Inactive: POTUS
Entries by Eric Rauchway
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Wednesday, August 23, 2006
"the global exception"
If you liked this and this, you might have an interest in Scott McLemee this week:
The way of thinking called American exceptionalism comes in two major varieties. One is more or less religious: A faith that the United States has a special place under heaven’s watchful eye. Sometimes this involves a literal belief that the country has a role in the divine plan; in other cases, it’s just a matter of rhetoric verging on national egomania.
The other form of American exceptionalism has a more left-wing genealogy. It emerged from debates over the peculiarities of the United States compared to other highly industrialized nation-states — especially the lack of a labor party or a mass-based socialist movement of the kind that became standard elsewhere in the world. That, in turn, raises some interesting questions about what distinctive factors might explain the “exception.” Was it slavery? The lack of an aristocracy? All those natural resources on the frontier, ripe for the plucking?
In either version, the United States stands as a nation apart — somehow the product of forces cutting it off from the rest of the world’s history. But [this book] takes a different and rather paradoxical approach to American exceptionalism....
Monday, July 24, 2006
Review of David S. Brown's Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual Biography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006)
Eric Rauchway's new book is Blessed Among Nations. He teaches history at the University of California, Davis.
Richard Hofstadter was my role model when I started graduate school, and not only because (as David Brown writes in his engaging and thoughtful biography) Hofstadter "wrote the best books for the best publisher, won the best prizes, and taught at the best city, at the best school, at the best time"(xiii)—though all that certainly appealed to me. Nor was it only because Hofstadter wrote well, or because he wrote with a sense of humor. Nor was it even because Hofstadter was the first, and maybe the only, major American historian to build a career out of noticing that American democracy was not always liberty-loving.
Wednesday, May 3, 2006
still more globalization
Still more on globalization from yr. humble correspondent, this time from today's Altercation:
...Finally, who's afraid of globalization? If you raised your hand, and
you're a liberal, well, you shouldn't be:
Monday, May 1, 2006
rip jkg
John Kenneth Galbraith has died. A year ago I wrote about him here.
I remember writing that essay on the airplane back from Helsinki, where I was at a conference. Galbraith had always impressed me as a man engaged with the world, rather in contrast to academics who shuttle hither and yon, trading views that drop into the void, and that impression felt rather deeper that day than usual.
Saturday, April 29, 2006
verboten verbs
Ralph Luker deploys a verb whose acceptability on television and in common speech mystifies me.
But were I confident in Neal Stephenson's etymology, I would be less puzzled:
"... she rides far too low in the water, and so she's got a great ugly Zog."...
"Zog is Dutch for 'wake' then?"
Dappa the linguist smiles yes.... "And a much better word it is, because it comes from zuigen which means 'to suck.'... Any seaman will tell you that a ship's wake sucks on her stern, holding her back—the bigger the wake, the greater the suck, and the slower the progress. That schooner, Doctor Waterhouse, sucks."
That joke kept me going for the whole Baroque Cycle. Yes, I know, I'm easy.
Tuesday, April 18, 2006
April 18, 1906
Heaven is a city Much Like San Francisco.
House upon house depended from Hillside,
From Crest down to Dockside,
The green Mirroring Bay....
Oh Joyful in the Buckled Garden:
Undulant Landscape Over which
The Threat of Seismic Catastrophe hangs:
More beautiful because imperiled.
Tony Kushner, Angels in America
Friday, April 14, 2006
except....
Both Oscar Chamberlain and eb have pushed me on my offhand use of the word "exceptional". Which they should have done. But as I said yesterday, I'm writing these posts in between things and you shouldn't expect coherence, oh no. Also, in a book soon appearing, these arguments are laid out with premeditated elegance begot of many drafts by quarrelsome referees, and have passed under the scrutiny of all sorts of argus eyes. Wouldn't you rather read 'em there? Also: illustrations!
But I will nevertheless say the following things.
Thursday, April 13, 2006
globalization and the state (slight return)
Wonderfully, Rob McDougall and Caleb McDaniel have picked up where I left off in my last commentary on globalization and political history. Less wonderfully, they've done so when I'm still in the thick of Exciting Committee Meetings and other distractions from the actual give-and-take of academia.
But what game academic ever let such business stop him from hastily adding a few stirs to a hot pot of debate?
