Like an Egyptian

Like an Egyptian



Book Details

Molly Swetnam-Burland

EGYPT IN ITALY

Visions of Egypt in Roman imperial culture
261pp. Cambridge University Press. £70 (US $110).
978 1 107 04048 9

The cultural impact of Egypt on Imperial Rome

PETER THONEMANN

Deep in the rolling Cotswold hills west of Chipping Norton, at the end of an avenue of ancient oaks, stands the sole example of what we might call the Islamo-Palladian architectural style. "And there they burst upon us", wrote John Betjeman in Summoned by Bells (1960), "the onion domes, Chajjahs and chattris made of amber stone . . . exotic Sezincote". Exotic seems almost too mild a word. Built by an affluent officer of the East India Company between 1805 and 1812, Sezincote is like a Mughal emperor's bad dream brought on by a surfeit of claret and snuff. Georgian windows, golden Cotswold stone and a gracefully curving orangery squabble noisily with peacock-tail arches, fiddly minarets, and a squat copper Mughal-style dome. Even the estate farm buildings and dairy are modelled on an Indian fort.

The reason why Sezincote looks so outlandish to modern eyes is simply that there is nothing quite like this anywhere else in England. (The Royal Pavilion at Brighton, built a decade or so later, is an exception: the Prince Regent was blown away by Sezincote, and wanted one of his own.) Two centuries of British rule in India ended up leaving virtually no mark on the architecture and material culture of the imperial mother country. Victorian London built no mosques or Hindu temples to cater for ardent English Indophiles; no looted statues of Shiva or Buddha were set up on The Mall to commemorate the capture of Lucknow or the Younghusband expedition.

The Romans would have found this very peculiar. In 30 BC, Octavian annexed the Ptolemaic kingdom of Egypt to the Roman Empire. The conquest was followed by an explosion of Egyptian artefacts, cults, building styles and interior decoration throughout Italy. Visitors to Rome can still boggle at the colossal tomb of a Roman aristocrat called Gaius Cestius, a 36-metre-high pyramid faced in marble, completed around 12 BC. A couple of years later, two gigantic obelisks from Egyptian Heliopolis were shipped to Italy at fabulous expense. They were re-erected in prominent locations at the heart of Rome, one in the Circus Maximus, the other on the Campus Martius, where it served as the gnomon of a colossal sundial. A huge sanctuary of the Egyptian gods Isis and Sarapis was laid out on the Campus Martius, complete with antique sphinxes, basalt baboons, and pharaonic portrait-sculptures imported from Egypt. In Victorian London, the Raj was all but invisible; in Julio-Claudian Rome, provincia Aegyptus was a noisy, colourful, and sometimes bizarrely incongruous presence.

This Roman Egyptomania of the late first century BC and first century AD is the subject of Molly Swetnam-Burland's lively new book, Egypt in Italy. One of its major themes is the variety and sophistication of Rome's engagement with Egyptian art and culture. Although countless Egyptian statues, inscriptions and curios ended up in Italian fora, temples and private houses, the Romans were far from just mindless looters. Italian craftsmen also produced careful imitations of Egyptian artefacts, ranging from little alabaster jars to monumental pharaonic statues, and Egyptian genre-scenes are lovingly recreated in the domestic wall paintings of Pompeii and Herculaneum. Even if the Romans did not always understand Egyptian art "correctly" (by our standards), their reactions to it were neither superficial nor triumphalist.

A nice example of creative Roman adaptation of Egyptian material culture comes from the south Italian city of Beneventum. Here, in the late 80s AD, a local civic benefactor called Rutilius Lupus commissioned two brand new obelisks of Egyptian granite, probably to adorn the city's own lavish temple to Isis. In most respects, the dedicatory inscriptions on these obelisks are conventional enough: they record Lupus's status as a legatus Augusti ("envoy of the Emperor"), and include a prayer to Isis for the health and happiness of the reigning Emperor Domitian. More startling is the fact that these inscriptions are written not in Latin, but in perfect Egyptian hieroglyphic script, complete with ingenious Egyptian paraphrases of technical Latin terms (legatus Augusti becomes "he who runs back and forth for the emperor"). Lupus had clearly gone to some trouble to produce a monument of the highest possible authenticity.

How many people in Rome (let alone Beneventum) could actually read hieroglyphs is another matter. The Romans were fascinated by the hieroglyphic script, and at least some Roman antiquarians made serious efforts to master it. The late Roman historian Ammianus quotes a complete Greek translation of the hieroglyphic inscription on the Circus Maximus obelisk, attributing it to an otherwise unknown figure called "Hermapion". In a brilliant recent article, Amin Benaissa has shown that this mysterious Hermapion must in fact be the well-known scholar Apion of Alexandria, who lived in Rome during the early Julio-Claudian period and who wrote a monumental encyclopedia, the Aegyptiaca, on the history, geography, religion and customs of Egypt.

Apion's translation of the Circus Maximus obelisk-inscription is an odd mixture of creative intelligence and outrageous muddle. The Egyptian titulature of Ramesses II, "Horus, powerful bull, son of Seth, golden Horus, chosen by Re", is rendered by Apion as "powerful Apollo, son of Helios, bright-shining, chosen by Helios". The Greco-Roman gods Apollo and Helios ("Sun") are perfectly plausible equivalents for the Egyptian deities Horus and Re (the Egyptian sun god). Apion seems to have been baffled by the hieroglyphic sign for "Seth", and so simply adds another reference to Helios. As Swetnam-Burland nicely puts it, "The act of translation here is twofold, both linguistic and cultural, translating the words of the Egyptian language while transforming their meaning into terms readers standing outside Egyptian culture could understand".

The chief problem with Swetnam-Burland's otherwise admirable book is her assumption that "Egypt" can be treated as a single homogeneous culture. By the time of the Roman conquest, the Egyptians had been ruled for three centuries by the Macedonian dynasty of the Ptolemies. The Ptolemaic capital of Alexandria, founded in 331 BC by Alexander the Great, was the greatest city of the ancient Mediterranean, with a population (largely of Greco-Macedonian origin) probably larger than that of late Republican Rome. The Romans suffered from a deep inferiority complex towards the glittering high culture of Ptolemaic Alexandria. Roman imperial architects studiously imitated or adapted the Alexandrian architectural style; Roman poets, from Catullus onwards, were heavily influenced by Ptolemaic literature, notably the third-century Alexandrian poet and librarian Callimachus.

Swetnam-Burland nowhere really engages with the long history of Roman reception of Ptolemaic culture. Of course, her main interest is in Roman responses to native Egyptian art and architecture, not the aesthetics of Greco-Macedonian Alexandria. But the trouble is that the two cannot always be separated. So, for example, a large part of Egypt in Italy is dedicated to Italian cults of the Egyptian goddess Isis. Isis was, it is true, a very ancient Egyptian maternal goddess. But long before she arrived in Rome, she had received a thoroughgoing Alexandrian makeover. In the last three centuries BC, the Ptolemaic kings energetically promoted a new hybrid "Greco-Egyptian" Isis (modelled on the Greek goddess Demeter), whose cult frankly had little in common with the earlier Egyptian Isis rituals. It was this new-style Isis who was worshipped so enthusiastically in early imperial Rome. Swetnam-Burland simply assumes that the cult of Isis was popular in Roman Italy because it was "Egyptian". Instead, might Isis not have been popular precisely because she was seen as Alexandrian – that is to say, because she was closely associated with the luxurious lifestyles of the Greco-Macedonian elite in Egypt?

Or take the pyramid of Cestius in Rome. Most people have simply assumed without argument that this tomb alludes to the venerable Old Kingdom pyramids at Giza. But can this really be right? The tomb of Cestius does not actually look much like any "real" Egyptian pyramid: the apex is too high in proportion to the base, and its sides are smooth, not stepped like the Egyptian structures. There is no sign of any Egyptian iconography anywhere else in the tomb; the materials (concrete core, marble facing) are quintessentially Roman, and the various tomb inscriptions (all in Latin) make no reference to Egypt. Might Cestius in fact have been aligning himself not with Cheops or Ramesses, but with the cultivated Greeks of Alexandria? We are pretty sure that the near-contemporary Mausoleum of Augustus (not discussed by Swetnam-Burland) was modelled on two of the most famous monuments of Ptolemaic Alexandria, the Lighthouse and the tomb of Alexander the Great. Cestius' tomb may well have been something similar: a good imitation of fashionable Alexandrian tombs, rather than a bad imitation of ancient Egyptian pyramids. If so, then Roman "Egyptomania" starts to look like a very different kind of phenomenon: not so much an antiquarian fascination with the remote and exotic Egyptian past, as a zeal to emulate the Romans' own refined Greco-Macedonian contemporaries.

Nonetheless, Egypt in Italy is a milestone in our understanding of Rome's cosmopolitan imperial imaginary. One of the most magnificent objects discussed in the book is a two-foot-high Egyptian vase carved from a single gigantic piece of honey-coloured calcite alabaster. According to the hieroglyphic inscription on the front, this vase (now in the Louvre) was made in the ninth or eighth century BC for an Egyptian priest called Nebneteru, who dedicated it in a temple at Thebes in Upper Egypt. Some 700 years later, probably at the time of the Roman conquest of Egypt, the vase was carted off to Italy as war booty, ending up in the hands of one P. Claudius Pulcher, the son of the notorious Republican demagogue Clodius, who eventually recycled it as his own funerary urn. The back of the vase now carries a brash Latin inscription in big black letters listing Pulcher's various political offices.

For a member of the Roman upper class to have had himself buried in an antique Egyptian pot is truly extraordinary, as if Lord Salisbury had chosen to be interred in a mummy casket. What did this vase signify for Pulcher? Was it simply a generic objet d'art, prized purely by dint of being foreign, expensive, and rare? Or was its "Egyptianness" significant to Pulcher in some way – either as a symbol of a modern, luxurious Alexandrian lifestyle, or as a link back to remotest Egyptian antiquity? Either way, we can enjoy picturing the patrician mansion of the Claudii Pulchri as a kind of Sezincote on the Tiber, with sphinxes guarding the entrance, miniature obelisks in the garden, and colourful frescoes of women in kohl eyeliner – all of it, naturally, in the best possible taste.

