The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic--and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World

by Steven Johnson

The social theorist Walter Benjamin reworked Dickens’ original slogan in his enigmatic masterpiece “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” written as the scourge of fascism was enveloping Europe: “There is no document of civilization that is not also a document of barbarism.” The opposition between civilization and barbarism was practically as old as the walled city itself. (As soon as there were gates, there were barbarians ready to storm them.) But Engels and Dickens suggested a new twist: that the advance of civilization produced barbarity as an unavoidable waste product, as essential to its metabolism as the gleaming spires and cultivated thought of polite society. The barbarians weren’t storming the gates. They were being bred from within. Marx took that insight, wrapped it in Hegel’s dialectics, and transformed the twentieth century. But the idea itself sprang out of a certain kind of lived experience—on the ground, as the activists still like to say. It came, in part, from seeing human beings buried in conditions that defiled both the dead and the living.