William Shakespeare - "Romeo und Juliette"

Fanny Fern - "Little Ferns For Fanny's Little Friends"

Henry Beam Piper - "Oomphel in the Sky"

Various - "The Best Short Stories of 1915"

Annual Bibliography of Commonwealth Literature 2007
This paper argues that discourses of love in Ghanaian market literature for youth offer a view into complex negotiations of agency and empowerment. Drawing on Deborah Durham's notion of youth as "social `shifters'" and Francis Nyamnjoh's conception of the "interconnectedness" of agency, I take Ghanaian market literature as one specific case of how African literature for youth foregrounds questions of continuity and change as African societies enter into increasingly complex global relations. In this literature for youth, received notions of love, often constructed out of impressions from American pop and hip hop music, carry new notions of agency that compete with existing "domesticated" forms. Authors like Ike Tandoh and Evelyn Tay employ discourses of love to offer youth alternative avenues for empowerment in a context of socio-economic disenfranchizement. In a creative process of "straddling", this writing both reveals and reproduces the contradictions that obtain in youth configurations of agency.

A Preface to Politics

W >> Walter Lippmann >> A Preface to Politics




The indictment against politics to-day is not its corruption, but its
lack of insight. I believe it is a fact which experience will sustain
that men steal because they haven't anything better to do. You don't have
to preach honesty to men with a creative purpose. Let a human being throw
the energies of his soul into the making of something, and the instinct
of workmanship will take care of his honesty. The writers who have
nothing to say are the ones that you can buy: the others have too high a
price. A genuine craftsman will not adulterate his product: the reason
isn't because duty says he shouldn't, but because passion says he
couldn't. I suggested in an earlier chapter that the issue of honesty and
dishonesty was a futile one, and I placed faith in the creative men. They
hate shams and the watering of goods on a more trustworthy basis than the
mere routine moralist. To them dishonesty is a contradiction of their own
lusts, and they ask no credit, need none, for being true. Creation is an
emotional ascent, which makes the standard vices trivial, and turns all
that is valuable in virtue to the service of desire.

When politics revolves mechanically it ceases to use the real energies of
a nation. Government is then at once irrelevant and mischievous--a mere
obstructive nuisance. Not long ago a prominent senator remarked that he
didn't know much about the country, because he had spent the last few
months in Washington. It was a profound utterance as anyone can testify
who reads, let us say, the Congressional Record. For that document,
though replete with language, is singularly unacquainted with the forces
that agitate the nation. Politics, as the contributors to the
Congressional Record seem to understand it, is a very limited selection
of well-worn debates on a few arbitrarily chosen "problems." Those
questions have developed a technique and an interest in them for their
own sake. They are handled with a dull solemnity quite out of proportion
to their real interest. Labor receives only a perfunctory and largely
disingenuous attention; even commerce is handled in a way that expresses
neither its direction nor its public use. Congress has been ready enough
to grant favors to corporations, but where in its wrangling from the
Sherman Act to the Commerce Court has it shown any sympathetic
understanding of the constructive purposes in the trust movement? It has
either presented the business man with money or harassed him with
bungling enthusiasm in the pretended interests of the consumer. The one
thing Congress has not done is to use the talents of business men for the
nation's advantage.

If "politics" has been indifferent to forces like the union and the
trust, it is no exaggeration to say that it has displayed a modest
ignorance of women's problems, of educational conflicts and racial
aspirations; of the control of newspapers and magazines, the book
publishing world, socialist conventions and unofficial political groups
like the single-taxers.

Such genuine powers do not absorb our political interest because we are
fooled by the regalia of office. But statesmanship, if it is to be
relevant, would obtain a new perspective on these dynamic currents, would
find out the wants they express and the energies they contain, would
shape and direct and guide them. For unions and trusts, sects, clubs and
voluntary associations stand for actual needs. The size of their
following, the intensity of their demands are a fair index of what the
statesman must think about. No lawyer created a trust though he drew up
its charter; no logician made the labor movement or the feminist
agitation. If you ask what for political purposes a nation is, a
practical answer would be: it is its "movements." They are the social
_life_. So far as the future is man-made it is made of them. They show
their real vitality by a relentless growth in spite of all the little
fences and obstacles that foolish politicians devise.

There is, of course, much that is dead within the movements. Each one
carries along a quantity of inert and outworn ideas,--not infrequently
there is an internally contradictory current. Thus the very workingmen
who agitate for a better diffusion of wealth display a marked hostility
to improvements in the production of it. The feminists too have their
atavisms: not a few who object to the patriarchal family seem inclined to
cure it by going back still more--to the matriarchal. Constructive
business has no end of reactionary moments----the most striking, perhaps,
is when it buys up patents in order to suppress them. Yet these
inversions, though discouraging, are not essential in the life of
movements. They need to be expurgated by an unceasing criticism; yet in
bulk the forces I have mentioned, and many others less important, carry
with them the creative powers of our times.

