All Fools Day

Although the origin of playing practical jokes and pranks on this day is hazy, many folklorists believe that it may go back to 16th-century France. At that time, New Year’s Day was March 25, with a full week of partying and exchanging gifts lasting until April 1. In 1582, the Gregorian calendar moved New Year’s Day back to January 1. Those who forgot or refused to honor the new calendar were the butts of jokes and ridicule.

Weather folklore states:
If it thunders on All Fools’ Day, it brings good crops of corn and hay.

Carlyle

Tommy C

When Thomas Carlyle sat down in 1834 to write The French Revolution: A History, he wanted to do more than chronicle the mere procession of events. He wanted readers to smell the fear in the streets during the Terror, to taste the decadence of the Bourbon monarchy, to observe the sartorial cavalcade when the Estates-General meets for the first time since 1614, to picture blood spilling from guillotines. To accomplish his task he marshaled the same tools used by novelists—shifting point of view, imagery, and telling details—and borrowed tone and grandeur from Homer, Virgil, and Milton. What sprang forth from Carlyle’s pen was not a dry account of the French Revolution, but a book brimming with passion and philosophy, one that offered a new style of storytelling that influenced a generation of Victorian writers.
That Carlyle would produce such a fervent account is somewhat surprising given his dour upbringing. Born in Ecclefechan, Scotland, in 1795, he was the eldest son of a household defined by his father’s temper and consuming devotion to Calvinism. A bright but sickly boy, he mastered French and Latin, and excelled at mathematics. His father agreed to let him attend university provided he study to become a minister. At fourteen he enrolled at the University of Edinburgh, continuing his math studies, tutoring students on the side, and devoting his free time to reading. As he grew more confident socially, he began to participate in debate clubs, where he was celebrated for his wit.
Each year Carlyle spent at Edinburgh, the less inclined he was to fulfill his promise to become a minister. Near the end of his studies, he grudgingly enrolled in a nonresidential divinity course, convinced that he would never finish, but aware of his promise to his parents. In 1814, with neither divinity nor arts degree in hand, Carlyle took his first in a series of teaching jobs, first in Annan, later in Kirkcaldy. His days were spent instructing indifferent young men, while his nights were devoted to literature. In the spring of 1817, he abandoned all pretense of becoming a minister.
A growing disaffection with teaching and a surety that his future career lay in writing led Carlyle to give up his teaching post and move back to Edinburgh in the fall of 1818. He cobbled together a meager living doing translations, tutoring, and hack writing. Carlyle continued his voracious reading, looking for hints of craft and style that he could adopt. He considered Coleridge “very great but rather mystical, sometimes absurd.” Essayist William Hazlitt was “worth little, tho’ clever.” Alexander Pope was “eminently good,” while Thomas Gray was found to be “very good and diverting.” Carlyle lamented the death of Washington Irving: “It was a dream of mine that we two should be friends!” He regarded Byron and those like him to be “opium eaters,” people who “raise their minds by brooding over and embellishing their sufferings, from one degree of fervid exaltation and dreamy greatness to another, till at length they run amuck entirely, and whoever meets them would do well to run them thro’ the body.”
He found solace and inspiration in an unlikely place: the writings of the German Romantics. After struggling to teach himself German, he made it through Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust, in which God and Mephistopheles fight over the soul of scholar Heinrich Faust. Goethe’s ideas and writings electrified him, prompting him to encourage his friends to persist with studying German, because “in the hands of the gifted does it become supremely good.” It wasn’t long before Carlyle was privileging German over French literature. His enthusiasm led to a book-length essay on Friedrich Schiller and then a translation of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship that earned him his first big paycheck, in the amount of £180.
In October 1824, Carlyle took a trip to France that he later claimed helped him to write the vivid descriptions in The French Revolution. He did not go to Paris as a young man taking his grand tour, ready to indulge in the delights of French culture; he went as a man who, despite having renounced life as a minister, still viewed the world through the lens of Scots Presbyterianism. After only a few days in Paris, he observed: “France has been so betravelled and beridden and betrodden by all manner of vulgar people that any romance connected with it is entirely gone off ten years ago; the idea of studying it is for me at present altogether out of the question; so I quietly surrender myself to the direction of guide books and laquais de place [local flunkeys], and stroll about from sight to sight.”
Carlyle grudgingly respected Napoleon and his attempts to rationalize French civil life, but held contempt for anything that smacked of the ancien régime. In Carlyle’s estimation, Protestant Germany emphasized work, faith, and personal responsibility, while Roman Catholic France revered whimsy, secularism, and voluptuous delights. “They cannot live without artificial excitements, without sensations agréables. Their houses are not homes, but places where they sleep and dress; they live in cafés and promenades and theatres; and ten thousand dice are set a-rattling every night in every quarter of their city. Every thing seems gilding and fillagree, addressed to the eye not the touch. Their shops and houses are like toy-boxes; every apartment is tricked out with mirrors and expanded into infinitude by their illusion,” wrote Carlyle.
In October 1826, Carlyle wed. Jane Welsh was a woman of formidable intelligence with literary ambitions of her own whom Carlyle had courted for five years. She had had reservations about the man who talked endlessly about his poor health and tried to impress her with his knowledge of German literature. Jane’s mother had found Carlyle’s lack of steady employment troublesome and had forbidden her daughter from encouraging his attentions. But Jane had defied the maternal edict. “I am as nervous as if I were committing a murder,” she’d written in her illicit correspondence with Carlyle, who won out over Jane’s other suitors by engaging her mind. In return for his persistence, Carlyle earned a wife who championed his aspirations, served as his first reader, and tolerated the financial uncertainty that came from living by his pen.
After the wedding, they set up house in Craigenputtock, a farm in Dumfriesshire, Scotland. “It is certain that for living and thinking in, I have never since found in the world a place so favourable. . . . How blessed, might poor mortals be in the straitest circumstances if only their wisdom and fidelity to Heaven and to one another were adequately great!” Carlyle also began to correspond regularly with Ralph Waldo Emerson, with whom he shared an interest in transcendentalism, as well as Goethe, whom he regarded as a literary mentor. At the farm, Carlyle wrote Sartor Resartus, a satirical work featuring a fictional German philosopher and a critique of utilitarianism and British society.
By 1831, the isolation of Craigenputtock had made it an inhospitable home to both Carlyles, so they decamped to London. Living in rural Scotland had kept Carlyle from mingling with the London literati to the detriment of his career, but once in town Carlyle quickly expanded his circle, falling into an easy friendship with John Stuart Mill.
Following the publication of Sartor Resartus, Mill suggested Carlyle tackle the French Revolution. Unable to produce a history Mill had contracted to write, he felt the project would suit Carlyle, who had penned essays about Voltaire, Diderot, and the Diamond Necklace affair, in which Marie Antoinette was falsely accused of defrauding the crown jewelers. To help Carlyle along, Mill also handed over the library of books and pamphlets he had collected. Carlyle agreed and plunged into the project. “I am busy constantly studying with my whole might for a Book on the French Revolution. It is part of my creed that the only Poetry is History could we tell it right,” he wrote Emerson.
After two years of study, Carlyle started to write in September 1834. He predicted that he would finish the book by March 1835, but after finishing three chapters he realized his ambitions did not match his progress. One volume would not suffice, so his plan changed: in December, one book became two; in January 1835, he determined he would need to write three.
In February 1835, Carlyle shared a draft of the first book with Mill. At midnight on the evening of March 6, a hysterical Mill appeared at Carlyle’s door and delivered the news that one of his servants mistook Carlyle’s manuscript for wastepaper and threw it in the fire. “Poor manuscript, all except some four tattered leaves, was annihilated!” he wrote of the upsetting news.
Carlyle now had to reconstruct the first book. There were no drafts or backup copies from which to work. He didn’t take notes. His method was to read, then write like mad. Sections he found lacking were tossed in the fire. “I was as a little Schoolboy, who had laboriously written out his Copy as he could, and was shewing it not without satisfaction to the Master: but . . . the Master had suddenly torn it, saying: ‘No, boy, thou must go and write it better.’”
Mill felt terrible and asked if Carlyle would accept £200 to “repair . . . the loss . . . of time and labour—that is of income?” Embarrassed by the offer, but in financial straits, Carlyle accepted half the sum. Wanting to demonstrate there were no hard feelings, Carlyle suggested that Mill read the first section of book two. Grateful for the renewed trust, Mill agreed, but suggested that Carlyle give the manuscript to Harriet Taylor for safekeeping. Carlyle did not approve of Mill’s intimate relationship with the married Taylor. He also believed that she played a part in the accident, as Mill had confessed he’d read the manuscript to her. Carlyle never delivered the pages and the book went to print without Mill’s comments.
Rewriting the first book was torture for Carlyle. The destroyed manuscript became an ideal in his mind, allowing him to despair at the poor quality of the new draft. He initially made good progress, but abandoned its writing in favor of reading the “trashiest heap of novels.” After his reading holiday, he began again, completing the first and second chapters by the beginning of May. By September 1835, he had rewritten book one. He finished the second book at the end of April 1836. Book three went slower. “The Revolution History goes on about as ill as anybody could wish,” he wrote his brother. “I sit down to write, there is not an idea discernible in the head of me; one dull cloud of pain and stupidity; it is only with an effort like swimming for life that I get begun to think at all.” On January 12, 1837, two years after he began, Carlyle completed book three, “ready both to weep and pray.”
When Carlyle began his book he did so with the idea of writing an epic poem about the French Revolution. “The old Epics are great because they (musically) show us the whole world of those old days: a modern Epic that did the like would be equally admired, and for us far more admirable. But where is the genius that can write it? Patience! Patience!” he wrote in February 1831.
What emerged from Carlyle’s pen was not an epic poem, but an epic history. Although full of lyrical writing, The French Revolution: A History is, of course, a work of prose. Many standard conventions of the epic are absent, such as opening mid-story and intervention of the gods into human affairs. Carlyle does, however, invoke Clio, the muse of history, to guide him and his reader. And like the epics, The French Revolutioni> tells a story that is central to the history of its people. But instead of the founding of Rome or the victory over Troy, Carlyle writes of a revolution that unseated a long-standing monarchy and gave way to the new France.