Uniter of his enemies

Uniter of his enemies

"The Princes in the Tower", by Paul Delaroche, 1831

Book Details

David Horspool

RICHARD III

A ruler and his reputation
336pp. Bloomsbury. £20.
978 1 4729 0299 3

Richard III: a bad man or just a bad king?

DAVID ABULAFIA

The century before the Battle of Bosworth was a bad time for the dynasties of Europe. From Poland to Portugal and from Sweden to Sicily kings and queens faced armed challenges to their authority from the greater nobility, generally led by their own close relatives. Usurpers abounded and often triumphed, with the result that we write the political history of the period as a series of success stories for rulers who might easily have failed to gain power – Henry VII at Bosworth, in 1485, Ferdinand and Isabella at Toro in 1476, Ferrante of Naples at Troia in 1462. Worse still, many of the major dynasties failed to maintain the line of succession; this was a disease-ridden period in which one royal prince after another died prematurely, while in several kingdoms, such as Naples under the vacillating Joanna II, the ruler remained childless.

Even when children were born, rivals for the crown flung accusations of illegitimacy at those best placed to succeed to the throne, most famously in the case of Queen Isabella of Castile, who ruthlessly exploited the accusation that her half-brother King Henry IV could not have fathered a daughter because he was apparently homosexual and therefore, supposedly, impotent. In Italy, if one could win the approval of Vatican City, illegitimacy was no bar to succession, as the troubled career of King Ferrante of Naples shows, though the shadow of French challenges lay over him and his successors, culminating in the French invasion of Naples in 1494–5. One of the major actors in those events was the ambitious and cultured duke of Milan, Ludovico il Moro, whose hold on power was consolidated by the untimely – or should one say timely? – death of his nephew and predecessor Giangaleazzo Sforza; and the accusation that Ludovico poisoned his way to the ducal throne still hangs in the air.

Ludovico has often been compared to his near contemporary, Richard III of England, and has been portrayed as a wicked uncle who, like Richard, developed to a high level the art of losing political friends when he needed them most. Over all these figures, Ferrante of Naples, Ludovico il Moro and Richard III, there hangs the question of how they justified in their own mind the killings that they reputedly fostered. There is a temptation to label the late fifteenth-century European rulers, in particular, as Machiavellians before Machiavelli.

David Horspool's account of the life of Richard III, from his childhood (about which we know very little) to his death in battle (about which we now know a great deal, following the excavation of his skeleton by Dr Jo Appleby) raises these issues sensitively and thoughtfully. Even though the figure he describes is decidedly unattractive, Horspool shows appreciation for the attempts of the Richard III Society to steer away from the staunchly negative view of the king fostered by Thomas More and the Crowland chronicle. He stresses how, even more than Shakespeare, Laurence Olivier has fixed in the mind the image of a scheming devil, intent on clearing the way to the throne. This is true even when the blame lay elsewhere, as in the case of his endlessly rebellious brother the duke of Clarence. King Edward IV had suffered more than enough from Clarence's disloyalty; but Clarence was condemned to death in the High Court of Parliament. By contrast, Shakespeare's Richard is found muttering: "Simple plain Clarence, I do love thee so that I will shortly send thy soul to heaven".

As for the Princes in the Tower, it is hard to see how Richard can be excused from their murder; as Horspool points out, Richard had the chance to parade the princes, if alive, or to show their bodies, if dead, and did neither; he could not afford to display a living Edward V, whose presence would undermine his own claim to the throne, despite his accusation that Edward was a bastard; and he could not admit to the scandalous murder of two children, his own nephews. One only has to look at Richard's appalling record in executing rivals to see that he was addicted to purges: Earl Rivers, a member of the Woodville family into which Edward IV had married, was executed even before Richard seized the crown; Lord Hastings too was beheaded without trial; the long list of victims makes plain Richard's determination to purge the English nobility of those who contested his claim to power. The evidence is silent on how his conscience dealt with this carnage.

This attempt to clear away all opposition was in reality his undoing. His most bizarre achievement was that he managed to bring together supporters of the house of Lancaster, loyal to the memory of King Henry VI, and of the house of York, loyal to the memory of King Edward IV. The death in childhood of his heir, Prince Edward, shattered Richard's hope of establishing a line of succession, though he may well have planned to take as his second wife Elizabeth of York, his niece, a story brilliantly enhanced by Shakespeare. However, York and Lancaster were not the opposing sides at Bosworth Field; Henry Tudor had already brought together the white and the red rose before he became king and married Elizabeth of York. Dynastic exhaustion had set in, and precisely because he was a relatively minor figure Henry could be seen as a fresh beginning.

There is a tendency in the literature to concentrate so heavily on Richard's behaviour that the wider setting of English politics at this time is ignored. Horspool's book does not engage with scholarly arguments about the fifteenth-century "constitution" or the exercise of power in the English counties, led by such luminaries as Christine Carpenter and John Watts, who do not even appear in the bibliography. The focus is firmly on Richard; it helps to know something about who was who during the Wars of the Roses, especially in the earlier chapters. Horspool does, however, pay welcome attention to the European setting. Even before he became king, Richard interfered in Scotland, supporting the rebellious duke of Albany, another troublesome royal brother (this time to James III); and suspicion of Richard's intentions may have prompted a number of Scots to join the army of Henry Tudor. However, events in France largely determined his fate. So long as Henry Tudor was stuck at the semi-independent ducal court of Brittany, along with sundry refugees from England, Richard had little to fear; but when Henry gained the support of the French king, and pieced together an army half of which was not in fact English, the threat became real. The threat was exacerbated by uncertainty about the loyalty of leading figures in England, of whom the most famous is Lord Stanley; the family links of the Stanleys to the Tudors, and of other potential allies to the Woodvilles, made any judgement about which way they would turn highly approximate.

David Horspool's measured and fluent account of Richard's life sets a new standard among biographies of medieval rulers aimed at a wide readership. This is not an evil Richard or a benign Richard, but a prince who again and again found it hard to control events, and whose response to crises, including, no doubt, the killing of his nephews, was both opportunistic and bloodthirsty. In the final analysis, Horspool convincingly shows, "whether or not Richard was a bad man, he was a bad king". For he had challenged the legitimacy of his predecessors on the throne, even of his own brother Edward IV; but he never convinced his subjects that his own claim to rule was impeccably legitimate. He had cheated his way to an inheritance that was not his. In the end, the usurper was usurped.

Bars and stripes

Bars and stripes

Michel Foucault, West Berlin Technical University, 1978

Book Details

Michel Foucault

THE PUNITIVE SOCIETY

Lectures at the Collège de France, 1972–1973
Edited by Bernard Harcourt and translated by Graham Burchell
340pp. Palgrave MacMillan. £27.
978 1 403 98660 3

The thinking and rethinking that led Michel Foucault to write his finest book

DAVID GARLAND

Le Collège de France, founded in 1530 and located in Paris's Latin Quarter, is one of France's elite institutions. It is a public institution of higher education but it enrols no students and grants no degrees. Instead, it requires its professors to give an annual course of lectures – free of charge and open to all – reporting on their on­going research. Michel Foucault, who was admitted to the Collège in 1970 as professor of "The History of Systems of Thought", took this obligation very seriously, preparing his lectures with exquisite care and presenting them to a packed amphitheatre at 5:45 pm each Wednesday from January to March. His lectures were intense, austere performances. Reading aloud from his prepared text, he made little concession to the oral form, refraining from informality and permitting himself a minimum of levity or improvisation. For ninety minutes at a time, he would set out historico-philosophical questions, summarize his archival findings, and outline explanatory hypotheses, speaking to his hundreds of auditors – many of whom were academic tourists come to hear the famous maître penseur – as if he were addressing a small group of fellow specialists. He evidently regarded these lectures as a specific kind of production: not working drafts, not thinking aloud but a completed scholarly performance of a certain kind. And indeed, mimeographed transcripts of lecture recordings soon circulated, samizdat-style, bringing the first results of Foucault's new thinking to eager audiences in France and abroad.

The Punitive Society: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1972–1973, adroitly translated from the French by Graham Burchell and expertly edited by Bernard Harcourt, is composed of thirteen lectures that were delivered in the spring of 1973 by Foucault while he was working on what would become his most famous book, Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison, published in February 1975 and translated as Discipline and Punish: The birth of the prison two years later. To read these lectures today is to be reminded of the remarkable impact that Foucault's genealogies of penal power had when they first appeared – among students of punishment his ideas quickly came to define a whole climate of opinion – and to reflect on their continuing relevance in light of the changes that have occurred in the forty years since.

The texts published here have been reconstructed using Foucault's original lecture notes and a transcript of cassette recordings made by one of his course auditors. These are presented together with Foucault's own course summary, a context-setting essay by Harcourt, and a foreword by François Ewald and Alessandro Fontana, the general editors of the series in which the book appears. That series recently completed the French language publication of all thirteen of the lecture courses Foucault delivered between 1970 and 1984 (on topics ranging from The Birth of Biopolitics to The Government of the Self and Others) and all but two of these have now been published in English. We await the appearance of Penal Theories and Institutions from 1971–2 and Subjectivity and Truth from 1980–81.

If one begins by reading Foucault's "course summary" – with its references to "discipline", "panopticism" and "a history of relations between political power and bodies"– one gets the impression that the Punitive Society lectures are a working draft for the famous book that would soon follow. But the summary misleads. Written after the lectures had been delivered, it anticipates the new thinking of Discipline and Punish more than it reflects the lectures that were actually presented. Characteristically, the ever-creative Foucault develops his ideas in the process of summarizing them, presenting concepts and arguments that first took shape towards the end of his lectures rather than being present throughout. (Readers of L'Archéologie du savoir will recall he did much the same thing in that book: transforming the "archaeological" method of discourse analysis he had used in his previous studies in the very act of explaining it.) As it turns out, there are interesting differences between the analyses set out in the lectures and those that Discipline and Punish would sub­sequently make famous: differences that make The Punitive Society worthy of close attention.

