Go round to Jo Jacobs’ place and read all about John Ralston Saul’s talk in Brisbane on Wednesday, 24 August. I just booked tickets – and only limited numbers remain.
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He is coming to the Melbourne Writers’ Festival to give the keynote address – from the one book I have read by him (The Unconscious Civilisation) he is not a very good writer – mangled metaphors, sentences that did not make sense – and to the extent I could work out what he was trying to say not a good thinker either. But I expect he will appeal to the Clive Hamilton market segment.
Andrew- did i hear you stoushing Clive on RN the other day, or was that another Norton?
i am sorry but i read Voltaire’s Bastards when I was in high school and detected so many red herrings, misrepresentations of both economic theory and the Enlightenment in that book that I have never read another book of his. The man is an intellectual fraudster.
I cant comment on ideological content, but must agree on style. I found the first pages of The Unconscious Civilisation so unreadable I just couldnt push on.
I’m reading Sauls’ Collapse of Globalism at the moment and finding it easy to read and interesting. Not sure what to make of his overall argument but that should wait till another 100 pages or so.
The original essay that lead to the book is online at the AFR.
In case anyone really wants to have a useful idea of the style and scope of John Ralston Saul’s perspectives and latest works, please have a look at the ABC Radio National transcript of a lecture of Saul’s at http://www.abc.net.au/specials/saul/first.htm and the Insight & Outlook interview at http://www.scottlondon.com/insight/scripts/saul.html. Both sites have audio as well as transcripts.
I found his “Unconscious Civilisation” clear and easy to read. I’ve also read his “On Equilibrium” where he struck me as a talented essayist rather than a philosopher, as his epistemology seemed ungrounded to me. Just saying how I found him.
Here’s a quote from the Wikipedia entry on him:
Sounds pretty sensible to me, but he’s no libertarian.
JHer’s another try at the Wikipedia link.
Heard the Norton v Hamilton stoush. I thought Norton won clearly on points, close to a knockout.
Yes, Brian – though my natural sympathies were with CH, I have to agree that Norton whalloped him. I was in the car thinking of better responses than Clive had. And it was his research!
And I was in a bad space when attempting ot read JRS – 2 months out from PhD completion back in 01. Probably should try again.
Yeah, Lefty, I was rooting for CH also, but you’re right, he had the rug pulled out and didn’t have a come-back.
It’s a while since I read Unconscious Civilisation so I’m not sure what I’d think of it now.
Was it a saul out?
That’s more appauling than saulful, Homerkles.
don’t you lose you saul!
Kant, I’m a saul man. I’m hoping your punning will peter out.
You impostle!
I am just ralston along singing my song!
Not impostle, but possible. Simon says, stop your sinning.
Simon, peter, Saul Paul ?
take your PUNishment
Andrew and Jason seem typical of the right-wing response to Saul, which is to junk him out of hand without any substantive criticism or examples. In particular, the supposed relationship between his work and Clive Hamilton’s is entirely mysterious to me.
To reply in kind, I find him a provocative, entertaining and suggestive thinker (most especially in Voltaire’s Bastards – the Unconscious Civilisation is merely a collection of his contribution to Canada’s equivalent of the Boyer Lectures). And if he’s a bad writer, well I for one sure would love to be that bad, if I could have his book sales.
You are my punishment. Homer’s where the hurt is.
Ok, no more puns on this thread, please. Chris has made a serious comment so I’d like to give people a chance to respond without distraction.
“Andrew and Jason seem typical of the right-wing response to Saul, which is to junk him out of hand without any substantive criticism or examples. ”
Well I did mention I read him in high school which was like 15 years ago. And no it wasn’t a ‘right wing response;. I could dig up some examples but my point was he put up a strawman of the Enlightenment and set fire to it like a Guy Fawkes effigy. I was so irritated by his misrepresentations and his silly dichotomies that I couldn’t read anymore of his books. Incidentally this was an opinion shared by a Laborite friend of mine at the time. That was the one thing I remember from reading him. My impression of him is that he is a strongly anti-enlightenment irrationalist thinker, a sort of lowbrow Alastair Macintyre.
okay Mark but it is more fun than discussing Saul of whom I heartily agree with those two atheists Andrew & Australia’s favourite malaysasian chinese!
