Out of Our Minds

by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto

  40. L. Lampert, Nietzsche’s Task: An Interpretation of Beyond Good and Evil (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001); F. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, ed. W. Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1966), pp. 101–2, 198.

  41. B. Russell, History of Western Philosophy, p. 690.

  42. S. May, Nietzsche’s Ethics and His War on ‘Morality’ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). A good English edition by K. Ansell, in translation by C. Diethe, is available of Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). A useful collection of essays is R. Schacht, ed., Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).

  43. F. Nietzsche, The Will to Power (New York: Vintage, 1968), p. 550.

  44. A. Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea (1818), and Nietzsche, The Will to Power, are the fundamental texts. B. Magee, The Philosophy of Schopenhauer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), is the best introduction. J. E. Atwell, Schopenhauer on the Character of the World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), focuses on the doctrine of the will. D. B. Hinton, The Films of Leni Riefenstahl (Lanham: Scarecrow, 1991), is a straightforward introduction to her work.

  45. Quoted in W. Laqueur, Guerrilla: A Historical and Critical Study (New York: Little Brown, 1976), p. 135.

  46. See F. Trautmann, The Voice of Terror: A Biography of Johann Most (Westport: Greenwood, 1980).

  47. The slogan, first reported in English, as far as I can tell, by H. Brailsford, Macedonia: Its Races and Their Future (London: Methuen, 1906), p. 116, has passed into lore. See M. MacDermott, Freedom or Death: The Life of Gotsé Delchev (London: Journeyman, 1978), p. 348; W. Laqueur, Terrorism: A Study of National and International Political Violence (Boston: Little, Brown, 1977), p. 13. K. Brown, Loyal unto Death: Trust and Terror in Revolutionary Macedonia (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), covers Gruev’s background superbly.

  48. W. Laqueur, The Age of Terrorism (Boston: Little, Brown, 1987), is a fine introduction; W. Laqueur, ed., The Guerrilla Reader (London: Wildwood House, 1978), and The Terrorism Reader (London: Wildwood House, 1979), are useful anthologies. P. Wilkinson, Political Terrorism (London: Macmillan, 1974), is a practical-minded survey. J. Conrad, The Secret Agent (London: Methuen, 1907), and G. Greene, The Honorary Consul (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973), are among the most perceptive novelistic treatments of terrorism.

  49. P. Kropotkin, Anarchism: A Collection of Revolutionary Writings, ed. R. Baldwin (Mineola: Dover, 2002), p. 123.

  50. C. Cahm, Kropotkin and the Rise of Revolutionary Anarchism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Kropotkin’s memoirs are available in a translated version, Memoirs of a Revolutionist (New York: Dover, 1988). A. Kelly, Mikhail Bakunin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), is probably the best book on Bakunin. D. Morland, Demanding the Impossible (London and Washington, DC: Cassell, 1997), studies nineteenth-century anarchism with a psychological perspective.

  51. H. D. Thoreau, ‘On the duty of civil disobedience’, in D. Malone-France, ed., Political Dissent: A Global Reader (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2012), p. 37.

  52. J. Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), pp. 364–88. See R. Bleiker, Popular Dissent, Human Agency and Global Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); J. M. Brown, Gandhi and Civil Disobedience (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1977).

  53. E. E. Y. Hales, The Catholic Church and the Modern World (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1958), makes a good starting point. B. Duncan, The Church’s Social Teaching (Melbourne: Collins Dove, 1991), is a useful account of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. D. O’Brien and T. Shannon, eds, Catholic Social Thought: Encyclicals and Documents from Pope Leo to Pope Francis (Maryknoll: Orbis, 2016), is a useful collection of documents. J. S. Boswell et al., Catholic Social Thought: Twilight or Renaissance? (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2001), is a committed collection of essays, which covers the field.

  54. A. R. Vidler, A Century of Social Catholicism (London: SPCK, 1964), is the single most important work, seconded by P. Misner, Social Catholicism in Europe (New York: Crossroad, 1991). L. P. Wallace, Leo XIII and the Rise of Socialism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1966), supplies important context. A. Wilkinson, Christian Socialism (London: SCM, 1998), traces Christian influence on labour politics in Britain. W. D. Miller, Dorothy Day (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1982), is a good biography of a leading Catholic social activist of modern times.