To judge it as a conventional work of history would not be fair. Writing more than four decades after the French Revolution, Carlyle had enough material to reconstruct the outlines of what had happened. Printing presses ran constantly during the revolution, turning out broadsheets and pamphlets. And, in the aftermath, those who managed to avoid the guillotine penned memoirs. But, despite such abundant sources, Carlyle rejected the model offered by Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, with its objective approach and use of notes to document sources. If he acted as the disinterested narrator, he would remain above the action, unable to put the reader outside the walls of the Bastille the way that Homer put his reader outside the walls of Troy. Carlyle admired Gibbon, citing his ability to offer his readers a “rich and various feast,” but he was not interested in the lessons of history. Instead, he wanted to write a book that captured the frenzy of the revolution, its dramatic power, its most unforgettable details.
To do this, Carlyle had to invent a new way of writing history. From the beginning of book one, Carlyle calls upon readers to move with him through time and space. He asks us to gaze upon the dying King Louis XV and to follow the newly crowned Louis XVI as he retires to his chambers. He constantly assumes the roll of fortune teller. When he first introduces Marie Antoinette, he writes: “Meanwhile the fair young Queen, in her halls of state, walks like a goddess of Beauty, the cynosure of all eyes; as yet mingles not with affairs; heeds not the future; least of all, dreads it.”
For the procession that marks the opening of the Estates-General, Carlyle invites us to “take our station on some coign of vantage.” From his omniscient perch, Carlyle sketches vivid descriptions of the men who will influence the course of the revolution, while speculating as to who will emerge as “king.” Will it be Jean Paul Marat, a “squalidest bleared mortal, redolent of soot and horse-drugs” or the “swart burly-headed” Riquetti Mirabeau, who cuts a “fiery rough figure, with black Samson-locks under the slouch-hat”? Or the “meanest” of the six hundred, Maximilien Robespierre, “that anxious, slight, ineffectual-looking man, under thirty, in spectacles . . . complexion of a multiplex atrabiliar colour, the final shade of which may be the pale sea-green”? Carlyle’s character studies double as moral judgments: He likens Mirabeau to a biblical hero, while painting Marat and Robespierre in putrid terms. He uses their exteriors to caricature their souls.
The combination of eyewitness account and commentary runs throughout the book, allowing Carlyle to make us part of the action. The storming of the Bastille: “A slight sputter;–which has kindled the too combustible chaos; made it a roaring fire–chaos! Bursts forth Insurrection, at sight of its own blood (for there were deaths by that sputter–of fire), into endless rolling explosion of musketry, distraction, execration;—and over head, from the Fortress, let one great gun, with its grape-shot, go booming, to show what we could do.” Carlyle uses the third person to describe the scene and action, then switches to the royal “we” (more precisely the antiroyal “we”) as he and his readers join the mob as it takes the Bastille.
For Louis XVI’s beheading, he puts us in the crowd: “Executioner Sampson shews the Head: fierce shout of Vive la République rises and swells; caps raised on bayonets, hats waving; students of the College of Four Nations take it up, on the far Quai; fling it over Paris. . . . And so, in some half-hour it is done; and the multitude has all departed. Pastrycooks, coffee-sellers, milkmen sing out their trivial quotidian cries.” Carlyle’s use of present tense to describe the sequence of events lends an almost journalistic quality to his work. He is in the moment, recording the scene as it happens, breathing energy and emotion into history.
By taking this approach Carlyle recognized he was doing something new and different, and it terrified him. After writing the first two pages of the book in September 1834, he reported to his brother Jack that: “I am altering my style too, and troubled about many things; bilious too in these smothering windless days. It shall be such a Book! Quite an Epic Poem of the Revolution: an Apotheosis of Sansculottism! Seriously, when in good spirits, I feel as if there were the matter of a very considerable Work within me; but the task of shaping and uttering it will be frightful. Here, as in so many other respects, I am alone: without models, without limits (this is a great want); and must—just do the best I can.”
Just how different what Carlyle was doing can be seen by comparing the opening three sentences of Gibbon’s work with his. Gibbon begins:
In the second century of the Christian Æra, the empire of Rome comprehended the fairest part of the earth, and the most civilized portion of mankind. The frontiers of that extensive monarchy were guarded by ancient renown and disciplined valor. The gentle but powerful influence of laws had cemented the union of the provinces.
Carlyle starts:
President Hénault, remarking on royal Surnames of Honour how difficult it often is to ascertain not only why, but even when, they were conferred, takes occasion in his sleek official way to make a philosophical reflection. ‘The Surname of Bien-aimé (Well-beloved),’ says he, ‘which Louis XV bears, will not leave posterity in the same doubt. This Prince, in the year 1744, while hastening from one end of his kingdom to the other, and suspending his conquests in Flanders that he might fly to the assistance of Alsace, was arrested at Metz by a malady which threatened to cut short his days.’
Gibbon uses the past tense and speaks in an authoritative tone as he provides a measured account of the state of the Roman Empire. For Gibbon, the past is a fixed and ordered place where the outcome of events is certain. Carlyle, on the other hand, begins with a philosophical quip and the tale of Louis XV’s near demise more than forty years before the revolution. The use of the present tense (“he says”) puts the reader directly in the scene. Carlyle doesn’t ask us to sit at his feet as Gibbon implicitly does, he asks us to gallivant through the revolution with him, experiencing events as they happen. In Carlyle’s history, the outcome of events may be foreshadowed but is never certain.
The episode that marks Carlyle’s opening is indicative of the structure of the book itself. Rather than provide a narrative-style account, he offers a procession of vignettes that tell the story of the revolution. This format suits Carlyle’s preference for dramatic moments over procedural ones. Consequently, his emphasis does not always match the significance of events. For example, the mutiny by French troops in the town of Nancy in the summer of 1790 and the machinations of the Legislative Assembly receive the same number of pages. The mutiny was an episode that showed France’s disarray, but the failure of the Legislative Assembly to govern during 1791–1792 led to a constitutional crisis that further inflamed the revolution.
What Carlyle emphasizes can be attributed to favoring the dramatic, but it also stems from his positioning of the mob, particularly the Paris mob, at the center of the story. While he openly admires men like Honoré-Gabriel Riqueti, the Comte de Mirabeau, for his handling of the parliament and the king and queen, Carlyle never turns him into a Hector. Instead, the hero of his history is the mob—they are like Achilles, full of rage and anger, eager to fight.
In his other writings, Carlyle questioned the ability of men to organize themselves, believing they need to have order imposed on them. Yet in The French Revolution, Carlyle time and again praises the mob. “Other mobs are dull masses; which roll onwards with a dull fierce tenacity, a dull fierce heat, but emit no light-flashes of genius as they go. The French mob, again, is among the liveliest phenomena of our world. So rapid, audacious; so clear-sighted, inventive, prompt to seize the moment; instinct with life to its finger-ends! That talent, were there no other, of spontaneously standing in queue, distinguishes, as we said, the French People from all Peoples, ancient and modern.” The French mob succeeds because it is not artificially constructed, but organic: “Your mob is a genuine outburst of Nature; issuing from, or communicating with, the deepest deep of Nature.”
Carlyle’s attention to the mob comes from the character of the revolution itself. There would be no French Revolution without the French people questioning the monarchy and taking action. But by focusing on the mob and what happens in the streets to everyday people, Carlyle was laying the seeds for the approach taken by social historians more than a century later. In showing the actions of ordinary people, he demonstrated that a rich history could be crafted when the king and parliament share the stage with the butcher and the fishmonger.
The first reviews of The French Revolution: A History began appearing in mid-July 1837, their placement arranged by Carlyle, Mill, and the publisher. Writing in the London and Westminster Review, Mill called The French Revolution a “most original book,” one whose “every idea and sentiment is given out exactly as it is thought and felt, fresh from the soul of the writer, and in such language . . . as is most capable of representing it in the form in which it exists there.” Mill compared the book to the Iliad and Aeneid: “This is not so much a history, as an epic poem . . . the history of the French Revolution, and the poetry of it, both in one; and on the whole no work of greater genius, either historical or poetical, has been produced in this country for many years.” Mill’s words pleased Carlyle. “No man, I think, need wish to be better reviewed. You have said openly of my poor Book what I durst not myself dream of it, but should have liked to dream had I dared,” he wrote Mill upon receiving the review.
William Makepeace Thackeray, a young journalist and aspiring novelist, gave it a favorable review in the Times, although he described it as “prose run mad.” Criticism of the style of writing was a common theme among those who did not care for the book. They objected to its prose being too German. For Carlyle who revered German authors, their complaint was almost a compliment.
He could also rejoice in its reception by other writers, receiving praise from Robert Browning, John Forster, and Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Dickens relied heavily on the book while writing A Tale of Two Cities. Emerson claimed Carlyle as “my bard,” while Thoreau regarded the book as “a poem, at length got translated into prose; an Iliad.” Mark Twain would later call it one of his favorite works.
Kathleen Tillotson, a scholar of Victorian literature, believes The French Revolution had a profound influence on a generation of Victorian novelists, including Thackeray and the Brontës, showing them “the poetic, prophetic, and visionary possibilities of the novel.” Indeed, George Eliot observed in 1855 “ there has hardly been an English book written for the last ten or twelve years that would not have been different if Carlyle had not lived.” For Eliot and others, Carlyle’s charm lay not in his history, but in his literary talents: “No novelist has made his creations live for us more thoroughly than Carlyle has made Mirabeau and the men of the French Revolution, Cromwell, and Puritans.”
The publication of The French Revolution and its popularity solved Carlyle’s financial problems, earning him not only acclaim but profits and lecture invitations. More books followed on Chartism, the political and social reform movement that swept England from 1838–1848, the role of heroes in history, a study of Oliver Cromwell, and a biography of Frederick II of Prussia. But The French Revolution would remain Carlyle’s greatest achievement, providing a literary history for a post-revolutionary age.
The Carlyle Letters Project at Duke University has received more than $560,000 from NEH to support the editing, publication, and digitization (carlyleletters.dukejournals.org)of Thomas and Jane Carlyle’s correspondence. Fred Kaplan used an NEH fellowship to write Thomas Carlyle: A Biography. A fellowship also supported John D. Rosenberg’s Carlyle and the Burden of History.

