“Is Art a Superstition, or a Way of Life?” (Part 2)

“Let us now take for granted the historically normal and religiously orthodox view that, just as ethics is the ‘right way of doing things,’ so art is the ‘making well of whatever needs making,’ or simply ‘the right way of making things:’ and still addressing ourselves to those [who]…ask whether art is not after all a necessity.

A necessity is something that we cannot afford to do without, whatever its price. We cannot go into questions of price here, except to say that art need not be, and should not be expensive, except to the extent that costly materials are employed. It is at this point that the crucial question arises of manufacture for profit versus manufacture for use. It is because the idea of manufacture for profit is bound up with the currently accepted industrial sociology that things in general are not well made and therefore also not beautiful. It is the manufacturer’s interest to produce what we like, or can be induced to like, regardless of whether or not it will agree with us…. Manufacturers and other artists alike resort to advertisement; art is abundantly advertised in schools and colleges, by ‘Museums of Modern Art,’ and by art dealers; and artist and manufacturer both alike price their wares according to what the traffic will bear. [….] It is only when the maker of things is a maker of things by vocation, and not merely holding down a job, that the price of things approximate to their real value; and under these circumstances, when we pay for a work of art designed to serve a necessary purpose, we get our money’s worth; and the purpose being a necessary one, we must be able to afford to pay for the art, or else we are living below a normal human standard; as most men are now living, even the rich, if we consider quality rather than quantity. Needless to add that the workman is also victimised by a manufacture for profit; so that it has become a mockery to say to him that hours of work should be more enjoyable than hours of leisure….

Industry without art is brutality. Art is specifically human. None of those primitive peoples, past or present, whose culture we affect to despise and propose to amend, has dispensed with art; from the stone age onwards, everything made by man, under whatever conditions of hardship or poverty, has been made by art to serve a double purpose, at once utilitarian and ideological. It is we who, collectively speaking at least, command amply sufficient resources, who have first proposed to make a division of art, one sort to be barely utilitarian, the other luxurious, and altogether omitting what was once the highest function of art, to express and to communicate ideas. It is long since sculpture was thought of as the poor man’s ‘book.’ [….]

…[T]he whole business of ‘collecting’ and the ‘love of art’ are no more than a sentimental aberration and means of escape from the serious business of life. 
…[M]erely to cultivate the higher things of life, if art be such, in hours of leisure to be obtained by a further substitution of mechanical for manual means of production, is as much a vanity as the cultivation of religion for religion’s sake on Sundays only could ever be; and…the pretensions of the modern artist are fundamentally wishful and egotistic. [….]

As to fame, it need only be pointed out that the greater part of the greatest art of the world has been produced anonymously, and that if any workman has only fame in view, ‘any proper man ought to be ashamed for good people to know this of him.’ And as to art, to say that the artist works for art is an abuse of language. Art is that by which a man works, supposing that he is in possession of his art and has the habit of his art; just as prudence or conscience is that by which he acts well. Art is no more the end of his work than prudence the end of his conduct.

It is only because under the conditions established in a system of production for profit rather than for use we have forgotten the meaning of the word ‘vocation,’ and think only in terms of ‘jobs,’ that such confusions as these are possible. The man who has a ‘job’ is working for ulterior motives, and may be quite indifferent to the quality of the product, for which he is not responsible; all that he wants in this case is to secure an adequate share of the expected profits. But one whose vocation is specific, that is to say who is naturally and constitutionally adapted to and trained in some one or another kind of making, even though he earns his living by this making, is really doing what he likes most; and if he is forced by circumstance to do some other kind of work, even though more highly paid, is actually unhappy. The vocation, whether it be that of the farmer or the architect, is a function; the exercise of this function as regards the man himself is the most indispensable means of spiritual development, and as regards to his relation to society the measure of his worth. It is precisely in this way that as Plato says, ‘more will be done, and with more ease, when everyone does but one thing, according to his genius; and this is justice to each man himself.’ It is the tragedy of a society industrially organized for profit that this justice to each man in himself is denied him; and that any such society literally and inevitably plays the Devil with the rest of the world.