The Punitive Society sets out to solve a historical puzzle. Why, between 1790 and 1830, did the penitentiary prison suddenly become the dominant form of punishment in France and throughout the Western world? (Discipline and Punish addressed this same basic problem, but framed and resolved it differently.) The rapid and widespread rise of imprisonment at the end of the eighteenth century is, Foucault says, a significant historical fact because the new penitentiaries had no exact precedents (earlier prisons were not designed to reform their inmates); because such institutions were not "deducible" from legal theory nor proposed by penal reformers; because the new prisons were, from the start, dysfunctional but persisted anyway; and because the penitential emphasis of the new prisons was not specific to them alone but was to become a "general dimension of all the social controls that characterize societies like ours".

To understand the birth of the prison, Foucault sets aside the broad concept of "exclusion" which had informed his earlier study of madness in order to think more precisely about the forms and functions of concrete penal practices. Noting that the same penalties and penal aims appear in different eras but that they operate differently depending on the historical matrix in which they function, he proposes that we focus our inquiries on a new object of analysis which he identifies as "the level of penal tactics". In order to understand the birth of the prison, we must stop trying to explain it by reference to the history of law or penal theory – in whose terms it appears altogether anomalous – and view it instead in relation to power structures and penal tactics. Penality, in this conception, is not the expression of an ideology: it is the relay of a certain kind of power.

Why then, did nineteenth-century penal systems adopt the prison and its techniques of penitential confinement? To answer this question, Foucault shifts the scope of inquiry, viewing this development as one event among others within a larger transformation of the structure of social controls. He tells us that in late eighteenth-century France, England and America, new practices of moralization began to take shape, focused on the supposed dissoluteness of the labouring classes. (In a passing remark, he proposes that someone write a "history of laziness", linking shifts in the perceived failings of the poor to changes in the mode of production.) Emerging first in civil society, in the activities of Societies for the Reform of Manners and Societies for the Suppression of Vice and in the work of Quaker and Methodist organizations, and then in a series of state enactments, these efforts generated a panoply of new controls – workers' records, workers' savings books, vagrancy laws, private police in the ports, and so on – that subjected the working population to intensified scrutiny and a daily moral accounting. The result, Foucault says, was the emergence of a "punitive society" characterized by mechanisms of supervision and punishment that aimed to moralize compliant subjects and shunt recalcitrant ones off to prison.

"To understand a society's system of morality", Foucault says, "we have to ask the question: where is the wealth?" And to explain moral change, he insists we should look not to philosophers like Kant but to practical men like the police reformer Patrick Colquhoun, who understood that the advent of commercial society required a new kind of moral training in the workplace and the penal system.

The spread of capitalist production and exchange meant that a great deal of wealth was no longer fixed in place but instead circulated in the form of commodities, rendering it vulnerable to depredation by the property-less workers who handled it in factories, docks and warehouses. This problem was compounded by the widespread existence of what Foucault calls "illegalisms" – customary practices that violated the letter of the law but had long been tolerated by officials because of the mutual benefits of collusive evasion. In the nineteenth century, these illegalisms increasingly took the more pointed form of popular resistance to wage contracts and exploitative working conditions – with the result, Foucault says, that this new "worker illegalism" prompted the development of "a whole repressive system".

In the new capitalist society, where wealth was exposed and depredations widespread, a more intense control of conduct was required. According to Foucault, these were the considerations that established a new "connection between morality and penality". Henceforth, the target of punishment would be "not just the infractions of individuals, but their nature, their character". (The new science of criminology would later medicalize these moral concerns, converting the sinning individual into the criminal type.) The result was a new and more thoroughgoing mode of regulation – one that sought not to deter criminal acts but to transform ­individuals. And as these mechanisms of supervision and punishment became pervasive, so the punitive society was born.

According to Foucault, the new prisons formed the end-point of coercive processes that were traced throughout the punitive society, and embodied the new penitential techniques in a concentrated form. But how did these institutions emerge? In Discipline and Punish, Foucault would argue that the new prisons encapsulated a series of disciplinary techniques – techniques targeting the body that had originated in schools, monasteries, factories and barracks and which had, by the late eighteenth century, become so widespread that they were, in effect, society's preferred means of exercising power. But in The Punitive Society lectures, the story is different. Here Foucault asserts that the modern prison emerged as a religiously charged moral enterprise – a penitentiary, first developed by the Quakers – and he devotes a good deal of attention to the associated ideas that crime is a sin and that punishment should aim at the inner transformation of the prisoner.

But how could an institution associated with a small religious sect, in a specific geographic region, so quickly become generalized? ­Foucault's answer – which owes something to Max Weber's Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism – is that the penitentiary prison became aligned with capitalism's need to moralize workers and with the penitential practices that were becoming characteristic of capitalist society.

More specifically, what enabled the prison's take-off at this historical moment was its focus on the control of time, and the affinity of this concern with the control imperatives of capitalist production. Unlike the diverse penalties suggested by penal reformers, imprisonment was modulated along a single dimension: that of time. Prison sentences were measured in temporal units just as the wage contract was calibrated in units of labour-time. The prison was, Foucault tells us, uniquely suited to an emerging society in which "capitalist power clings to time, seizes hold of it, makes it purchaseable and usable".

So Foucault's explanation for the prison's rapid rise is to be found not in legal or penological theory but instead in the economic figure of the wage form and the new control problems faced by the bourgeoisie. According to Foucault, the "prison-form" and the "wage-form" are "historically twin forms". They emerge together and are linked by an elective affinity – a shared focus on the regulation of time and the moral control of the worker. And the term that Foucault repeatedly uses to describe carceral confinement – "sequestration" – works to reaffirm this connection, linking the commercial practice of confiscating assets with the practice of incarcerating an offender to punish a crime.

In these lectures, the explanatory framework that Foucault employs is a Marxist functionalism that views the emergence of penitential controls as "the mode of production provid[ing] itself with the instruments of a new political power"; the function of which is "to connect up time, the body, the life of individuals, to the process of production and the mechanisms of hyper-profit". But being Foucault, he takes care to distinguish himself from conventional Marxist positions and particularly from the then-fashionable theses on ideology developed by Louis Althusser, with whom Foucault had studied at the École Normale Supérieure. Foucault emphatically rejects the concept of ideology and any methodology that reads texts for their hidden meanings, insisting that meanings are neither hidden nor unsaid but are in fact available for inspection on the surface of actors' statements. He insists on treating discourse not as a mystification, or an emanation of something more real, but instead as a vector in a field of force, a power to be understood in its strategic functioning. "Every point at which power is exercised is, at the same time, a site of formation, not of ideology but of knowledge" and "where epistemologists [a lightly veiled reference to Althusser] see only poorly controlled ideological effects, I think it is possible to see perfectly calculated, controlled strategies of power".

These glancing encounters with unnamed theorists are characteristic of Foucault's mode of theorizing, both in the lectures and elsewhere. Though Foucault is often described as a "theorist" he is far from being a theory-builder in the conventional sense. He is, instead, a pragmatic thinker who conceptualizes and re-conceptualizes phenomena according to the problem at hand, adapting his theoretical toolbox in the process. In most of these lectures, there is little overt theorizing. Instead, Foucault narrates concrete historical events and episodes, proposes genealogical inquiries, and suggests low-level socio-historical explanations that stick close to the material. At one point early in the lectures, he proposes that society might be characterized as a kind of "civil war" – an ongoing struggle between groups that invests all social relations and social norms with elements of power and conflict. But this turns out to be a theoretical dead-end, and the notion is later dropped. More fruitfully, he uses the final lecture of March 28 to talk explicitly, for the first time, about the conception of power he has been using: a conception that opposes itself to the orthodoxies of Marxism by insisting that power is not possessed – but is, instead agonistic and relational; that it is not localized in the state but rather suffused throughout society; that it does not "guarantee" the mode of production but, in fact, constitutes the relationships that make production possible; that power does not work through ideology but instead is articulated with, and operates through, knowledge; and, more positively, that power is normalizing, shaping habits and creating consciousness. At the end of this lecture he notes that when sociologists study social norms and consciousness, they are in fact dealing with the covert relations of power that suffuse the social surface and constitute social relations: "What characterizes the social . . . is nothing other than the system of disciplines, of constraints. Power is exercised through the system of disciplines, but so that it is concealed and appears as that reality called society" – an observation that reveals just how all-encompassing Foucault's concept of power is at this point.

By the time of Discipline and Punish, Foucault had largely abandoned the Marxist approach, together with the concept of sequestration and the prison-form/wage-form argument. And though the control of time continued to feature, it was now characterized as a legacy of the monastery – and one strand of the web of disciplines – rather than a form of control imposed by the bourgeoisie. More generally, Foucault's account of causation ceases to be so class-based and conspiratorial and becomes more pluralistic, more anonymous, and more non-intentional. In The Punitive Society, social classes struggle to moralize other classes. In Discipline and Punish, actors have mostly dropped out of sight, the passive voice dominates, and power-knowledge relations proliferate. Instead of property-protecting projects launched by the bourgeoisie we learn of the silent, anonymous emergence of disciplinary techniques. Instead of a "punitive society" designed to control workers and align them with production and profit we witness the pervasive spread of discipline, embodied in the architecture and routines of modern institutions. In the lectures, Foucault describes pentitential projects directed at the workers; by the time of ­Discipline and Punish these have become ­disciplinary technologies, normalizing us all.

The Punitive Society is, for the most part, a work of historical sociology, analysing the emergence of new practices of supervision and punishment and the social uses to which they were put. Discipline and Punish is, in contrast, a more philosophical work. Its focus is not so much on economic change and the struggle to establish adaptive controls as on the new rationalities of power, new human sciences, and the constitution of the modern individual. Instead of a history of punishment, it presents a genealogy of "the present scientifico-legal complex from which the power to punish derives its bases". In the later work, it is the cognitive aspects of penal power that are foregrounded – the individualized knowledge produced by ­surveillance, inspection and examination; the science of criminology; the normalizing concerns of modern law – rather than the struggles of one class to control and exploit another. It is an account focused not on the sociological uses of penal power but on penal power's rationalities and technologies. Its central concern is to anatomize modern power together with the human sciences and forms of knowledge that render it possible. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault moves back onto his own terrain – that of the historian of the human sciences, their practical surfaces of emergence, and their philosophical implications – and leaves behind the analysis of social process and historical causation.