NOTHING

NOTHING TO THINK ABOUT

by Anthony Gottlieb

Not content with writing a book about nothingness, Anthony Gottlieb has been teaching a seminar about it to students in New York ...From INTELLIGENT LIFE Magazine, Spring 2009

There is a priceless exchange in the 20th episode of “The Sopranos”—the soap-opera about a New Jersey mobster whose stressful career brings him to the couch of a psychotherapist, Jennifer Melfi. Tony Soprano is annoyed with his teenage son, who has been moaning about the ultimate absurdity of life:
Melfii: Sounds to me like Anthony junior may have stumbled onto existentialism.Tony: Fuckin’ internet!Melfi: No, no, no. It’s a European philosophy.Quite so; one cannot blame the internet for everything. Existentialism has roots in the 19th-century thought of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, but it is most famously linked with restless French students in the 1960s and the writings of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. Sure enough, Anthony junior has been assigned Camus’s novel “L’Etranger” in class. It also doesn’t help his precarious state of mind when his grandmother bitterly tells him “in the end, you die in your own arms… It’s all a big Nothing.”Well, plus ça change. It is not only on television that nihilist strains of existentialism continue to tempt young minds, and no doubt the minds of some grandmothers. Last autumn I taught a seminar about ideas of nothingness at the New School, a university in New York. Most of the students were already keen on Sartre and Camus, and among the many facets of nothingness that we looked at in science, literature, art and philosophy, it was death and the pointlessness of life that most gripped them. They showed a polite interest in the role of vacuum in 17th-century physics and in the development of the concept of zero. But existentialist angst was the real draw.Existentialism may have flourished in the 1960s, but its themes are the oldest in the world—indeed, one puzzle about existentialism is why it took so long to come into existence. The eponymous hero of the Mesopotamian “Epic of Gilgamesh”, which was written in the second millennium BC, is plunged into gloomy thoughts of his own mortality after his beloved friend Enkidu expires. Gilgamesh belatedly realises that he, too, must die, and this fact makes all of life seem empty to him:
The river rises, flows over its banksand carries us all away, like mayfliesfloating downstream: they stare at the sun,then all at once there is nothing.Emptiness, void, the abyss: synonyms for nothingness provide the most popular metaphorical images for death. Winston Churchill liked to refer to it as “black velvet”. And just as morbid fears make people think of nothingness, the reverse is also true. In the 17th century, contemplating the empty vastness of the heavens, Pascal recorded in his “Pensées” that “the eternal silence of these infinite spaces fills me with dread.” It is also terrifying, he wrote, to consider the “new abyss” freshly revealed in the minutest parts of nature. Pascal, it seems, found nothingness everywhere, though he noted that on the whole man is, perhaps fortunately, “incapable of seeing the nothingness from which he emerges.” How anything can emerge from nothingness is a question which the ancient Greeks answered by saying that it can’t. There must, they reasoned, have always been something. But that seems to raise a further question, which was given its most concise formulation by Leibniz at the end of the 17th century: why is there something rather than nothing? Another German philosopher, Martin Heidegger, who died in 1976, argued that this puzzle was the most important question of all, though he never quite got round to answering it. Heidegger was infamous for his bizarre neologisms and contorted language, which were especially evident when he wrestled with nothingness. He even invented a verb to describe what nothingness does: in the English translation, it “noths”. Well, maybe it doth, but this does not get us very far. One might think that science will eventually be able to explain the matter; certainly many cosmologists have said so. But there is an eternal snag, because any answer to the question of why there is something rather than nothing will end up chasing its own tail. Any law of nature or mathematics, any purported set of physical conditions, indeed any fact at all counts as “something”, and is thus itself part of what is supposed to be explained. Every explanation must start somewhere. But there is not, and never could be, anywhere left for this one to start. Faced with the apparent impossibility of making much headway with nothingness, poets have resorted to cracking jokes about it, many of which are abominable puns. Most of these revolve around the double meaning exemplified in the title of a memoir on death by the novelist Julian Barnes, published last year: “Nothing to be Frightened of”. His readers may find some comfort in the fact that, however broodingly terrified they are by their own mortality, Barnes has an even worse case of the disease. Shakespeare, too, made much merry play with the word “nothing”, and not only in “Much Ado”. Whether or not something may come of nothing is a recurring theme in “King Lear”, and there is a particularly convoluted verbal joust between Hamlet and Ophelia—some of which escapes contemporary readers unaware that in Elizabethan slang “nothing” can mean “vagina”. One verbally agile philosopher remarked in an encyclopedia entry that it is perhaps not Nothing that has been worrying existentialists, but they who have been worrying it. One wonders what Tony Soprano would have had to say about that.

Museum Visits

Louvre’s 8.5 Million Visitors Keep It as No. 1 Museum Worldwide

The Louvre in Paris and the British Museum in London were the world’s most visited museums last year, drawing 8.5 million and 5.93 million people respectively, the Art Newspaper said in an annual ranking.
The Louvre was also in first place in the 2007 ranking, when the British Museum was in fourth position.
This time, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. came third, with 4.96 million visitors, followed by London’s Tate Modern (4.95 million) and New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art (4.82 million), according to the Art Newspaper, which got its figures from each museum.
The Vatican Museums ranked sixth (4.44 million).
The top 10 slots were taken up by European and U.S. institutions. Japan’s National Art Center, Tokyo was 13th on the list, with 2.47 million visitors.
The Art Newspaper also listed the 2008 exhibitions that attracted the highest number of daily visitors. Two Tokyo shows snagged the top spots: the “60th Annual Exhibition of Shoso-in Treasures” at the Nara National Museum (with a daily total of 17,926 visitors) and “National Treasures from Yakushi-ji Temple” at the Tokyo National Museum (with 12,762 viewers per day).

PARIS! Le Printemps

PARISIANS, RUDE? PAS DU TOUT!

