A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Adam Smith, Aristotle, Bartholomew Fayre, Ben Jonson, Benjamin Franklin, Bible, C.S. Lewis, Canon, Capitalism and Freedom, Cervantes, Chaucer, Cleanth Brooks, Confessions, Critique of Pure Reason, Dante, Descartes, Discourse on Method, Don Quixote, Edmund Burke, Ethics, For a New Liberty, Freud, Hayek, Hegel, Hobbes, Ideas Have Consequences, Individualism and Economic Order, James Burnham, Joseph Conrad, Joyce, Kant, Leviathan, Locke, Lolita, Lord Jim, Lyotard, Machiavelli, Meditations on First Philosophy, Michael Oakeshott, Milton, Milton Friedman, Mises, Murray Rothbard, Nabokov, New Testament, Nicomachean Ethics, Norman Mailer, Ohio, Old Testament, Plato, Politics, Pragmatism, Proust, Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays, Richard Weaver, Robert Nisbet, Russell Kirk, Saint Augustine, Shakespeare, Sherwood Anderson, Socialism, Spinoza, Suicide of the West, Summa Theologica, Swann’s Way, The Canterbury Tales, The Divine Comedy, The Interpretation of Dreams, The Moviegoer, The Naked and the Dead, The Phenomenology of Spirit, The Politics of Prudence, The Postmodern Condition, The Prince, The Quest for Community, The Republic, The Screwtape Letters, The Sound and the Fury, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, The Well Wrought Urn, Thomas Aquinas, Two Treatises of Government, Walker Percy, Western Canon, Western Civilization, William Faulkner, William James, Winesburg
In Arts & Letters, Books, Creativity, Fiction, History, Humanities, Law, Literature, Novels, Philosophy, Politics, Western Civilization, Western Philosophy, Writing on December 12, 2012 at 8:45 am
Editorial Note (April 15, 2013): At this point in the year, I have already discovered flaws in this list. For instance, I gave myself two weeks to read Augustine’s Confessions and one week to read Aquinas’s Summa Theologica. I should have done the reverse. Summa Theologica may have required more than two weeks to read, since I found myself rushing through it, and it is not a book through which one should rush. My schedule has forced me to speed read some texts in order to avoid taking shortcuts. Some of the texts on this list will therefore appear on my list for next year, so that they get the treatment and consideration they deserve.
2013 will be a good year for reading. I’ve made a list of the books I’m going to undertake, and I hope you’ll consider reading along with me. As you can see, I’ll be enjoying many canonical works of Western Civilization. Some I’ve read before; some I haven’t. My goal is to reacquaint myself with the great works I fell in love with years ago and to read some of the great works that I’ve always wanted to read but haven’t. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that everybody ought to read these works, but I do think that by reading them, a person will gain a fundamental understanding of the essential questions and problems that have faced humans for generations.
Some works are conspicuous in their absence; the list betrays my preferences. Notably missing are the works of Shakespeare and the canonical texts that make up the Old and New Testament. There’s a reason for that. I’ve developed a morning habit of reading the scriptures as well as Shakespeare before I go to work. If I’m reading these already, there’s no need to add them to the list, which is designed to establish a healthy routine. What’s more, the list comes with tight deadlines, and I’m inclined to relish rather than rush through the Bible or Shakespeare.
Lists provide order and clarity; we make them to reduce options or enumerate measurable, targeted goals. Lists rescue us from what has been called the “tyranny of choice.” Benjamin Franklin made a list of the 13 virtues he wished to live by. What motivated him is perhaps what’s motivating me: a sense of purpose and direction and edification.
At first I wanted to assign myself a book a week, but realizing that some works are longer or more challenging than others, that as a matter of obligation I will have other books to read and review, that I have a doctoral dissertation to write, that the legal profession is time consuming, and that unforeseen circumstances could arise, I decided that I might need more time than a week per book depending on the complexity of the particular selection or the busyness of the season. Although I hope to stick to schedule, I own that I might have to permit myself flexibility. We’ll see.
For variety—and respite—I have chosen to alternate between a pre-20th century text and a 20th century text. In other words, one week I might read Milton, the next Heidegger. For the pre-20th century texts, I will advance more or less chronologically; there is no method or sequence for the 20th century texts, which I listed as they came to mind (“oh, I’ve always wanted to read more Oakeshott—I should add him. And isn’t my knowledge of Proust severely limited?—I’ll add him as well.”). It’s too early to say what lasting and significant effects these latter texts will have, so I hesitate to number them among the demonstrably great pre-20th century texts, but a general consensus has, I think, established these 20th century texts as at least among the candidates for canonicity.
I have dated some of the texts in the list below. Not all dates are known with certainty, by me or anyone else. Some texts were revised multiple times after their initial publication; others were written in installments. Therefore, I have noted the time span for those works produced over the course of many years.
One would be justified in wondering why I’ve selected these texts over others. The answer, I suppose, pertains to something Harold Bloom once said: that there are many books but only one lifetime, so why not read the best and most enduring? I paraphrase because I can’t remember precisely what he said or where he said it, but the point is clear enough: read the most important books before you run out of time.
