AMA

[Filuwaúrdjan]

What's your take on François Mitterrand?

The most perfect fraud in human history, perhaps. Nothing sums the man so much as the time he faked an assassination attempt on himself in order to boost his popularity...

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Bernard Lewis?

Brilliant man and a first rate historian - though too political for his own good, unfortunately. Of course a lot of people really only know him from his trollish and intemperate media persona (which was always in direct contrast to his style in a professional capacity), though that will eventually pass. His spat in the 70s with Said is always good for a laugh: Said argued that Lewis's insistence that the history (and therefore also the political future) of the Middle East could not be understood without reference to Islam was 'orientalist' and proof that Lewis did not understand the region. Oh dear.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Robert Heilbroner?

I can't comment on his abilities as an economist (i.e. because I'm not one), but he was an outstanding economic historian (economic history tends to attract oddballs and is all the better for it) and a perceptive and sharp observer of both politics and political economy. Our societies really don't produce the public intellectuals they used to, do they?

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Any good, readable books or essays on philosophy of history you'd recommend?

The Historian's Craft (Bloch), In Defence of History (Evans), On History (Hobsbawm). And, oddly enough, Europe: A History (Davies), large chunks of which are as good as any book written specifically on the subject. And, but really only after these I guess, Main Currents of Marxism (Kołakowski). There's also What Is History (Carr) but I don't think it's dated particularly well. Avoid anything by Hayden White - mind you, it's not like anything he wrote would pass the 'readable' test so...

[FEMA Camp Administrator]

I think my Dad had a copy of Carr’s book. If so, I spirited it away to my current residence.

Do you have any preferred reading in comparative revolution?

In a similar vein, thoughts on Charles Tilly?

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Is the Colombian Left going for Petro over Fajardo one of those massive missed opportunities that will haunt them for at least a decade?

Think this one counts as a rhetorical question!

[Filuwaúrdjan]

You quoted from Beethoven (or, well, Schiller) earlier in this thread, so who's your favourite composer?

Long reply on this probably needed. Please hold.

[All Along The Watchtower]

I asked you this on AAD but never got a response.

---

The revolutionary movements in Tsarist Russia included a noticeably disproportionate number of people from ethnic and other minority groups within the Empire. What was the significance of this within the context of late 19th/early 20th century Russia (and hell, within the broader world back then)?

[Grand Wizard Lizard of the Klan]

As you are historian and you have different perspective than me probably you are formed by different academic culture, different curricula etc. and I wonder what is your opinion about Hayden White and narrativism? And question about more present trends in British historiography in general - what is now most popular?

[WMS]

Is the Colombian Left going for Petro over Fajardo one of those massive missed opportunities that will haunt them for at least a decade?

Think this one counts as a rhetorical question!

I’d have to agree! Two goddamned percent and everything could be different...

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

Any good, readable books or essays on philosophy of history you'd recommend?

The Historian's Craft (Bloch), In Defence of History (Evans), On History (Hobsbawm). And, oddly enough, Europe: A History (Davies), large chunks of which are as good as any book written specifically on the subject. And, but really only after these I guess, Main Currents of Marxism (Kołakowski). There's also What Is History (Carr) but I don't think it's dated particularly well. Avoid anything by Hayden White - mind you, it's not like anything he wrote would pass the 'readable' test so...

Thanks.  I saw you mention Davies' book on twitter.  Looks quite interesting.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

You quoted from Beethoven (or, well, Schiller) earlier in this thread, so who's your favourite composer?

First tier would be something like: Bach,¹ Beethoven,² Brahms, Bruckner,³ Britten^,4 Mahler,⁵ Mussorgsky,⁶ Nielsen, Schnittke, Schubert, Schumann,⁷ Shostakovich,⁸ Vaughan Williams,⁹ Wagner.¹⁰

Difficult to put things into order - so much depends on mood.

Second tier something like: Bartok, Berg, Elgar,¹¹ Dvorák, Fauré, Franck, Glass, Gurney,¹² Howells,¹ Mendelssohn, Messiaen, Prokofiev, Rachmaninoff, Rimsky-Korsakov, Schoenberg, Sibelius, Stravinsky, Tchaikovsky,¹³ Tippett, Weill. This list especially subject to change.

I could list a third tier but it would be very long. There's so much out there that's really quite excellent.

I could also add even more notes! Happy to argue endlessly about anything relating to this, of course, especially as some of my views are not moderate...

