Corey Robin's Blog, page 30

On China Miéville’s October: An Arendtian History of the Russian Revolution

I just finished October, China Miéville’s turbo-charged account of the Russian Revolution. Think Ten Days That Shook the World, but in months: from February through October 1917. With each chapter narrating the events of each month. Just some quick thoughts here on what has been one of the most exhilarating reading experiences of my recent past.

1.

I don’t think I’ve ever read such an Arendtian account of revolution as this. I have no idea if Miéville has read Arendt or if he counts her as an influence. But if you want a purely political account of revolution, this is it.

There are workers, there are peasants, there are soldiers, there are parties, there are tsars, there are courtiers. Each of them bears his or her class position, his or her economic and other concerns, but it is the political field itself, how it hurls its protagonists into combat, combat with its own rules and norms, its own criteria for success and failure, that is front and center here. This may be the most textured, most concrete, account of what political contest and political combat, literal and metaphoric, feels like. Or what an event-driven account (Arendt was big on events, as is Miéville; it’s nice to see a writer like Miéville prise narrative and events from the hands of Simon Schama) might look like.

While people on the left, particularly the Marxist left, have a big distrust of Arendt, she did get at something about the revolutionary experience itself, which the best Marxist historians have always understood, but which isn’t always well conveyed in Marxist histories of revolution. This book shows you what those accounts are missing.

2.

There’s a famous public dialogue, I can’t remember when or where, between Arendt and a bunch of her readers, in which Mary McCarthy says something like: Okay, I get it, you think politics shouldn’t be about economics or the social question. But aside from war and diplomacy, what would politics in your world be about? It’s one of the big questions that has always haunted Arendt scholars. What should politics in the Arendtian vision be about? What would it look like? (E. M. Forster has a line about Virginia Woolf: “For it [Woolf’s writing] was not about something. It was something.” That’s not a bad approximation of, on some interpretations, Arendt’s view of politics.) Read Miéville. You’ll find out.

3.

I love Miéville’s portrait of Kerensky. His Kerensky seems like a brilliant knock-off of Tony Blair. Vain, vainglorious, fatuous, infatuated, though lacking Blair’s ability to translate his conviction in himself into world-historical action.

4.

The first chapter, the pre-history of the Revolution, is written in the present tense. From Peter the Great to Nicholas II, it reads like one of those newsreels they used to run in theaters before the main show. Then, as the countdown from February to November is launched, and the subsequent chapters begin, the book shifts to the past tense.

It’s a brilliant and counterintuitive use of syntax: as if the preceding centuries were a powder keg waiting to explode, always pregnant with possibility, forever situated in the grammar of the now, only to shift into the past tense once the revolution begins, as if the revolution is the inexorable working out of history, the thing that had to happen.

While Miéville never loses a sense of contingency—making a mockery of all those historians who go on about contingency (or in the case of Niall Ferguson, counterfactuality) as a way of countering the alleged determinism of Marxism—he manages nonetheless to capture a sense of inexorability, of fate, of possibilities that weren’t ever really possible, except in the imagination of Kerensky and his minions.

5.

One element in the book that resonates with our current moment is the inability or refusal of both liberals and the left to lead, where leadership means destroying the old regime. Power is there, waiting to be exercised, on behalf of a new order: the soldiers demand it, the workers demand it, the peasants demand it, but all the parties of the left, including the Bolsheviks, just hesitate and vacillate, refusing to take responsibility for society itself. It feels like we’re in a similar moment, and it could last much longer than the interregnum between February and October 1917. Not because of the power of the old regime—quite the opposite, in fact—but, as in moments throughout 1917, because of the weakness and incoherence, the willed refusal, of the parties that might bury it.

6.

As Jodi Dean has said, the real hero in October is the revolution itself. Trotsky’s there, but mostly in the wings. There’s the familiar tussle between Zinoviev/Kamenev and Lenin, and between Lenin and everyone else. And while Miéville honors and recognizes Lenin’s tactical genius, his antenna for the mood and the moment, Miéville mostly portrays a Lenin who is struggling to keep up and who often gets it wrong. It’s the revolutionary process that has the last word; it is the protagonist.

7.

That said, Miéville’s chapter on April—that’s the chapter where Lenin arrives in Petrograd, having developed his revolutionary theses in exile, far from the crucible of the revolution itself—is sublime. It has this wondrous feeling of condensation, as if the revolutionary precipitant is taking shape right then and there. It’s the perfect counterpoint to the chapter on June, where all that’s solid, and much else, melts into air.