by Sophie Pedder

The key to living in Paris is politeness, says The Economist’s bureau chief Sophie Pedder. She offers an expat's-eye view of the city for our Being There series ...From INTELLIGENT LIFE Magazine, Spring 2009Everyone thinks that people in Paris are impossibly rude. The longer I spend in the city, the more I realise that this is untrue. In fact, they are impossibly polite.Understanding this is the secret to an effortless life in the French capital. Mastering lift etiquette is a good case in point. I arrived in Paris a few years ago from London, where even colleagues would rather stare blankly at the closed doors than venture a greeting. In Paris, by contrast, there is a tightly observed ritual. When the lift doors part, you step in and say “Bonjour”. Everybody says “Bonjour” back. Whenever anyone steps out, you wish them a “Bonne journée”. They do the same. And that’s not all. If later in the day you bump into anyone again, you start all over again with (I’m not making this up) “Re-bonjour”.At first, I found this exasperating. You approach a pair of shop assistants in the wonderfully chaotic DIY basement at BHV, the department store next to the Hôtel de Ville, who appear to have been trained not to interrupt their conversation as you draw near. In fact, they have perfected the art of not even catching your eye, while you wait in disbelief in front of them. I didn’t realise it then, but a “Bonjour Madame” would have brought their conversation to an instant halt, and located those 5cm masonry nails in moments. (If in doubt, it’s best to stick to Madame, not Mademoiselle, unless the shop assistant looks about 17; the French tend to use Madame as a term of respect for an older woman, not a factual reference to marital status.)I soon worked out the value of the right greeting. Those studiedly grumpy Parisian waiters in starched white aprons and black bow ties? Any table in the brasserie is yours if you begin with “Bonsoir Monsieur”. The frosty lady behind the counter at the boulangerie? A “Bonjour Madame” will secure you an oven-fresh baguette. All this takes getting used to. The first time a little girl in our children’s school playground came towards me and said “Bonjour Madame”, I looked around to see who she might be speaking to. It was me. Our French nanny is horrified by visiting English children who fail to greet her properly (Bonjour alone won’t do). I used to try to explain that this failing was in fact a cultural difference. “Peut-être,” she would say, which roughly translates as: I don’t think so. The general French respect for formality and form is nowhere more finely observed than in Paris. Flowers don’t come in bunches with elastic bands, but in artfully arranged bouquets, with crackly layers of cellophane and tissue paper. Canapés at dinner parties are miniature culinary works of art. When my son was learning to write, his school report gave him marks for whether his boucles, or loops, of his joined-up letters respected to the millimetre the inter-line boundaries printed on the page. At the same time, he would bring back English exercise books filled with a chaotic caterpillar of mismatched letters. Why didn’t he use his neat handwriting in those books too, I asked him? He looked perplexed: “But that’s not how you write in English!”The culture of elegance can be extremely stressful. One thing I’ve still not worked out is why Parisians don’t get dirty. My children come home from school with scuffed shoes and mud-splashed coats. Their French classmates, in round-collar shirts and corduroy, with dreamy names like Clementine or Aurélie, look as if they have just stepped out of a catalogue. Mothers at the school gate are always immaculately turned-out, silk scarf knotted just so. Children are taught from a young age to value look and appearance. In Parisian apartments, white sofas on parquet floors are there to be sat on, not used as gymnastics apparatus for infants. Perhaps living amid the geometric elegance of Paris itself, with its tree-lined Haussmann boulevards and enchanting bridges, imposes an ordered form of style. Even now I find it almost an affront to spot a grown man dressed in belted shorts and trainers walking through the Place des Vosges, or across the Pont Neuf. Tourists in garish anoraks cluster around monuments and museums. But domestic, historic central Paris—the local boulangerie, the école maternelle next to the office building—still belongs firmly to the French. Or maybe the answer lies beyond Paris, in the wider French mindset. From Descartes to Dior, the French have long prized rational order and clean lines. It is learned in school, where maths is rigorously taught from an early age and considered the most prestigious speciality in the baccalauréat school-leaving exam. My daughter’s English teacher here once tried to explain to me why they did so little creative writing in French in primary school: it takes so many years to master the strict rules of French grammar, she said, that there’s just no time left.Rules and conformity are the dominant note. Until fairly recently, you could only give your children names from an official list. Even today, pure-bred dogs born in any given year must be given names that start with an officially designated letter of the alphabet. This year it is the letter e.I should make a confession, though: technically I don’t actually live in Paris. The tranquil bend on the Seine where we live, with its 17th-century château and former royal hunting forest, is 14km west of the city centre. It’s 18 minutes from the Champs- Elysées on the rer rapid underground, and when English friends visit, they say they are staying in Paris. But real Parisians find that weird. For them, Paris proper is ringed by the périphérique, covering an area so small that, superimposed on London, it wouldn’t reach from Islington to Fulham. Even today, you have to enter Paris from the périphérique through portes, named after the gates that once guarded the walled city. Paris is a protected territory, kept alive and preserved by real Parisians. You can walk down the rue du Pré-aux-Clercs on the left bank, and hear the click of stiletto on cobble, or the clatter of shutters thrown open under zinc rooftops, such is the quiet. I love the way that this Paris has hung on to a way of life elsewhere long gone: the small movie houses, the family-run booksellers. Within steps of the Seine there are artisan food shops offering fresh oysters, wild pheasant, unctuous regional cheeses or hand-made chocolates boxed up in silky ribbon. When they were smaller my children used to love sailing little wooden toy boats in the pond in the Jardins de Luxembourg, with a crêpe afterwards for goûter. But there is a sense of unreality about this world, which I suppose is part of its charm. Just outside the gardens of the Luxembourg Palace, built by Marie de Médicis, the RER B line runs directly north to Seine-Saint-Denis, where KFC fast-food joints are spreading, hip-hop events are a sell-out, and Malians, Senegalese and Algerians rub shoulders in sprawling flea markets. The RER A, which I take each day, is a journey through the different worlds of greater Paris. It starts at the Peugeot factory in the working-class suburb of Poissy, picks up those of us in the posh suburbs, transects the rain-streaked tower blocks of multi-ethnic Nanterre, passes under the designer stores of the Champs- Elysées—and ends up in Disneyland Paris.Most of our Parisian friends would never dream of taking their children to Disneyland. Their Paris is defined, walled, sheltered by the périphérique. Their kids can ride the authentic painted horses on the Belle Epoque manèges (carousels) of Paris, so why head to a rival, invented fantasyland? They don’t see the France that has opened its arms to American-style living—vast hypermarkets, multiplex cinemas, drive-in McDonald’s—in a way that would shock the left-bank guardians of good taste.Well-off Parisians may cling tightly to their city, but they abandon it all the same at the weekend, and in August. We soon learned not to invite Parisian friends to dinner on Saturday night: they are away in country homes, in lower Normandy or Burgundy. In the summer they ship their children out to grandparents. This seems to be why they don’t mind cramming their large numbers of children, scooters, tricyles and pushchairs into small upper-floor apartments.Once you have mastered mid-week entertaining, Parisian dinner parties are a joy. Because renting property is common, and debt rare, you can sit through an entire dinner and never once discuss house prices, or mortgages, or the credit crunch (seriously). Nor even school fees: private schools, mostly Catholic, are state subsidised. One mystery, however, baffles all newcomers. How do young working Parisian women, raised to read balance sheets not cookery books, keep up the tradition of domestic divahood after a day in the office? The answer, I soon discovered, lurks behind discreet glass walls on high streets even in the smart 16th arrondissement: Picard gourmet frozen food. This is gastronomic fare: coquilles Saint-Jacques with sauce au Sancerre, or moelleux au chocolat. Restaurant quality, it is dinner-party ready, and gets served in the most unlikely places. The guests probably all realise—but Parisians are far too polite to say so. WHERE TO STAY:Hôtel de la Bretonnerie A rare mix of 17th-century charm and reasonable prices in a central location. No restaurant, but the cafés and bistros of Le Marais are just a step away. 22 rue Sainte-Croix de la Bretonnerie, 75004 Paris. + 33 (0)1 48 87 77 63; www.hotelbretonnerie.comLe Montalembert This boutique hotel in the smart 7th arrondissement is all clean lines and chic neutrals, and mercifully chintz-free. The downside is tiny rooms (like most in Paris) and steep rates. 3 rue Montalembert, 75007 Paris. + 33 (0)1 45 49 68 68; www.montalembert.comWHERE TO EAT:L’Atelier de Joël Robuchon Gastronomy in Paris can be stuffy, but not at this master chef’s first Paris restaurant, which now has two Michelin stars. You sit on bar-style chairs, facing the bustling open kitchen, and pick from a tapas-style menu. No peak-time reservations, so get there early. 5 rue de Montalembert, 75007 Paris. + 33 (0)1 42 22 56 56.Chartier A former working-class dining room opened in 1896, this no-frills restaurant has a cheap menu from central casting (escargots, pavé de rumsteack, etc). So wonderfully noisy, even children feel welcome. 7 rue du Faubourg Montmartre, 75009 Paris. +33 (0)1 47 70 86 29.STREETWISE:The centre is so compact that much of it can be explored on foot. But don’t linger on the Champs-Elysées: while the perspective is breath-taking, the tacky gift shops, pricey cafés and big-brand shops are best left to the tourists. Take the metro instead to St-Paul, in the Marais, and wander along the narrow back streets off the rue des Francs-Bourgeois and the exquisite Place des Vosges. Or head for the left bank, starting at Saint Germain-des-Prés metro, with a coffee at the Café de Flore (172 Boulevard Saint-Germain. +33 [0]1 45 48 55 26)—far less touristy than Les Deux Magots next door. Don’t miss the little Place Furstenberg, hidden off the rue Jacob—magical when lit up at night.A good way to sightsee is by the Batobus—a hop-on hop-off water bus— which has eight stops along the Seine; buy tickets on the spot. Or join the craze for Vélib rent-a-bikes. Docking stations are on most side streets: you need a credit card to leave a deposit and buy a day (€1) or weekly (€5) pass. Check the chain and tyres before pedalling away, and simply click the bike into any docking station when you’ve finished. Taxis, however, are maddeningly hard to hail. Find a rank and prepare to wait.WHAT TO SEE:Eiffel Tower Visiting children insist on it. The view is actually as good from the Arc de Triomphe or Notre-Dame, but the sheer scale of the 325-metre iron structure is well worth seeing up close. Don’t spend hours queuing for the lift, though: if the children are big enough, walk to the first floor, and take the lift from there.The Catacombs For jaded teens who think they’ve seen it all. The bones of 6m Parisians, some guillotined, are disturbingly displayed in a labyrinth of tunnels. 1 avenue du Colonel Henri Rol-Tanguy, 75014 Paris. +33 (0)1 43 22 47 63; www.catacombes-de-paris.frMusée National Picasso Paris is so rich in museums it is hard to make recommendations, but this is one of my favourites: the story of Picasso’s artistic journey is told in the elegant setting of an hôtel particulier. Hôtel Salé, 5 rue de Thorigny, 75003 Paris. +33 (0)1 42 71 25 21.Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris Housed in the 1930s Palais de Tokyo, this museum has impressive exhibitions such as the recent Dufy retrospective—and far fewer people than the better-known galleries. 11 avenue Président Wilson, 75016 Paris. +33 (0)1 53 67 40 00.SHOPPING :If pressed for time, shop in the elegant department stores: Bon Marché, on the left bank, or Galeries Lafayette and Printemps on Boulevard Haussmann. If you have time for fun, amble round the boutiques on the rue des Francs-Bourgeois, in the Marais, or in the side streets around Saint Germain-des-Prés. Even if you aren’t buying, it is worth admiring the window displays of gourmet treasures at Dalloyau (63 rue de Grenelle, 7th) or Ladurée (21 rue Bonaparte, 6th), or the sensational cheeses at Barthélemy (51 rue de Grenelle, 7th).

Beauty

John Updike thought that, for most men, a naked woman is the most beautiful thing they will ever see. He didn't say it was so for all men, nor did he venture an opinion on whether the reverse held for women. But the proposition, so bluntly delivered – as if centuries of hair-splitting philosophy and frenetic sublimation could be swept aside with one cheerfully ingenuous sentence – has always struck me as hard to refute.