  55. Quoted in M. Hirst, States, Countries, Provinces (London: Kensal, 1986), p. 153.

  56. N. Leask, ‘Wandering through Eblis: absorption and containment in romantic exoticism’, in T. Fulford and P. J. Kitson, eds, Romanticism and Colonialism: Writing and Empire, 1730–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 165–83; A. and N. Jardine, eds, Romanticism and the Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 169–85.

  57. E. Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008), p. 47.

  58. E. Gellner, Nationalism (London: Phoenix, 1998), is a superb introduction. B. Anderson, Imagined Communities (New York: Verso, 1991), is a pioneering study of nationalism and identity. E. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger, eds, The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), is an intriguing collection of essays on national self-extemporization. R. Pearson, ed., The Longman Companion to European Nationalism, 1789–1920 (London: Longman, 1994), is a useful reference work. D. Simpson, Romanticism, Nationalism and the Revolt against Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), is a good short conspectus. L. Hagendoorn et al., European Nations and Nationalism (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), is an important collection of essays.

  59. Quoted in Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, i, p. 300.

  60. Davies, Europe: A History, p. 733.

  61. J. G. Fichte, Reden an deutsche Nation (Berlin: Realschulbuchhandlung, 1808), is the basic text. A. J. P. Taylor, The Course of German History (London: Routledge, 2001), is a brilliant polemic. A. J. LaVopa, Fichte, the Self and the Calling of Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), makes Fichte’s thought intelligible in context.

  62. T. B. Macaulay, Critical and Historical Essays, 3 vols (London, 1886), ii, pp. 226–7.

  63. T. B. Macaulay, The History of England, 2 vols (London: Longman, 1849), ii, p. 665.

  64. Macaulay, The History of England, is the starting point of the nineteenth-century British myth; D. Gilmour, Rudyard Kipling (London: Pimlico, 2003), is the best biography of the greatest celebrant of Britishness. The quotation from Rhodes is at p. 137. N. Davies, The Isles (London: Macmillan, 2000), is the best, as well as the most controversial, single-volume British history.

  65. In Act 1 of I. Zangwill’s 1908 play, The Melting Pot.

  66. R. Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), is a lively and controversial enquiry. W. Cronon, ed., Under an Open Sky (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994), is a superb study of westward colonization and its ecological effects. W. Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992), is a gripping study of the growth of Chicago.

  67. F. Fernández-Armesto, ‘America can still save the world’, Spectator, 8 January 2000, p. 18.

  68. J. Farina, ed., Hecker Studies: Essays on the Thought of Isaac Hecker (New York: Paulist Press, 1983), is a good introduction. W. L. Portier, Isaac Hecker and the Vatican Council (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen, 1985), is a substantial study. J. Dolan, The American Catholic Experience (Indianapolis: University of Notre Dame Press, 1985), and P. Gleason, Keeping Faith (Indianapolis: University of Notre Dame Press, 1987), are good histories of US Catholicism.

  69. Z. Sardar and M. Wynn Davies, Why Do People Hate America (London: Icon, 2005), is a brilliant summation. J. S. Nye, The Paradox of American Power (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), is a searching and compelling study.

  70. I. Jack, ed., Granta 77: What We Think of America (London: Granta, 2002), p. 9. />
  71. Han-yin Chen Shen, ‘Tseng Kuo-fan in Peking, 1840–52: his ideas on statecraft and reform’, Journal of Asian Studies, xxvi (1967), pp. 61–80 at p. 71.

  72. I. Hsu, The Rise of Modern China (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), is the best history of China throughout the relevant periods. S. A. Leibo, Transferring Technology to China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), is an excellent study of one strand in the self-strengthening movement. R. B. Wong, China Transformed (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000), is fundamental.

  73. Quoted in C. Holcombe, A History of East Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), p. 245.

  74. F. Yukichi, Autobiography (New York: Columbia University Press, 1966), is a fascinating memoir of one of Japan’s ‘discoverers of the West’. See also the works listed in chapter 6.