8.

Buy the book. You can read it in a few days. You won’t be sorry.

Update (11:30 pm)

I should add, another Arendtian note: the keyword of the Russian Revolution, in Miéville’s telling, is freedom. It’s the word that keeps recurring throughout the tale. That’s what the revolution is after: freedom.

Also, just listened to this great interview that Chapo Trap House did with Miéville, and he’s got some things to say that are worth listening to.

Why does the GOP stick with Trump? It’s all about the judges.

Throughout Trump’s time in the White House, I’ve been wondering, like many others, what would it take for the GOP to break with Trump. I never thought for a moment that they’d break with him over a question of law or constitutional principle or democratic norms or political propriety. My working assumption, for most of this time, has been that if they felt like their tax cuts were in jeopardy, they might jump ship, tax cuts being the one thing that unites the party and that they know how to do. But things aren’t looking good for the tax cuts, and I see no signs of any break.

So we’re left with the question: why is the GOP sticking with Trump? They’re getting so little from him, relative to Republican presidents past. Consider the following:

According to today’s Wall Street Journal, Democrats still control the National Labor Relations Board and are helping shape its agenda. That has created considerable consternation among the business lobbies that depend upon Republican antipathy to organized labor dictating the outcomes of federal agencies.

In the last couple of weeks, the Journal and the Times have reported on similar phenomena at the Federal Regulatory Energy Commission (new oil and gas pipelines are having a tough time getting approved) and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (no easing up on Obama-era regulations of the futures market) and the Justice Department, where classic Trumpist issues like gangs, anti-terrorism, and drug trafficking are getting short shrift because Trump has failed to appoint a single US attorney to replace the 93 US attorneys he fired back in February.

Even on immigration, the Washington Post recently reported that the Trump administration has approved or renewed hundreds of thousands of DACA permits for immigrants—much to the rage of Trump’s anti-immigrant base.

I’ve been flagging Trump’s failure to exercise control over the state apparatus for a while, and one of the counter-arguments is that this is part of Bannon’s plan to downsize the state. But these failures to control the state don’t just involve the soft welfare-ish side of the government. Some of these failures are making it difficult for Trump to pursue the nastiest, most coercive parts of the hard-right agenda that no one doubts Trump, Bannon, and the hard right wish to pursue. And remember: where some of Trump’s failures have to do with his inability to get the cooperation of Congress or the courts, these are the areas of executive power where Trump has a relatively free hand, where he can act without a lot of consultation or interference. He simply hasn’t exercised it.

So what keeps the GOP, particularly the elite sectors, with Trump? Like David Dayen, I’ve begun to think it all comes down to the judiciary. Trump has gotten one Supreme Court appointment, he may well get more, and he’s moved more quickly on lower-court appointments than Obama did. The legal arm of the conservative movement is probably the best organized, most far-reaching and far-seeing sector of the right. They truly are in it—and have been in it—for the long game. Control the Supreme Court, stack the judiciary, and you can stop the progressive movement, no matter how popular it is, no matter how much legislative power it has, for decades.

It may seem ironic that a movement that came to power on the basis, in part, of a populist surge against “activist judges” would come to rely upon the judiciary as its most reliable weapon. But it’s not: while conservatism, from its beginning, has struggled to be an elitist movement of the masses, a populist movement for privilege, it has never departed from its elitist origins and supremacist mission. Going back to the rotten boroughs and Lords of early 19th century Britain, the right has always relied upon the least democratic sectors of the state. With this embrace of the judiciary as its last bastion of power, the right has come home.

If there is an irony here, it is this: Since Trump’s election, and before that, liberals have seen the Constitution as the greatest weapon against the hard right. But long after Trump is gone, the hard right will be relying upon the judiciary—and behind that, the Constitution—to protect their gains. As was true of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the right will depend upon unelected judges interpreting the law, in defiance of the popular will. The very thing, in other words, that liberals think is the antidote to Trumpism—the Constitution—will turn out to be its long-term preservative, the elixir of life.

Second Edition of The Reactionary Mind now available for order

Sorry for the radio silence. I’ve been hard at work on the manuscript for the second edition of The Reactionary Mind, which I’ve now completed!