This shift of perspective proved productive. Foucault was tremendously insightful when it came to the description of technologies of power-knowledge, analysing diagrams of power reduced to their ideal forms. But he was less good on their actual uses and functioning: here he exaggerates, he ignores resistance, he neglects variation, and he has little to say about institutional supports and social foundations. It is Foucault the philosopher, the archaeologist of discourse, the historian of systems of thought who is penetratingly original in his insights, not Foucault the sociologist. Discipline and Punish is Michel Foucault at his best: the book in which our most important genealogist of the human sciences has truly found his subject. The Punitive Society is the story of the thought processes – the thinking and relentless rethinking – that eventually led him there.

Frost in the shade

Frost in the shade

Edward Thomas, 1916

Book Details

Jean Moorcroft Wilson

EDWARD THOMAS

From Adlestrop to Arras
496pp. Bloomsbury. £25 (US $42).
978 1 4081 8713 5

Edward Thomas's journey towards poetry

JOHN GREENING

This is the first full biography of Edward Thomas since R. George Thomas's (1985) and, significantly, the first written without the guiding hands of his widow, Helen, and children. The poet's final years have been well documented, not least by Eleanor Farjeon, and they are really the most interesting period of his life. It was not until the start of the First World War that this respected reviewer and writer on travel and nature turned his hand to poetry. He had written about it often enough (in 1917 the TLS considered him "the man with the keys to the Paradise of English Poetry"), but conversations with Robert Frost led him to see what could be chipped from the mass of prose he had written. All this has been gone over many times and it makes a gripping story, as Matthew Hollis's Now All Roads Lead to France (2011) reminded us. A poet himself, Hollis had an instinct for the creative process and for Thomas's importance to today's poets, but he also highlighted less familiar details: the obsessive attachments to younger women, the anxiety to show he was not a coward after failing to help Frost confront a gamekeeper.

Jean Moorcroft Wilson also covers some of this, but she questions familiar assumptions as well: that Thomas was poverty-stricken, that his prose is "hackwork", that he "was a true 'Celt'", that his infatuations were passing fancies and only with women, that he ever really found "serenity and fulfilment" in the army – and that he truly loved his wife. Helen is certainly far less of a presence in this biography, and there is much evidence (some of it new) that her husband fell out of love with her very early on, felt his marriage "encrusting the soul" and was on the point of leaving her as war broke out. Wilson calls it "an unfortunate mismatch of temperaments" and can barely disguise her impatience with Helen, whose memoirs (originally published as fiction) As It Was and World Without End have, she suggests, misled biographers – most strikingly in the case of Thomas's death. It is clear from Wilson's account that his widow either conveniently idealized the way he was killed – on the first day of the battle of Arras, at Easter 1917 – or confused it with an incident the day before, when a blast from a shell knocked him over (which may have been what left the "ripples" in his pocket diary). Helen wrote "there was no wound and his beloved body was not injured". In fact, a letter from his O/C, Major Lushington, to John Moore, "buried for many years in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library", explains that he was "shot clean through the chest by a pip-squeak (a 77 mm shell) the very moment the battle began".

Such "revelations" apart, Wilson's skill lies in synthesizing earlier material, while gently pointing us towards new perspectives or ­quietly suggesting that the evidence does not quite add up. She is very good on the poet's formative years, his relationship with his Swindon grandmother (whose kitchen "could have come straight out of a Welsh village"), his fondness for the countryman "Dad" Uzzell – the model, perhaps, for "Lob" – his increasing coolness towards his actual "Dad" and even his five brothers, about whom he later could not "recall anything distinctly". Noting the "extraordinary writing out of [his eldest brother] Ernest from his childhood", Wilson makes sure we hear stories about their time together – as when a teenage Edward enraged him at bedtime by reciting Keats and Shelley.

The literary tyro knew few girls, but came to meet Helen Noble through her father, a liberated kindred spirit and influential man of letters. Wilson hardly needs to remind us that the encounter was life-changing, that Helen's pregnancy and their hasty clandestine marriage would soon threaten Thomas's Oxford career (he was already suffering from heavy drinking, an addiction to laudanum and a dose of gonorrhoea contracted during celebrations for the Relief of Mafeking). More revealing is her remark that James Ashcroft Noble "did not hesitate to dismiss Edward's attempts at verse as 'a pleasant little twitter'". It would not be poetry that dominated his next decade, but prose, those 1 million words and 1,900 reviews (on average "one review every three days for 14 years") that Thomas is estimated to have written.

If Wilson cannot quite bite her subject "to the core", perhaps no one biographer of Thomas can. The importance of his walking rather eludes her; on the other hand, we do learn that his persistent foot trouble was probably due to the fact that he preferred to walk in cheap football boots. And there are relationships that she covers more fully than anyone else – young Hope Webb, who stirred Thomas to "an extraordinary energy in writing" and is woven secretly into his book The South Country (1906), emerges vividly. Wilson appears to have read an unprecedented amount of the prose and gives us fair warning of The Feminine Influence on the Poets (Thomas called it "a wretched, wretched book"), Windsor Castle, The Isle of Wight, Norse Tales: lukewarm potboilers all. She does her best to interest us in the life of a Grub Street melancholic (although she challenges that characterization), assisted by fascinating photographs of the Thomases' many rented homes and anecdotes about literary friends such as Joseph Conrad, W. H. Davies, W. H. Hudson and Rupert Brooke. Thomas was, she writes, "most relaxed and truly [himself] in male company". But, of course, there is Eleanor Farjeon, "a short, plump, homely woman in glasses", as Wilson describes her, "who fell instantly in love with Edward" and became a "sounding-board" as well as, in effect, a secretary. Some of these friendships turned sour, and Wilson even wonders whether it was the poet Ralph Hodgson snarling at him "You damned pro-German" that finally spurred Thomas to volunteer. He left a message afterwards to "tell Hodgson I've enlisted".

Inevitably, all roads lead to Frost. Wilson raises the stakes by claiming it was "a literary friendship rivalled only by that of Wordsworth and Coleridge, Rimbaud and Verlaine, or [somewhat bathetically] Owen and Sassoon". Yet she has a point, and the myth hardens when we hear what a "miracle of chance" their meeting, in London in 1913, was. She detects similarities between the poets: both were physically attractive, had married early, were prone to depression and had experienced "a repeated sense of defeat". But she understands the differences, the rivalries, adding: "However threatened [Frost] may have felt by Thomas's extraordinarily accomplished start in verse, he rejoiced in it and offered expert, detailed advice at every stage".

Frost was almost forty, Thomas four years younger. The American poet, who settled in England in 1912, had barely been noticed when Thomas hailed the originality of North of Boston (1914), his second volume of poems, calling it "revolutionary". They spent much time walking in Gloucestershire; this was above all a friendship hammered out in the forge, to the ringing of Frost's "sentence sound", "the sound of sense", although Wilson believes that this was "only a timely expression of a position [Thomas] had also been working towards". She even quotes a fragment of verse dated a month before Frost appeared on the scene (this was first aired in the TLS, August 8, 2012) and is convinced that the American was influenced by his English friend in more than just subject matter ("The Road Not Taken" was famously inspired by Thomas's indecisiveness), that there are elements of Frost's poetic style that can be traced back to Thomas.

Wilson has wisely allowed room for substantial discussions of the earliest poems, exploring how they derived from Thomas's prose, and for descriptions of what was going on while they were written – the poet's moods as well as local or wider political events. Nor does she let us think it was overnight success for "Edward Eastaway", as he initially signed himself: "Every one of the poems sent out between March and June [1915] was returned". Unsurprisingly, the biographer of Siegfried Sassoon, Isaac Rosenberg and Charles Hamilton Sorley is authoritative on these war years, and she manages to tease out new threads: Thomas's "indulgent time" during August 1914, for example, when he makes no mention of the war, but attends the races and plans a holiday: "While Germany swept rapidly through Belgium into France in the opening days of the war, they might be sitting in Little Iddens trying to remember the words of 'Mr John Blunt' or 'Au Jardin de Mon Père'".

Vital commissions such as that for A Literary Pilgrim in England were beginning to dry up ("Who will want the thing now?") even as Thomas talked poetry with Frost and Farjeon: "Did anyone ever begin at 36 in the shade?". There is a valuable account of Thomas's vacillation before enlisting, including the research he did to "establish how the 'man in the street' was reacting to the war" for an article, "Tipperary"; and some illuminating quotations from his Life of Marlborough (written at a time of Zeppelin raids and submarine attacks) show how even in the Duke's day "Mons was besieged again and again", and how they "mined and countermined, and blew men into the air or were blown up, by hundreds at a time". But the most potent image is of "Edward Eastaway" with a bad ankle, sitting in a deckchair composing "Adlestrop" as the war entered a new year.

Wilson's account of Edward Thomas in the army is a forthright one. She does not think that he was courting death by joining up, but believes he did want to prove himself. She dismisses speculation that he might have taught Wilfred Owen map-reading. She emphasizes his initial stand-offishness with fellow recruits and concludes "the army had increased rather than diminished his class-consciousness". She draws our attention to Paul Nash's observation that far from appearing liberated, Thomas seemed "oppressed by some load of sadness and pessimism". Most intriguingly, she addresses the case of Edna Clarke Hall, whom he met just before going to France, and who is not mentioned by R. George Thomas. Wilson is understandably sceptical that Helen was really, as she claimed, "glad" to know how much Edward was enjoying his "little times" with Edna, who was "as beautiful as Helen felt sure she herself was not".

