Eric Brandom
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ebrandom.bsky.social
Eric Brandom
@ebrandom.bsky.social
12K followers 3.3K following 13K posts
Intellectual history, here decontextualized. Especially modern France, history of political thought, and socialism. And Kansas, because that's where I live "als Gelehrter, der durch Schriften zum eigentlichen Publikum, nämlich der Welt, spricht."
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ebrandom.bsky.social
Here is Mahmood Mamdani describing the time in 1965 when the FBI inadvertently introduced him to Karl Marx. This took place in Pittsburgh, and was in response to a SNCC visit to Alabama during which he met Martin Luther King.
Roughly a month ­ after returning from Alabama, two FBI agents knocked on my door, wearing beige raincoats, badges in hand. The FBI—­ I was thrilled. Just like on ­ television, I thought. ­ After a few preliminaries, they asked what I thought of Marx. I said I had never met him. Not surprisingly, this Ugandan Muyindi had never heard of Karl Marx. “He’s dead.” I said, “I’m sorry, what happened?” “No, he died long ago.” I wondered why, then, the question. “Why, then, are you asking me?” They said that Marx believed that the money of rich ­ people should be taken away and distributed to poor ­ people. I said it sounded like a fine idea! At that point, they seemed to decide ­ there was ­ little point in continuing the conversation, and they left. That, however, was not the end of the story. I went to the library to look up Marx. ­ Later, I would remind myself: the FBI intro- duced me to Karl Marx! This was 1965. It would mark my entry point into the civil rights movement. ­ There was a student ­ organization at the university called the Hill Education Proj­ ect. The Hill referred to the area where poor African American families lived. The proj­ ect brought together college students like me to mentor a secondary school kid from the neighborhood once a week. The pre- sumption was that we would have something to teach ­ these kids. Very soon I realized I ­ didn’t have much to teach this par­ tic­ u­ lar kid. The best ­ thing I could do was to take him for a nice meal, and talk over the meal about anything he was interested in. So we used to go to a Lebanese restaurant, Umar Khayyam, in an upscale neighborhood, Shadyside, eat pita bread with hummus and bar- becued lamb . . . and talk. I ­ don’t know how much it helped him, but it certainly did help me. The 1960s in the US ­ were an amazing ­ decade, especially culturally. ­ There seemed few limits to the risks you could take and the bound­ aries you could transgress. Every­ thing was provisional, every­ thing was experimental. It began for me a ­ decade of activism, and I moved seamlessly from civil rights to anti-war mobilization.
November 9, 2025 at 6:30 PM
ebrandom.bsky.social
Here's the back
Black and white photograph of a crowded freeway. I'm block caps below: TOUT CE QUI RAMPE EST GOUVERNÉ PAR LES COUPS
November 8, 2025 at 7:47 PM
ebrandom.bsky.social
I'd forgotten I had this. A Parisian zine from 2008.
géographie nocturne Tous les sages de pacotille peuvent bien nous avertir, prendre des vessies pour des lanternes, outre qu'il finit toujours par en résulter quelques fâcheuses conséquences, cela n'est pas si simple qu'il n'y parait. Se diriger vers la lumière est une pratique que sans peine nous abandonnons aux volatiles. Laissons donc les maitres sur leurs trónes en plastique; quant à leurs esclaves, le mépris leur sied mieux qu'une vague pitié. Que l'on nous foute la paix, voilà une motivation sans effet secondaire. Enfin l'air toxique, le ciel éteint, les fruits påles, et notre place encore chaude dans le circuit économique: on a beau dire une vie de chien, la nôtre ne vaut que rarement mieux. Une vérité communément admise, quoique sous-jacente, est la supériorité d'une espèce rompue à la métaphysique et à la mécanique des fluides. Mais poussés dans nos ultimes retranchements, du fond de nos lits, les idées se dissolvent. Ne reste que le goût amer d'une existence gâchée, que de menus plaisirs n'auront pas secourue, laissant au contraire entrevoir l'ampleur du sabotage. Le Surhomme dépasse de loin l'imagination fantasque d'un philosophe; il s'agit au contraire d'une image en creux, qui trouve tout son sens par contraste, dans la réalité inverse, strictement symétrique et on ne peut plus matérielle de l'insuffisance de nos vies. Le fait est que NOUS N'EN POUVONS PLUS D'ETRE DES SOUS-HOMMES. géographie nocturne - premier numéro, novembre 2008. édité et diffusé par la librairie béatrice 12, rue d'Ulm, Paris. rédaction: Benjamin Pitchal, Philippe Urvoy. photographies: Emilien Urbano, Philippe Urvoy.