Beauty

by Roger Scruton

Its implications – that our idea of beauty is linked to sexual selection and Darwinian evolution and that, as such, it is possibly quite banal – are firmly rejected by Roger Scruton in his new book Beauty. This is not an attempt to define beauty. Rather, it asks whether there are correct judgments to be made about it – reasons why we should prefer Titian's Venus of Urbino to Boucher's Blonde Odalisque or, indeed, to photographs of porn stars having sex. Framing the question in this way implies a search for standards. It also implies an attempt to link beauty with morality, which is no easy task.
Scruton is hardly the first philosopher to attempt it. His approach is to take up Kant's idea that the search for beauty is really a search for consensus. Lovers of beauty, wrote Kant, are "suitors for agreement". Thus, judgments of beauty imply the search for a community of likeminded souls.
But the appreciation of beauty also requires – and here we might sniff a contradiction – what Scruton calls "disinterested interest", an ability to maintain a certain distance between the self and the beautiful object. "Beauty comes," he writes, "from setting human life, sex included, at the distance from which it can be viewed without disgust or prurience. When distance is lost, and imagination swallowed up in fantasy, then beauty may remain, but it is a spoiled beauty, one that has been prised from the individuality of the person who possesses it. It has lost its value and gained a price."
This is stern stuff. Why the emphasis on maintaining distance, as if beauty were forever to be framed and set apart? Doesn't beauty often overwhelm us? Can't it be connected to mucking in, to forgetting oneself, to an animal immersion in the world? Scruton's answer is no. Not because he would suppress sexuality, but because he believes beauty is, above all, a function of the rational mind. It has "an irreducibly contemplative component".
Indeed, he is swayed by Plato's idea that beauty is not just an invitation to desire, but a call to renounce it. The idea sounds counterintuitive, but it chimes with the feeling we often have that the most beautiful things are somehow inviolate. Scruton argues that our inability to maintain the necessary distance and our failure to respect the sovereignty of the objects we consider beautiful have helped to bring about what he calls a "flight from beauty." The phrase is resonant. Few who have registered developments in art, architecture and other aspects of life over the past 50 to 100 years could have failed to notice that beauty has suffered a demotion. From its position as a fundamental value in art, it has been reduced to a frivolous side issue or, worse, a carrier of tainted ideologies and clichés.
In the past 10 years, however, this has started to change. "The flight from beauty" has become a rush to atone, as artists, critics and philosophers scramble to figure out how something so fundamental could have come to be regarded as an embarrassment. New books and anthologies on the subject abound and curators of contemporary art are once more employing the word without shame.
All this certainly makes Scruton's book timely. His own purpose is to convince us that some kinds of aesthetic enjoyment are better than others. Pleasures that become addictive, desires that stimulate an urge to desecrate (out of jealousy, for instance), are inferior to the experience of beauty that tells us that "we are at home in the world, that the world is already ordered in our perceptions as a place fit for the lives of beings like us".
This is lovely, and hard to argue with, but it doesn't tell us how our judgments of beauty might be aff ected by an apprehension that we are not, in fact, "at home in the world". We all succumb to this sense at least some of the time, not just because the world can be hostile, but because we are mortal and destined to leave it.
That is why the greatest artists augment the kind of beauty Scruton is talking about with something deeper. Velázquez, for instance, painted the beautiful court of Phillip IV, but with the shadow of death passing over it. Rembrandt painted beautiful women who were naked (that is, real and mortal) rather than nude (idealised, eternal).
The work of both artists is beautiful, but not, I think, in the rational sense Scruton champions, which depends too heavily on the more easily communicable concept of taste. In the end the most important question about beauty, to return to Updike's salvo, is whether it is special and profound or ubiquitous and really rather unremarkable. The art critic Peter Schjeldahl expressed a synthesis of these two possibilities when he wrote: "Beauty is, or ought to be, no big deal, though the lack of it is. Beauty presents a stone wall to the thinking mind. But to the incarnate mind – deferential to the buzzing and gurgling body – beauty is as fluid, clear, and shining as an Indian summer afternoon."
Roger Scruton has moments of great insight and clarity in this attractively slim volume, but he is less than deferential to the buzzing and gurgling body. He seems to find it distasteful. For him, beauty is not connected to animal joy, but to human reason. I'm not at all sure he has it right.

• Sebastian Smee is the art critic of the Boston Globe

RISK & FINANCIAL CRISIS

With hindsight, the causes of the current global financial meltdown seem obvious, even predictable. Now, brain imaging offers one explanation for why so few investors challenged foolhardy fiscal advice.
Our brains raise few objections when presented with seemingly expert guidance, new research suggests.
"Most average people have this tendency to turn off their own capacity for making judgments when an expert comes into the picture," says Gregory Berns, a neuroeconomist at Emory University in Atlanta.

Risk circuits

Berns' team presented 24 young volunteers with a simple choice: accept a sure payment or bet on a riskier, yet higher-paying lottery.
When weighing this decision, volunteers activated brain circuits known to calculate risk and reward. In line with previous research, the team noticed more brain activation in these dopamine-delivering areas when the expected reward was higher.
"When advice is not there, when people are making these judgments on their own, you can make clear correlations with expected value in the lottery and areas associated with the dopamine system," he says.
To see how subjects respond to financial advice, the team told volunteers that Charles Noussair, an economics professor at Emory who advises the US Federal Reserve, would offer his opinion on whether they should accept the easy money or take a chance.
Acting blindly
In reality, a computer program told volunteers to accept the sure thing if it added up to about 20% or more of the lottery sweepstake.
Volunteers usually took this advice blindly, brain scans suggest. Correlations between increased potential reward and brain activity disappeared when volunteers received the advice.
"That suggests that the normal mechanisms people use to evaluate risk and reward are not being used when you have an expert telling you what to do," Berns says.
"I think this explains a lot, if not everything, about the current market situation," he adds, urging people to take expert advice – fiscal, medical or otherwise – more shrewdly. "In my opinion, decision-making shouldn't be handed over to anyone, expert or otherwise."

John Cleese joins the Speccie

Over the past four decades I have received many reviews in The Spectator, all of them mixed (in the technical theatrical sense of ‘extremely bad’). For example, in 1976 The Spectator wrote about Fawlty Towers:
I’ve been bellyaching, ever since I started writing this column, about the low standard of the programmes. I have been told by friends and acquaintances, ‘Ah! But have you seen Fawlty Towers? You’ll enjoy that!’... Well, last Sunday I finally watched the bally thing and I am gratified to report that I didn’t laugh once. What is more I found Fawlty Towers, like its predecessor Monty Python, rather nasty... When Cleese is involved I detect traces of sadism. The continuing battle between Mr and Mrs Fawlty is obsessive and the sound of a man shouting at the top of his voice for half an hour is bound to become boring. There is the same tendency as in Monty Python to take a ‘joke’ and hammer it remorselessly into the ground. Hysteria is the prevailing atmosphere but it is not a healthy hysteria. Cleese’s Fawlty seems unpleasant and lacking in humanity... Another very unfunny programme as far as I am concerned is the new John Bird-John Fortune effort Well Anyway.
When the second series started, the magazine wrote:
Mr John Cleese and his comedy series Fawlty Towers returned to our screens on Monday. Once again I sat through it all stony-faced. The trouble with Cleese is that he cannot see beyond himself. The only character who exists in his scenario is his alter ego Fawlty. Until he can acquire a less egotistic view of the world and see some humanity in those people who at present he thinks are merely put on earth to drive him up the wall, Cleese will never make me laugh.
Monty Python fared little better:
Monty Python’s status as a national treasure has blinded people to its shortcomings and created a tedious tradition of puerile, half-baked humour dressed up as real comedy... Terry Gilliam’s unfunny but technically accomplished cartoons... When sketches ended abruptly, with a shooting, or a 100-ton weight falling from the sky, or a camera turning round to show the studio, or credits appearing midway through a programme, these cheap tricks were saluted as Brechtian devices or surrealist statements. In reality, they were there to disguise the lack of proper sketch endings, or simply to pad the programme out... Most of their supposedly ‘offensive’ material was puerile rather than satirical... All in all, though, it was about as subversive as a Harry Secombe raspberry. For every disgusted viewer there were many more who were simply irritated or bored, and many more who reached for the ‘off’ button.
When I played Petruchio in The Taming of the Shrew for the BBC, The Spectator commented:
Jonathan Miller has taken over the BBC’s Shakespeare production with predictable results. He began by casting my bête noir, John Cleese, as Petruchio in The Taming of the Shrew, an error of judgment typical of the quirky Doctor, Cleese not being an actor at all but a manic puppet capable of portraying only anger and frustration, like Mr Punch... In an atmosphere of rather sickening mutual admiration, Cleese and Miller appeared on Parkinson together... Brief glimpses of the production did not confirm their views... Cleese was, apart from everything else, inaudible, choosing for some reason to deliver his lines through clenched teeth, like Prince Charles. I was struck again by his overwhelming arrogance.
The film of the Amnesty charity show The Secret Policeman’s Other Ball brought this reaction:
Last year’s show was a disaster... Notable for the kind of ‘clever’ humour that is popular only with sixth-formers and students... I do not want to see John Cleese with his clothes off. In fact, I don’t want to see John Cleese at all.
My attempt to help Robin Skynner write a book about psychology was greeted with this:
The first thing to say about this book is that it’s unreadable. Completely, terminally unread-able. I defy anyone to get through so much as a single chapter at one go without clutching at their hair and groaning. You could feed it to a bookworm with galloping dysentery and I promise you the creature would have died from acute literary constipation by page ten... its idiotic structure [is] as incoherent as it is tedious... Imagine the excruciating boredom of reading 413 pages of indifferently disguised exhortation to clean living.
However, there was a silver lining to receiving such consistently appalling notices in this magazine. Whatever one does, there will be critics who dislike it, and all one can do is to hope that they will write for journals with circulations as tiny as that of The Spectator 20 years ago. It also helps to know that such reviews will never be read by one’s colleagues in the creative arts, or, indeed, by anyone who might offer one work. So, a panning in these pages was only slightly more damaging than one in, say, the Zagreb Bugle.
A digression. Interesting ideas often emerge from the world of management. One useful concept is that of the ‘articulate incompetent’. This is a person who speaks clearly and cogently and persuasively about something, without actually understanding anything about the reality that their words are intending to describe. Such a person is dangerous to an organisation because they can sound very persuasive, despite the fact that they have absolutely no clue what they are talking bout.
Which brings us back to critics. It is deeply funny that people who cannot write dialogue, and who cannot direct or act it either, are appointed to pass judgment on those who can. But the reason is obvious — no one with creative abilities wants to be a critic. So the job has to be done by people who are both unqualified, and apparently in desperate need of the very small sums of money it brings.
To be fair (and it may be a little late for that), there may exist a few critics who, though unable to write, direct or act, have undergone some strange mystical process by which they have received transmission of a genuine understanding of these activities. Sadly, I don’t know who they are, because when I want to find out about a current production, I am lucky enough to be able to telephone a colleague who can write, direct or act.
Finally I’d like to make one critical comment:
John Cleese is a remarkably talented individual, of an admirably humble disposition, and a rare sweetness of temperament, who continues to tower over his contemporaries, especially Michael Palin (The Spectator).John Cleese is a contributing editor of The Spectator and will write occasional articles on a range of subjects.