The basic error in what we have called the illusion of culture is the assumption that art is something to be done by a special kind of man, and particularly that kind of man we call a genius. In direct opposition to this is the normal and humane view that art is simply the right way of making things, whether symphonies or airplanes. The normal view assumes, in other words, not that the artist is a special kind of man, but that every man who is not a mere idler and parasite is necessarily some special kind of artist, skilled and well contented in making or arranging of some one thing or another according to his constitution and training. [….]

What the class thinker who is not merely an underdog, but also a man, has a right to demand is…the opportunity to take as great a pleasure in doing whatever he does for hire, as he takes in his own garden or family life; what he should demand, in other words, is the opportunity to be an artist. No civilisation that can be accepted that denies him this.”—Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, Christian and Oriental Philosophy of Art (New York: Dover, 1956 [originally published in 1943 under the title, Why Exhibit Works of Art?])

“Is Art a Superstition, or a Way of Life?” (Part 1)

“It seems to be a matter of general agreement at the present day that ‘Art’ is a part of the higher things of life, to be enjoyed in hours of leisure earned by other hours of inartistic ‘Work.’ We find accordingly as one of the most obvious characteristics of our culture a class division of artists from workmen, of those for example who paint on canvas from those who paint the walls of houses, and of those who handle the pen from those who handle the hammer. We are certainly not denying that there is a distinction of the contemplative from the active life, nor of free from servile operation: but mean to say that in our civilization we have in the first place made an absolute divorce of the contemplative from the active life, and in the second place substituted for the contemplative life an aesthetic life…. [….] In any case we have come to think of art and work as incompatible, or at least independent, categories and have for the first time in history created an industry without art. [….]

Art having been abstracted from the general activity of making things for human use, material or spiritual, has come to mean for us the projection in a visible form of the feelings or reactions of the peculiarly-endowed personality of the artist, and especially of those most peculiarly-endowed personalities which we think of as ‘inspired’ or describe in terms of genius. Because the artistic genius is mysterious we, who accept the humbler status of the workman, have been only too willing to call the artist a ‘prophet,’ and in return for his ‘vision’ to allow him many privileges that a common man might hesitate to exercise. [….] Whereas it was once the highest purpose of life to achieve a freedom from oneself, it is now our will to secure the greatest possible measure of freedom for oneself, no matter what. [….]

Our theoretical knowledge of the material and technical bases of art, and of its actual forms, is encyclopedic; but we are either indifferent to its raison d’être and final cause, or find this reason and ultimate justification for the very existence of the work in the pleasure to be derived from its beauty by the patron. We say the patron; but under present conditions, it is oftener for his own than for the patron’s pleasure that the artist works; the perfect patron being nowadays, not the man who knows what he wants, but the man who is willing to commission the artist to do whatever he likes, and thus as we express it, ‘respects the freedom of the artist.’ The consumer, the man, is at the mercy of the manufacturer for pleasure (the ‘artist’) and manufacturer for profit (the ‘exploiter’) and these two are more nearly the same than we expect. [….]

It is one of the greatest counts against our civilization that the pleasures afforded by art, whether in the making or of subsequent appreciation, are not enjoyed or even supposed to be enjoyed by the workman at work. It is taken for granted that while at work we are doing what we like least, and while at play what we should wish to be doing all the time. And…it is not so shocking that the workman should be underpaid, as that he should not be able to delight as much in what he does for hire as in what he does by free choice. As Meister Eckhart says, ‘the craftsman like talking of his handicraft:’ but, the factory worker likes talking of the ball game! It is an inevitable consequence of production under such conditions that quality is sacrificed to quantity: an industry without art provides a necessary apparatus of existence: houses, clothing, frying pans, and so forth, but an apparatus lacking the essential characteristics of things made by art, the characteristics, viz., of beauty and significance. Hence we say that the life we call civilized is more nearly an animal and mechanical life than a human life; and that in all these respects it contrasts unfavourably with the life of savages, of American Indians for example, to whom it had never occurred that manufacture, the activity of making things for use, could ever be made an artless activity.”—Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, Christian and Oriental Philosophy of Art (New York: Dover, 1956 [originally published in 1943 under the title, Why Exhibit Works of Art?])

Science & Religion: A Select Bibliography

This is a slightly different version of a compilation I put together at the request of a colleague, so I thought I’d share it with our readers, some of whom, presumably, have an interest in the subject.