While the immediate impetus for the second edition was the election of Trump—so there now will be a 13,000-word monster of a concluding chapter on Trump—the new edition has allowed me to confront some nagging concerns I had about the first edition. As I explain in the preface to the new edition:

Beyond Trump’s election, I had two reasons for writing this new edition of The Reactionary Mind. First, I’ve long felt that the first edition suffered from an inattention to the economic ideas of the right. While some of the essays dealt with those ideas in passing, only one—on Ayn Rand—directly addressed them. Part of this neglect had to do with the genesis of my interest in conservatism and the moment in which many of the essays in this book were first conceived: the George W. Bush years, when neoconservatism was the right’s dominant ideology and war making its dominant activity. That focus on war and violence naturally eclipsed some longstanding conservative themes about the market. In this edition, I have tried to remedy that. I’ve cut four of the chapters dealing with war and peace and have added three new chapters about the right’s economic ideas: one on Burke and his theory of value, one on Nietzsche, Hayek, and the Austrian School of Economics, and one on Trump. The result is a far more comprehensive account of the right’s ideas about war and capitalism.

Second, of all the criticisms this book has generated, the one that hit closest to home was the one I heard from readers rather than reviewers. This criticism was less substantive than structural: the book, readers complained, opened with a strongly argued thesis but then slipped into a seemingly shapeless collection of essays. Over the years, I have taken this criticism to heart. While I had a clear structure in mind for the first edition, that structure was plainly not conveyed to my readers.

For the second edition, I have overhauled the book. It now opens with three theoretical essays that set out the building blocks of the right. I call this “a primer” on reaction. It sets out what the right is reacting against (emancipatory movements of the left) and what it is seeking to protect (what I call “the private life of power”); how it makes its counterrevolutions through a reconfiguration of the old and a borrowing from the new; and the centrality of violence to its means and its ends.

The remainder of the book is organized chronologically and geographically. Part 2 takes us to ground zero of reactionary politics: Europe’s old regimes from the seventeenth to the early twentieth centuries. Situated in three distinct moments of counterrevolutionary time—the English Civil War, the French Revolution, and the proto-socialist interregnum between the Paris Commune and the Bolshevik Revolution—it looks at how Hobbes, Burke, Nietzsche, and Hayek attempted to formulate a politics of privilege in and for a democratic age. The chapters on Burke, Nietzsche, and Hayek also focus on how these thinkers forged an aristocratic politics of war or the market in response to the rise of capitalism. Part 3 brings us to the reactionary apotheosis of US conservatism from the 1950s through today. Here I offer a close reading of five moments of the American reaction: Ayn Rand’s midcentury capitalist utopia; the fusion of racial and gender anxiety in the Republican Party of Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon; the drums of war in the neoconservative imagination; and the Darwinist visions of Antonin Scalia and Donald Trump.

Here is the new table of contents, which will give you a better sense of the structure of the book:

Preface to the Second Edition

Part 1  Reaction: A Primer

The Private Life of Power
On Counterrevolution
The Soul of Violence

Part 2 Europe’s Old Regimes

The First Counterrevolutionary
Burke’s Market Value
In Nietzsche’s Margins

Part 3 American Vistas

Metaphysics and Chewing Gum
The Prince As Pariah
Remembrance of Empires Past
Affirmative Action Baby
A Show About Nothing

Notes

You can pre-order the second edition now. I’m still unclear about the official publication date, but you can still order the book. And did I say you could still order the book now?

It’s got an amazing new cover, which I love:

 

 

One Bernie With One Stone

There really is something rotten about the discussion of abortion and the Democratic Party.

In a Washington Post oped, the leader of a reproductive rights coalition calls out Democrats who would sideline abortion rights in the effort to build a big tent.

Oddly, the author doesn’t cite or link to statements by Nancy Pelosi, the highest-ranking elected official in the Democratic Party, who, within the last several weeks, came out against making abortion a litmus test not once, but twice. Not does the author cite or link to the statement by Tom Perez, the official head of the Democratic Party, chosen by the members of the Democratic National Committee, who supported Mello for the sake of electing Democrats, even if they were not pro-choice. (Perez was later forced to retract that statement.)

The sole example of Democratic backtracking that the author does focus on is…Bernie Sanders, accusing him of “throwing abortion rights under the bus.” Sanders, as his social media critics never tire of reminding us, is not in fact a registered Democrat. But he’s the author’s main—no, sole—target.