  75. ‘The man who was’ (1889), in R. Kipling, Life’s Handicap (New York: Doubleday, 1936), p. 91.

  76. A. F. Salahuddin Ahmed, Social Ideas and Social Change in Bengal, 1818–35 (Leiden: Brill, 1965), p. 37.

  77. S. Chaudhuri, Renaissance and Renaissances: Europe and Bengal (University of Cambridge Centre for South Asian Studies Occasional Papers, no. 1, 2004), p. 4.

  78. D. Kopf, The Brahmo Samaj and the Shaping of the Modern Indian Mind (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), is a profoundly insightful work. G. Haldar, Vidyasagar: A Reassessment (New York: People’s Publishing House, 1972), is an outstanding portrait. M. K. Haldar’s introduction to Bankimchandra Chattopadhyaya’s insider-essay, Renaissance and Reaction in Nineteenth-Century Bengal (Calcutta: Minerva, 1977), is brisk, perceptive, and provocative. M. Rajaretnam, ed., José Rizal and the Asian Renaissance (Kuala Lumpur: Institut Kajian Dasar, 1996), contains some suggestive essays.

  79. N. Keddie, Sayyid Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972). A. Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), is fundamental. Z. Sardar is the current incarnation of Islamic tradition favourably disposed to the West. See, for instance, Desperately Seeking Paradise: Journeys of a Sceptical Muslim (London: Granta, 2005).

  80. I. Duncan, ‘Darwin and the savages’, Yale Journal of Criticism, iv (1991), pp. 13–45.

  81. C. Darwin, On the Origin of Species (London: Murray, 1859), p. 490.

  82. On the Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1872) set out the theory and placed humankind in its context. N. Eldredge, Time Frames (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985), is the best modern critique. A. Desmond and J. Moore, Darwin (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994), is the best biography – exciting and challenging; more exhaustive and more staid are the two volumes of J. Browne, Charles Darwin (New York: Knopf, 1995).

  83. R. C. Bannister, Social Darwinism: Science and Myth in Anglo-American Social Thought (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989), p. 40.

  84. H. Spencer, An Autobiography, 2 vols (London: Murray, 1902), i, p. 502; ii, p. 50.

  85. M. Hawkins, Social Darwinism in European and American Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 81–6.

  86. K. Taizo and T. Hoquet, ‘Translating “Natural Selection” in Japanese’, Bionima, vi (2013), pp. 26–48.

  87. D. Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c. 1848–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

  88. N. Stepan, Picturing Tropical Nature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001).

  89. H. Krausnick et al., Anatomy of the SS State (New York: Walker, 1968), p. 13; Fernández-Armesto, A Foot in the River, p. 63.

  90. Browne, Charles Darwin, i, p. 399.

  91. G. Best, Humanity in Warfare (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), pp. 44–5, 108–9.

  92. G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. A. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 361.

  93. P. Bobbitt, The Shield of Achilles (New York: Knopf, 2002), is a spectacular, hawkish history of war in international relations. B. Heuser, Reading Clausewitz (London: Random House, 2002), explains his thought and surveys his influence. M. Howard, Clausewitz (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), is a pithy and satisfying introduction.

  94. C. von Clausewitz, On War, trans. J. J. Graham, 3 vols (London: Routledge, 1968), i, pp. 2; ii, p. 24.

  95. G. Ritter, The Sword and the Scepter, 2 vols (Miami: University of Miami Press, 1969), is the classic study of German militarism. V. R. Berghahn, Militarism (Leamington Spa: Berg, 1981), and N. Stargardt, The German Idea of Militarism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), are helpful introductions for the period from the 1860s onward. S. Finer, The Man on Horseback (New York: Praeger, 1965), is an outstanding investigation of the social and political role of the military.

  96. H. Pross, ed., Die Zerstörung der deutschen Politik: Dokumente 1871–1933 (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1959), pp. 29–31.