While the close reading of the poetry here does not displace Thomas's wisest commentators (Edna Longley, John Lucas, Stan Smith), and Jean Moorcroft Wilson makes no mention of more controversial critics (Craig Raine), the most useful passages in these final chapters remain those where she sets a poem against the circumstances of its composition: how, for example, Thomas's imminent departure seems to be in the very "whisper" of "Aspens" and the elegiac tone of "The Brook". A little more acknowledgement of the "Edward Thomas effect", the literary lattermath, would have been welcome. There were, after all, both immediate influences (on Edmund Blunden, who was so thrilled to think he might have found the author's own copy of his book about Keats down the side of a bunk in a stand-to billet) and later ones – in works by, among others, Andrew Motion and Glyn Maxwell – together with at least three anthologies paying homage.

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Assads and Isis

Assads and Isis

The al-Kalaseh neighbourhood of Aleppo, November 17, 2014

Book Details

Samar Yazbek

THE CROSSING

My journey to the shattered heart of Syria
Translated by Nashwa Gowanlock and Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp
288pp. Rider. £20.
978 1 84604 486 1

Jonathan Littell

SYRIAN NOTEBOOKS

Inside the Homs uprising
Translated by Charlotte Mandell
192pp. Verso. Paperback, £12.99 (US $24.95).
978 1 78168 824 3

Jean-Pierre Filiu

FROM DEEP STATE TO ISLAMIC STATE

The Arab counter-revolution and its jihadi legacy
328pp. Hurst. £15.99.
978 1 84604 486 1
US: Oxford University Press. $24.95.
978 0 19 026406 2

Charles Glass

SYRIA BURNING

ISIS and the death of the Arab Spring
156pp. OR Books. Paperback, £11.
978 1 939293 88 6

Christian C. Sahner

AMONG THE RUINS

Syria past and present
240pp. Hurst. £20.
978 1 84904 400 4
US: Oxford University Press. $27.95.
978 0 19 939670 2

'Predictable' and 'avoidable' aspects of the Syrian tragedy

LYDIA WILSON

Well into its fifth year, the conflict in Syria only seems to worsen every day, the news impossible to foresee from one month to the next, with warnings from the UN, NGOs and charities growing ever more desperate. And all the while the feelings of helplessness grow. What can we do? Or, increasingly, what should we have done? Would early intervention have been the better option, stopping, or at least slowing, the carnage, the rise of sectarianism and extreme Islamism? Should the West have dug out those moderate opposition fighters and armed the right ones? And if so, is it now too late to do so?

Meanwhile, the civilians pay the price. Syria, a country with a population of under 23 million, now has the highest number of IDPs (Internally Displaced People) in the world: around 7.6 million. One in every four refugees (almost 4 million) in the world is Syrian: 43 per cent of the entire population is displaced. Deaths resulting from the conflict are hard to verify: the UN, well known for being conservative, says that the toll has surpassed 220,000; the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights puts the number at 320,000. UN humanitarian missions are being blocked or ignored by the regime, despite the soaring poverty levels – three out of four citizens were living in poverty by the end of 2013.

Samar Yazbek brings these horrifying statistics to life in her powerful and deeply painful The Crossing: My journey to the shattered heart of Syria, beautifully translated by Nashwa Gowanlock and Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp. After fleeing to France in 2011, Yazbek made three trips to Idlib province in northern Syria, illegally crossing the Turkish border – all too easy, then and now – thus charting the changing fortunes and attitudes of the opposition forces and giving a rich portrait of this province, "liberated" from the regime early in the civil war and relentlessly bombarded by air and land in return. She charts with grief the rise of the Islamists and their claim to the revolution, which the secular idealists could only stand and witness given their critical lack of weapons to counter the foreign-funded jihadists.

A fine novelist, Yazbek makes her experiences palpable; visceral fear and anger – and pride in her compatriots – thread through the account. Her deep commitment to understanding her interviewees, along with the virtuosic prose, make her characters and their stories indelible: there is the regime soldier refusing to rape a Sunni girl and so shot in the back by his officer, a friend defecting the same night to live and tell the tale; the seven-year-old girl nightly recounting stories of injury and death in the cellar during bombing raids – "my little Scheherazade", Yazbek calls her; the two old women who refuse to seek shelter or flee with their family, reminiscent of characters in a novel by Gabriel García Márquez; the foreign jihadists manning checkpoints and the spurt of anger from Syrians at this new form of occupation.

By contrast, Syrian Notebooks: Inside the Homs uprising by the Franco-American novelist and journalist Jonathan Littell (translated by Charlotte Mandell), is a bare record of notes the author made during two weeks in Homs in 2012. Perhaps unsurprisingly, his book is sketchy, and this can be frustrating. So many questions remain. Why was Littell's interpreter and photographer, Ra'id, so quick to get into arguments? Why were there sometimes other translators involved? What was Ra'id's background, given that he had good contacts and spoke Arabic but came from outside Syria? These details matter: they would explain the reactions of the fighters and others to Littell, but the reader is left wondering at the gulf between his experience with the rebels, seemingly antagonistic at every stage, and that of Yazbek, who was welcomed and appreciated for her help, despite their common aim in documenting the revolution. Is it because she is Syrian, he European? She female, he male? Is it a question of the difference between towns in Idlib province and the major city of Homs? Littell's epilogue shows one possible benefit of his approach: with hindsight, he is ashamed of some of the episodes that may well have been deleted in a sanitized, revised version, episodes that do indeed strike a jarring note (including his unexplained anger with the people who are daily risking their lives to defend their country), but perhaps give a truer version of what it is to be a European war correspondent in Syria, with all the confusion and fear and bad behaviour that can occur.

In the heat of disgust at the behaviour of ISIS, it is sobering to find evidence in both of these books of identical behaviour by Bashar al-Assad's regime, and long before ISIS broke out into the open. Burning people alive, taking women as spoils of war (especially if they were deemed heretical by the Alawite shabiha militias), widespread looting and the destruction of culture were all happening from the beginning of the revolution, and the abuses reported here are every bit as bad as those of ISIS: Littell describes in stomach-turning detail the experience of a doctor formerly in the service of the regime employed to keep people alive after horrific and repeated torture. So why does the West only respond militarily to ISIS and not to Assad's forces? The reality is that Assad beats even ISIS at propaganda, to such an extent that many don't even recognize him for what he is: an opportunist ruthlessly taking advantage of whatever group is expedient to his purpose only to turn on them when necessary, in this case using the jihadists both to fight his war against the rebels, and at the same time using their presence in the country to defend his actions to the international community, claiming his tactics are necessary for the global war on terror, an excuse used by Russia and China to block international action against his regime and more recently by Russia to build up troops inside the country. This is where Jean-Pierre Filiu's work is valuable, showing the long-established techniques of Syrian leaders which led directly – inexorably – to the formation of ISIS.

From Deep State to Islamic State: The Arab counter-revolution and its jihadi legacy is somewhat misnamed, being mostly structured around an analogy between four current regimes and the medieval Mamluk rulers of the Islamic world, barely mentioning, let alone explaining, the "Deep State" of Turkey (which, in Filiu's version, seems to refer to an unofficial power structure, parallel to and secret from the elected government, capable of meting out "justice" and guiding, even controlling, the legitimate leaders for the perceived welfare of the country); and on top of this there is a crucial flaw to the Mamluk analogy, but nevertheless this book is forceful and illuminating. The flaw is that the Mamluks, even in Filiu's own description, were outsiders, remaining so through strict rules concerning marriage and lifestyle. In fact, Filiu goes a little too far in stressing their foreignness to Arab culture, claiming that in over two centuries they never really learned Arabic properly, something hard to imagine. In contrast, the twentieth-century despots in the region were locally born, compatriots of the people they brutally suppressed and continue to suppress. (The fact that they are sometimes minorities of the countries – Alawite in Syria, Sunni in Iraq – has contributed to the descent into sectarian violence we have so often seen.) But, despite flaws and a certain patchiness of evidence, Filiu has produced a refreshingly nuanced analysis of the region's totalitarian regimes, distinguishing between those of his "Modern Mamluks" (in Syria, Egypt, Yemen and Algeria) and other styles of suppressive ­dictatorships (in Iraq, Libya, Tunisia and the Gulf States): the dictators that held on to power in these four countries, he shows in great detail, "hijacked their independence from the hands of the actual, mostly civilian, freedom fighters", and held on to it at all costs. The intricate story of Tahrir Square leading to the victory of the Muslim Brotherhood at the polls before power reverted to the "modern Mamluks" of the army is particularly revealing, though of less relevance to the Syrian civil war than the acid portrait of Bashar al-Assad, who "follow[ed] in his father's footsteps, compensating for his minor talent through his tenacious greed".

Filiu shows that Assad was caught off guard by the demonstrations but quickly regained lost ground through the use of the Islamists he had previously imprisoned and tortured: the regime's "dramatic recovery owed a lot to the viciousness of [its] jihadi gamble that literally caught the popular uprising in a crossfire". Yazbek, observing this "double occupation" of the regime and the Islamists, delicately explores the complicity of Assad's government: why were notorious Islamist prisoners released in May of 2011, she asks many of the fighters she meets, just when the demonstrations began to get violent? The questions are rebuffed by the interviewees, but, perhaps because of this, they echo throughout the text, unanswered. The link between Assad and ISIS is laid out directly by Littell in his introduction when he draws comparisons between modern-day Syria and the Chechen revolution – with Chechnya's democratically elected government overwhelmed by Russian government-backed Islamists – as well as with the jihadists once supported in Afghanistan by the CIA. When charged with the evidence from Syria, the then French Foreign Minister, Alain Juppé, agreed with Littell (to his surprise), but said that "alone . . . without the participation of its American and British allies, France could do nothing". The alliance is also contextualized historically by Filiu, who shows that it was no surprise, given the previous tactics of the Syrian regime of drawing cynically on what he calls the "jihadi joker". And so when Charles Glass, in Syria Burning, says that the West is now effectively supporting Assad by bombing his enemies, he only has half the picture: Assad avoided bombing the Islamists himself while they were battling the more moderate opposition (for example, waiting for rebels to kick ISIS out of districts of Aleppo and Idlib provinces, at some cost, before sending in his warplanes: around 2,000 people died in the subsequent bombing of the ISIS-free area while ISIS had already turned its attention to expanding in Iraq), gambling on the fact that the international community would react to such an enemy. The gamble paid off. Coalition's air strikes against ISIS positions started after the declaration of the Caliphate in 2014, which, as Glass points out, sought to remove one enemy facing Assad, but only once it had helped ­decimate another.