Quickly, let me rehearse my position: I don't think you can talk meaningfully about globalization or if you like transnational factors without talking also about politics, and about the nation-state. That's the argument I made in the commentary on globalization and political history linked above.
Now, I'll go a step further. I find that the more you look at transnational factors in American history, the more you're drawn back to the peculiar character of the American state. I'll state it as bluntly as I can: transnational factors have reinforced the exceptional character of American politics.
Thursday, March 30, 2006
nobody likes him, he's too popular
An irritation plagues the reviews sections of serious journals. It is an irritation that, so far as careful diagnosis can tell, erupts in response to perceived popularity, particularly in history-writing. Increasingly, this irritation appears symptomatic of an auto-immune disorder—the defenses meant to guard the body are instead attacking it, and stand possibly to destroy the system these defenses are supposed to preserve.
Friday, March 17, 2006
"un-American"
You probably remember Grover Norquist referring to the Greatest Generation's fights against the Depression and the Nazis as all of a piece, and that piece being "un-American". Probably only a few history readers remembered that David Kennedy made the "all of a piece" argument, though not the "un-American" argument, in Freedom from Fear. A new book, by a Kennedy student, takes the argument a step further, looking at the peace arrangements of 1944-45. Here's the start of my review from "Altercation", where you can read the rest:
Elizabeth Borgwardt, A New Deal for the World: America's Vision for Human Rights. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005. vi+437 pp., illustrations, notes, and index. USD 35.00, cloth.
Reviewed by Eric Rauchway
Regular readers know that we at Altercation love us some Bretton Woods, or at least, we love those books that say something useful about Bretton Woods. Why? well, to the extent that the world did not fall into chaos after 1945 the way it did after 1918, it’s owing largely to the successful imposition of an international order paid for by the Bretton Woods system. You wouldn’t know it, of course, to pick up a textbook on U.S. history. They barely mention it—because, let’s be honest here, there’s more than a whiff of castor oil about Bretton Woods. It happens in the middle of 1944, and there’s no shootin’ in it. You could be talking about the aftermath of D-Day, the battle for Guam, or at least the Port Chicago explosion, and instead you want to talk about piddling stuff like the management of international economic relations? Please. We prefer the clash of armies to the vaporings of economists and diplomats.
Yet, of course, it’s Bretton Woods that rules after 1945 (or, really, 1947: but more on that below), it’s Bretton Woods that makes for an era of speedy and widely distributed economic growth in the world. It would be stretching only a little to say that it’s Bretton Woods that wins the Cold War. And Elizabeth Borgwardt wants you to know that, and to know why the U.S. backed Bretton Woods, why there was something immensely moral about that choice, and what it means that we don’t want to do things like that anymore.
Read the rest here.
Thursday, March 2, 2006
bryan
Here's the first paragraph of a review essay on Michael Kazin's new Bryan biography. You can read the rest of it on Altercation (follow that link and scroll down).
FWIW I wanted them to cut the part about "The Blue Water Line" -- I thought it was about me, and not Kazin or Bryan -- but it went in there anyway. Also, this is not exactly another post on why we might want more political history, but it gets partially at the issue of looking at political history through the partisan politics of the present.
Michael Kazin, A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006. xxii+376 pp., illustrations, notes, and index. USD 30.00, cloth.
If you want to read everything worth knowing about William Jennings Bryan, Michael Kazin has set it down in a lively style that moves briskly through the Great Commoner's five-act life, each episode of which contains a different epic defeat -- three times beaten for the presidency, one time shackled as a pacifist Secretary of State to an administration bound for war, and finally humiliated at the hands of Clarence Darrow and H. L. Mencken in the court of public opinion. Among the minor successes he scored we can count the sale of Florida swampland, which he shilled on the same bill as a "shimmy dancer", and the Democratic Party's adoption of Jim Crow, which he cheered on behalf of the "advanced race". But Kazin hasn't much interest in counting Bryan's wins or losses: he wants us to hear the voice of a populist Protestant preaching against the entrenched rich, because "Bryan's sincerity, warmth and passion for a better world won the hearts of people who cared for no other public figure". (306) That Bryan did not also win office doesn't detain Kazin: he wants rather to draw our attention to the phenomenon of a Christian left, irrespective of its success....
Find the rest of the essay on Altercation. Then if you want you can come back here and comment.