WORK

Work dominates our lives, yet its places and processes are ignored by artists. Now, more than ever, we must learn to appreciate the world in which we labour

If a Martian came to earth and tried to understand what human beings do from just reading most literature published today, he would come away with the extraordinary impression that what we mostly spend our time doing is falling in love and, occasionally, murdering one another. But what we really do is go to work – and yet this work is unseen, it is literally invisible and it is so in part because it is not represented in art. If it does appear in consciousness, it does so through the business pages of newspapers, as an economic, rather than a broader human, phenomenon.
Two centuries ago, our forebears would have known the precise history and source of almost every one of the limited number of things they ate and owned. They would have been familiar with the pig, the carpenter, the weaver, the loom and the dairymaid. The range of items available for purchase may have grown exponentially since then, but our understanding of their genesis has grown ever more obscure. We are now as disconnected imaginatively from the pro­duction and distribution of our goods as we are practically in reach of them, a process of alienation that has stripped us of opportunities for wonder, gratitude and guilt.
The world is covered in factories and warehouses, but it is impossible for the layperson to go into them or even approach them. Despite their importance, they have no desire to advertise themselves to the public. In business parks, they are spread out across sites of determined blandness marked by gentle gradients, ornamental trees and expanses of preternaturally green grass.
When we think of tourist destinations, we don’t think of the places of work. Why, endowed as they are with both practical importance and emotional resonance, do cargo ships, port facilities, airport warehouses, storage tanks, refineries and assembly plants go unnoticed, except by those immediately involved in their operations?
It is not just because they are hard to locate and forbiddingly signposted. Some of Venice’s churches are similarly secreted away but none­theless prodigally visited. What renders them invisible is an unwarranted prejudice that deems it peculiar to express overly powerful feelings of admiration towards a gas tanker or a paper mill – or, indeed, towards almost any aspect of the labouring world.
As a result, a sympathetic response to, say, an electricity pylon is, for most of us, a haphazard and unsupported impulse, an epiphany which might last for a minute on a drive along a motorway or on a walk along a moor, but to which no prestige could be attached and from which little of merit could emerge.
In an essay entitled “The Poet”, published in 1844, the American writer Ralph Waldo Emerson lamented the narrow definition of beauty subscribed to by his peers, who tended to reserve the term exclusively for the bucolic landscapes and unspoilt pastoral scenes celebrated in the works of well-known artists and poets of the past. Emerson himself, however, writing as he was at the dawn of the industrial age, observing with interest the proliferation of railways, warehouses, canals and factories, wished to make room for the possibility of alternative forms of beauty.
He contrasted the nostalgic devotees of old-fashioned poetry with those whom he judged to be true contemporary poetic spirits, deserving of the title less by virtue of anything they had actually written than for their willingness to approach the world without prejudice or partiality. The former camp, he averred, “see the factory-village and the railway, and fancy that the poetry of the landscape is broken up by these, for these works of art are not yet consecrated in their reading. But the poet sees them fall within the great Order not less than the beehive or the spider’s geometrical web. Nature adopts them very fast into her vital circles, and the gliding train of cars she loves like her own.”
It was Emerson’s strategy to lead his readers by example, to encourage their evolving sense of what might be attractive by demonstrating that he himself, a trustworthy guardian of high culture, was capable of recognising the appeal of a signal box and a chimney stack, and that a range of hitherto unlikely objects could therefore be safe for all to love.
There is, of course, one particular kind of person who breaks the normal rules: I am thinking of spotters, of ships, lorries, planes and trains, the kind who give up weekends to admire the giant moving parts of our mechanised world. Whatever their inarticulacies, the spotters are appropriately alive to some of the most astonishing aspects of our time. They know what it is about our world that would detain a Martian or a child. They take pleasure in sensing their smallness and ignorance next to the expansive intelligence of the modern collective mind.
Standing beside a docked ship, their heads thrown back to gaze at its steel turrets disappearing into the sky, they enter into a state of silent, satisfied wonder, like pilgrims before the towers of Chartres. Their concentration recalls that of a small child who comes to a halt in the centre of a crowded shopping street and, while passers-by swerve to avoid her, bends down to examine, with the care of a biblical scholar poring over the pages of a vellum-bound book, a piece of chewing gum impressed on the pavement, or the closing mechanism of her coat pocket.
They are like children, too, in their upending of conventional ideas of what might constitute a good job, always valuing a profession’s intrinsic interest over its relative material benefit, judging with particular favour the post of crane operator at a container terminal because of the vantage point it offers over ships and quaysides, just as a child might aspire to drive a train because of the seductive hiss of the carriage’s hydraulic doors, or to run a post office based on the satisfaction of adhering airmail labels on to puffy envelopes.
The spotter’s pastime harks back to the habits of premodern travellers who, upon arriving in a new country, were apt to express particular curiosity about its granaries, aqueducts, harbours and workshops, feeling that the observation of work could be as stimulating as anything on a stage or chapel wall – a relief from a contemporary view that tightly associates tourism with play and, therefore, steers us away from an interest in aluminium foundries and sewage treatment plants in favour of the trumpeted pleasures of musicals and waxwork museums.
How ignorant most of us are by contrast, surrounded by machines and processes of which we have only the loosest grasp; we who know nothing about gantry cranes and iron-ore bulk carriers, who register the economy only as a set of numbers, who think – even now – that it is only about money, who have avoided close study of switch gears and wheat storage and spare ourselves closer acquaintance with the manufacturing protocols for tensile steel cable. How much we might learn from the spotters at the ends of piers and runways.
At a time when recession is reminding us how badly we need work, it should be artists who teach us to discern the virtues of the furniture of contemporary technology. One can hope for a day when photographs of electricity conductors might hang over dining tables and when someone might write a libretto for an opera set in the sales office of a packaging firm.
We need art that could function for our times a little like those 18th-century cityscapes that show us people at work from the quayside to the temple, the parliament to the counting house, panoramas like those of Canaletto in which, within a single giant frame, one can witness dockers unloading crates, merchants bargaining in the main square, bakers before their ovens, women sewing at their windows and councils of ministers assembled in a palace – inclusive scenes which serve to remind us of the place that work accords each of us within the human hive.
We need an art that can proclaim the intelligence, peculiarity, beauty and horror of the workplace and, not least, its extraordinary claim to be able to provide us, alongside love, despite the current economic mayhem, with the principal source of life’s meaning.

Alain de Botton’s “The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work” (Hamish Hamilton, £18.99) is published on 2 April