November 8, 2025 at 7:40 PM
ebrandom.bsky.social
"Lewis...returned home with so intense a disgust at the scenes he had beheld that he took to poetry"
His 700-line poem, "The Dream and Riddle" echoed the many despairing pamphlets, poems, and squibs pub-lished in London in the 1720's and early 1730's in ridiculing the justice of the English government ("Complaints if just are very shocking things; / And not encouraged in the courts of Kings"); the venality of the court ("... our noble Prince's ear / Is open to complaints, and he will hear; / The difficulty's how to get them there"); the mores of shopkeepers ("The gaudy shops of this tumultuous hive / By several arts of cheating only thrive"); and the corruption of Parliament ("Both senates and their chosers vote for pay / And both alike their liberty betray"). He ended
November 8, 2025 at 3:01 AM
ebrandom.bsky.social
the executive possesses means of distracting Parliament from its proper function; it seduces members by the offer of places and pensions, by retaining them to follow ministers and ministers' rivals, by persuading them to support measures - standing armies, national debts, excise schemes - whereby the activities of administration grow beyond Par-liament's control. These means of subversion are known collectively as corruption, and if ever Parliament or those who elect them - for corruption may occur at this point too - should be wholly corrupt, then there will be an end of independence and liberty. 35
November 7, 2025 at 3:57 AM
ebrandom.bsky.social
It's old news but I hate so much that platforms like ProQuest and JSTOR are inserting AI in alongside texts like this. Might as well say, why read?
proquest ebook screenshot, showing the pop-up offer of an AI research assistant in a column to the left. book in question is Wang's White Lotus Rebels and South China Pirates.
November 6, 2025 at 5:17 PM
ebrandom.bsky.social
Even exotic peasants should go vote, 1906 edition. gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/b...
cover of le petiti parisien. color picture of oddly dressed people on stilts on their way, evidently, to the voting booth.
November 5, 2025 at 5:25 PM
ebrandom.bsky.social
Settembrini on protestantism and Luther's probable wendish-slavic-sarmation blood. The racial imaginary of 19th century liberalism, at least according to Thomas Mann. (Mainly, Wends mentioned).
Protestantism harbors within it certain elements-just as the Great Reformer himself harbored such elements within his personality. I am thinking here of a sentimentality, a trancelike self-hypnosis that is not European, that is foreign and hostile to our active hemisphere's law of life. Just look at him, this Luther. Look at the portraits, both as a young man and later. What a skull, what cheekbones, what a strange set to the eyes. My friend, that is Asia. I would be surprised, would be astonished, if Wendish-Slavic-Sarmatian blood was not at work there, and if it was not this massive phenomenon of a man and who would deny him that-who proved to be a fatal weight placed on one of the two precariously balanced scales of your nation, on the Eastern scale, which caused-and still causes-the Western scale to fly heavenward." Herr Settembrini had moved now from his humanist's folding lectern to the round table with its water carafe, closer to his pupil, who was sitting on the backless divan pushed up against one wall, his elbows on his knees and his chin propped in one hand. "Caro!" Herr Settembrini said, "Caro amico! Decisions must be made-decisions of incalculable significance for the future happiness of Europe, and your country will have to make them, they must come to
November 2, 2025 at 9:55 PM
ebrandom.bsky.social
Have only just started so I don't want to say anything about the words on the inside, but this pink is a delight.
Photograph of the spine of a hardback book. The Mistral, Dunlop. Book is white, type is pink.