Monday, February 27, 2006
notes on sundown towns
I remember noticing, with some friends, the infelicitous wording of a sign on a tennis court that read, "On weekends, only whites are allowed," or words to that effect. In context, it was, or looked, innocent: it came under a heading called "Dress code" or something like that. Also, it was in Canada -- which had its own history of Jim Crow, of course, though perhaps not quite like the place where I grew up, where in the 1980s I heard young black people my age refer to certain towns, not far away from where we were, as places you didn't want to let the sun set on you.
Via Gary Farber, I find something that has already sparked discussion around HNN, this Washington Post article on "sundown towns" and the reseach of James Loewen.
Tuesday, February 21, 2006
Congress Day, II
Why no "Congress Day"?
Julian Zelizer asks.
This is not exactly an answer, but it is what came to my mind. I propose that there be a Congress Day, and that on it we think of a favorite thing said about, by, or to Congress or one of its members.
From that page, I nominate
I never can think of Judas Iscariot without losing my temper. To my mind Judas Iscariot was nothing but a low, mean, premature, Congressman.
Wednesday, February 8, 2006
toward an increased focus on political history, part ii: the globalizing
Previously, on "toward an increased focus on political history," I made a case that even if what we really want as historians is to understand "history from below," we actually need to understand quite a bit of history from above, more than we do now, and would therefore benefit from knowing, doing, and thinking more about political history than we as a profession presently do.
But really, that was easy! and old news. It's already been eight years since a political scientist, Rogers Smith, showed historians that he could win a bunch of our awards for a book* on how laws relating to citizenship construct and are constructed by these categories.
For today, let's try something that superficially seems a little tougher: arguing for an increased focus on political history in the age of transnational history. Because really, isn't transnational history supposed to deal a death blow to political historians' donnée?
Wednesday, February 1, 2006
toward an increased focus on political history
I confess that whenever I start writing something about the direction of the profession I immediately think to myself, "shut up 'n' play yer guitar" -- because after all I should be doing it, not talking about it, right? But I confess, too, that when someone throws down a gauntlet, I'm awfully tempted to pick it up. Even if Tim Burke has already had a whack at some related material. ("Didn't you learn your lesson the last time you strayed onto Burke turf?" No, evidently I didn't.)
the point at issue
Here's the suggestion as eb made it:
I would like to see someone lay out, post by post, a case for an increased focus on political history, one that makes no reference to current political representation or affiliation, partisan or otherwise, but which demonstrates the continued and future relevancy of the subject no matter which way the electorate turns.
Tuesday, January 24, 2006
quantitative history humor!
For those of you dying to see quantitative history humor represented in the public sphere, look no further than Wiley Miller's "Non Sequitur" for today, below the fold.
Even the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the epistemic status of historical facts can be funny!
Tuesday, January 10, 2006
"... and i know what's happening"
This is really Tim Burke territory, but he's busy teaching Africa and the slave trade, so we here at POTUS pick up the slack:
Even though you've been raised as a human being, you are not one of them. They can be a great people... they wish to be. They only lack the light to show the way. For this reason above all -- their capacity for good -- I have sent them you, my only son.
Thus speaks a heavenly father to his only begotten son. Superman's getting really messianic on its long-awaited return, isn't it?
Saturday, December 31, 2005
"i don't like the sound of those drums"
``Welcome to Injun Country'' was the refrain I heard from troops from Colombia to the Philippines, including Afghanistan and Iraq.... The War on Terrorism was really about taming the frontier.So Robert Kaplan says in his Imperial Grunts. But one whopping historical analogy is not enough: not only is the War on Terror like the Indian Wars, both of them, Kaplan has it, resemble the work of the British Raj in the nineteenth century.
In the current New York Review of Books, John Gray writes, with characteristic snappiness,
The suggestion that there is an analogy between the American Indian wars and the global role of the United States today is striking, and so is the comparison between those wars and the construction of the British Raj. In each case the resemblance is tenuous or nonexistent.Which is perfectly fair. The Raj was, after all, a reasonably long-term colonial proposition with an extensive civil service and a supporting ideal of imperialism. The Indian Wars were, more or less, a military expression of ``get out of my way''. The War on Terror is neither: despite Niall Ferguson's urgings, an intelligent, thought-out American imperialism has not emerged nor, I bet, will it. And, as Gray points out, we had better hope the War on Terror doesn't start to look like the Indian Wars; to hope so is, as he writes, ``repugnant and absurd''.