<sub>1. Always associated in my mind with my Taid. For Bach: the diversity of performing traditions is a fundamentally good thing and should be embraced and celebrated. Down with the sectarians.
2. Special level of Hell reserved for those who forget that he was the wellspring of musical Romanticism and try to turn everything into a tedious academic parlour game.
3. Performance is always a massive caveat with any composer,^a but particularly with Bruckner: amongst other things it is necessary for the conductor to understand the implications of the fact that Bruckner was an organist. When that doesn't happen the results are just... bad. When it does, it's like visiting a higher form of reality. Celibidache's interpretations tower over those of everyone else.
4. Any role written for Peter Pears should be performed by a tenor with an 'English' tone (wherever they're actually from) or GTFO, frankly.
5. The trend for (comparatively) emotionless Mahler bothers me - Mahler was the most operatic of symphonic composers, and if you hack away at that then the symphonies don't really work as Mahler was not particularly interested in symphonic architecture. A notable fact about Mahler is that nearly all (not all, but not far off) the best Mahler conductors have been Jewish, in fact that's about the only thing they've had in common - a pretty strong indicator of the importance of meaning to good Mahler performances, I'd argue.
6. I take the presently unfashionable view that Mussorgsky, for all his other talents, was a sh!t orchestrator - he was just too busy drinking vodka to care about such details tbh and I'm sorry but it shows - and that you're better off using Rimsky or (even better) Shostakovich's orchestrations. Doing so is not showing disrespect for Mussorgsky, quite the opposite.
7. Always associated in my mind with my Grandma.
8. Rewards cerebral performances with a great deal of colour, I'd argue. The whole idiocy of the 'Shostakovich Wars' would be bad enough even had it not led pretty directly to some pretty lousy performances of fantastic works, and the present tendency to emphasise a frankly crass sense of energy isn't super either.
9. Always associated in my mind with my Grandad.
10. The Romanticism has to be embraced fully and the music have a consequent sense of momentum (it's a matter of style: the postmodern score-obsessive approach associated with the Met and a certain someone we don't name now is often pretty dead for instance) or things tend to fall apart. Why, yes, I do own a Furtwängler Ring Cycle, why do you ask?
11. But I'll note that he really needs to be understood and performed as the Wagner stan that he was rather than as a representative of an ossified notion of Englishness.
12. He only wrote a handful of songs, but what songs!
13. Performance style matters a lot here as well: old fashioned Russian autocratic conducting produced (produces) excellent performances, and old fashioned Germanic Romantic conducting was perhaps even better suited (intriguingly) - other approaches... I don't know, something goes missing.

a. Let's not talk about the revisions issue because it's wrong to inflict headaches on innocent bystanders.</sub>

[Statilius the Epicurean]

I see you have a very capital-R Romantic 19th/20thc German/Russian preference, which is slightly different to mine I must confess that I think Mahler's music needs the psychiatrist's couch more than the concert hall. Not a fan of Mozart, the greatest of them all?

[🦀🎂🦀🎂]

1) Do you have any regrettable political phases (e.g. Trotskyism or whatever) in your past?
2) opinions on Harold Pinter?

[Filuwaúrdjan]

The revolutionary movements in Tsarist Russia included a noticeably disproportionate number of people from ethnic and other minority groups within the Empire. What was the significance of this within the context of late 19th/early 20th century Russia (and hell, within the broader world back then)?

Significance as in 'why did this happen' or significance as in 'what were the consequences'? Some of it was co-incidental and irrelevant though - e.g. Lenin had rather (to say the least) mixed ancestry, but he was in no meaningful sense a member of a minority; just a Russian with an odd family tree.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Do you have any preferred reading in comparative revolution?

Hobsbawm's 'Age of...' series would be essential reading there. The first volume (Age of Revolution) is a bit dated in certain respects, but a) is still good and b) it's important to understand the development of ideas about history sometimes. An important - and still controversial, not least because of its impact on Modern History as a general field of study - work on the French Revolution is Schama's Citizens (I suspect you'll like both the style and the general thesis), which is also a good springboard of a book for others on the subject. As you know Russian historiography is quite the flaming dumpster fire. For a basically functionalist explanation, Fitzpatrick is still the go-to historian (try The Russian Revolution), while for a different - I was about to write 'more conventional' but that's not accurate! - perspective Figes' A People's Tragedy is good, as is the first volume of Kotkin's Stalin biography (one of the Completely Mad historical megaprojects of our time, along with Kynaston's series about postwar Britain. I think you'd like Kynaston, though it's a different subject again). For 20th century Germany, the works of the Mommsen twins are classics and (again) a good springboard into the wider subject. I would also recommend - because of course I would - Scott's brilliant work on Modernism (Seeing Like A State) much of which is devoted to revolutionary regimes.

