Human Events, a right-wing online publication that features Ann Coulter pop-up windows and ads for conservative dating services (I kid you not), has this list of the top 10 most harmful books of the 19th and 20th Centuries. (HT: Doing Justice).
- Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto
- Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf
- Mao Zedong, Quotations from Chairman Mao
- Alfred Kinsey, The Kinsey Report
- John Dewey, Democracy and Education
- Karl Marx, Das Kapital
- Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique
- Auguste Comte, The Course of Positive Philosophy
- Friedrich Nietschze, Beyond Good and Evil
- John Maynard Keynes, General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money
Honorable mentions:
- Theodore Adorno, Authoritarian Personality
- John Stewart Mill, On Liberty
- Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species
- Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization
- Margaret Mead, Coming of Age in Samoa
- Simone de Beauvoir, Second Sex
- Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks
- Rachel Carson, Silent Spring
- Sigmund Freud, Introduction to Psychoanalysis
With a few exceptions (Mein Kampf, Quotes from Chairman Mao) this is actually a pretty good reading list for a college course in critical thinking. It certainly contains some of the most important works of the last two centuries, such as the Origin of Species, Beyond Good and Evil, Introduction to Psychoanalysis, On Liberty, Das Kapital, etc. Hats off to the “15 clowns scholars and public policy leaders [who] served as judges in selecting the Ten Most Harmful Books.”[tags]politics, books[/tags]
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And to think all this time I’ve been telling everyone that the most harmful books–at least of the twentieth century–were written by Ayn Rand!
‘The Onion’ should make any decent anti-intellectual magazine-burning list. Headline from last week’s edition:
“Bush Grants Self Permission To Grant More Power To Self”
Opening line: “In a decisive 1–0 decision Monday, President Bush voted to grant the president the constitutional power to grant himself additional powers.”
—–
Which raises some interesting questions about the nature of power.
The central premise of American government is that all legitimate power flows from the Constitution. And yet the Constitution is not a self-executing document; some degree of interpretation is required. So let’s take a few basic propositions:
i. The Constitution grants power.
ii. The power to interpret the Constitution equals the power to grant power.
A. Therefore, when the President claims the power to interpret the Constitution authoritatively, he is claiming the power to grant himself power.
Such a claim should sound mental alarms for several reasons. First, it raises specters of unchecked power. Second, as a formal matter, it seems to violate the doctrine of separation of powers (which is designed to guard against the first danger).
So where would this putative power to interpret flow from? Perhaps the President would claim that executive power to interpret the Constitution can also be found in the Constitution, by implication. But this is a circular argument: The basis for the power to interpret is itself an interpretation, which begs the question.
[A comparison can be made to a religious figure who bases his authority to interpret scripture on the basis of (an interpretation of) scripture.]
Let’s examine this phenomenon from the perspective of a legal layperson, with no concrete knowledge of the content of the Constitution, much less a copy close at hand. The President’s appeal, while illogical, operates on the level of rhetoric: if individuals believe that yes, he does have the power to claim that the Constitution grants him the power to interpret the Constitution, even though such a claim is premised on a circular power of interpretation, these believers will act as if this power exists. In effect, they will grant those powers to him ‘extra-constitutionally’ by their acquiescence. [The line is apparently thin between our attention to the substance of a claim and our attention to the status of the individual to make the claim. The more believable the claim, the less likely we are to question the status of the individual to make it authoritatively. Under our current system, presidential persuasion of the general population would likely constrain Supreme Court decision-freedom. In other words, the presidential claim becomes imbued with a sense of 'objective truth' which constrains the formal authority's decision-making freedom, effecting a subtle but de facto shift in the distribution of interpretive power.]
Take the following example:
The president takes controversial action. Two universes are possible, depending on how well the President subsequently makes the case that his actions were constitutional. In the first, the people are persuaded and believe that yes, he *had* the power. In the second, persuasion fails, and the people believe that no, he *did not* have the power. Note the tenses that accompany these beliefs. They seem to suggest that subsequent persuasion can determine prior existence. A strange reversal of causality’s normal chronology, to say the least. The burning question seems to be then: is there any valid sense in which power exists apart from belief, or is it just a reification constructed on the grounds of belief? This is especially thorny when we consider that people may be persuaded on grounds other than the merits of the claim to power – perhaps almost solely as a function of trust. If we can acknowledge that the success of the president’s persuasion bears no *necessary* relation to things such as the intent of the framers, prior history of the nation, etc. (even though such devices may enhance persuasiveness), can one dissident voice validly stand back from the mass of consensus and say, “I know you all believe he had the power, but he *really* didn’t,” or the converse, “I know you all believe he didn’t have the power, but he *really* did.”
A description of power as reification is consistent with the notion that if every person outside government simply stopped believing that the social structures of government had any power to control their actions – that its laws have the power to bind them, that its subpoenas are anything more than junk mail – and recognized the system as just cooperative associations of role-playing individuals, government would cease to exist as a psychological, and perhaps therefore ontological, matter. [Something akin to this process probably happens during civil wars or when empires are in a state of dissolution.]
So why would anyone be vulnerable to the President’s circular claim that the Constitution grants him the power to interpret the Constitution? Perhaps because they actually believe that the Constitution really does ’say’ something on the matter, and that his claim is reasonable and believable.
This is consistent with the notion that the Supreme Court authoritatively interprets the Constitution’s meaning, which is reified as something discoverable, not created in the act of interpretation. So where does this interpretive power come from? Marbury v. Madison, and something more like natural law claims than constitutional interpretation. But a parallel question is raised: if the Supreme Court invokes the power to interpret natural law, on what is this power based? Ultimately, I think, the answer is that it derives simply from our belief in it, our acting *as if* it were true. And if the existence of power is ontologically dependent upon belief, the relevant question, in response to a claim of power, ceases to be a descriptive “Does X have the power?” and becomes of necessity the normative “Should X have the power?”. If we do not believe X should, then the avenue of counter-persuasion is available to us.
Fascinating how clearly the world view of the compilers of that list shines through. Tell me what you fear and I will tell you who you are.
It would be fun to ask Richard Rorty to compile such a list.
About No. 2 on the list, Hitler’s Mein Kampf. I would certainly include it in a top list of evil books. But is it really one of the most harmful books? It contains very little thought, was never widely read, and I would argue had no perceptible effect on history: none of the Nazi horrors occured because of it. The horror of he book arises in retrospect: to see that Hitler had it all planned and laid out, and that nobody paid attention or cared enough to stop him.
Personally, I don’t understand why the Nancy Drew mysteries didn’t make the cut. Or, for that matter, Bunnicula.
Manfred, that was my reaction to the inclusion of Mein Kampf as well. I also like the circularity of including The Kinsey Report. Are we to understand that a report revealing that people were having a lot of sex caused some sort of decline in morality?
And Matt, if we are going to include harmful periodicals, US News & World Report goes at the top of my list.
I like the fact that “The Authoritarian Personality” gets an honorable mention. No one but intellectual historians has read the damned thing since 1970. It weighs a ton and mixes the awful prose of midcentury American social science with the awful prose of Frankfurt School social theory. It’s only “harmful” because it suggests bad things about political extremists, conservative ones especially. I guess “harmful” means “says mean things about us.”
If only Adorno’s Minima Moralia, one of the great books of the twentieth century, was read by these knuckleheads (and everybody else besides!). Now *that’s* a book that deserves honorable mention!