So you weren’t right-wing at school Jason?
Haven’t got time to argue this out, but the crux of his argument (in VB) was that reason and scepticism were praiseworthy and powerful attributes in the hands of the great Enlightenment thinkers epitomised by Voltaire, but have since become severed from their roots and emptied of their content, outdistancing and fragmenting other human attributes.
The argument was scarcely against ‘reason’ as such (Saul reasoned), but what has happened to reason (it has been converted into barren method – a position not dissimilar to Keynes’, or Newton’s if you really look into it). His position on the meaning of the Enlightenment is not novel. What made the book most interesting to me is the way it cut across, not only the presumptions of today’s technocratic elites, but also the po-mo debate. That’s as much as I can offer on the hop, except that to stress that he was far from anti-Enlightment, and the retort that if you criticise any system of reasoning today, you therefore must be an irrationalist, is a cheap shot. He also has a good turn of phrase.
Yes Mark’s right about the distractions. Serious points are being made here which deserve a response.
And another one too. Mark, are you gonna ask Saul at his talk what it’s like to bonk a Governor-General?
I’m with cs on this one. From memory, his is a very good summary of Voltaire’s Bastards. The title certainly gives the theme away as a critique of JRS’s contended for perversion of the Enlightenment’s legacy.
I also found “Unconscious Civilization” stimulating and full of interesting ideas. Good essays.
I don’t think he is hard to read or a bad writer.
By the way, Alasdair Macintyre writes very interesting moral philosophy. Can’t see how you could describe him as an “anti-Enlightenment, irrationalist thinker”, high brow or otherwise.
I did write a review of The Unconscious Civilisation, which unfortunately is sitting on the hard disk of a dead computer. My overall impressions have stuck in my mind more than the detail. I will take a look at the book tonight to see if there are margin scribblings.
Hamilton and JRS appeal to a certain ideological mindset – against what they see as the takeover of economic rationality, and against dynamic technology-driven capitalism. Only last Saturday night I was at a dinner party where one of the guests proclaimed his liking of Hamilton and JRS, along with the usual nonsense about corporations.
Mix in overblown theories, half-baked intuitions, good intentions and a few vague factoids and you have the thought process of the kind of person that likes JRS and Hamilton. There’s a market for this kind of stuff, so good book sales are not surprising.
I’ve now had a quick look at The Unconscious Civilisation, and it really is very bad. In the first few pages: hopelessly wrong economic history, wild assertions without evidence, concepts thrown around without convincing definition, characterisations of intellectual/political movements without citations (very necessary when they appear implausible).
What are we to make of statements like?:
“I’ve said elsewhere, at least half seriously, that the only true Marxists functioning today teach in the Chicago School of Economics and manage our large corporations. I could add that these same people are the true descendants of Benito Mussolini.’
[about Freud and Jung] “In a sense they were the inevitable, confused voice of a century that saw abstract rational egotism crashing on the rocks of reality with indescribable and and unprecedented violence.”
I’m not at all sure what ‘abstract rational egotism’ might be, and I am even less sure how it can violently crash into a rock (wouldn’t an abstraction bounce??).
It’s garbage.
I gave up on The Unconscious Civilisation after about 30 pages. Approached it with high hopes, but it was a sharp slope downhill from page one.
What are we to make of statements like?:
“IÄôve said elsewhere, at least half seriously, that the only true Marxists functioning today teach in the Chicago School of Economics and manage our large corporations. I could add that these same people are the true descendants of Benito Mussolini.Äô
Which means they have something of a belief in economic determinism, somewhat analagous to Marx, without democracy. A common enough observation, or at least claim.