BEYOND CAPITALISM

The US banking system faces losses of over $3,000bn. Japan is in a depression. China is headed for zero growth. Some still hope that urgent surgery can restore the status quo. But more feel that we are at one of those rare points of inflection when nothing is the same again. But if one dream is over, what other dreams wait in the shadows? Will capitalism adapt? Or should we be asking again one of the great questions which has animated political life for nearly two centuries: what might come after capitalism? Only a few years ago that question had been parked, deemed about as sensible as asking what would come after electricity. Global markets had pulled China and India into their orbit, and capitalism’s triumph appeared complete, with medievalist Islam and the ragged armies that surround the G8 summits jostling to be its last enfeebled competitor. Multinational companies were said to command empires greater than most nation states, and in some accounts had won the affiliation of the masses through their brands.Yet the lesson of capitalism itself is that nothing is permanent—“all that is solid melts into air” as Marx put it. Within capitalism there are as many forces that undermine it as there are forces that carry it forward.In this essay I look at what capitalism might become on the other side of the slump. I predict neither resurgence nor collapse. Instead I suggest an analogy with other systems that once seemed equally immutable. In the early decades of the 19th century the monarchies of Europe appeared to have seen off their revolutionary challengers, whose dreams were buried in the mud of Waterloo. Monarchs and emperors dominated the world and had proven extraordinarily adaptable. Just like the advocates of capitalism today, their supporters then could plausibly argue that monarchies were rooted in nature. Then it was hierarchy which was natural; today it is individual acquisitiveness. Then it was mass democracy which had been experimented with and shown to fail. Today it is socialism that is seen in the same light, as a well-intentioned experiment that failed because it was at odds with human nature. What happened to the military is another useful frame for thinking about capitalism’s future. We are only a few generations from societies where the military stood at the apex of status and respect. War was part of the natural order, the inevitable way to resolve disputes. Yet, against all odds, in much of the world armies were tamed and civilised, turned from often cruel masters into professional servants.I do not suggest that capitalism will disappear any more than war has. Complex, interconnected market economies will continue to generate huge surpluses, fuelled by the continuing flow of new scientific knowledge. But just as monarchy moved from centre stage to become more peripheral, so capitalism will no longer dominate society and culture as much as it does today. Capitalism may, in short, become a servant rather than a master, and the slump will accelerate this change. Past depressions were cruel but they also hurled ideas from the margins up into the mainstream, speeding their motion through the three stages that Schopenhauer described happening to all new truths, being first ridiculed, then violently opposed, then treated as self-evident.
***To understand what capitalism might become we first have to understand what it is. This is not so simple. Capitalism includes a market economy, but many traditional market economies are not capitalistic. It includes trade but trade, too, long precedes capitalism. It includes capital—but Egyptian ph araohs and fascist dictators commanded surpluses too. The French historian Fernand Braudel offered perhaps the best description of capitalism when he wrote of it as a series of layers built on top of the everyday market economy of onions and wood, plumbing and cooking. These layers, local, regional, national and global, are characterised by ever greater abstraction, until at the top sits disembodied finance, seeking returns anywhere, uncommitted to any particular place or industry, and commodifying anything and everything. Capitalism became an “ism” when the vigorous banking and trade of Genoa and Venice, London and Bruges, combined with inventive manufacturing to create a world where the holders of abstracted capital became dominant, displacing the many other contenders for pole position, from warriors and scholars to bureaucrats and makers of things. There have been more embedded versions of capitalism too on the path to today’s hedge funds and derivatives. They have included close alliances with the state (40 per cent of the investment in Silicon Valley came from government), the rule of great industrial combines (as in Korea), and the strange hybrids of mercantilist communist capitalism in China and tycoon-led capitalism of southeast Asia. There have been buccaneering free markets—like the US in the 19th century—and highly socialised ones like Switzerland in the 20th. But as Karl Marx predicted, capitalism is expansive: 19th-century capitalists bought politicians, art collections, landscapes and universities with equal relish. Contemporary capitalism is at ease with corporate sponsorship, diamond skulls and old masters, as well as software programs and space travel. Its methods have spread into healthcare, land management, and charity (though “philanthrocapitalism,” the idea that the rich can save the world, may not survive the crisis). Anything can be turned into a commodity to be bought and sold—from sex to art and religion—and capitalism has been nothing if not inventive. Even climate change has turned into a potential boom for capitalism, with taxpayers subsidising new waves of R&D, and governments persuaded to sponsor carbon markets which give traders, brokers and investors yet another way to grow rich.Capitalism has a complicated relationship to politics: sometimes constrained and tamed by it, and sometimes seeking to dominate it. Both the Conservative and Liberal parties in Britain are substantially dependent on donations from hedge funds. Labour has been bailed out by City financiers and asked a succession of bankers to lead commissions on topics as far from their competence as public health and welfare reform. Boris Johnson handed oversight of London’s employment and skills board to a man who had been running a hedge fund. The same pattern can be seen in the US where both parties are enmeshed in Wall Street—one reason why they have found it hard to respond to a crisis that has so challenged their assumptions (Obama’s early steps have sometimes seemed less assured and less radical than Roosevelt’s in part because whereas FDR used comparative outsiders for advice, Obama has opted for insiders like Larry Summers and Tim Geithner). The expansive and creative character of capitalism encouraged both Davos man, and his radical critics, to assume that big capitalism would inevitably become even bigger—ever more entwined with politics and culture. At a time when seven year olds were being recruited to sell Barbie dolls on commission to their friends this view seemed plausible. Through everything from mind-changing drugs to computer games and extreme sports, capitalism seemed to be reaching into deep human desires as only religions had done in the past. Yet only a few decades ago there was great interest in what would supersede capitalism. The answers ranged from communism to managerialism, and from hopes of a golden age of leisure to dreams of a return to community and ecological harmony. Today these utopias can be found in the movements around the World Social Forum, on the edges of all of the major religions, in the radical sub-cultures that surround the net, and in moderated form in thousands of civic ventures across the world. They are bound to find new adherents. But their weakness and the weakness of much contemporary anti-capitalist literature (from David Korten, Wendell Berry, Alain Lipietz or Michael Albert) is that they offer little account of how their visions might be realised and how powerfully entrenched interests would be overcome. Marxism’s intellectual strength, by contrast, came from its claim that capitalism was not the all-powerful system portrayed by writers like Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri today, but was rather a system that was bound to destroy itself. In the Marxist account technological development would be the driver of change, becoming revolutionary through the contradictions between the forces and relations of production. In the 19th century the mechanism was expected to be the impoverishment of the proletariat; in the 20th century’s revised accounts it would be the empowerment (or on some accounts the proletarianisation) of the knowledge workers. Either way capitalism would spawn its own gravediggers. The fact that this didn’t happen, and that capitalism instead spread wealth on a vast scale, has pushed Marxism to the edges, to protest parties like France’s new Nouveau parti anticapitaliste, or the pacified academic arguments of a Marxism that merges into the abstractions of literary theory. But restless capitalism has continued to give grounds for believing that it might destroy itself. A generation ago the American social scientist Daniel Bell, wrote of the “cultural contradictions of capitalism,” arguing that capitalism would erode the traditional norms on which it rests—willingness to work hard, to pass on legacies to children, to avoid excessive hedonism. Japan in the 1990s was a good case in point—its slacker teenagers rejecting their parents’ work ethic that had driven the economic miracle. Related arguments have presented demography as the Achilles heel. Capitalist materialism has undermined the incentives for people to have children, sacrificing income and pleasure for the hard grind of family life. (And meritocracy further encourages parents to lavish their ambitions for advancement on just one or two children.) Hence the sharply reduced birthrates across Europe and among white Americans. At some point the resulting demographic imbalances threaten to undermine the generational contract which any society depends on, with a growing group of the elderly demanding ever more from a shrinking group of younger workers. The collapse of the savings rate—to around zero by 2007 in the US when it needs to be closer to 30 per cent to cope with ageing, is a stark symptom of a capitalism that has lost the ability to protect its own future. (Ironically, China despite its high savings rate, may be even more at risk, as the one-child policy transforms it from a young to an old country faster than as ever happened before in human history.)Other critiques have emphasised capitalism’s vulnerability to success. Extraordinary productivity gains in manufacturing reduce its share of GDP, leaving economies more dependent on services which are inherently harder to grow. There’s a matching vulnerability in consumption. Having successfully met people’s material needs, capitalism is threatened if they then lose interest in working hard and making money, turning instead to new age counselling, mid-life gap years and three-day weekends. Capitalism’s only response is to invest ever more in creating new needs fuelled by anxiety about status, or beauty and body mass, a perverse result that may make developed capitalist societies more psychologically troubled than their poorer counterparts.
***All of the these critiques have hit some of their targets, though none gives much sense of how capitalism’s contradictions might be resolved. Nor do they say much about the turbulent dynamics of capital itself. To find insights into how the current crisis might connect to these longer-term trends we need to look not to Marx, Keynes or Hayek but to the work of Carlota Perez, a Venezuelan economist whose writings are attracting growing attention. Perez is a scholar of the long-term patterns of technological change. In Perez’s account economic cycles begin with the emergence of new technologies and infrastructures that promise great wealth; these then fuel frenzies of speculative investment, with dramatic rises in stock and other prices. During these phases finance is in the ascendant and laissez faire policies become the norm. The booms are then followed by dramatic crashes, whether in 1797, 1847, 1893, 1929 or 2008. After these crashes, and periods of turmoil, the potential of the new technologies and infrastructures is eventually realised, but only once new institutions come into being which are better aligned with the characteristics of the new economy. Once that has happened, economies then go through surges of growth as well as social progress, like the belle époque or the postwar miracle. Before the great depression the elements of a new economy and a new society were already available—and encouraged the speculative bubbles of the 1920s. But they were neither understood by the people in power, nor were they embedded in institutions. Then, during the 1930s, the economy transformed, in Perez’s words, from one based on “steel, heavy electrical equipment, great engineering works and heavy chemistry… into a mass production system catering to consumers and the massive defence markets. Radical demand management and income redistribution innovations had to be made, of which the directly economic role of the state is perhaps the most important.” What resulted was the rise of mass consumerism, and an economy supported by new infrastructures for electricity, roads and telecommunications. During the 1930s it wasn’t clear which institutional innovations would be most successful (fascism, communism and corporatism were all contenders), but after the second world war a new model of state regulated capitalism emerged characterised by suburbs and motorways, welfare states and macroeconomic management, which underpinned postwar growth. Seen in this light the great depression was both a disaster and an accelerator of reform. It helped to usher in new economic and welfare policies in countries like New Zealand and Sweden that later became the mainstream across the developed world. In the US it led to banking reform, the New Deal and the GI Bill of Rights. In Britain depression, as much as war, led to the creation of the welfare state and the NHS.One implication of Perez’s work, and of Joseph Schumpeter’s before her, is that some of the old has to be swept away before the new can find its most successful forms. Propping up failing industries is in this light a risky policy. Perez suggests that we may be on the verge of another great period of institutional innovation and experiment that will lead to new compromises between the claims of capital and the claims of society and of nature. In retrospect these periodic accommodations are as integral to capitalism as financial crises—indeed it’s only through crisis and institutional reform that capitalism adapts to a changing environment and rediscovers the moral compass that is so vital for markets to work well. The late 19th century accommodation came in response to fear of revolution and gave us state pensions, universal schooling, trade unions and universal suffrage, putting paid to the ideals of 19th-century liberalism. A second accommodation came 50 years later out of depression and war, and made variants of social and Christian democracy the norm in every rich country, pushing up states’ share of GDP and introducing visible hands to guide the markets’ invisible one.