For the rest of the oped, the author focuses on the need to overturn the Hyde Amendment—never once mentioning, not once, that the Democratic Party’s Vice Presidential nominee in 2016—Hillary Clinton’s chosen candidate—came out against overturning the Hyde Amendment after Hillary Clinton had selected him as her running mate.

For the record, I have been staunchly critical of Sanders’s position on the role of abortion rights in the left’s campaign to become the electoral majority. Particularly since I believe reproductive freedom and access to abortion is critical to the issues of economic inequality that Sanders has been so passionate about. Overturning the Hyde Amendment, an effort that Sanders does support, is an important campaign, fusing issues of gender and class in ways the left needs to do. But it seems strange that Sanders would be the only politician identified by name in this piece as an example of Democratic Party waffling on abortion rights and reproductive justice.

The charitable interpretation is that the author would like to make abortion—and more important, the Hyde Amendment—a litmus test within the Democratic Party, that the author is simply trying to urge the party to remain firm on the issue, but is too timid or strategic to attack those official and elected party leaders who pose a threat to that position. It’s safer to displace that concern onto Sanders and behind Sanders, the Bernie Bros, because the neoliberal party establishment hates them anyway. So push for abortion rights by attacking critics of the party’s neoliberalism. Kill two birds with one stone.

That’s the charitable interpretation.

The uncharitable interpretation is that she’s just killing one bird.

 

Trump is a Tyrant: The Devolution of an Argument

I’ve noticed an interesting evolution—perhaps devolution—in the “Trump is a tyrant” line of argument.

Originally, the claim was robust and ambitious: Trump was like the classic fascist rulers of the twentieth century, readying to lead not only a repressive and violent state apparatus, under the unified control of his party, but also a street-based mass movement that channeled a broad and scary consensus of the majority of the nation. It soon became apparent that despite his electoral victory, Trump in fact had very little ability to control popular opinion.

Not only has he had the worst approval ratings of any president at this point in his term, but he’s also been singularly incapable of moving the needle of public opinion toward his positions. As I pointed out in my Guardian article last Tuesday, two of Trump’s signature positions—against immigration and free trade—are today more unpopular, almost by record levels, than they were when Trump was elected. Ironically, for all the talk (from people like Jeet Heer) that Trump’s words are a form of action, the main action that his words, qua words, have produced in the realm of public opinion is a movement away from his positions.

So then the claim became more modest: Trump is an authoritarian. Here the claim is less that Trump has some intuitive ability to manipulate and control public opinion or to ride the wave of a mass movement than that he’s got control over the state and is using his control to smoothly execute his will. The problem with this argument is that Trump has not in fact consolidated his control over the state. In many cases, he hasn’t even tried.

Judged by the standard of previous presidents, in fact, Trump has been remarkably lax about consolidating his power. And not just because of opposition in the judiciary, which, contrary to Heer, shows no signs of being intimidated by his tweets (quite the opposite, in fact), but because of divisions within his party, divisions that he has proven himself singularly incapable of overcoming. Trump has given up or has been beaten back on multiple fronts of foreign policy, on free trade, on infrastructure spending, on the Wall, and more. He suffered, at the hands of his party, a humiliating defeat on health care, which despite Thursday’s House victory, he still has a long long way to go to reverse. (And it’s not at all clear, given the Senate’s response, that he’ll be able to.) He’s been forced to rely on executive orders, some of which—as the ACLU pointed out with respect to his recent EO on the Johnson Amendment— are as rhetorical as his speeches. They neither execute nor order much of anything.

(Even this article about how Trump has installed commissars throughout the executive branch and its agencies, which some folks offered to me as a counter to my claim about his failure to make appointments to the executive branch, provides little evidence of that approach actually working, and one of the cases it cites is of the executive branch resisting the intrusion of these commissars. The article also claims that Trump’s approach is consistent with what Obama tried to do with the Departments of Justice and Defense.)

So now the claim has become this: Trump may not be ruling as a fascist, Trump may not be ruling as an authoritarian; the real problem is that, in his heart of hearts, he wants to rule as an authoritarian. Trump’s gestalt, says Heer, is “authoritarian in its aspirations.” His intentions are fascist; his motives are repressive; his personality is authoritarian. “The fact that he wants to” undo the Constitution, writes Josh Marshall, “matters a lot.” Whatever the public reality of his rule, we know that the inner aspiration is autocratic. (“Aspiration” is a word that I now see a lot.) This is the kind of focus on intentions that Hannah Arendt, whose name often gets thrown around as the guiding intelligence of our times, thought was so toxic to any true understanding of politics.