November 1, 2025 at 8:34 PM
ebrandom.bsky.social
It's significant that the "liberalism" these people all think is dying, irrelevant, collapsed, is not a thing that has ever actually existed
By liberalism, I mean here both the broad Enlightenment "classical liberalism" of individual rights and limited democratic government, and its late-20th-century "progressive" form dominated by bureaucratic proceduralism. Post-liberalism in this thought experiment refers not to a single ideological program but to the family of arguments that liberalism may be exhausted. Whether a post-liberal America would still be an Aristotelian "America" as defined by its constitution and first principles is its own debate. My concern here is how the military profession may adapt if liberal norms no longer anchor it.
October 31, 2025 at 12:20 AM
ebrandom.bsky.social
Opening paragraphs of Carl Becker's review of the Education of Henry Adams doi.org/10.1086/ahr/...
THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS IN 1771, Thomas Hutchinson wrote to one of his friends, "We have not been so quiet here these five years... if it were not for two or three Adamses, we should do well enough." From that day to this many people have agreed with the fastidious governor. But so far, an Adams or two we have always had with us; and on the whole, although they have sometimes been exasperating, they have always been salutary. During four generations the men of this family have loved and served America as much as they have scolded her. More cannot be said, except that they have commonly given, on both counts, more than they have received. Theirs is therefore the blessing, and ours the benefit. Among other things, we have to thank them for some diaries and autobiographies which have been notable for frank self-revela-tion. Henry Adams would of course have stoutly denied that any such impertinence as self-revelation was either intended or achieved in the Education. There is no evidence that he ever kept a diary (all things considered, the burden of proof is not on us!); but it is not to be supposed that he would have published it in any case. A man who regarded himself as of no more significance than a chance deposit on the surface of the world might indeed write down an intimate record of his soul's doings as an exercise in cosmic irony; but the idea of publishing it could hardly have lived for a moment in the lambent flame of his own sardonic humor. He could be perverse, but perversity could not well go the length of per-petrating so pointless a joke as that would come to. No, Henry Adams would not reveal himself to the curious inspection of an unsympathetic world; but he would write a book for the purpose of exposing a dynamic theory of history, than which nothing could well be more impersonal or unrevealing. With a philosophy of history the Puritan has always been preoccupied; and it was the major interest of Henry Adams throughout the better
October 30, 2025 at 7:25 PM
ebrandom.bsky.social
to compare to this, painted i believe only a decade earlier
painting of napoleon with a bunch of people around him, he is looking at a mummy whose casket has recently it seems been opened.
October 30, 2025 at 6:07 PM
ebrandom.bsky.social
gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/b...
black and white illustration. digging up some skeletons in the desert. men doing the work in robes, other men in european uniforms with moustaches. a city suggested with domes, walls, minarets, in the background. the caption says, "deciuverte de vestiges du corps d'occupation de Bonaparte en Egypte"
October 30, 2025 at 5:59 PM
ebrandom.bsky.social
How about these two! One after the other in September!
cover of le petit journal. we are high above a city, the bottom of a balloon is visible, with the american flag waving from it. a woman on a trapeze bar attached to it, in pants, maybe an acrobat, is hanging with her leg and grabbing with her hand the hair of another woman, in regular clothes, who has her foot tangled in a rope. cover of le petit journal. we are in the mountains. a large eagle is carrying off a child, while a mother shouts in understandable distress below.
October 30, 2025 at 1:47 PM
ebrandom.bsky.social
These journals loved all sorts of extreme things. Air travel and also submarine business.
cover of le petit parisien, featuring a balloon descended to the level of the street, exploding. windows shatter, a crowd flees. cover of le petit journal. the viewer is at the water level, the top of the image is boats above, with many ropes/lines leading down, and then under is a submarine with people in diving suits around it.
October 30, 2025 at 1:36 PM
ebrandom.bsky.social
For those who may possibly be local here in MHK
Poster for a food drive. Flint hills bread basket. Collection noon-4 in Sunday 2nd of November at the city park shelter on Poyntz. Bread, produce, proteins most needed.