Making this list, I learned that one can read only so many great works by picking them off one week at a time. The initial disheartenment I felt at this realization quickly gave way to motivation: if I want to understand the human condition as the most talented and creative of our predecessors understood it, I will have to make a new list every year, and I will have to squeeze in time for additional texts whenever possible. I am shocked at the number of books that I wanted to include in this list, but that didn’t make it in. I ran out of weeks. What a shame.
Here is my list. I hope you enjoy. Read the rest of this entry »
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Cicero, commands, Comparative Literature, England, Geoffrey of Monmouth, Giorgio Agamben, Henry I, Inquire, John Austin, King Arthur, law, Monarchy, nation state, Norman Conquest, polis, Ranulf de Glanvill, sovereignty, Stephanie L. Mooers, The History of the Kings of Britain, The Republic
In Arts & Letters, Britain, Christianity, Fiction, Historicism, History, Humanities, Imagination, Jurisprudence, Justice, Law, Law-and-Literature, Liberalism, Libertarianism, Literary Theory & Criticism, Literature, Politics, Rhetoric, Rhetoric & Communication, Western Civilization on March 9, 2012 at 10:09 pm
This essay originally appeared here at Inquire: Journal of Comparative Literature (Issue 2.1, 2012)
Geoffrey of Monmouth’s The History of the Kings of Britain is a tale of the rise of law that suggests that there can be no Britain without law – indeed, that Britain, like all nation-state constructs, was law or at least a complex network of interrelated processes and procedures that we might call law. During an age with multiple sources of legal authority in Britain, The History treats law as sovereign unto itself in order to create a narrative of order and stability.1 This article examines the way Geoffrey establishes the primacy of law by using the language-based, utilitarian methodologies of John Austin, who treats law as an expression of a command issued by a sovereign and followed by a polis, and whose jurisprudence enables twenty-first-century readers to understand Geoffrey’s narrative as a response to monarchical succession and emerging common law. The first section of this article briefly explains Austin’s jurisprudence and provides historical context for The History. The second section considers The History in terms of uniform and rational justice in the twelfth century, situating Geoffrey’s jurisprudence alongside that of Ranulf de Glanvill and analyzing the complex relationships between sovereignty, law, polis and nation state.
The Jurisprudence of John Austin
Austin treats law as an expression of will that something be done or not done, coupled with the power to punish those who do not comply: “A command […] is a signification of desire […] distinguished from other significations of desire by this peculiarity: that the party to whom it is directed is liable to evil from the other, in case he not comply with the desire” (Province 6). Accordingly, law is a command that carries the power of sanction. Austin, who writes in the nineteenth century, is in many ways different from the twelfth-century Geoffrey. Whereas Geoffrey employs fiction to instruct his contemporaries in the official narrative of incipient nationalism, Austin proclaims that many “of the legal and moral rules which obtain in the most civilized communities, rest upon brute custom, and not upon manly reason” (Province 58). Austin adds that these legal and moral rules “have been taken from preceding generations without examination, and are deeply tinctured with barbarity,” and also that these takings are particularly harmful because the rules “arose in early ages” during “the infancy of the human mind” when people ruled based on “the caprices of fancy” (Province 58). Because The History is more mythology than fact, Austin probably would have accused Geoffrey of perpetuating “obstacles to the diffusion of ethical truth” and of “monstrous or crude productions of childish and imbecile intellect” that nonetheless “have been cherished […] through ages of advancing knowledge” (Province 58). Austin, in short, was skeptical of mythology and claims about absolute law, whereas Geoffrey embraced mythology and implied that law was a constant corrective.
Despite this disjuncture, or perhaps because of it, Austin’s theories provide an illuminating framework in which to consider The History. Austin’s proposition that laws are commands backed with the power to sanction stands in contradistinction to Geoffrey’s suggestion that law emerged out of an ancient precedent and achieved its fullest expression under the great King Arthur. The conception of law as merely language reinforced by the possibility of physical threat undercuts the idea that law is based in first principles discovered by the fathers of civilization. Austin’s proposition – that customary laws carry no threat of punishment and therefore are not laws at all unless a sovereign, who can punish, declares them to be laws – also contradicts Geoffrey’s suggestion that law is embedded in custom and represents a point of authority from which kings may or may not deviate. Finally, Austin’s proposition that “every law which obtains in all societies, is made by sovereign legislators” (Lectures 566), even if such law derives its lexicon from divine inspiration or religious texts, weakens Geoffrey’s suggestion that law is relatively fixed in custom and tradition despite the whims and fancies of a given age. To employ Austin’s jurisprudence is not to privilege Austin’s reading over Geoffrey’s or Geoffrey’s reading over Austin’s but to treat Austin as a lens through which to examine how Geoffrey navigates the legal terrain of his day and negotiates conflicts about law and monarchy that unsettled the harmony of the burgeoning state. Geoffrey uses myth both to validate law and British unity and to reassure the anxious polis of law’s ultimate supremacy over temporary ideological disruptions. He establishes models of behavior for both monarchs and the polis. Read the rest of this entry »
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