Emile Zola – L’Assommoir (The Drinking Den) 1877, Translation by Robin Buss (Penguin Classics) (2004)

My one liner: Zola’s classic and probably most famous.  Evocative 19th
century Paris. Trials and tribulations of Gervaise the laundry girl, who finds success and happiness through hard work. Then loses it all through drink, and through events  beyond her control.

“Her dream was to live amongst decent people, because if you kept bad company, according to her, it would hit you like a blow from a mallet, break your head and flatten a poor woman in no time”
 
Gervaise is a laundry-woman who knows what is like to be poor, abused, and abandoned by a lover to bring up two children. Miraculously, given that this is 19th century Paris, she manages to turn it around.  With the support of a caring and supportive new husband M. Coupeau the roofer, the generosity of a neighbour-lender M. Goujet and his mother, and by dint of sheer grit and determination, she becomes the proud proprietor of a successful laundry business.  Surely, knowing where she came from, she will not let the idyll slip away. Yet, by end, “no one even knew what exactly she died of. There was talk of cold and warmth, but the fact was that she died of poverty, or the filth and weariness of her own life.”
 
Of course in reality it is more complicated than that.  A classic illustration of self-fulfilling prophecy in both directions.  Success breeds success, of course.  On the way up.  But on the way down you have no shortage of detractors who wish your downfall. Chief amongst these are M and Mme Lorilleux, Coupeau’s sister and brother in law.  Opposed to the marriage in the first place, jealous in the extreme when Gervaise shows signs of success, they are the first to spread gossip rumour and innuendo as soon as they spot chinks in the armour.  

An unfortunate roofing accident for M. Coupeau has incapacitated him, temporarily, we all want to believe, as he is a hard-working and honest man. 
But he is not emotionally equipped to recover from setback, and soon the comforts of his incapacitation, the medical care funded out of Gervaise’s  savings, and the success of her business make him delay his return to work.  As do the increasingly frequent visits  to the drinking den.  When he increasingly keeps the company of men such as “Bec-Salé (also known as Drinks-Without-Thirst)” you know where fate is taking him.
 
New dependants arrive in the Coupeau household.  A baby daughter.  Mme Coupeau, the mother (foisted by the Lorilleux). And unbelievably, M. Lantier, the former lover.  All supported by Gervaise.  If this were a play, at every act of generosity the audience would be willing Gervaise not to take it on.  But she does, and runs up more debt from her benefactors the Goujets.  

And she has a further opportunity to avoid the impending train crash. M. Goujet, physically strong and emotionally stable, works at the forge, a classic hero.  Gervaise frequently stops by and cannot helped but be entranced by his masculinity. A close friendship develops.  We hope he will be the deus-ex-machina that will prevent the unfolding tragedy.  On several occasions, and even as she is descending into disaster, he entreaties her to elope with him, confident that he can care for her and her children. 

In the end though there is to be no happy ending. There are many factors at play here, some voluntary, others of weak-will, aided and abetted by a cruel and gossiping society. But Zola had a single-minded agenda in this book, and he was determined to execute it:
 
“I set out to show the fatal collapse of working family in the poisonous environment of our city slums.  With drunkenness and laziness come the loosening of family ties, the filth of promiscuity and the gradual abandonment of decent feelings; then, in the end, shame and death. Quite simply, this is morality in action.”

 It was ever thus.
 
[A word on the translation – clear, and captures the essence. Easy for the lay reader, and hence an important contribution to opening out this important work to a wide  readership.]

Here is the wikipedia link for the book.

Amartya Sen - The Idea of Justice (2009)

My one liner: Nobel Prize winning economist.  A comprehensive survey of the great theorists' competing notions of justice, concluding that a system based on Social Realism (or taking society as it is) is preferable to constructing institutions of justice in a vacuum (“Transcendental Justice”).  
 