October 28, 2025 at 10:06 PM
ebrandom.bsky.social
This reminds me of a different story about scratching things on walls, which is from a text I happen to be teaching tomorrow.
Gusti Wieghardt, whom we see every week on reciprocal visits, reports the Communist Party view: another 6 to 12 months. This Party thinking and feeling makes her ever more stupid. She talks about her "faith in Marx, faith in Lenin." Their dogmas have unqualified validity for her. As soon as she talks about these things, a phonetic indication of her frame of mind appears: she begins to roll her Rs. Recently she read out a little poème en prose by Brecht smuggled in from Denmark in shorthand. [...] A prisoner writes "Long live Lenin" on the wall of his cell. Painters are supposed to get rid of it, again and again the writing shows through: "Long live Lenin!" A few more prose verses. Then: "Tear down the wall! ordered the soldier." Very nice, but one could allow oneself the joke of transferring the poem word for word to the Nazis after the 1923 Munich putsch. The prisoner only needs to write "Heil Hitler!" on the wall. One afternoon Fräulein Papesch visited us; brave of her to come. Her Protestantism keeps her at a distance from the regime; but she is of course cautious to an extreme. I read the La Mettrie and d'Alembert sections to her.
October 27, 2025 at 10:49 PM
ebrandom.bsky.social
Hannah Höch. Untitled Change of Address (1933 Umgezogen Nach Der Rubensstr. 66). 1933.
Did she make a bunch of these and then fill them out differently each time they had to move? I want to know more! www.jstor.org/stable/commu...
linocut print. two figures walking, carrying art supplies. a cat walks with them. along the bottom is written in pencil 1933 Umgezogen Nach Der Rubensstr. 66
October 27, 2025 at 5:07 PM
ebrandom.bsky.social
"Hardest of all to meet is the moral challenge of rethinking the meaning of agency, responsibility and blame on a global scale and over many generations." www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
Perhaps it is too much to expect that any history should deliver guidance for present policy, rather than just cautionary tales about past errors and excesses. Historians who address such topics as extinction, which straddle the history of humans and of the Earth, face the additional challenge of scale: the mismatch between our decades and centuries and the Earth’s epochs and aeons. The challenges don’t end there. The images of catastrophe that currently occupy the collective imaginary are explosive, sometimes literally so. Anxiety about nuclear armageddon may no longer be uppermost in most people’s minds, but the emblematic world-destroying catastrophe is still the mushroom cloud of a nuclear bomb blast. We engage with slow-motion disasters like extinction, if we engage with them at all, as the dwindling and disappearance of favourite individual species, not as the incremental loss of biodiversity as a whole. Hardest of all to meet is the moral challenge of rethinking the meaning of agency, responsibility and blame on a global scale and over many generations. Moral categories originally conceived with individuals in mind begin to creak when stretched to cover nations or span generations, as vexed debates over reparations for past wrongs demonstrate. Historical narratives, even those of environmental history, are mostly about human beings, by human beings and for human beings. Still to be imagined are the plots, characters and judgments that will be needed to narrate the Anthropocene. It may be that understanding the epoch named after humans will require transcending the human.
October 27, 2025 at 5:00 PM
ebrandom.bsky.social
Neither is le grisou gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/b...
cover of le petit parisien. a miner is attacked by a skeletal horror, which covers his mouth and clutches at his neck.
October 27, 2025 at 3:01 PM
ebrandom.bsky.social
Mountain goats are no joke
gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/b...
cover of the french illustrated weekly le petit journal. a small herd of surprisingly cute mountain goats cause havoc with some hikers. "dans le massif de l'argentiere."
October 27, 2025 at 2:43 PM
ebrandom.bsky.social
"...a disregard that did not look like tact, consideration, or politeness, but instead like pure indifference or callousness--a tolerance so vast it was almost eerie..."