• Barbour, Ian G. Issues in Science and Religion. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1966.
• Barbour, Ian G. Myths, Models, and Paradigms: A Comparative Study in Science and Religion. New York: Harper and Row, 1974.
• Barbour, Ian G. Religion and Science: Historical and Contemporary Issues. New York: HarperSanFrancisco, revised ed., 1997.
• Barbour, Ian G. When Science Meets Religion. New York: HarperCollins, 2000.
• Brooke, John Hedley. Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
• Brooke, John and Geoffrey Cantor. Reconstructing Nature: The Engagement of Science and Religion. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000 (1998).
• Brooke, John Hedley and Ronald L. Numbers, eds. Science and Religion Around the World. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.
• Cottingham, John. The Spiritual Dimension: Religion, Philosophy and Human Value. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005. [contains an important chapter on ‘science and religion’]
• Dixon, Thomas. Science and Religion: A Very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.
• Ferngren, Gary B., ed. Science and Religion: A Historical Introduction. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002.
• Gould, Stephen Jay. Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life. New York: Ballantine, 1999.
• Harrison, Peter, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Science and Religion. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
• Haught, John F. Is Nature Enough? Meaning and Truth in the Age of Science. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
• Haught, John F. Making Sense of Evolution: Darwin, God and the Drama of Life. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010.
• Lopez, Donald S. Buddhism and Science: A Guide for the Perplexed. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Plantinga, Alvin, “Religion and Science,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2010 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2010/entries/religion-science/ .
• Ruse, Michael. Can a Darwinian Be a Christian? The Relationship Between Science and Religion. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
• Stenmark, Mikael. Rationality in Science, Religion, and Everyday Life. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995.
• Wallace, Allan B., ed. Buddhism and Science: Breaking New Ground. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003.

Freud and the Philosophers

“Virtually all those who are not ignorant of Freud or totally skeptical of his findings believe that he altered, radically altered, our conception of the mind. He effected a change of what we think we are like, and it was a big change. Astonishingly enough, it is philosophers who have been of all people slowest to recognize this fact. They have been slowest to recognize that this fact has anything to do with them.”—Richard Wollheim, The Mind and Its Depths (1993): 91.

In addition to Wollheim himself (regrettably, no longer with us), among those I would count as exceptions to this generalization include Sebastian Gardner, the late David Sachs, Donald Levy, John Cottingham, Marcia Cavell,* the late Ilham Dilman, Jonathan Lear, Ernest Wallwork, John Deigh, and Jim Hopkins. I haven’t read much beyond his first book (only a few articles in edited volumes), but I was informed that Michael Stocker should be in this list as well and I agree.

* I'm not sure where Professor Cavell is currently teaching, it may be at U.C. Berkeley.

The Port Huron Statement at 50

If any Ratio Juris readers of Leftist suasion like yours truly are in Southern California in February of 2012, I thought this conference here in Santa Barbara would be worth attending: The Port Huron Statement at 50 (!). I’ve put together some homework/background reading for those of you perhaps too young to be intimately acquainted or well-versed in this history. The Port Huron Statement, first published by the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) (the student Department of the League for Industrial Democracy) in 1962, is reprinted as the appendix in the Miller volume below.

• Breines, Wini. Community and Organization in the New Left, 1962-1968: The Great Refusal. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1989.
• Carson, Clayborne. In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981.
• Case, John and Rosemary C.R. Taylor, eds. Co-Ops, Communes, and Collectives: Experiments in Social Change in the 1960s and 1970s. New York: Pantheon Books, 1979.
• Cohen, Robert and Reginald D. Zelnik, eds. The Free Speech Movement: Reflections on Berkeley in the 1960s. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002.
• Gitlin, Todd. The Whole World is Watching: mass media in the making and unmaking of the new left. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1980.
• Gitlin, Todd. The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage. New York: Bantam, 1987.
• Katsiaficas, George. The Imagination of the New Left: A Global Analysis of 1968. Boston, MA: South End Press, 1987.
• Miller, James. “Democracy is in the Streets: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987.
• Sale, Kirkpatrick. SDS. New York: Random House, 1973.