Glass's book is an extended form of an article written for the New York Review of Books, the argument resting largely on the colonial period, in particular blaming Britain and France for the current debacle. "Think back", Glass tells the reader, confident that there can be no disagreement, "to when this mess began which was a long time before young Mohamed Bouazizi burned himself to death in Tunisia. It was about the time the British and the French decided to save the Arabs from the Ottoman Empire's oppression." This wishful picture of peaceful coexistence before the Europeans arrived is common enough among journalists and academics, but there are limitations to the narrative. It robs the people of the Middle East of their history and the historical fractures the European powers exploited, and it fails to account for the rampant nationalism seen within these artificial borders made very clear by the Arab Spring. To blame the colonialists is ultimately to deny responsibility to the people of the Middle East for their own affairs. It is old-fashioned orientalism dressed up in mea culpa garb. Filiu shows that there was indeed self-determination, but it was all in terms of the self-interest of a few, never for the general good – or, rather, what was for the general good never managed to gain or hold on to power. In this context the crushing of the Arab Spring was just the latest in a series of moves against a popular opposition to the status quo, and the covert support of Islamists just another tool in the kit.

Christian Sahner's Among the Ruins: Syria past and present is another form of witness, often expressing the same affection and grief as Yazbek, but from the perspective of an outsider, as are Littell and Glass. But instead of concentrating on the conflict itself, Sahner bears ­witness to the country as it was before the demonstrations, including factors that led to, and somewhat explain, the current tragedy. In his beautiful patchwork of recent experience and academic history, he gives a truly original portrait of contemporary Syria without shirking the social problems, physical ugliness or political realities many Westerners often want to deny. "I suspect some readers will disagree with my assessments of the importance of religious identity in Syrian history", he rather humbly and bravely says in his introduction, pointing out how many commentators blame the regime or foreign powers for stoking a sectarianism that simply didn't exist before the war, a stance his book gently demolishes. "True", he says later, "the destructive sectarianism the world has witnessed in Syria recently is something new, but it seems clear that . . . sectarianism is appealing precisely because it builds on pressures that have existed in Syria for a long time."

Sahner gives a long historical arc, going back to pre-Islamic, Byzantine Syria, before going on to produce a moving and highly readable account of the country today. His close attention to the buildings and geography of Syria, together with accounts of his many friendships, bring the country into sharper focus than textual sources alone can do. In one scene he walks through the Christian area of Bab Touma in Damascus, describing the churches he passes. As he goes, he explains their presence and position in the Old City: the first Caliphs to make Damascus their capital, the Umayyads, decided to demolish the big basilica in the centre of the city. The Christians negotiated with their new rulers, and were compensated with land granted in perpetuity in another part of the city – land where four churches still stand (though they are not the original buildings). This was canny of the Caliphs: Christian worship and hence much of its culture was pushed from the middle to the edges of Damascus in a move construed as gracious and generous to the conquered population. Sahner uses this background to explain various conversations he has had with contemporary Damascene Christians, digging beneath the "rosy picture" of Muslim–Christian co-existence to find that "much was left unsaid"; in particular, he writes, the construction of the old city now gives the impression of a "very gentle siege". His affection for the city never blinds him: "In 2008, Damascus seemed less like paradise than urban purgatory: from high above, she was a mash of satellite dishes and grey tenements, an expanse of concrete slowly consuming all trace of green on the desert fringe".

History is not only practised by scholars seeking to understand the present, but also by politicians wishing to shape it; we see the effects in Shakespeare's history plays, or Israel's politicization of archaeological sites, or in ISIS's expositions of Islam in the time of Muhammad. As Sahner says: "Ancient history can be a hobby of . . . the kinds of people who profit from tracing the political present to a distant, unknowable past . . . . It's also a way of excluding those deemed not to belong". His account brings us up to the present, complementing Filiu's more broad-brush picture of the Assad regime with descriptions of the social effects of the security state created by Hafez Assad and now maintained by his son. A conversation with a friend sheds light on "the most tragic side-effect of Syria's security state: the decay of civil society, of the invisible bonds that create an esprit de corps among a people". This is just one factor in the descent into a multi­faceted civil war that Christian Sahner explores in his subtle book.

Nothing about the twentieth-century history of the Middle East was inevitable, although ­historical retellings often make it seem so. As Jean-Pierre Filiu says in his conclusion: "The unfolding of such disasters in the Arab world was both predictable and avoidable". Read together, these books complement and contradict each other not only to give a composite ­picture of the conflict, but also to show the numerous ways in which this region is (and has been) interpreted, for good and for ill, and of the ideologies that continue to dog the Middle East, from within and without.

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Too high a bill

Too high a bill

Refurbishment of the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires, March 31, 2010

Book Details

Andrew Sayer

WHY WE CAN'T AFFORD THE RICH

414pp. Policy Press. £19.99 (US $35.95) .
978 1 4473 2079 1

Inequality is a growing problem but the solution is far from clear

EDWARD N. LUTTWAK

For a reviewer, no sin is greater than to cite one's own work when one is supposed to present another's, especially a book as substantial as Andrew Sayer's Why We Can't Afford the Rich. But sin I must, because it is important to recognize that the discovery around 2013 of the long-term trend towards increasing inequality (I time it by the huge response to Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century) was anticipated as early as 1993, both in my own work – as a very part-time economist – The Endangered American Dream, and by others, more qualified no doubt. These books were well published, politely reviewed for the most part – and yet utterly ignored in political reality, even though the simple argument was documented, perhaps over-documented, with a relentless parade of statistical series centred on the deflated hourly pay rates of non-farm, non-supervisory employees in a whole slew of industries.

They demonstrated that by 1977 or so, the long-term increase in the hourly wages of American employees – the very engine of the American Dream – decelerated and then practically stopped. Separating out overall averages, it emerged that hourly pay rates were no longer growing even in the best-paid sectors, such as mining or the unionized car industry, while there was a concurrent decrease in the numbers so well employed. Unemployment was not rising in the United States, because there were fewer European-style rigidities, legal or cultural, and fewer unemployment benefits, and the minimum wage is set low; so that instead of European unemployment levels, in the US low-paid employment could keep expanding in retail trade, fast food, private security and such. But the drop from manufacturing pay rates to such service pay rates was huge, at least a 4:1 difference, one that implied entirely different ways of life: the former with house, pick-up truck and children in higher education; the latter with parental or rented lodgings, a battered car, and nothing else.

That seemed very alarming, because by 1993 the sinister immiseration process had outlasted any possible cyclical or otherwise temporary causes, while the sovereign remedy insistently proposed (as it still is, by the statistically ­ignorant) – increasing skill levels, was clearly a non-starter because well-paid work itself was migrating away, and because people earning a few dollars per hour would not be able to educate anyone, let alone employees for companies such as Apple, Microsoft, Google or Facebook (whose total employee numbers in any case remain modest as compared, notably, to WalMart's 1.4 million employees in the US alone).

It is true that high-tech pay rates were and are even higher than the highest industrial wages of old, indeed much higher, so that in high-tech regions Victorian employment patterns have been re-created: too-busy-to-live high-techies employ retinues of nannies, housekeepers, dog walkers, cat-minders, pool boys and personal shoppers. None is of course called a servant, certainly not by their employers, but the economic and thus the social gap is even larger than it was in the days of under-parlourmaids, because no personal-service job, however well paid, can begin to compare to stock-option earnings, which can of course make even doctors and lawyers into the equivalent of under-parlourmaids.

The new American servant class, moreover, is very much better off than most of those who work in impersonal service jobs, because for every hedge fund executive, there are vast numbers of near-minimum wage employees. In most parts of Europe where such jobs are ­precluded by high minimum wages, there is instead chronically high unemployment, with more of it now in the superimposed cyclical ­crisis, and still more in such places as Sicily's Bagheria, where the official 40 per cent unemployment rate is thoroughly misleading in both ways: first because some of the listed unemployed works in the black economy (which pays poorly, however), while the employed are in large part the useless or counterproductive employees of the municipality, province, region or state.

Worse still, when classic industrial employment disappeared in urban centres, such as Baltimore or Rochdale or Thionville, nothing could replace it, except welfare dependence and all its unlovely corollaries that go unnoticed but for the occasional outbreak of violence. Much less dramatically, but much more significantly, the long-term slide in earnings is manifest not just in certain benighted streets of Baltimore, Rochdale or Thionville, but across the breadth of society in the United States, as well as in most parts of Europe. The consequences are both concrete and measurable, as well as invisibly corrosive until they emerge in the form of increasingly immoderate political preferences: in the US within the Republican and Democratic coalitions, in Europe in distinct political parties variously labelled as populist or xenophobic, but certainly anti-European, (i.e. anti-system).

In the US, the accumulated consequences of declining or stagnant earnings are measurable in family net worth averages: between 1989 and 2013 (which comprises both "boom" and "bust" years), the inflation-adjusted net worth of the median family of each of the four racial or ethnic groups were: non-Hispanic whites, $130,102 and $134,008 (that is, a wealth increase of around $4,000 in twenty-four years, very much less than in past periods since 1776); starting lower down, Hispanics of any race did better relatively at $9,229 and $13,900, but that number cannot comprise owned housing except in fringe areas; non-Hispanic blacks, $7,736 and $11,184, remain at the bottom of the pile, and are mostly lodgers, not householders; Asians and other minorities did much better at $64,165 and $91,440.

These numbers come from a much less ­radical source than Andrew Sayer's declaredly radical work: the Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis (William R. Emmons and Bryan J. Noeth's "The Middle Class May Be Under More Pressure Than You Think", online at stlouisfed.org). Their implication, however, is decidedly radical, nothing less than the end of the American promise of ever-increasing prosperity.