  97. A. Bowler, ‘Politics as art: Italian futurism and fascism’, Theory and Society, xx (1991), pp. 763–94.

  98. B. Mussolini, Doctrine of Fascism, para. 3; C. Cohen, ed., Communism, Fascism and Democracy: The Theoretical Foundations (New York: Random House, 1972), pp. 328–39.

  99. B. V. A. Rolling, ‘The sin of silence’, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, xxxvi (1980), no. 9, pp. 10–13.

  100. K. Fant, Alfred Nobel (New York: Arcade, 1993), is the only really useful study of the man. L. S. Wittner, The Struggle against the Bomb, 2 vols (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995–7), is a comprehensive study of the nuclear disarmament movement. Stanley Kubrick´s movie of 1964, Dr Strangelove, is a delectable black-comic satire of the Cold War.

  101. F. Galton, ‘Hereditary talent and character’, Macmillan’s Magazine, xii (1865), pp. 157–66, 318–27; F. Galton, ‘Eugenics: its definition, scope, and aims’, American Journal of Sociology, x (1904), no. 1, pp. 1–25.

  102. F. Galton, Essays in Eugenics [1909] (New York: Garland, 1985). M. S. Quine, Population Politics in Twentieth-Century Europe (London: Routledge, 1996), brilliantly sets out the context. M. B. Adams, ed., The Well-Born Science (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), is a collection of important essays. M. Kohn, The Race Gallery (London: Jonathan Cape, 1995), studies the rise of racial science. C. Clay and M. Leapman, Master Race (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1995), is a chilling account of one of Nazism’s eugenics projects. Bashford, Global Population, is indispensable.

  103. Bethencourt, Racisms.

  104. A. Thomson, Bodies of Thought: Science, Religion, and the Soul in the Early Enlightenment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 240.

  105. A. de Gobineau, The Inequality of Human Races (New York: Howard Fertig, 1999), is the starting point. C. Bolt, Victorian Attitudes to Race (London: Routledge, 1971), and L. Kuper, ed., Race, Science and Society (Paris: UNESCO, 1975), are excellent modern studies.

  106. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, p. 118.

  107. D. Cohn-Sherbok, Anti-Semitism (Stroud: Sutton, 2002), is a balanced and rigorous history. N. Cohn, Europe’s Inner Demons (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), is a classic and controversial investigation of the lineage of anti-Semitism. H. Walser Smith, The Butcher’s Tale (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003), is a fascinating case study. P. Pulzer, The Rise of Political Anti-Semitism in Germany and Austria (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), is well informed and convincing. S. Almog, Nationalism and Antisemitism in Modern Europe (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1990), provides a short overview.

  108. F. Adler, The Religion of Duty (New York: McClure, 1909), p. 108.

  109. M. Knight, ed., Humanist Anthology (London: Barrie and Rockliff, 1961), is a useful collection of texts. Chadwick, The Secularization of the European Mind, is an excellent account of the nineteenth-century ‘crisis of faith’, echoed in A. N. Wilson, God’s Funeral (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999).

  110. Kristeller, Renaissance Thought and Its Sources, is a superb digest on the earlier, unrelated tradition, and can be helpfully supplemented by P. Burke, Tradition and Innovation in Renaissance Italy (London: Fon
tana, 1974).

  111. See K. Armstrong, The Battle for God: Fundamentalism in Judaism, Christianity and Islam (New York: HarperCollins, 2000).

  Chapter 9: The Revenge of Chaos: Unstitching Certainty

  1. J. Chevalier, Henri Bergson (Paris: Plon, 1926), p. 40. L. Kolakowski, Bergson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), is the best introduction to Bergson. A. R. Lacey, Bergson (London: Routledge, 1989), and J. Mullarkey, Bergson and Philosophy (Indianapolis: University of Notre Dame Press, 1999), go into more detail with less elegance.

  2. Chevalier, Henri Bergson, p. 62.

  3. H. Bergson, Creative Evolution (Boston, MA: University Press of America, 1983), p. 161.

  4. H. Bergson, Données immédiates de la conscience [1889] in Oeuvres (Paris, 1959), p. 67; Chevalier, Henri Bergson, p. 53.

  5. H. Bergson, La perception du changement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1911), pp. 18–37.