History Readings

dismissal of Arendt’s work — essentially a rejection of the “banality of evil” argument — is by no means new, but it does not hold up when one truly understands the meaning of her phrase. Couldn’t Eichmann have been a fanatical Nazi and banal?

It is this strange mixture of bravado and cruelty, of patriotic idealism and the shallowness of racialist thinking that Arendt sensed because she was so well attuned to Eichmann’s misuse of the German language and to his idiosyncratic deployment of concepts like the Categorical Imperative. As Stangneth puts it, “Hannah Arendt, whose linguistic and conceptual sensibilities had been honed on classical German literature, wrote that Eichmann’s language was a roller coaster of thoughtless horror, cynicism, whining self-pity, unintentional comedy and incredible human wretchedness.”

Commenting on Eichmann’s claim that he was “neither a murderer nor a mass murderer,” Stangneth writes that his “’inner morality is not an idea of justice,  a universal moral category, or even a kind of introspection…. Eichmann was not demanding a common human law, which could also apply to him, because he, too, was human. He was actually demanding recognition for a National Socialist dogma, according to which each people (Volk) has a right to defend itself by any means necessary, the German people most of all.” Stangneth explains that for Eichmann “Conscience was simply the ‘morality of the Fatherland that dwells within’ a person, which Eichmann also termed ‘the voice of the blood.’ ”

economists can now track what they call “business dynamism” in ways they couldn’t before. As researchers have dug into these numbers, they’ve found that most metrics of dynamism and upheaval in American business have actually been declining for decades, with the downturn steepening after 2000. Fewer new businesses are being launched in the United States, the average age of businesses is increasing, job creation and job destruction are on the wane, industries are being consolidated, and fast-growth businesses are rarer.

There was in fact plenty of upheaval in the top ranks of the business world in the 1980s and ’90s, as newcomers crashed the Fortune 500 list with increasing frequency. And the high tech sector was, as widely perceived, a hotbed of entrepreneurship and growth. All of that activity seems to have peaked, however, a year or two after the stock market did in 2000. Measures of big-business volatility began to drop.High-tech start-up activity and what economists call the skewness of growth—how quickly the fastest-growing companies in a sector are outpacing the median company—declined below the levels of the mid-’90s and stayed there.

spectacular rise in living standards that began in Europe and North America just over 200 years ago is thus largely the work of disruptive innovations. Without a new burst of them, we may face “secular stagnation”—an extended period of slow growth.

Many households have not regained the purchasing power they had before the recession that began in December 2007. Median household income was 8 percent lower last year than in 2007, and the poverty rate was two percentage points higher.

“The typical family has still not seen its income recover from the deep recession, which came on top of a decade in which incomes stagnated for the middle class, itself part of a longer-term trend of increasing income inequality,”

The poverty rate is much lower than the 19 percent of 50 years ago, when President Lyndon B. Johnson declared “unconditional war on poverty.” But it is higher than it was in the 1970s, when the rate dropped as low as 11.1 percent.

Narratives are inevitably moralistic; they are never created spontaneously from “the facts” but are rather stories imposed upon a range of phenomena that always include implicit ideas about what’s right and what’s wrong

sustainability-minded thinkers question whether the Industrial Revolution has jeopardized humankind’s ability to live happily and sustainably upon the Earth. Have the fossil-fueled good times put future generations at risk of returning to the same misery that industrialists were in such a rush to leave behind?

in many ways, the ecological crisis of the present day has roots in the Industrial Revolution.

Denouncing Israel’s treatment of Palestinians under occupation, a group of veterans from an elite, secretive military intelligence unit have declared they will no longer “take part in the state’s actions against Palestinians” in required reserve duty because of what they called “our moral duty to act.”

In a letter sent Thursday night to their commanders as well as Israel’s prime minister and army chief, 43 veterans of the clandestine Unit 8200 complained that Israel made “no distinction between Palestinians who are and are not involved in violence” and that information collected “harms innocent people.” Intelligence “is used for political persecution,” they wrote, which “does not allow for people to lead normal lives, and fuels more violence, further distancing us from the end of the conflict.”

“After our service we started seeing a more complex picture of a nondemocratic, oppressive regime that controls the lives of millions of people,”

The National Football League, which for years disputed evidence that its players had a high rate of severe brain damage, has stated in federal court documents that it expects nearly a third of retired players to develop long-term cognitive problems and that the conditions are likely to emerge at “notably younger ages” than in the general population.

They also appear to confirm what scientists have said for years: that playing football increases the risk of developing neurological conditions like chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a degenerative brain disease that can be identified only in an autopsy.