He heard about the accelerated or form of this process, which could lead to one's exitus within a few months, even weeks, heard about pneumectomy, the director's skillfully executed craft, about lung resections, like the one that would be performed the recently arrived serious case, a once next day, or at least very soon, on a very attractive Scottish woman, who was now suffering from gangraena pulmonum, gangrene of the lungs, so that a blackish-green infection was raging inside her, forcing her to breathe a vaporized solution of powdered carbolic acid all day just to keep from losing her mind in revulsion at her own body and suddenly, much to his own surprise and great embar-rassment, the consul burst out laughing. The laughter came in loud snorts, until in his dismay he thought better of it and suddenly recovered, coughed, and tried to gloss over his inane conduct by any means possible; but he was relieved to see a relief that contained the seeds of renewed disquiet-that Hans Castorp had paid no attention at all to what had happened, although he could hardly not have noticed, but simply passed over it with a disregard that did not look like tact, consideration, or politeness, but instead like pure indifference or callousness-a tolerance so vast it was almost eerie, as if he had taught himself long ago not to be surprised by such incidents.
October 27, 2025 at 2:00 AM
ebrandom.bsky.social
We may soon arrive in a world where intelligent machines are conceiving, driving, and implementing a lot of our material progress. They'll be making scientific discoveries, recursively designing new robots, and who knows what else. That's a great thing. We'll take all the progress we can get. But it is essential that people in the world feel like they have a stake in the system; like they've contributed to our shared sense of progress. And I believe Predictions, as a movement, are the answer to our postmodern malaise. They give us something to do. I see no better explanation for the rise of speculation, gambling, and public prediction in the last ten years of popular culture than as a mass revolt against the numbing apathy of late postmodernism. And even though I find some of it uncouth and crass, I don't see it as a regression: it's a step forward, in self-discovery. We have a new way to think about our purpose in the world: we create order in the universe by contributing information. And in the past few years, we've discovered the extent to which it's a shared purpose; perhaps a universal one. I couldn't imagine something more optimistic if I tried. ↑
October 26, 2025 at 2:16 AM
ebrandom.bsky.social
"We provide analysis, a chance to talk things out and a hell of a lot of good it does. The more the rhonchial pack talks things out the more lecherous they become."
An Outburst of Temper 409 matter in a as he examined the cousins, he went on talking about the matte melancholy, resigned tone of voice, for he was such an expert in ausculta-tion that he could simultaneously listen to a patient's interior, talk about something else, and dictate what he had heard to his assistant. "Yes, yes, gentlemen, the damn libido," he said. "The whole affair is great sport for you, of course-it doesn't matter to you. Vesicular. But the director of a sanatorium gets a noseful, believe you-muffled-believe you me. Can I help it if phthisis is accompanied by increased concupis-cence? Slight roughness? I didn't arrange things this way, but before you know what's happened you're running a cathouse. Diminished under the left shoulder. We provide analysis, a chance to talk things out and a hell of a lot of good it does. The more the rhonchial pack talks things out the more lecherous they become. I advocate mathematics. Better here, the old sound is gone. Keeping oneself occupied with mathematics, I say, is the best medicine for cupidity. Prosecutor Paravant, who was severely afflicted, threw himself into math-he's busy squaring the circle these days, and it has greatly eased his problem. But most of them are too dull-witted or too lazy for that, God help them. Vesicular. You see, I'm quite aware that young folks go to the dogs all too easily here, and I used to attempt to take occasional measures against their debauchery. But then one day some lad or lover looked me straight in the eye and asked what business it was of mine. And since then I've been only a doctor. Weak rattling, top right."
October 26, 2025 at 12:46 AM
ebrandom.bsky.social
I had not, immediately, understood that she was inviting him back up to her room, but having read more it seems clear that this indeed is what was happening. The pencil. Forsooth.
338 THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN And she set her paper hat on his head. "Adieu, my Carnival Prince! I can predict that you'll see a nasty rise in your fever chart this evening." Then she glided out of her chair, glided across the carpet to the door, where she stopped and turned halfway back to him, one bare arm raised, a hand on the hinge. Over her shoulder she said softly, "Don't forget to return my pencil." And she left.
October 26, 2025 at 12:33 AM