But right as Gray is about these points, there are certain discomfiting lessons of the Indian Wars that might well apply today.
Thursday, December 22, 2005
the good kind of quarrel
Or mostly, anyway. You can now read a .pdf essay in which Thomas Frank responds to Larry Bartels's critique of What's the Matter with Kansas. (For links to Bartels and summaries of Bartels and various elements of the WMK debate, see the introductory sentence here.)
Frank argues Bartels's definition of class at some length. He concludes by saying that if Bartels's paper is the whole story, then there is nothing to explain about what he calls, variously, "right-wing populism" or "working-class conservatism" and I am sympathetic to his suggestion that there most certainly is.
Frank doesn't explain why Kansas is a particularly good state to examine (it has not just gone Republican, and if it has just gone a particular shade of Republican it would be perhaps more telling to analyze states where there have been more obvious shifts), and maybe he should.
But I mention this not because of the substance of the argument -- though the substance interests me -- but because there is substance in the argument between the two.
It's true, the quarreling parties do not universally observe the Tawney principle. Frank indulges what he calls his "fondness for sarcasm", and he points out in a footnote that Bartels has not been 100 percent gracious in his criticism either. But mainly they're arguing the actual data and the actual issues. Neither argues that he wouldn't like the consequences of his critic's argument being true, or that he doesn't like his critic's friends. They argue the points at issue.
This is the kind of argument that leads to better understanding of substantial issues. It's the kind of argument after which, even if it turns out both parties have been wrong, and even if they've been more wrong than right, each can properly claim to have advanced our understanding of the subject for having pressed their claims. It's the kind of argument that is a credit to its participants, and to the audience they address.
Thursday, December 15, 2005
i spy ... something purple
Edward L. Glaeser and Bryce A. Ward, "Myths and Realities of American Political Geography," NBER Working Paper 11857, December 2005, http://www.nber.org/papers/w11857.
Even if you haven't considered various takes on What's the Matter with Kansas and Larry M. Bartels's explanation of what isn't the matter with Kansas, and explanations of why Bartels may not be quite right, even if Frank isn't either, and even if you're not waiting for Michael Kazin's new Bryan biography to have another whack at explaining the relation between religion and populism -- even if you haven't, and aren't, you still know that the electoral map in 2000 and 2004 looks a lot like the one from 1896, only with the party labels reversed. Which maybe sticks a little bit in your historian's craw, because it's something maybe we should have a little more, of a little higher quality, to say about.
So maybe chew a little on Glaeser and Ward's new working paper. In it they take shots at many elements of the blue state / red state cliché, including their argument that "While the geographic differences [in culture] within America are large, they are not new and they do not seem to be growing." (p. 16)
Friday, December 2, 2005
lynching and a political synthesis
Noted and worth reading: Michael Bérubé of Penn State on James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man and lynching. In passing, Bérubé notes
far too many white Americans believed that lynching was a positively good thing that they should commemorate with celebratory photographs and postcards
I sometimes use a postcard of a lynching in lecture. It provokes precisely the response Bérubé describes. It is a horror.
But the challenge that lynching poses the historian is not to convey the horror. That's too easy. In getting only that across you've failed. What's essential to understand as a student of history is the routineness, and ordinariness, of that horror in the America of not so many years ago; of the complicity in that routine horror of the Democratic Party even into the years of the Great Society; of the way that complicity shaped what the Democratic Party could (and can) accomplish politically.
Tuesday, September 6, 2005
mckinley enters the hall of martyrs
... is just one of the fine illustrations Alan Lessoff and his editorial staff picked to accompany an article on historians' reassessments of William McKinley's presidency in the current Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (History Cooperative link). Credit for such choices goes to them. Credit goes to JGAPE's anonymous referees for making the article readable.
The spirit of full disclosure prompts me to mention that I wrote the article. Anyway, if you like this sort of thing, you might like this thing.
Thursday, September 1, 2005
war is a force that we can measure
The true hero [of war] ... is force. Force employed by man.... To define force -- it is that x that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing. Exercised to the limit, it turns man into a thing in the most literal sense: it makes a corpse out of him. Somebody was here, and the next minute there is nobody here at all....