As for the causes of the epochal change, even back in 1993 there were several different hypotheses. The most obvious was the increasing integration of advanced economies with lower-wage economies, or globalization, a term still new in those days (as the then chief executive of Caterpillar put it, why should our US workers earn more than our Mexican workers?). But that was also the only argument that was disallowed, because professional economists could only shudder at the ignorance of those who did not know their David Ricardo, and therefore did not understand that Free Trade is always better for all, given that each time a barrier is removed, the many bene­ficiaries can easily compensate the few losers. Among my reviewers, it was the eminent Robert M. Solow (in the New York Review of Books) and the already well-known Paul Krugman (in the purpose-written Pop Internationalism) who mocked the crude intellectual error of blaming globalization, and both thought it irrelevant that compensation for freer-trade losers is not actually paid at each remove, that being irrelevant to the validity of the theory.

Where I and others more qualified, such as Robert Reich in The Work of Nations (1991), came up short was in offering remedies, because, while blaming freer trade, I was not about to recommend autarky; while Robert Reich, on becoming Bill Clinton's Secretary of Labor in 1992, was entrapped in the false "up-skilling" solution. Nor was I ready to support sharp tax increases to redistribute income, let alone wealth, if only because I would have been a redistributor rather than a redistributee.

Things are different now, because in most industrial countries inequality in itself has become the central issue rather than the processes that generate it – because there is no longer the hope of redirecting them – and any number of policy remedies can now be proposed by those like Andrew Sayer who argue that when the 1 per cent takes all the growth, the remaining 99 per cent should use their vote to take it back, or some of it, at any rate, by voting for politicians who will do it for them. That is what the book is about, and Sayer proceeds very systematically with arguments that may be disliked but which are internally coherent, and with facts that are excessively selective at times but not dubious in themselves. Most important, Sayer does not invent economic mechanisms in the way that populists often do, never forgetting that cake-making must come before cake-distribution, even while rejecting each version of the argument that redistribution inhibits growth.

After taking 118 pages to demonstrate that the rich take too much of total wealth in ways that most people view as legitimate, indeed as desirable in principle, but which Sayer deems unjustified (e.g. "Shares and dividends: a bizarre institution"), using the dread word usury along the way, after focusing on the evils of rentier incomes, he arrives at the standard objections to redistributive policies. Proceeding systematically, he starts with "don't the rich create jobs?", answering that in fact they destroy jobs because if poorer people in greater numbers had their money, they would consume more. Aware that supply is also needed, which in turn requires investment, which requires wealth, he answers the objection by first praising entrepreneurship as wealth-creating but then arguing that pressures to deliver "shareholder value" (any mix of appreciation, buy-backs and dividends) inhibit the innovative risk-taking that makes entrepreneurship valuable.

Next he notes the concrete value of social entrepreneurship (a cycle club can add value), and then argues that the state (adding "yes, the state") can also be entrepreneurial, mentioning the creation of the British National Health Service; but he notably fails to give examples of state enterprises that use the taxpayer's capital efficiently, which are indeed surprisingly hard to find, given the immense number of state enterprises world-wide. It is remarkable in how many of them the employees diminish the people's wealth even without theft (all too common) and without corrupt giveaways ( a simple device, but it made many a Russian oligarch), by simply paying themselves too much perfectly legally. In South America, for example, state-owned entities commonly pay a double aguinaldo, the second salary paid for the Christmas month of December, which thereby becomes a triple salary.

Thus Andrew Sayer fails to note that rather important extra way for the richer than average to become richer, if not very rich: the average pay rates of state-owned enterprises are almost always higher than non-state pay rates, often much higher. And things become worse when the state subsidizes private or institutional activities, which invariably redistribute upwards, sometimes egregiously: a few years ago, it emerged that the Buenos Aires Opera, whose ticket prices are high and thus bought only by the relatively wealthy, nevertheless received a subsidy of US$100 million for a major refurbishment, i.e. all Argentinians were paying for a few rich opera-goers (by comparison, the Royal Opera House in London received £26 million in 2013).

Of course the Buenos Aires Opera is a mere bagatelle as compared to the redistributive effects of the global warming panjandrum now raging across the world, from the especially afflicted West Coast of the United States all the way to China: it is a very powerful way of impoverishing the poor while enriching the rich both broadly and very narrowly: who gets to receive solar-panel installation credits? Certainly not Baltimore lodgers or Thionville denizens of rent-controlled HLMs (habitation à loyer modéré). Who gets to buy subsidized hybrid cars and super-subsidized electric cars? Certainly not those driving older second-hand cars, or none. Narrowly, i.e. when state money is given to specific companies "to fight global warming", things are much worse: the billionaire owner of Tesla cars was given $1 billion or so to produce its fancy electric cars that only a few of the subsidizing taxpayers could ever buy, and that is normal because all known environmental restrictions and initiatives redistribute from the poorer to the richer, but the rather "green" Sayer does not pursue that track. Indeed, in his global warming paragraphs, he takes the highly conventional view that proving global warming is man-made is the same as proving that it must be stopped, without even trying to calculate benefits as well as costs (Canada and Kazakhstan could feed the world, etc), these being things worth looking at given the global redistributive effect of global warming policies, most recently ruining the livelihoods of American coalminers.

To reach his conclusion, Sayer proceeds systematically through all the objections. After addressing the innovators' claim to great riches, citing the vacuum-cleaner entrepreneur James Dyson as well as Steve Jobs et al, incidentally noting their propensity to export jobs to overseas plants, he concludes that they deserve two cheers and millions, not three and billions. He replies to the argument that the rich will emigrate if taxes rise by noting that very rich Norwegians stay and pay, as do some Swedes, so that rich Londoners would do the same rather than live in Dubai down the road from Islamic State. Philanthropy is dismissed on the grounds that the state should provide, and his penultimate point is that inequality causes ill health.

At the very end the prescriptions are uncompromising, indeed extreme in their totality, but again very well presented in detail. Sayer wants not only steeper income tax tables, but also substantial and very progressive wealth taxes, to which he would add Piketty's "exceptional" tax, a one-time levy (a huge one) to pay off national debts and unburden fiscal regimes everywhere (he does not pause to contemplate what profligate legislators would do without the national debt to restrain them), stiff inheritance taxes, and much higher corporate taxes regardless of inter-company transfers, all of the above preceded by global bank data-sharing so that fiscal authorities everywhere would know who has what, as the Internal Revenue Service in the United States mostly already does (it also has a functioning court system to deter evasion by swift imprisonments, a thing mostly impossible elsewhere).

I of course oppose Sayer and will resist redistribution in any way I can, but must recognize that what was politically premature in 1993 has now arrived. David Cameron's victory, amply justified by bold economic growth policies nevertheless had to overcome the inequality argument, which has now propelled Corbyn's improbable rise, while Hillary Clinton's royal progress has become a ragged scamper as the Socialist Bernie Sanders forges ahead (desperate, she abruptly turned on the fat cats that have lavishly funded her family, her family's non-profit profiteering, and her own campaigns). Even Republicans are talking about wage stagnation, with some pursuing the argument into Andrew Sayer territory – without the wealth tax, of course.

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Wrong for the poor

Wrong for the poor

Ottmar Hörl's sculptures of Karl Marx, Trier, Germany, 2013

Book Details

John Plender

CAPITALISM

Money, morals and markets
334pp. Biteback. £20.
978 1 84954 868 7

Thomas Piketty

THE ECONOMICS OF INEQUALITY

Translated by Arthur Goldhammer
160pp. Belknap. £16.95 (US $22.95).
978 0 674 50480 6

Anthony B. Atkinson

INEQUALITY

What can be done?
400pp. Harvard University Press. £19.95 (US $29.95).
978 0 674 50476 9

Paul Mason

POSTCAPITALISM

A guide to our future
340pp. Allen Lane. £16.99 (US $27).
978 1 84614 738 8

A clearer alternative to Thomas Piketty: and the problem when capitalists make nothing but money

PAUL COLLIER

There are many people who find capitalism morally offensive. Perhaps the overriding reason is an unease at Adam Smith's proposition that the consequence of an economic act cannot be inferred from its motivation. Are our true benefactors the entrepreneurs who, driven by greed, unintentionally enrich us? Then there is capitalism's reliance on the market model, which belittles co-operation: communities, it is argued, would be happier if self-sufficient. A variety of other objections follow: capitalism contaminates our sense of value. Its inequalities of wealth create imbalances of power: between workers and capitalists, or between special interests and the common good. Capitalists are exploitative, hijacking the fruits of labour. From Aristotle to present-day Islam, some have regarded a reward for waiting as undeserved. The rise of consciousness about sustainability has opened a new ­critique: capitalism is environmentally unsustainable because it plunders the planet, and socially unsustainable because the accumulation of capital leads to ever-widening inequality. Finally, since 2008, the post-1929 critique has been revived: capitalism is condemned on its own metric as inefficient.

In thinking coherently about capitalism, a helpful starting place is to ask yourself this question: why are poor people poor? Discussion of poverty circles around three answers. Firstly, some people have become rich at the expense of others; secondly, people are poor because they have been unlucky; or, thirdly, because they have made poor choices. The first would require restitution, which would in turn imply striving for equality: the poorest people must have been robbed of most, and the richest must have stolen the most. The second, ill-luck, would require social insurance. As proposed by John Rawls's principle of Maxi Min, the priority would be to raise the floor. The third explanation, poor choices, poses the options of indifference or compassion. These three rival analyses lurk beneath all discussion of inequality. The passion of the Left is driven not by belief that social insurance would be valuable, but by anger at perceived wrongs. The contempt of the Right is driven not by concerns about the disincentive effects of social insurance, but by anger at the prospect of rewarding the foolish at the expense of the prudent.

Determining which of these rival positions best accounts for poverty is an empirical matter. In the Britain of the nineteenth century, the first was reasonably persuasive, but it is no longer so in the twenty-first. The appropriate agenda is now a social insurance floor and compassion. As to poverty at the global level, none of these three accounts has much traction. Overwhelmingly, the answer to why poor societies are poor is that they lack the organizations of modern capitalism. Capitalism has created organizations that harness the productivity potential of scale and specialization without triggering the alienation predicted by Marx. Marx thought that large-scale production inevitably separated enjoyment from labour, and that specialization "chained [man] down to a little fragment of the whole". Ironically, the consequences of alienation were most devastatingly revealed by industrial socialism. Modern firms maintain motivation by a judicious combination of incentives and a sense of purpose: workers internalize the objectives of the firm. From the entrepreneur to the car park attendant, people get job satisfaction from what they do, not just from what they earn. Being subject to the discipline of the market, firms that fail to create such work environments go bankrupt.