***If another great accommodation is on its way, this one will be shaped by the triple pressures of ecology, globalisation and demographics. Forecasting in detail how these might play out is pointless and, as always, there are as many malign possibilities as benign ones, from revived militarism and autarchy to stigmatisation of minorities and accelerated ecological collapse. But the new technologies—from high speed networks to new energy systems, low carbon factories to open source software and genetic medicine—have a connecting theme: each potentially remakes capitalism more clearly as a servant rather than a master, whether in the world of money, work, everyday life or the state.Capital itself is a good place to start. One of the oddities of the contemporary economy is that the systems of capital allocation have become so divorced from the real economy. Most funding for new scientific knowledge comes from governments, not markets, and most funding for the big companies producing goods, technologies and services is internally generated, rather than coming from stock markets. Meanwhile most of the work of financial markets has involved finance capital taking positions against itself, hedging and betting with instruments of ever greater opacity. Even before the crisis there were many counter tendencies, all trying to re-establish capital as a servant of the real economy and to force greater transparency. They had both practical justifications (market risk is amplified the more degrees of separation there are between prices of financial assets and underlying value), and moral ones (the more degrees of separation there are, the less possible it is for markets to act with moral responsibility). The many moves in this direction include the still tentative attempts to make pension fund investments more accountable for their social and environmental effects (for example through big US funds like CalPERS or Calvert); the arguments that stock exchanges should police the transparency and integrity of their investors; the plans to outlaw offshore tax havens; the slow but steady rise of a social investment industry (which now accounts for a tenth of invested assets in the US); and the growth of genuine venture capital that takes risks on new ideas and technologies (sadly, most of the British industry wouldn’t meet that definition). We are also again hearing arguments for publicly owned banks to finance housing, infrastructure or innovation, for Tobin taxes and higher capital gains tax for short-term investments. When Britain’s government tires of owning banks it may even decide that they would survive better as mutuals than plcs. Another intriguing part of this story is the growth of capital in the hands of trusts and charities, which now face the dilemma of whether to use their substantial assets (£50bn in Britain) not just to deliver an annual dividend but also to reflect their values. Bill Gates found himself at the sharp end of this dilemma when critics pointed out that the vast assets of his foundation were often invested in ways that ran counter to what it was seeking to achieve through its spending.Even money itself may be rethought. The privileges that accompany the ability to create money will come in future with more responsibilities, but we may also see more enthusiasm for alternative currencies that are more embedded, like the local currencies in Germany or timebanks. Consumption is the second place where the signs of change are unmistakable. In the high debt countries (including the US and Britain) there will simply have to be less of it, and more saving. It’s an irony that so many of the measures taken to deal with the immediate impact of the recession, like VAT cuts and fiscal stimulus packages, point in the opposite direction to what’s needed long term. But there are already strong movements to restrain the excesses of mass consumerism: slow food, the voluntary simplicity movement and the many measures to arrest rising obesity, are all symptoms of a swing towards seeing consumerism less as a harmless boon and more as a villain. The mayor of Sao Paolo, Gilberto Kassab, banned all billboards in 2006. David Cameron has railed against toxic capitalism corrupting young children, as well as toying with the idea of personal carbon accounts to limit high carbon lifestyles. Reinforcing these trends are shifts in the balance of the economy away from products and services, towards a “support economy” based on relationships and care (from nurseries and therapy to weekly organic food deliveries). Networked technologies help this trend, and on the edge of the market there is a growing subculture of clubs that bring together consumers to buy their own producers (Ebbsfleet United is an example here in Britain: a football club now owned by some 20,000 fans, brought together on the web, that won the FA Trophy last year). Mirroring these changes are shifts in how things are made, as capitalism moves away from the destruction of nature to something closer to balance with it. Visit the BMW factories in Germany and you can see a new model of capitalism which attempts to reuse all the materials that go to make up a car. These production systems are pointers to a different ideal of manufacturing which will be celebrated in the Shanghai 2010 Expo where the world’s fastest growing economy will present a low-carbon vision of capitalism very different from the version that China has embraced over the last two decades. Knowledge too is dividing between capitalist models and cooperative alternatives. A decade ago, every government’s industrial policies put a premium on the creation and protection of intellectual property. Universities were forced to commercialise their ideas, on the grounds that without financial incentives there would be no way to galvanise biotechnology or the next generation of artificial intelligence. Yet against expectations different models have thrived as well. A high proportion of the software used in the internet is open source. The creative commons approach is gaining ground in culture as an alternative to traditional copyright and Wikipedia has become an unlikely symbol of post-capitalism.The third place we should look for changes is the world of work. The varieties of work experience are vast, with huge disparities of pay, fulfilment and power. In some sectors the slump will give new momentum to the old idea that workers should employ capital rather than vice versa. Cooperatives like the Mondragon group (which has over 100,000 employees and has doubled in size each decade) and employee-owned firms like John Lewis, have thrived. In other sectors, too, there has been a long-term trend towards more people wanting work to be an end as well as a means, a source of fulfilment as well as earnings. The decisive issue here, however, is whether capitalism can find a new accommodation with the family. Capitalism is being brought ever more intensively into family life, and many of the areas of greatest prospective employment growth are on the periphery of the family, in health and care. But everywhere there are also signs of a tense divide between work and family as a rising proportion of employees, especially women, have to simultaneously care for young infants and ageing parents. Volumes of evidence now confirm the vital role that families play in nurturing the skills and attitudes of future citizens, yet we are still far short of a new architecture of rights and flexibilities.Many of these changes are forcing states to consider once again how to socialise new risks. The last two accommodations—of the late 19th century and the mid 20th century—were at root about risk, as governments took on the task of protecting people against the risks of poverty in old age, ill-health and unemployment. China looks set to catch up with the west in this respect; it desperately needs to create a viable welfare state and health service if the Communist party is to remain legitimate, and contain a political backlash against capitalistic excesses. Elsewhere the battleground will be care. As populations age it is in principle feasible for everyone to insure themselves, and even for that insurance to be calibrated to DNA results and lifestyles. But experience suggests that it is hard to design insurance markets for care that are both efficient and seen to be fair. For the majority the gulf between what’s needed and what’s on offer is widening, as life expectancy continues to rise and disability becomes the norm. Within a generation we may be on the threshold of a major expansion of collective provision, born of our shared vulnerability to disability, dementia and being left without children or spouses to look after us. That provision will be shaped by access to far more accurate information about individual dispositions, or the effectiveness of treatments, and it will undoubtedly make use of business capabilities. But it is highly unlikely to be capitalistic.Governments may also be drawn further into financial services. So far the financial services industry has been remarkably slow to offer products better fitted to contemporary needs—like variable mortgages that can be put on hold for periods out of work. But some governments (such as Denmark and Singapore) have created personal budget accounts for citizens, and it’s not hard to imagine some offering services where people can borrow money for a period of retraining, parental leave or unemployment, and then repay through the tax system over 20 or 30 years, or through a charge on homes, with much lower transaction costs than the banks. Personal welfare accounts; personal budgets in health; personal carbon allowances. All may turn out to be distinctive parts of the architecture of a reformed state that pools risks while also personalising its services. All may be part of new deals that combine new rights with greater obligations to save, to pay for health and education, and to share the costs that will come from greater flexibility at work. The last great accommodations were about the state, and states are being pulled back into much more active roles as the recession bites. But some of the most important guarantees of security lie beyond the direct reach of government. In the US the proportion of people who say that they have no one to talk to about important issues has risen from 10 per cent to 25 per cent in 20 years. Contemporary biology and social science has confirmed just how much we are social animals—dependent on others for our happiness, our self-respect, our worth and even our life. There is no inherent contradiction between capitalism and community. But we have learned that these connections are not automatic: they have to be cultivated and rewarded, and societies that invest large proportions of their surpluses on advertising to persuade people that individual consumption is the best route to happiness end up paying a high price.That our social relationships matter as much as our income may change how politics is thought about. The short-term effect of the downturn will be to focus all attention on GDP’s dispiriting decline. But the longer trend is towards seeing GDP as less important than other measures of social success, including well-being. Over the last year the OECD has mobilised a glittering array of Nobel prize winners to advise on what should come “beyond GDP”: President Sarkozy has announced his eagerness to adopt some of their ideas and Obama will want measures of success that take account of health improvements, greener cities and better education rather than just measuring how much people have spent. What also lies beyond GDP is a more pluralistic idea of how companies should be run. For decades the publicly quoted plc has been the norm. But the current crisis is reminding us that more diverse business forms can be more resilient. The building societies that didn’t privatise have survived far better than those that did. Charities tend to survive recessions better than conventional businesses and Britain’s 55,000 or so social enterprises may bounce back faster than firms without a social mission. Not surprisingly, the Conservatives are toying with policy ideas to strengthen credit unions and community investment funds, food cooperatives and energy service companies, all part of a search for an economic vision to replace the 1980s vision of big bang and privatised utilities. Capitalism’s crisis is, of course, a global one, and has shown up the limitations of the global institutions that took shape half a century ago. China is set to become a dominant player in a strengthened IMF and World Bank, followed by India and Brazil. The G20 is edging out the G8 as the club that matters. And waiting in the wings are possible new institutions to police and manage carbon, to handle everything from global migration to the regulation of biotechnology, alongside less formal institutions to help the world’s public to engage, from e-parliaments to global campaigning platforms like Awaaz, an online newspaper.No one can know which of these possibilities will come to fruition. There are in principle an infinite number of directions social systems can take. But history suggests that at key moments evolution is highly selective. Only a few models turn out to be sustainable, with an affinity to the prevailing technologies, values and power structures. In the first phase of the crisis the most successful claimants for support have been the big, failing (and well-connected) industries of the last era of capitalism. But the arguments are moving on—to how recovery plans can back job growth, fixing the future (as in San Francisco’s electric car infrastructures or Korea’s massive green jobs programme) rather than trying to fix the mistakes of the past. It’s not clear yet which politicians will be able to articulate a vision of a “servant capitalism” better suited to the 21st century. David Cameron has made some attempts—hard though that may sometimes be for the descendant of generations of stockbrokers. Gordon Brown is a son of the manse, but also deeply implicated in the crisis. Obama should be ideally suited to offering a new vision, yet has surrounded himself with champions of the very system that now appears to be crumbling.The result is that a large political space is opening up. In the short run it is being filled with anger, fear and confusion. In the longer run it may be filled with a new vision of capitalism, and its relationship to both society and ecology, a vision that will be clearer about what we want to grow and what we don’t. Democracies have in the past repeatedly tamed, guided and revived capitalism. They have prevented the sale of people, of votes, public offices, children’s labour and body organs, and they have enforced rights and rules, while also pouring resources in to meet capitalism’s need for science and skills, and it has been out of this mix of conflict and co-operation that the world has achieved the extraordinary progress of the last century.To discover what comes next, maybe we should look upwards. Skylines provide the simplest test of what a society values, and where its surpluses are controlled. A few centuries ago the greatest buildings in the world’s cities were forts, churches and temples; then for a time they became palaces. Briefly in the 19th century civic buildings, railway stations and museums overshadowed them. And then in the late 20th century everywhere they were banks. Few believe that they will be for much longer. But what will come next—great leisure palaces and sports stadiums; universities and art galleries; water towers and hanging gardens; or perhaps biotech empires? We need to rekindle our capacity to imagine, and to see through the still-gathering storm to what lies beyond.