I find this a fascinating and remarkable turn of the argument. If you step back and look at the trajectory of the claim, what you see is that the scope and scale of Trump’s politics has dramatically shrunk. It’s gone from a demagogic mass movement in possession of state power—that is, the entire field of state and society—to a more a limited field of the consolidated state, to, now, not just one man, but something even more removed from the public realm, something more interior: one man’s motives and intentions. The setting is no longer a polity; it’s a psyche. As if public life itself now transpires—and can be understood by what happens—in one man’s head. And in this regard, I think Trump’s critics mirror what Trump thinks about himself: he is the terrain of politics.

As Montesquieu understood, that is the hallmark of a despotic regime: all of politics is reduced to the space of the tyrant’s head. In such a regime, politics is focused entirely on a “man whose five senses constantly tell him that he is everything and that others are nothing.” The irony is that the only ones, besides Trump, who seem to believe that this implosion of political space describes or can account for our current moment are his critics.

His Mother’s Son

“Looking back, I realize now that I got some of my sense of showmanship from my mother. She always had a flair for the dramatic and the grand. She was a very traditional housewife, but she also had a sense of the world beyond her. I still remember my mother, who is Scottish by birth, sitting in front of the television set to watch Queen Elizabeth’s coronation and not budging for an entire day. She was just enthralled by the pomp and circumstance, the whole idea of royalty and glamour. I also remember my father that day, pacing around impatiently. ‘For Christ’s sake, Mary,’ he’d say. ‘Enough is enough, turn it off. They’re all a bunch of con artists.’ My mother didn’t even look up. They were total opposites in that sense. My mother loves splendor and magnificence, while my father, who is very down-to-earth, gets excited only by competence and efficiency.”

—Donald Trump, The Art of the Deal

 

What we talk about when we talk about Susan Sarandon

Susan Sarandon says Trump’s election may help the revolution. Liberals scream, “IRRESPONSIBLE!”

The Democrats say that Trumpcare’s victory in the House will help the Democrats in 2018. Liberals say, “Strategy.”

Bernie Sanders says abortion shouldn’t be a litmus test. Liberals cry, “SOCIALIST CLASSBRO HATES WOMEN!”

Nancy Pelosi says—twice, second time even more strongly—abortion shouldn’t be a litmus test. Liberals say…almost nothing at all.

It’s almost as if we’re not really having an honest conversation about our disagreements.

A wise psychoanalyst once told me (sort of): look at what Trump does, not what he says

A wise psychoanalyst once told me, “Stop looking at what you’re saying, look at what you’re doing.” I wish journalists applied a similar rule to Trump.

Yesterday, Trump said some whatever about the “archaic” rules of Congress, and this is what Aaron Blake, a journalist at The Washington Post, has to say in response:

Whether this is just him [Trump] blowing off steam or signaling what lies ahead, it’s significant. Because it suggests a president, yet again, who doesn’t agree with his own powers being limited or even questioned. Remember when senior policy adviser Stephen Miller declared “the powers of the president to protect our country are very substantial and will not be questioned?” This is more of that kind of attitude. He wants more power — and he wants it quickly. It’s not difficult to connect this to his past admiration for authoritarian leaders, and these comments are likely to give Democrats (and even some in the GOP establishment) plenty of heartburn. This is a demonstrated pattern for him, for all the reasons listed at the top of this post.

Oy. I know journalists (and academics like Timothy Snyder) love this narrative of Trump as authoritarian, but again, look at what he does, not what he says.

If Trump were serious about consolidating his power, he might start by, oh, I don’t know, consolidating his power. Because while Trump talks, this is what he’s doing, or not doing:

The Senate has confirmed 26 of Trump’s picks for his Cabinet and other top posts. But for 530 other vacant senior-level jobs requiring Senate confirmation, the president has advanced just 37 nominees….

That was according to a piece the other day in The Washington Post, the very newspaper Aaron Blake writes for. And this failure to consolidate executive power isn’t just in the agencies and departments Trump wants to gut. This is also in agencies and departments Trump wants to expand and empower. (I won’t even get into all the legislative battles Trump has lost. Some of which Blake has reported on.)