Framing the debate on the nature of justice, Amartya Sen provides a practical illustration, which he calls Three Children and a Flute, in the Introduction of the book: Imagine which of three children Anne, Bob and Carla should get a flute about which they are quarrelling.  Anne claims the flute on the grounds that she is the only one who knows how to play it. Bob, on the other claims the flute because he says that he is the only one of the three who is so poor that he has no toys of his own, so the flute would give him something to play with. Carla then intervenes and says that it was she who made the flute with her own painstaking labour, and just as she finishes her work “these expropriators came along to try to grab the flute away from me.”
 
It is clear that theorists of different persuasions would give the flute to different
candidate.  The economic egalitarian would give it to Bob, on the basis that poverty and inequality should be reduced.  The utilitarian hedonist “would face the hardest challenge”, but would be persuaded to give it to Anne, as her pleasure would be greatest from owning and playing it (though he would recognise that Bob’s incremental pleasure in owning it may outweigh this).  The libertarian would of course have no hesitation in awarding it to Carla.  
 
Amartya Sen’s credentials in leading us towards new theories of justice are of course impeccable, so this is a book that we have to pay attention to.  “Transcendental Justice” is the term he gives to the theories, which seek
to prescribe an institutional framework to the ideal form of justice, a sort of
build-it-and-they-will-come approach. Sen uses the work of John Rawls as his "departure point".  Sen was a student of Rawls, and whilst he acknowledge Rawls’ contribution to modern thinking on justice, he also considers it to be too rigid.  Rawls’ concept of “Justice as Fairness” is centered on a requirement of  “primordial equality”, namely that the “parties involved have no knowledge of their personal identities, or their respective vested interests, within the group as a whole.  Their representatives have to choose under this ‘veil of ignorance’”.  The primordial equality requirement then goes on through a chain of reasoning to determine the types of institutions that would be required to deliver it.

 Sen is more drawn to the “Social Realisation” school of justice. This is more concerned with justice as resulting from “actual institutions, actual behaviour and other influences.”  These concepts are to found in Smith, Condorcet, Bentham, Wollstonecraft, Marx, and Mill. In Sen’s words all of these thinkers, though having very different ideas about the demands of justice were “all involved in comparisons of societies that already existed or could feasibly
emerge”.
 
Sen is able to draw on Indian notions of justice, both from Sanskrit texts on jurisprudence and also from the Hindu epics of the Bhagavad Gita and the Mahabharata. So in Sanskrit literature, niti and nyaya both stand for justice.  Niti  signifies organisational propriety (and hence more akin to the transcendental institutionalism) and Nyaya which stands for a comprehensive
concept of realised justice.  And  he draws on examples of Eastern emperors who have come to symbolise one or the other.  Contrast the practical, societally relevant forms of justice practised by both Ashoka (a Hindu) and Akbar (a Muslim) on the one hand, with the much more prescriptive format expounded by Kautilya (a must-read by the way, if you want do a compare and contrast with Machiavelli), the latter having little faith in the ability of his  subjects to make such decisions for  themselves.
 
The arguments that Sen draws us towards are those of Adam Smith in his Theory of Moral Sentiments.  Smith invokes the concept of an “impartial observer” who can adjudicate on fairness given the world as it is, and who can take into account factors and opinions which are not merely present within the immediate community but which are geographically distant, but nevertheless relevant.  Sen believes that this is a more relevant way to approach justice in an interconnected world in which we grapple issues such as global terrorism and the financial crisis.

 Overall, there is as you would expect real intellectual substance in this book.  But it is highly readable, and more importantly highly relevant for how we think about what constitutes realistic justice.

Here is the Wikipedia link to the book.

Ian Morris: Why the West Rules...For Now (2010)

My one-liner: Quite simply the best popular history book you will ever read.  Astounding survey of historical forces that have shaped today’s world.