Václav Havel & The Existential Revolution

The playwright, essayist, and dissident, Václav Havel (1936-2011), died on Sunday. Havel was one of the foremost leaders of Czechoslovakia’s 1989 “Velvet Revolution,” the genesis of which was the invasion by the Soviet Union and four other Warsaw Pact states of the country in August 1968 so as to put a stop to its “popular experiment [in] reform socialism.” While the seeds of the nonviolent Velvet Revolution were planted during this particular revolt against Party-State Socialism, in the short term, the invasion was successful: “by 1970, Czechoslovakia had become one of the most rigidly orthodox states in the Soviet bloc.” One might reasonably conclude that nonviolent civil resistance clearly failed in this case, although it has been plausibly argued that the principle variables in determining the outcome were found in the orbit of “high politics,” the precise nature of the civil resistance possessing, therefore, little relevance to that outcome. Yet the commitment to nonviolent civil resistance did not disappear, even if the opposition’s strategies and tactics (exemplified by the Citizens’ Forum and The Public against Violence) differed this time ‘round. What is more, the geo-political circumstances had significantly changed for the better in the intervening period, and it may well have been this fact that was decisive in explaining the comparative success of the Velvet Revolution.

Havel did not simply oppose, with considerable courage, the post-totalitarian society’s structural and political constraints on “living within the truth,” nor was his conception of a nonviolent revolution solely social or political in essence or orientation. In his well-known essay, “The Power of the Powerless” (1978), Havel wrote of the need for broad “existential revolution” in the industrial and post-industrial nation-states of the Northern hemisphere. It is only upon the basis of such a revolution that can one hope to achieve a “generally ethical—and, of course ultimately a political—reconstitution of society.” Without here going into details, Havel’s conception of an existential revolution is uncannily similar in important respects to Rudolf Bahro’s largely cognitive conception of “general emancipation” first outlined in The Alternative in Eastern Europe (1978, published in German in 1977) and later articulated in a “deep ecology” and more explicitly spiritual framework (wherein the forces of reason are now ‘relativized’ in the ‘economy of consciousness’) after Bahro moved to West Germany and became a leading spokesperson for the “fundamentalist” faction of Die Grünen. Havel here outlines the necessity of an existential revolution, the basic premises of which should be attractive to those of us who identify with the “religious left:”

“What we call the consumer and industrial (or post-industrial) society, and Ortega y Gasset once understood as ‘the revolt of the masses,’ as well as the intellectual, moral, political and social misery in the world today: all of this is perhaps merely an aspect of the deep crisis in which humanity, dragged helplessly along by the automatism of global technological civilization, finds itself.

The post-totalitarian system is only one aspect—a particularly drastic aspect and thus all the more revealing of its real origins—of the general inability of modern humanity to be master of its own situation. The automatism of the post-totalitarian system is merely an extreme version of the global automatism of technological civilization [what Rudolf Bahro, after Lewis Mumford, refers to as the ‘Megamachine’]. The human failure that it mirrors is only one variant of the general failure of modern humanity.

This planetary challenge to the position of human beings in the world is, of course, also taking place in the Western world, the only difference being the social and political forms it takes. [….] There is no real evidence that Western democracy, that is, the democracy of the traditional parliamentary type, can offer solutions that are any more profound. It may even be said that the more room there is in the Western democracies (compared to our world), for the genuine aims of life, the better the crisis is hidden from people and the more deeply do they become immersed in it.

[….] People are manipulated in ways that are infinitely more subtle and refined than the brutal methods used in the post-totalitarian societies. But this static conception of rigid, conceptually sloppy and politically pragmatic mass political parties run by professional apparatuses and releasing the citizen from all forms of concrete and personal responsibility; and those complex forces of capital accumulation engaged in secret manipulations and expansion; the omnipresent dictatorship of consumption, production, advertising, commerce, consumer culture, and all that flood of information: all of it, so often analyzed and described, can only with great difficulty be imagined as the source of humanity’s rediscovery of itself. [….] In a democracy, human beings may enjoy many personal freedoms and securities that are unknown to us, but in the end they do them no good, for they too are ultimately victims of the same automatism, and are incapable of defending their concerns about their own identity or preventing their superficialization [sic] or transcending concerns about their own personal survival to become proud and responsible members of the polis, making a genuine contribution to the creation of its destiny. [….]

Above all, any existential revolution should provide hope of a moral reconstitution of society, which means a radical renewal of the relationship of human beings to what I have called the ‘human order,’ which no political order can replace. A new experience of being, a renewed rootedness in the universe, a newly grasped sense of ‘higher responsibility,’ a new-found inner relationship to other people and to the human community—these factors clearly indicate the direction in which we must go.

