealt with the problem of “American” identity. They were nothing if not conflicted: they recognized that British culture was much more sophisticated than their own, but they also sought to find virtue in American rudeness. One of the most interesting things about Kariann’s book is how she uses a variety of unusual sources to study this cultural anxiety–porcelain, maps, paintings, furniture, architecture, cloth, clothes, and other artifacts of “material culture.” Her analysis made me look at the “material culture” in my own house differently (“What in the world does a Dustbuster say about being an American?”). Kariann’s book will make you think differently about how Americans became Americans.

When it comes to Russia’s great reformers of the nineteenth century, Count Sergei Witte looms large. As a minster to both Alexander III and Nicholas II, Witte presided over some of the most important economic and political developments in the Old Regime’s last quarter century. As Finance Minister he oversaw the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway. As a diplomat, he was Russia’s chief negotiator of the Portsmouth Peace Treaty that ended his country’s disastrous war with Japan. As Prime Minister, Witte authored the October Manifesto which crowned a series of sweeping reforms of Russia’s political system with a parliament, the State Duma. But as Frank Wcislo emphasizes in his biography, Tales of Imperial Russia: The Life and Times of Sergei Witte, 1849-1915 (Oxford University Press, 2011), Witte was also a great storyteller, as exemplified in his memoirs The Notes of Count Witte. Wcislo shows in this fascinating book how Witte’s stories reveal the times of the man as a man of the times. Witte was an archetypical New Russian torn by his affinity for the conservatism of the Russian elite and his recognition that those very values were fetters on his nation’s modernization. At the same time Witte’s stories reveal a man prone to masculine hero worship, gossip, vindictiveness, and embellishment of his own role in Russia’s high politics.

In a liberal democratic society, individuals share political power as equals. Consequently, liberal democratic governments must recognize each citizen as a political equal. This requires, in part, that liberal democratic governments must seek to govern on the basis of reasons that all citizens could endorse. However, the freedoms secured by liberal democratic institutions give rise to a plurality of religious and moral doctrines, and thus a morally and religiously diverse citizenry. Liberal democratic states, then, must try to govern on the basis of noncontroversial principles, and must avoid governing on the basis of contentions moral and religious ideas. Religious principles are notoriously controversial among liberal democratic citizens; consequently, it is widely thought that a liberal democratic government must not employ controversial religious reasons when deciding policy. Hence the familiar commitment to the separation of church and state, and the corresponding idea that government must be neutral when it comes to the Big Questions of human life. Yet the idea that politics and religion should be kept separate seems to be a controversial moral idea in its own right. For many religious believers, faith informs every aspect of their lives, including the political and social aspects. Hence the claim that their religious commitments are inappropriate sources of guidance in political matters strikes many religious citizens as deeply objectionable, perhaps even a violation of their right to free religious exercise. A central challenge for liberal democratic political theory, then, is to justify the separation of church and state (or religion and politics) to religious citizens in a way that does not rely upon controversial moral ideas. In Democratic Authority and the Separation of Church and State (Oxford University Press, 2011), Robert Audi proposes a novel and forceful account of the proper role of religious conviction in democratic politics. This account provides the basis for an attractive conception of the separation of church and state, and a compelling vision of civic virtue.

‘Traders to rulers’ is an enduring caption insofar as the English East India Company is concerned. But were they ever just traders to start off with, and they eventually morph into mere temporal rulers unconcerned with the dynamics of the global economy? Philip Stern‘s book, The Company-State: Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundations of the British Empire in India (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011) explores just this: the changing boundaries and demarcations between corporate bodies and sovereign states, and the ‘rightful’ spheres of action of each. This is not to suggest that the English East India Company was a sort of half-way house, or that it occupied a zone of hybridity; it was merely that, in those days (as is perhaps increasingly the case again),  the ‘business of government’ was often assumed by ‘corporations and non-state actors’; and they went about their job just as well as any political government with sovereign powers. So it was that the East India Company’s factors, based in coastal entrepots, built forts, codified law, brought in settlers, collected taxes, waged war, and generally laid down a framework for the governance of the environs they operated in- and carried on trade. The Company-State couldn’t carry on for ever though; as Stern points out, it eventually became a casualty of the ‘evolving definitions’ of what constituted an economic body and what constituted a political body, and eventually ceded all political space to the British Crown, even as its economic avatar just celebrated a quatercentenary of existence.