The Achilles heel of modern capitalism is the financial sector. In recent years, this sector has radically skewed its model of motivation towards reliance on incentives. Perhaps this was because performance appeared to be so readily measurable, but it is very difficult to design incentives to reward what is really desired. Asset managers are well rewarded for short-term performance, as a result of which they judge the firms in which they invest on the same criteria. Gradually, this has come to infect the way in which the CEOs of non-financial companies are rewarded. Over the past two decades, the ratio of CEO pay to the average pay of their workforce has widened in the USA from 20:1 to 231:1 (with banks themselves leading the way with a ratio of 500:1). In turn, this infects the way that firms are run. Directly, the widening of differentials has made it harder for firms to maintain the commitment of their workforce. Indirectly, it has tempted CEOs into dysfunctional balance sheet tricks: profits are at a peak, while investment is at a trough.

The resort to exclusive reliance on incentives may also have been because the intrinsic incentives have become threadbare. The mission statement of Lehman Brothers, "we make nothing but money", hardly invited devotion to the greater good. The approach perhaps inevitably backfired: the culture of an organization that thought this a fit statement of purpose ultimately licensed its workforce to work for their individual interest. But the problem of misalignment of private and social incentives is more fundamental. Smith's proposition that the market does a good job of aligning them, while true for many markets, is often seriously wrong in financial markets. A gain made by one asset trader is matched by the loss borne by another. Such trade is not socially useless, but its social value bears little relation to the private returns. The main social value of trading in financial assets is that it makes the underlying investment in the real asset more liquid, and so more attractive than if it were held forever. This is an important value, but the private returns to trading, typically driven by tiny informational advantages, generate far more trades than are needed for liquidity. At the margin, the social value of trading approaches zero. A similar process is at work in a legal dispute. The rule of law is a huge public good, but no commercial lawyers are working to achieve "justice": they work to win a case in a zero-sum tournament. The last hour of legal effort purchased by a party to a legal ­dispute yields its return not by generating more justice, but by increasing the chances of winning the tournament. There are simply too many people spending their time on these zero-marginal-social-product activities. Worse, many of them are highly talented. In Britain, some of the brightest brains are diverted to the City from activities such as innovation, where the marginal social returns are far higher than the private returns, because innovations can be imitated. In their hearts, many of these people recognize that while enriching themselves they are not enriching society: they quit and do something more satisfying.

The four books under review all reflect the current disquiet over capitalism but in ­radically different ways. John Plender is a financial journalist of long standing. The journalistic practice of close observation has been the key missing skill among academic economists, and it partly accounts for why we failed to foresee the global financial crisis: we did not realize the extent to which the banks had geared up on their asset base. Plender's account of the modern City is at the core of Capitalism: he suggests that, to date, insufficient measures have been taken to prevent a repeat of the crisis. But his account is considerably enhanced by being placed in the much wider historical context of moralizing about markets: in Capitalism, Aristotle and Marx rub shoulders with the recent bank CEOs. Plender also provides a nice account of the evolution of entrepreneurship: and, yes, many of these people are our true benefactors. His book is balanced, well written and not self-aggrandizing. I recommend it.

Thomas Piketty's recent analysis of wealth and growth, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (reviewed in the TLS, June 27, 2014), is an important thesis that, barring catastrophes, wealth takes an ever-rising share of income. A book by Piketty on inequality sounds like an important event. Unfortunately, although just published in English, The Economics of Inequality is actually a prequel written in 1997, presumably now translated opportunistically. Piketty's ostensible thesis here is that disputes about inequality are largely based on a lack of understanding of economics. But his underlying critique of capitalism is that it is socially and morally intolerable because the rising ratio of wealth to income generates ever-rising inequality. This depends on both technical and moral assumptions. Technically, he assumes that the return on capital remains indefinitely at around 4.5 per cent, and accrues to wealth owners. Yet the return on capital is currently much lower, and the deficiencies of modern corporate governance have enabled managements to transfer much of the return from wealth-owning shareholders to CEOs and asset managers. This is one reason why pension funds are in such trouble. Morally, he assumes that the inter-generational transfer of wealth is a "lottery of birth" to be corrected by taxation. But characterizing inheritance as a lottery is an abuse of metaphor. The inter-generational attachment within families is a bond more powerful than any other form of social attachment. Framing humanity as merely two entities – mortal individuals and infinitely lived society – may be the stuff of economics textbooks, but for many people inter-generational family trumps both. This is not to vindicate, but certainly to complicate, the morality of inheritance.

Piketty also discusses whether redistri­bution can be "efficient". That is, would the redistribution of £1 from the rich to the poor cost more or less than £1? "Pure" redistribution would cost £1, while "efficient" redistribution would cost less than £1: for example, initial assistance in a job search might enable a person to get a more productive job. So much of economics is about efficiency that to economists this appears to be a central distinction: a move to efficiency is potentially "Pareto­improving" – in principle, everybody could be made better off. We are trained from economic infancy to think of Pareto outcomes to be potentially superior. But it is hard to think of why the efficiency issue might actually matter: in either of the cases sketched above, one person gains £1, and whether the other loses 90p, £1, or £1.10 is unlikely to be decisive. While, at the time it was written, Piketty's book on inequality was valuable, if you are sufficiently interested to think of reading it, I recommend that instead you read Anthony B. Atkinson's Inequality: What can be done? Unless I have missed something, Atkinson's book incorporates everything that Piketty has and a lot more. I suspect that Piketty, who has worked extensively with Atkinson, might agree.

Within its own terms, Atkinson's book is magisterial. It is the definitive analysis of inequality in Britain and how to reduce it, as viewed through the standard professional economics prism of Utilitarianism. While grounded in sophisticated theory and state-of-the-art quantitative evidence, the book carries through to specific policy recommendations on standard matters such as tax rates, benefits and tax reliefs. More ambitiously, it proposes guaranteed employment for job seekers by unrestricted recruitment into the public social sector, and that fiscal incentives should be used to skew technology away from labour-saving innovations such as robotics. I do have qualms both about these ambitious proposals and about the Utilitarianism on which the entire analysis is implicitly premissed. A guarantee of employment in the public social sector is neither necessary, given current levels of unemployment, nor desirable. Inadvertently, by turning social work into the sump sector, it would undermine it as the chosen profession of many dedicated people. More than most jobs, the quality of social work depends on personal commitment. As to skewing technological change, while conceptually neat, it is scarcely the domain of practical policy. The pace of robotics innovation is a global phenomenon set not by the British Treasury, but by companies in the USA, Japan and China.

My deeper concern is that the Utilitarian calculus of inequality used in economics is indifferent to desert. A transfer from anyone on a higher income to anyone on a lower income is welfare-improving regardless of how their respective incomes came about. As a result, the key to tackling inequality appears to be to redistribute huge amounts of money in the middle of the income distribution, because this is where the numbers of people are largest. We return to the Britain of 1977 – the most equal recent year – through higher taxes on doctors and headmasters, and lower taxes on postmen and bus drivers. Yet I suspect that when people say they are "concerned about inequality", this is not what they have in mind. Rather, people feel angry about those high incomes that they perceive to be undeserved. While the old ­distinction between the deserving and the undeserving poor is barren, since even those poor people who are entirely responsible for their condition have to be helped, that between the deserving and the undeserving rich really matters. Applying the same marginal tax rate to a doctor on £160,000 and a CEO on £5 million will increasingly be questioned, even though it is of no consequence for inequality as measured by economists.

Paul Mason is entertaining, but predominantly in ways that are unintended. His title, PostCapitalism, says it all. Mason is a Marxist of the school that in the 1980s was writing about "late capitalism". If Atkinson has written the book that Ed Miliband would have wanted, Mason is for Jeremy Corbyn. The Marxists have never quite got over the fact that the 1980s actually turned out to be the period of late socialism. "Post-capitalism" is one stage more messianic than "late capitalism": yes, capitalism as we know it is being crushed by the weight of its own contradictions as the zero marginal cost economy of the internet drives it to oblivion. The sharing economy of Wikipedia is the future, and Mason hyperventilates about it. That industries with marginal costs below average costs have been around since the 1840s (railways) is not mentioned. That internet applications such as Uber and Airbnb seem to be bringing masses of people into the market goes unremarked. Wikipedia is exciting, as are many other non-market aspects of the sharing economy such as common housing schemes and craft collectives. But they are outcrops of the prosperity generated by markets, not alternatives to them. No matter; Marx is Mason's great guide, and a once missing fragment of his work brilliantly presages the new economy of the internet. There is a sad discourse on why the working class let Marx down. But dismay can be tempered by the new and more reliable army of liberation: techno-nerds. We are given a whole chapter devoted to the labour theory of value. And the great tide of history is with us: Gaza, Greece and the SNP are all part of the same new political movement: you will be reassured to learn that the SNP "was not a nationalist surge". Whatever underpins such thought processes, it is not intellectual. More plausibly, it is a psychological craving for an oppositional identity. Mason is now the economics editor for Channel 4 News. That he got this job despite never having studied the subject may suggest how its management prioritizes infotainment.

Aspects of capitalism undoubtedly need to be addressed. But the undeserving rich may consist less of capitalists than of powerful managers: corporate governance needs to be rebalanced, perhaps on the German model in which societal interests are represented on supervisory boards. Similarly, the useless rich may consist less of the idle descendants of ­capitalists than of smart people wasting their lives in those sectors where at the margin activity is socially rather unproductive. These sectors need to be downsized: we were right to do it with coalmines; we should do it with the City. In Britain the nostalgic narrative that the poor have been wronged should be put to rest. We need an effective floor of social insurance and compassionate policies that are effective in ­lifting people out of poverty traps. As to global poverty, whatever the problems of poor societies, overdosing on capitalism is not one of them.

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