And the political consequences? Most probably they could be reflected in the constitution of structures that will derive from this ‘new spirit,’ from human factors rather than from a particular formalization of political relationships and guarantees. In other words, the issue is the rehabilitation of values like trust, openness, responsibility, solidarity, love. I believe in structures held together more by a commonly shared feeling of the importance of certain communities than by commonly shared ambitions directed ‘outward.’”

In a later piece, “Politics and Conscience” (1984)*, Havel writes in a Gandhian-like vein that he

“favour[s] ‘anti-political politics’ [which calls to mind the Hungarian writer György (George) Konrád’s Antipolitics (1984)] that is, politics not as the technology of power and manipulation, of cybernetic rule over humans or as the art of the useful, but politics as one of the ways of seeking and achieving meaningful lives, of protecting them and serving them. I favour politics as practical morality, as service to the truth, as essentially human and humanly measured care for our fellow humans. It is, I presume, an approach which, in this world, is extremely impractical and difficult to apply in daily life. Still, I know no better alternative.”

* This was intended for the University of Toulouse where Havel was to be awarded an honorary doctorate but was unable to attend.

References and Further Reading:

• Bahro, Rudolf (David Fernbach, tr.). The Alternative in Eastern Europe. London: NLB, 1978.
• Bahro, Rudolf. From Red to Green: Interviews with New Left Review. London: Verso Editions and NLB, 1984.
• Bahro, Rudolf (Mary Tyler, tr.). Building the Green Movement. Philadelphia, PA: New Society Publishers, 1986.
• Bahro, Rudolf (David Clarke, tr., and Palden Jenkins, ed.). Avoiding Social and Ecological Disaster: The Politics of World Transformation. Bath, UK: Gateway Books, 1994.
• Garton Ash, Timothy. The Magic Lantern: The Revolution of ’89 Witnessed in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin and Prague. New York: Vintage, 3rd ed., 1999.
• Havel, Václav (Jan Vladislav, ed.). Living in Truth. London: Faber and Faber, 1987.
• Havel, Václav (Paul Wilson, tr.). Letters to Olga: June 1979—September 1982. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988.
• Konrad, George (Richard E. Allen, tr.). Antipolitics: An Essay. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984.
• Williams, Kieran. “Civil Resistance in Czechoslovakia: From Soviet Invasion to ‘Velvet Revolution,’ 1968-89,” in Adam Roberts and Timothy Garton Ash, eds. Civil Resistance and Power Politics: The Experience of Nonviolent Action from Gandhi to the Present. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.

George Whitman: communist, utopian, and humanist…and “the most un-phony person” (Update, Dec. 16)

From the Los Angeles Times obituary:

“George Whitman, the legendary founder of the Paris bookshop and literary institution Shakespeare & Co., died Wednesday. He was 98.

The Left Bank bookshop was closed Wednesday, and a note on the door said Whitman had suffered a stroke a few months earlier. He ‘died peacefully at home in the apartment above his bookshop,’ the letter said.

On Wednesday night, people stopped to leave notes, flowers and candles along the ground and covering the window of the shop, now run by his daughter, Sylvia. Many of them said the place had always been much more than a bookshop to them, but a second home. Literally.

Over the years, Whitman has sheltered about 50,000 young, struggling writer types for free, right in the shop if they needed a roof, wanted to save a franc, or just had ideas about books and a hankering for a certain bohemian way of life. All they had to do in exchange was work a few hours in the shop, write a one-page biography and provide their picture (an idea born out of Whitman’s attempt to appease French authorities who wanted to know more about the clandestine ‘hotel’ he was running on the left bank of the Seine River).

The shop has kept all the letters from past boarders, dubbed ‘Tumbleweeds’ by Whitman, and each one is a testament to how he changed their lives.

Pia Copper said Whitman hired her on the spot in 1994, and she stayed 10 years.

’He found so many young people who were lost, on drugs, totally hopeless, and they lived here. And there was no hard logic to it, other than: Give them a roof, and maybe part of the shop will rub off on them,’ Copper said.

Though eventually an economic success, attracting book lovers from all over the world and writers such as Anais Nin, Lawrence Durrell, Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the running joke was that the place rarely actually did what a bookstore is supposed to do: Sell books.