Simone Weil, "The Iliad, or the Poem of Force," 1945.
Suppose war is about force, and force is that power to reduce the subject to an object. We could then measure force and also the ability to wage war; similarly, we could as historians retrospectively measure the force exerted in war. We might then fruitfully compare wars on a common, definite basis.
the scott mclemee review of books
Perhaps the days might return when Time and Newsweek felt some obligation to report on the same books covered in The New York Review of Books. They did, you know, once upon a time.
Well, no such luck. If the editors of Time and Newsweek do have a model for their cultural coverage, it seems to be People magazine.
So Scott McLemee is going to do his part to fix book coverage, one Thursday column at a time, at Inside Higher Ed. Good for him. If there's one endangered cultural phenomenon the blogosphere could revive, it's reasonably serious bookchat. An excellent example is Crooked Timber on Freakonomics.
Monday, August 29, 2005
AHA and high school history
Should the AHA take a stronger role in shaping high-school history curricula? An article by Robert Orrill and Linn Shapiro (History Cooperative link; Boston Globe story) in the new AHR suggests as much. It's an interesting article and worth your reading.
I know we here use Teaching American History funds to bring university and high-school history teachers together to (what looks to me like) good effect: we discuss recent historiography and research on a historical topic and consider how it affects teaching of the state history standards at the 8th and 11th grade level.
The authors of the AHR article make a case for "the AHA's [historical] leadership in promoting evidence-based reflection about the condition and future course of history education in the United States," and argue that "only the discipline can bring substantive depth and a spirit of critical inquiry to conversations about the direction of school history."
The AHR will hold a forum on this proposition on History Cooperative during the first two weeks of September.
Tuesday, August 23, 2005
social security notes from all over
For the moment we are no longer talking about partially privatizing, reforming, or otherwise changing Social Security. But while it's in our minds, we might note expert opinions from elsewhere. An official report of the Financial Services Authority in the UK notes that people who opted out of the government pension in favor of a private alternative are now worse off than those who stayed with it. Why? the BBC asked Ros Altmann of the LSE on the Today Programme (audio link). "Stock markets don't always go up," she replied.
Monday, August 22, 2005
let no quarrel faltah
In the next week, before the BBC erases it, you might spare 45 minutes to listen to this morning's episode of "Six Places that Changed the World," which features Zbigniew Brzezinski, Gregor Dallas, Stephen Graubard, and Mart Laar arguing over the effects of the Yalta agreement. (This link takes you to the "s" section of the alphabetized BBC Radio 4 "Listen Again" page; once there, look for "Six Places That Changed the World.")
They batted the word "naïve" around far too much -- FDR, Churchill, and Stalin were probably the three least naïve people on the planet at the time and it strains credulity to suggest that even the sunny FDR believed Stalin would democratize Poland, or anything else. Brzezinski admitted that the best that could have been hoped for was the Finlandization of Poland, and nearly admitted that really, the Americans were much too interested in defeating Japan to press for that at the time. Perhaps most strikingly, you could hear Dallas claim that with FDR being ill, Harry Dexter White was running the Treasury, Alger Hiss was running State, and therefore Washington was in the hands of Soviet spies.
Three observations: first, Dallas made the reasonable point that the pass had been sold long before Yalta, and it seems true that the Anglo-American interest in air war and staying off the European battlefield for as long as possible did ensure the Red Army could make the most of its opportunities; second, the most provocative argument on Yalta that I've read in years is Alterman's in When Presidents Lie, which gives pretty short shrift to naïve and talks about FDR's deliberate attempt to hide what he'd done at Yalta; third, knowing that Harry Dexter White passed intelligence to the Soviet Union, how do we understand his rather nationalistic behavior at Bretton Woods, which was almost certainly his most important historical moment? Skidelsky does an excellent job on this in his Keynes biography but it hasn't filtered into the more general historiography of the postwar world. But then, Bretton Woods itself hasn't much, either.
Friday, August 19, 2005
shoot it again, sam
Third View: A Rephotographic Survey of the American West shows photographs of the same place in the American West, "made from the originals' vantage point with as much precision as possible," decades or a century apart. (via eb).