Whatever fantasies Trump may have about the presidency unbound, this man has almost no agenda for consolidating the power of the presidency. It’s a slogan, a rhetoric, a performance, but that’s it.

So for the last time: Look at what Trump does, not what he says.

On liberals, the left, and free speech: Something has changed, and it’s not what you think it is

When I was in college and in graduate school (so the 1980s and 1990s), the dividing line on free speech debates was, for the most part, a pretty conventional liberal/left divide. (I’m excluding the right.) That is, self-defined liberals tended to be absolutists on free speech. Self-defined leftists—from radical feminists to radical democrats to critical race theorists to Marxists—tended to be more critical of the idea of free speech.

What’s interesting about the contemporary moment, which I don’t think anyone’s really remarked upon, is that that clean divide has gotten blurry. There were always exceptions to that divide, I know: back in the 1980s and 1990s, some radical feminists were critical of the anti-free speech position within feminism; some liberals, like Cass Sunstein and Owen Fiss, were more sensitive to how power differentials in society constrained speech, and thus were more open to more regulatory approaches to speech; some Marxists were always leery of the critiques of free speech. Even so, there was a divide. That divide hasn’t now reversed, but it’s no longer the case that it maps so easily onto a simple and clear divide between liberalism and the left.

From what I see online, a lot of mainstream liberals today are far less absolutist in their defense of free speech, particularly on campuses; indeed, that absolutist position increasingly seems like the outlier among liberals. And parts of the left are now taking the more absolutist position. Once upon a time, a Jonathan Chait would denounce leftist campus critics of free speech, and it all made sense. Today, when he does that, he seems completely out to lunch: a lot of the people he’s talking about are conventional liberals just like him.

(On a related note, there was a funny moment on Twitter yesterday, when the ACLU defended Ann Coulter’s right to speak at Berkeley. Twitter liberals freaked out in surprise: the ACLU, defending Ann Coulter’s right to speak! How could that be? None of them seemed to remember or realize that it was the ACLU that defended Nazis—as in real members of the American Nazi Party—marching in Skokie, a Chicago suburb whose residents included many Holocaust survivors, back in the 1970s.)

Just so we’re clear. Nothing in this post is meant to be normative or prescriptive; I’ve tended to stay out of these debates of late, in part because they mostly don’t speak to my experience of campus free speech. Our challenge at Brooklyn College has never really been how to keep speakers off campus; it has almost always been how to get them on campus.

All I’m doing here is making a simple, and I believe non-normative empirical observation: that something new is happening on the divide between liberalism and the left over the question of free speech. Unlike the recent past, the free speech argument now cuts right across that divide. And to that extent, it takes us back to an earlier moment, in the 1930s and 1940s, when American liberals and the left were also in dialogue, and taking a mixture of cross-cutting positions, on the question of free speech.

The Language of Pain, from Virginia Woolf to William Stanley Jevons

Virginia Woolf, On Being Ill:

English, which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear, has no words for the shiver and the headache…The merest schoolgirl, when she falls in love, has Shakespeare or Keats to speak her mind for her; but let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry. There is nothing ready made for him. He is forced to coin words himself…

William Stanley Jevons, The Theory of Political Economy:

In this work I have attempted to treat Economy as a Calculus of Pleasure and Pain…

I hesitate to say that men will ever have the means of measuring directly the feelings of the human heart. A unit of pleasure or of pain is difficult even to conceive; but it is the amount of these feelings which is continually prompting us to buying and selling, borrowing and lending, labouring and resting, producing and consuming; and it is from the quantitative effects of the feelings that we must estimate their comparative amounts. We can no more know nor measure gravity in its own nature than we can measure a feeling; but, just as we measure gravity by its effects in the motion of a pendulum, so we may estimate the equality or inequality of feelings by the decisions of the human mind. The will is our pendulum, and its oscillations are minutely registered in the price lists of the markets….

Many readers may, even after reading the preceding remarks, consider it quite impossible to create such a calculus as is here contemplated, because we have no means of defining and measuring quantities of feeling, like we can measure a mile, or a right angle, or any other physical quantity. I have granted that we can hardly form the conception of a unit of pleasure or pain, so that the numerical expression of quantities of feeling seems to be out of the question. But we only employ units of measurement in other things to facilitate the comparison of quantities; and if we can compare the quantities directly, we do not need the units.