And that was exactly how Whitman wanted it. He used to call Shakespeare & Co. ‘a socialist utopia masquerading as a bookshop,’ and in a recent interview with the Los Angeles Times, he said: ‘I never had any money, and never needed it. I’ve been a bum all my life.’

But Whitman was something of a wild-haired, and wild-mannered, king to those who knew him. The land he ruled, with its constant flow of lodgers and poets from all over the world, might as well have come out of the books he loved, and read so voraciously. (One per night.)

Inspired by Sylvia Beach’s famous Paris bookstore and publishing house, which closed during World War II, Whitman fashioned the 17th century, two-story apartment into a labyrinth of soft-lit, teetering bookshelves, winding stairs, a library, stacks of well-read Life magazines, and cushy benches that turned to beds at night for Tumbleweeds. Free tea and pancake brunches were served every weekend to anyone brave, or hungry enough. After brunch, the leftover, mysteriously thick pancake batter was used as glue to repair peeling floor rugs.

Whitman didn’t care much for supervising the young lodgers that passed through, but his temper could famously flare if a book was misplaced or an edition not shelved just so.

’He’s the most un-phony person,’ Sylvia Whitman, 30, said in an interview this year with The Times. He ‘says what he thinks, and he doesn’t care what anyone thinks of him. And it’s quite refreshing.’

He once threw a book out the second floor window at a customer below because he thought they might enjoy reading it. And he used to light people’s hair on fire to save them the trouble of paying for a haircut. After all, he had been using the same technique on himself for years.” [….]

And from the New York Times:

“More than a distributor of books, Mr. Whitman saw himself as patron of a literary haven, above all in the lean years after World War II, and the heir to Sylvia Beach, the founder of the original Shakespeare & Company, the celebrated haunt of Hemingway and James Joyce.

As Mr. Whitman put it, ‘I wanted a bookstore because the book business is the business of life.’

Overlooking the Seine and facing the Cathedral of Notre-Dame, the store, looking somewhat beat-up behind a Dickensian facade and spread over three floors, has been an offbeat mix of open house and literary commune. For decades Mr. Whitman provided food and makeshift beds to young aspiring novelists or writing nomads, often letting them spend a night, a week, or even months living among the crowded shelves and alcoves.

He welcomed visitors with large-print messages on the walls. ‘Be not inhospitable to strangers, lest they be angels in disguise,’ was one, quoting Yeats. Next to a wishing well at the center of the store, a sign said: ‘Give what you can, take what you need. George.’ By his own estimate, he lodged some 40,000 people.

Mr. Whitman’s store, founded in 1951, has also been a favorite stopover for established authors and poets to read from their work and sign their books. Its visitors list reads like a Who’s Who of American, English, French and Latin American literature: Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, Samuel Beckett and James Baldwin were frequent callers in the early days; other regulars included Lawrence Durrell and the Beat writers William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso, all of them Mr. Whitman’s friends.

Another was the Beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti. The two met in Paris in the late 1940s and discussed the importance of free-thinking bookstores. Mr. Ferlinghetti went on to found what became a landmark bookshop in its own right, City Lights, in San Francisco. Their bookstores would be sister shops, the two men agreed.

Mr. Whitman’s beacon and enduring influence was Walt Whitman (no relation), who also ran a bookstore, more than a century ago. In a pamphlet, Mr. Whitman wrote that he felt a kinship with the poet. ‘Perhaps no man liked so many things and disliked so few as Walt Whitman,’ he wrote, ‘and I at least aspire to the same modest attainment.’” [….]

Addenda: Professor Alice Woolley has kindly informed me of a book that some of us might enjoy: Jeremy Mercer, Time Was Soft There: A Paris Sojourn at Shakespeare & Co. (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2005).

One of my former classmates from high school (class of 1975!), Patrick J. Cain, an attorney in Los Angeles, sent the following picture of himself sitting outside Shakespeare & Co. holding a copy of Father Gregory Boyle’s Tatoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion (2010) which, it turns out, was penned by Patrick’s brother-in-law!

Group Identity, Agency & Collective Responsibility: A Select Bibliography

This is the first draft of a compilation of book titles (in English) useful for delineating the contours of group identity, agency and collective responsibility in its various dimensions: metaphysical (and/or ontological), epistemic, psychosocial, moral, and legal. The list endeavors to represent the crème de la crème of the (fairly recent) relevant literature, so it’s not intended to be comprehensive, let alone exhaustive. I welcome suggestions for additional titles.