The West of "Third View" is emphatically the landscape West of the TR-style conservationists' imagination. The same goes for the West's quarters, by the way: Nevada has wild horses and mountains; North Dakota has bison and mountains; California has a condor and mountains (and John Muir); Colorado has mountains, period. Not a mine, ranch, railroad, or -- God forbid -- a city in sight.
Yet, you know, you could have done fascinating rephotography in Western cities just in the last decade. When I first moved to Reno, you could sip espresso at the Barnes and Noble and look across the street at grazing cattle; it represented a new kind of frontier. During the time I lived there you could see the subdivisions and shopping malls advance daily -- eat your heart out, Frederick Jackson Turner. Maybe the rephotographers could consider fast-growing Western cities their next agenda item. But the meditative exhibit has some wonderful images as it is.
Thursday, August 18, 2005
more sheehan, more theater
Edmund Morris writes that Cindy Sheehan "cannot expect a president to emote on demand."
But, dollars to donuts, this is not really what Ms. Sheehan wants. At any rate it is not what she is doing. She is staging an impasse, defining the terms of her protest in stark, photo-friendly images. It may be a pity that such inarticulate drama should attract more attention than reasoned argument would. But it is certainly not untrue that it does. And it would be political idiocy of the highest order to stick to reason knowing it is less effective than an available alternative.
Meanwhile Morris misses a chance to tell us something we really want to know about Reagan. After all, "emote on demand" is one of the tricks of the movie star's trade, and Reagan was a movie star once. But Morris does not like talking about Presidents as thoughtful manipulators of their publics -- his TR, his Reagan are heartfelt men, not thinkers. At least, he doesn't like talking about Presidents he likes this way: see what he says about Clinton.
Tuesday, August 16, 2005
we are all counterfactualists now
All historians, especially those who write about presidents, practice what-if history; it's just that some of us don't know it. But any claim that this or that decision mattered includes an implicit counterfactual: if it hadn't happened this way, things would have been markedly different. And if we aren't prepared to argue that, at least to ourselves, we haven't got much of a case.
Monday, August 15, 2005
what it takes costs
Two points noted in catching up on summer periodicals.
(1) Grover Norquist calls out George Soros for going shopping in a market he didn't adequately research:
The one thing that surprised Norquist about Soros's appearance ... was the revelation that Soros had spent only twenty-seven million dollars during last year's election. "That is so goofy," Norquist said. "The guy is worth, what, seven billion dollars, and he tried to buy the Presidency on the cheap. He should have been in for two and a half billion dollars, for crying out loud. Twenty-seven million dollars -- that should have been ante money. What were they thinking?"
(From John Cassidy, "The Ringleader," The New Yorker August 1, 2005, 42-53, p. 50.)
Do historians pay enough attention to how much money comes from whom in Presidential elections?
(2) On an unrelated point in the same article, I'm pretty sure Tony Perkins would have prayed that every "lying tongue," not every "lion tongue," be cast down. (p. 49) But I await correction from Biblical cognoscenti among the readership.
Friday, August 12, 2005
presidents as analysts and actors
Greetings and many thanks. Let me start with a quick gloss on Rick's post on TR's Cromwell and the self-awareness of leaders.
Stuart Pratt Sherman concluded his essay on TR in Americans (1922) with TR's own critique of Cromwell.
His strength, his intensity of conviction, his delight in exercising powers for what he conceived to be good ends; his dislike for speculative reforms and his inability to appreciate the necessity of theories to a practical man who wishes to do good work ... all these tendencies worked together to unfit him for the task of helping a liberty-loving people on the road to freedom. (287)
Now, anyone who could write that did not lack an appreciation of theories, speculations, and above all calculation. In truth both TR's admirers and detractors have colluded to do him a disservice by portraying him too much as a man of action and not of thought.
Yet it is almost impossible, as a TR-watcher, not to agree with Sherman when he writes that TR "developed a habit of speaking so scornfully of 'over-civilization' and so praisefully of mere breeding and fighting as to raise the question that he himself raised about Cromwell, whether he had an adequate 'theory of ends,' and whether he did not become so fascinated with his means as frequently to forget his ends altogether." (284)
Me, I'd say he had a theory of ends, and a means too. But he enjoyed the means so much that, as sometimes happens to good stage actors, he lost himself in his performance. And when actors do that, they spoil an overall production. It's hard for the show to go on once the scenery's been chewed to pieces.
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