Jesse
Thanks for your interest in my ancient piece on exterminism. This was written for a CND or END publication in Europe in the early 80s and I no longer have it. My basic line was that the arms race was not driven so much by its internal bureaucratic logic of mutual machismo and bureaucratic empire-building (as EPT's exterminism thesis maintained) but by a quasi-rational attempt on the part of the US to make nuclear weapons, or the threat of nuclear weapons, credibly usable, so that the US could integrate them effectively into its military support for economic world dominance. The Soviet part of the arms race I attributed to Hobbesean fears of being dominated or attacked. EPT didn't like being disagreed with at all, he was bored with what took to be dogmatic Marxists such as he saw me to be, and he didn't like the fact that I made the explanation for the arms race asymmetrical in a way that seemed to shift the "blame" to the Americans rather than putting it equally on both. I was right, though.
Thanks for the name of the the Linebaugh book. David Brion Davis's review was certainly explicitly right wing or anyway overtly anticommunist in a startlingly old fashioned way, but my recollection was that he many telling, and if valid fatal, objections to the book, including that Linebaugh didn't address the supposedly well-known mostly fictional status of a well-known slave narrative that is central to the book. This isn't my area, and I liked the idea of the book, but the review worried me a lot.
Btw, I'm not saying you're doing this, but I never assess a scholarly thesis merely because of its politics or those of its author. Davis is a great scholar. So, for that matter, is Donald Kagan (on ancient Greece), a leading neocon. I am a big fan of Hayek and Richard Posner, etc.
--- Jesse Lemisch <utopia1 at attglobal.net> wrote:
> The title you are looking for is Marcus Rediker and
> Peter Linebaugh, The
> Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and
> the History of the
> Revolutionary Atlantic (Beacon 2000). Though subject
> to criticism in various
> ways, it's an excellent book, which I've always
> thought of as a kind of
> Bottom-Up version of Robert R. Palumer's Age of the
> Democratic Revolution,
> describing the movement of radical ideas via the
> groups named in the title.
> It's possible that David Brion Davis's NYRB review
> made some good points,
> but I recall it as a hideously political review from
> the right. For a
> publication that pretends to a certain hipness,
> NYRB's stable of reviewers
> in US history is amazingly archaic and out of touch:
> Gordon Wood, Davis,
> Edmund Morgan, and til his death, Vann Woodward. The
> distance between the
> often (well, sometimes, good) material elsewhere n
> NYRB and its incredible
> backwardness in US history is almost a repeat of the
> "two cultures" problem.
>
> Andy, can you give a citation to your piece critical
> of EP Thompson on
> "exterminism"?
>
> Jesse Lemisch
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "andie nachgeborenen"
> <andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com>
> To: "lbo-talk lbo-talk" <lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org>
> Sent: Thursday, January 31, 2008 12:18 AM
> Subject: [lbo-talk] Linebaugh (Was Re: decoupling)
>
>
> >
> > I love Peter Linebaugh's The London Hanged, which
> is
> > perhaps the only really EP Thompsonesque book to
> > follow very closely but imaginatively in the path
> the
> > EPT indicated for modern history.
> >
> > However David Brion Davis really took apart at the
> > joints Linebaugh's co-authored book on the
> > trans-Atlantic shipping economy, class struggle,
> and
> > the slave trade. I am very much more inclined to
> be
> > sympathetic to Linebaugh than to Davis, but you
> should
> > read his NYRB demolition of that book, which I use
> to
> > have but the title of which escapes me. The Many
> > Headed Beast or something like that. I am no
> expert in
> > the field, but unless Davis is just lying that
> work
> > was a real disaster. Linebaugh is even crankier
> than
> > Thompson -- I have an exceedingly cranky response
> from
> > ETP to a historical materialist (as I saw it)
> critique
> > I made of his "exterminism" theory of the cold war
> > from back in the early 80s --so it should be
> > interesting to hear what Linebaugh has to say
> about
> > Davis.
> >
> > Nonetheless I am eager to read anything Linebaugh
> > writes, and Magna Carta is especially topical
> these
> > days, since it is being trashed.
> >
> > In a note to my Evidence class I quoted in Latin
> and
> > modern English the provision on trial by a jury of
> > one's peers, since the students are becoming
> lawyers
> > they should be exposed to some Latin.
> >
> > --- Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
> >
> > >
> > > On Jan 30, 2008, at 8:34 PM, Julio Huato wrote:
> > >
> > > > Martin Wolf (FT), who -- I believe -- is
> somewhat
> > > sensitive to the
> > > > broader interests of "global finance" makes a
> > > rather distressed
> > > > exhortation for those countries to decouple.
> > >
> > > By the way, I recorded an interview with him
> this
> > > morning which I'll
> > > run on the radio tomorrow - along with Peter
> > > Linebaugh, talking about
> > > his new book on the Magna Carta.
> > > ___________________________________
> > >
> >
>
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> > >
> >
> >
> >
> >
>
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