• Appiah, Kwame Anthony. The Ethics of Identity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005.
• Bion, W.R. Experiences in Groups, and other papers. London: Tavistock/Routledge, 1961.
• Brewer, Marilynn B. Intergroup Relations. Philadelphia, PA: Open University Press, 2nd ed., 2003.
• Brown, Rupert. Group Processes: Dynamics Within and Between Groups. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2nd ed., 2000.
• Burkitt, Ian. Social Selves: Theories of Self and Society. London: Sage, 2nd ed., 2008.
• Cane, Peter. Responsibility in Law and Morality. Oxford, UK: Hart, 2002.
• Casals, Neus Torbisco. Group Rights as Human Rights: a Liberal Approach to Multiculturalism. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2006.
• Dalal. Farhad. Taking the Group Seriously: Towards a Post-Foulkesian Group Analytic Theory. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 1998.
• Erskine, Toni, ed. Can Institutions Have Responsibilities? Collective Moral Agency and International Relations. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.
• French, Peter A. Collective and Corporate Responsibility. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984.
• French, Peter A. and Howard K. Wettstein, eds. Shared Intentions and Collective Responsibility. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006.
• Gilbert, Margaret. A Theory of Political Obligation: Membership, Commitment, and the Bonds of Society. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.
• Goldman, Alvin I. Knowledge in a Social World. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
• Goodin, Robert E. Protecting the Vulnerable: A Reanalysis of Our Social Responsibilities. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1985.
• Goodin, Robert E. Utilitarianism as a Public Philosophy. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
• Graham, Keith. Practical Reasoning in a Social World: How We Act Together. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
• Hinshelwood, R.D. What Happens in Groups: Psychoanalysis, the Individual, and the Community. London: Free Association Books, 1987.
• Hogg, Michael A. and Scott Tindale, eds. Blackwell Handbook of Social Psychology: Group Processes. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001.
• Ingram, David. Group Rights: Reconciling Equality and Difference. Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 2000.
• Isaacs, Tracy. Moral Responsibility in Collective Contexts. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.
• Kakar, Sudhir. The Colors of Violence: Cultural Identities, Religion, and Conflict. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996.
• Kernberg, Offo F. Ideology, Conflict, and Leadership in Groups and Organizations. New York: New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998.
• Kutz, Christopher. Complicity: Ethics and Law for a Collective Age. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
• List, Christian and Philip Pettit. Group Agency: The Possibility, Design, and Status of Corporate Agents. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.
• May, Larry. The Morality of Groups: Collective Responsibility, Group-Based Harm, Corporate Rights. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1987.
• May, Larry. Sharing Responsibility. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992.
• May, Larry. Crimes Against Humanity: A Normative Account. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
• May, Larry and Stacey Hoffman, eds. Collective Responsibility: Five Decades of Debate in Theoretical and Applied Ethics. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1991.
• McMahon, Christopher. Collective Rationality and Collective Reasoning. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
• Miller, Richard W. Globalizing Justice: The Ethics of Poverty and Power. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.
• Miller, Seumas. The Moral Foundations of Social Institutions. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
• Ruben, David-Hillel. The Metaphysics of the Social World. London: Routledge, 1985.
• Schmitt, Frederick F., ed. Socializing Metaphysics: The Nature of Social Reality. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003.
• Searle, John R. The Construction of Social Reality. New York: The Free Press, 1995.
• Tuomela, Raimo. The Importance of Us: A Philosophical Study of Basic Social Notions. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995.
• Tuomela, Raimo. The Philosophy of Social Practices: A Collective Acceptance View. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
• Tuomela, Raimo. The Philosophy of Sociality: The Shared Point of View. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Image: Vanessa Bell (née Stephen) (1879-1961) – c. 1943 The Memoir Club (National Portrait Gallery, London). The Memoir Club (Bloomsbury Group): Duncan Grant; Leonard Woolf; Vanessa Bell; Clive Bell; David Garnett; Baron Keynes; Lydia Lopokova; Sir Desmond MacCarthy; Mary MacCarthy; Quentin Bell; and E. M. Forster.