[about Freud and Jung] “In a sense they were the inevitable, confused voice of a century that saw abstract rational egotism crashing on the rocks of reality with indescribable and and unprecedented violence.”
IÄôm not at all sure what ‘abstract rational egotismÄô might be, and I am even less sure how it can violently crash into a rock (wouldnÄôt an abstraction bounce??).
Theory ran aground on reality. Rather easy, I must say.
ItÄôs garbage.
Also seems easy. You disagree with or don’t like these ideas.
“Which means they have something of a belief in economic determinism, somewhat analagous to Marx, without democracy. A common enough observation, or at least claim.”
And they are all Europeans or or European descent. And they are all male. It’s pretty silly to lump supporters of the maximum and minimum state in together – it is the kind of analogy that confuses rather than enlightens. Its purpose was to smear, and is at best cheap propaganda.
It’s not just that I disagree with his ideas. They are confused ideas that are badly expressed. Without any sense of irony, elsewhere he talks about the need for clear language. Perhaps his other books are better, though this one has all the signs of someone with a fundamentally muddled mind, and little skill as a writer.
What cs said as glosses.
Also, the sentence drawing the Marxian analogy is nicely written and also effective as rhetoric. The sort of provocative gambit one expects in a good speech or essay.
Similarly, “abstract rational egotism” is a good phrase with a perfectly clear meaning and well used in a sentence that then juxtaposes the “abstract” with a collision with “reality”. I also like the subltety of the “egotism” as against “egoism” in sketching Freud and Jung. Nicely written.
“The sort of provocative gambit one expects in a good speech or essay.”
Rather on a level with Andrew Fraser’s assertions about Africans, really.
And nobody has explained ‘asbtract rational egotism’, spelling out what all words are doing. What is non-abstract egotism? What is the unprecedented doing there – given that we can easily think of much greater violence than any collision with a rock could do (try a nuclear explosion, for example).
JRS is a bullshitter in the Harry Frankfurt sense of the word – not someone who deliberately lies, but someone who does not care enough about truth to check facts or choose his words carefully.
it is the kind of analogy that confuses rather than enlightens.Its purpose was to smear, and is at best cheap propaganda.
Perhaps you might take the point up with Prof Q, who makes exactly the same analogy in his excellent book Great Expectations (and I suspect, somewhere on his blog). My point is that the point is clear, for those prepared to see.
At the same time, and while I find him perfectly lucid (as well as holding PhD from King’s College, he is an award winning novelist, which in a sense sums up his intelligent and enviably readable style), I agree that UC is not his best book. It is merely a collection of speeches, and, as we all know, published speech is different to writing that is in the first instance intended to be read not heard. I recommend Voltaire’s Bastards as a more sound basis for a substantive critique.
Speaking of how commonplace it is to draw parallells between Marx and neoliberals ah la JRS, this from John Gray in the current New York Review of Books, (in a recommended review of Thomas Fridman’s new book):
Because they were on opposite sides of the cold war it is often assumed that neoliberalism and Marxism are fundamentally antagonistic systems of ideas. In fact they belong to the same style of thinking …
As for “asbtract rational egotism”, well it refers to the notion of rational self-interest (or selfishness, i.e. egotism), which is an abstraction. Andrew’s objections are, I suggest, disengenuous.
CS, you are obviously a saulman.
no neo-liberal economist would support selfishness.
It creates problems for capitalism ie bubbles and then recessions.
No neo-liberal economist could do without it, however. It is the cornerstone of their philosophy. Which is why they can only explain so much. There are a couple of other human motives apart from selfishness.
Got it Homer. That’s why all the bubbles and recessions of the past 30 years didn’t really happen, sauly.
bubbles have occured since the advent of capitalism all i am pointing out is that greed is bad for capitalism!
Great goddess! Homer, you sound like a saulcialist.
Homer, you sound like a saulcialist.
Saulcialist!