At the top of the front cover of this book, there is the following quote from Niall Ferguson: “The nearest thing to a unified field theory of history we are ever likely to see”.  That is not far off the mark, and it would be impossible to do justice to the breathtaking breadth covered by this work in a short review.

There is much current debate the so-called catch-up of developing / emerging countries after several centuries of Western economic dominance.  The West’s relative decline, exacerbated by the financial crisis, is personified by the projected overtaking of the USA’s GDP by China some time in the next 10-40 years, depending on which research you read. And in the world of finance and investment, this translates into debates around upcoming fast economic growth in emerging markets being a driver for superior investment returns.  After a reading of Ian Morris’ book, that analysis seems less applicable as an appropriate framing for relative rise and decline.  Because it forces the reader to think in much longer time frames. And to ask himself some different questions.

The book is an astounding synthesis of biology, geography, geology and socio-economic history, that surveys the ascent of humanity from pre-historic times until today.  The style is both story and analysis.   From Monty Python’s Life of Brian to Voltaire’s Pangloss (“All is for the best in all possible worlds”) to Alexander Pope (of Newton: “Nature, and Nature’s laws lay hid by night, God said Let Newton be ! And all was Light !) to Albert Einstein (“I do not know how the Third World War will be fought, but I can tell you what they will use in the Fourth – rocks”), there is enough literary, poetic, scientific and cultural commentary to keep any self-styled polymath reader happy. 

Some central themes of the thesis. 

The frame of reference is the evolution, over the last 16 millenia, of Morris’ Social Development Index.  You can quibble, if you want, with the construction and the components (energy capture, organisation / urbanisation, war-making, and information technology), but what it serves to do is impose a consistent development measure across all time periods for the relative development of the West and East. 

Throughout pre-history and history the index has swung in favour of either East or West for many centuries at a time. Geography (“maps”) and human progress (“chaps”) variously define which region takes the lead.  Progress, is in Morris’ self-confessedly pithy theorem, “made by lazy, greedy, frightened people looking for easier, more profitable, and safer ways to do things.” The analysis thus looks to dismiss the notion that there is somehow a hard-wired ethnic or geographical lock-in of development capability for any one region. 

The first sustained decline in social development in both West and East, began around 100CE and there was another one around 1000CE, as both regions hit what Morris refers to as a “hard ceiling”.  Both periods were characterised, in Morris’ analysis by the prevalence, using the biblical analogy, of the “Five Horsemen of the Apocalypse”, namely climate change, famine, state failure, migration, and disease.  The West spent most of the period from 1400 to 1800 CE catching up with the East, ending a 1200-year year reign of Eastern supremacy, and crucially, resulting in both regions breaking through the previous 1000CE hard ceiling. The last two hundred years ? We know the story. An unprecedented, acceleration in development for both regions, but a clear advantage to the West (the opening of the Atlantic trade route, the industrial revolution, European military power etc, etc), with its roots in an ex-ante highly probable chain of history stretching back to the twelfth century .

The surprising end to the book is less about whether China will now regain its superiority, although the projection is that it will, around 2103 at the latest, and we all kind of know that. With a further massive acceleration (from an index score of 900 to 4000) for both regions as new technologies and globalisation unlock development.  This “Singularity” is borrowed from futurist Ray Kurzweil. It is “a future period during which the pace of technological change will be so rapid, its impact so deep…that technology appears to be expanding at infinite speed.”

The more ominous question is whether the world will instead enter a period of “Nightfall” (last flirted with in the Younger Dryas ice age period around 10,800BC), using the title of the novel by Isaac Asimov.  Not only will the world hit another hard ceiling, but, like any crash after a big bubble, the next crash of humanity will be utterly destructive. Are the “Five Horsemen” amongst us again, as climate change threatens and the free transfer of technology increases the chance that devastating and dangerous technology can end up in the wrong hands ? Morris concludes that there will be no halfway house, no “silver medal”.  Only one of Singularity or Nightfall will prevail.

Here is the wikipedia link for the book.