Concerns that the fund might run dry are largely moot now because the N.F.L. agreed in June to pay an unlimited amount in awards to address concerns raised by the judge

“Eichmann in Jerusalem” in many ways mirrored Eichmann’s own self-presentation. She insisted that, contrary to expectations, the man in the dock was not some kind of demonic Nazi sadist but a thoughtless, relatively anonymous, nonideological bureaucrat dutifully executing orders for the emigration, deportation and murder of European Jewry. Arendt’s insights — that genocide and bureaucratic banality are not necessarily opposed, that fanatical anti-Semitism (or for that matter, any ideological predisposition) is not a sufficient precondition for mass murder — remain pertinent.

as Bettina Stangneth demonstrates in “Eichmann Before Jerusalem,” her critical — albeit respectful — dialogue with Arendt, these insights most certainly do not apply to Eichmann himself. Throughout his post-1945 exile he remained a passionate, ideologically convinced National Socialist.

Since he had a penchant for tailoring his endless chatting and voluminous writings to what he believed his audience desired, it may not be immediately evident why his statements in Buenos Aires should be considered more authentic than the “little man” portrait he painted in Jerusalem. The answer lies in the stance he took against what his Nazi and radical-right audience wanted to hear. For they were intent on either denying the Holocaust altogether, or outlandishly regarding it as either a Zionist plot to obtain a Jewish state or a conspiracy of the Gestapo (not the SS) working against Hitler and without his knowledge. Eichmann dashed these expectations. Not only did he affirm that the horrific events had indeed taken place; he attested to his decisive role in them. Hardly anonymous, he insisted on his reputation as the great mover behind Jewish policy, which became part of the fear, the mystique of power, surrounding him. As Stangneth observes: “He dispatched, decreed, allowed, took steps, issued orders and gave audiences.”

Last month, the University of California system announced that a version of the Big History Project course could be counted in place of a more traditional World History class, paving the way for the state’s 1,300 high schools to offer it.

“We didn’t know when the last time was that somebody introduced a new course into high school,” Gates told me. “How does one go about it? What did the guy who liked biology — who did he call and say, ‘Hey, we should have biology in high school?’ It was pretty uncharted territory. But it was pretty cool.”

The American high school experience, at least as we now know it, is a relatively recent invention. Attendance did not start to become mandatory until the 1850s, and the notion of a nationwide standardized curriculum didn’t emerge until the turn of the century. But by the early 1900s, most children were taking the same list of classes that remains recognizable to this day: English, math, science and some form of history. For much of the 20th century, this last requirement would usually take the form of Western Civilization, a survey course that focused on European countries from around the rise of Rome through modernity.

Only the presence of slavery was a harbinger of problems. “It is not economic inequality that caused the subsequent development of poor institutions,” wrote Nunn. “Rather, it was slavery itself.”

Soares and his colleagues examined the connection between historical slavery and contemporary inequality in a number of countries, largely in Latin America. The authors found a consistent correlation between the existence—and intensity—of slavery in the past and contemporary inequality. Moreover, this relationship was independent of the number of people of African descent living there today.

how exactly did slavery have this effect on contemporary inequality? Soares and his colleagues speculated that limited political rights for slaves and their descendants played a role, as did negligible access to credit and capital. Racial discrimination, too, would h

What’s the moral here? For years, pundits and politicians have insisted that guaranteed health care is an impossible dream, even though every other advanced country has it. Covering the uninsured was supposed to be unaffordable; Medicare as we know it was supposed to be unsustainable. But it turns out that incremental steps to improve incentives and reduce costs can achieve a lot, and covering the uninsured isn’t hard at all.

I look to historians for their power to illuminate not just the invisible lineaments of the present, but also that which is not present. What are the roads that were not taken that most shape our own time?

Nelson Lichtenstein, who parlayed a career writing about midcentury capitalism and industrial unionism into extraordinarily penetrating accounts of why the economic regime we live under today is so deeply unsatisfying. One abandoned idea documented in his most recent book, “A Contest of Ideas: Capital, Politics, and Labor,” haunts me. Powerful people in the Democratic Party, like Senator Robert Wagner of New York, used to insist that the job of liberalism was to penetrate the “black box” of the corporation and turn the workplace into a more democratic institution. They believed that to leave decision-making in the great firms that dominate our lives merely to owners (as opposed to, say, the system of “co-determination” between labor and management under which the German economy now thrives) was no less than a violation of the Constitution’s 13th Amendment, which outlawed involuntary servitude.

who today are the best writers on American politics? There are two, and they both are bloggers. One, Corey Robin of Brooklyn College, is also a political theorist; his book “The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism From Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin” provides the most convincing account about what right-wing habits of mind are ultimately all about.