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Not read much by him, but what I've seen is impressive. And you have to admire the work ethic: history of that sort requires serious dedication.

[All Along The Watchtower]

The revolutionary movements in Tsarist Russia included a noticeably disproportionate number of people from ethnic and other minority groups within the Empire. What was the significance of this within the context of late 19th/early 20th century Russia (and hell, within the broader world back then)?

Significance as in 'why did this happen' or significance as in 'what were the consequences'? Some of it was co-incidental and irrelevant though - e.g. Lenin had rather (to say the least) mixed ancestry, but he was in no meaningful sense a member of a minority; just a Russian with an odd family tree.

I guess more the former than the latter, though if you have insights into both that would be much appreciated too!

[FEMA Camp Administrator]

Thanks for your long and thoughtful response!

Do you have any preferred reading in comparative revolution?

Hobsbawm's 'Age of...' series would be essential reading there. The first volume (Age of Revolution) is a bit dated in certain respects, but a) is still good and b) it's important to understand the development of ideas about history sometimes.

Looks interesting (and Age of Revolution is like $4.00 used on Amazon!). I recall other historians--and you--mention Hobsbawm. I got the impression he was sort of a posterboy for postwar Marxist academia.

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My own thoughts on the French Revolution aren't fully formed; in what little listening or reading I do on the subject, my sympathies tend to lie with moderate republicans, though I could never sign onto anti-clericalism. The revolution had its share of absurdities beyond The Terror, such as that ridiculous calendar. The impression I get is that monarchy was a bloated anachronism that needed to go, but my preferred end product is rather different than ~1793 France, and I think that the proximity of the capital to the sans culottes was a hindrance to the development of a deliberative, democratic body. That said, the reactionaries and conservatives of the story always manage to disappoint me whenever they get back into power, leading to disappointment and disillusionment. 

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I'm not as well-versed in Russian historiography as you might think! I'm picking up books for thesis research right now, but a lot of acquisitions are focused on the eight "Asian"/"Middle Eastern" former Soviet republics of South Caucasus and Central Asia. I read Moshe Lewin's The Soviet Century earlier this year, which struck me as a very unconventional way of telling Soviet history. My real quest with regard to Russia, at least until after my thesis is done, is to find a detailed account of resistance/dissident movements in the republics and post-Soviet state formation. The Revolution itself is largely an unrelated academic pursuit until then, sadly. Fitzpatrick is definitely on my "list" in the most literal way possible--my Amazon wishlist. She was recommended to me by my Frankfurt School-loving professor/sometimes boss. Not sure what that says about her. I've heard of A People's Tragedy though never looked into it. All I've read of Kotkin was Armageddon Averted. Anne Applebaum is an author I'm interested in but haven't gotten around to.

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Can't say I'd heard of the Mommsen twins before this. As for Seeing Like a State, I know Gully Foyle read it and in a search of "comparative politics books" it comes up.

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Not read much by him, but what I've seen is impressive. And you have to admire the work ethic: history of that sort requires serious dedication.
[/quote]

I read Democracy earlier in the summer and it wasn't really my speed, but this was probably because it was a compilation of wisdom gleaned in his earlier work. I'm considering picking up Contention and Democracy in Europe if the Amazon price is right.

[Holmes]

How've you been?

[Filuwaúrdjan]

I see you have a very capital-R Romantic 19th/20thc German/Russian preference, which is slightly different to mine I must confess that I think Mahler's music needs the psychiatrist's couch more than the concert hall. Not a fan of Mozart, the greatest of them all?

Mahler did, in fact, go to see Freud!

Mozart I always find to be technically brilliant but not particularly interesting (though there are some important exceptions).

[PSOL]

Before regulations and welfare in Europe, was the migration of peasants to the cities a bump up from rural life? Did it actually ease issues in the country and provide lots of needed stability to the new city goers. Or did it just starve the rural areas while the new urban residents just lived in structural squalor? Maybe more history related then Urban studies go through.