It is not surprising that so many political inventions have been made
within these movements, fostered by them, and brought to a general public
notice through their efforts. When some constructive proposal is being
agitated before a legislative committee, it is customary to unite the
"movements" in support of it. Trade unions and women's clubs have joined
hands in many an agitation. There are proposals to-day, like the minimum
wage, which seem sure of support from consumers' leagues, women's
federations, trade unions and those far-sighted business men who may be
called "State Socialists."

In fact, unless a political invention is woven into a social movement it
has no importance. Only when that is done is it imbued with life. But how
among countless suggestions is a "cause" to know the difference between a
true invention and a pipe-dream? There is, of course, no infallible
touchstone by which we can tell offhand. No one need hope for an easy
certainty either here or anywhere else in human affairs. No one is
absolved from experiment and constant revision. Yet there are some
hypotheses that prima facie deserve more attention than others.

Those are the suggestions which come out of a recognized human need. If a
man proposed that the judges of the Supreme Court be reduced from nine to
seven because the number seven has mystical power, we could ignore him.
But if he suggested that the number be reduced because seven men can
deliberate more effectively than nine he ought to be given a hearing. Or
let us suppose that the argument is about granting votes to women. The
suffragist who bases a claim on the so-called "logic of democracy" is
making the poorest possible showing for a good cause. I have heard people
maintain that: "it makes no difference whether women want the ballot, or
are fit for it, or can do any good with it,--this country is a democracy.
Democracy means government by the votes of the people. Women are people.
Therefore women should vote." That in a very simple form is the
mechanical conception of government. For notice how it ignores human
wants and human powers--how it subordinates people to a rigid formula. I
use this crude example because it shows that even the most genuine and
deeply grounded demands are as yet unable to free themselves entirely
from a superficial manner of thinking. We are only partially emancipated
from the mechanical and merely logical tradition of the Eighteenth
Century. No end of illustrations could be adduced. In the Socialist party
it has been the custom to denounce the "short ballot." Why? Because it
reduces the number of elective offices. This is regarded as undemocratic
for the reason that democracy has come to mean a series of elections.
According to a logic, the more elections the more democratic. But
experience has shown that a seven-foot ballot with a regiment of names is
so bewildering that a real choice is impossible. So it is proposed to cut
down the number of elective offices, focus the attention on a few
alternatives, and turn voting into a fairly intelligent performance. Here
is an attempt to fit political devices to the actual powers of the voter.
The old, crude form of ballot forgot that finite beings had to operate
it. But the "democrats" adhere to the multitude of choices because
"logic" requires them to.

This incident of the "short ballot" illustrates the cleavage between
invention and routine. The socialists oppose it not because their
intentions are bad but because on this issue their thinking is
mechanical. Instead of applying the test of human need, they apply a
verbal and logical consistency. The "short ballot" in itself is a slight
affair, but the insight behind it seems to me capable of revolutionary
development. It is one symptom of the effort to found institutions on
human nature. There are many others. We might point to the first
experiments aimed at remedying the helter-skelter of careers by
vocational guidance. Carried through successfully, this invention of
Prof. Parsons' is one whose significance in happiness can hardly be
exaggerated. When you think of the misfits among your acquaintances--the
lawyers who should be mechanics, the doctors who should be business men,
the teachers who should have been clerks, and the executives who should
be doing research in a laboratory--when you think of the talent that
would be released by proper use, the imagination takes wing at the
possibilities. What could we not make of the world if we employed its
genius!

Whoever is working to express special energies is part of a constructive
revolution. Whoever is removing the stunting environments of our
occupations is doing the fundamentals of reform. The studies of Miss
Goldmark of industrial fatigue, recuperative power and maximum
productivity are contributions toward that distant and desirable period
when labor shall be a free and joyous activity. Every suggestion which
turns work from a drudgery to a craft is worth our deepest interest. For
until then the labor problem will never be solved. The socialist demand
for a better distribution of wealth is of great consequence, but without
a change in the very nature of labor society will not have achieved the
happiness it expects. That is why imaginative socialists have shown so
great an interest in "syndicalism." There at least in some of its forms,
we can catch sight of a desire to make all labor a self-governing craft.

The handling of crime has been touched by the modern impetus. The
ancient, abstract and wholesale "justice" is breaking up into detailed
and carefully adapted treatment of individual offenders. What this means
for the child has become common knowledge in late years. Criminology (to
use an awkward word) is finding a human center. So is education. Everyone
knows how child study is revolutionizing the school room and the
curriculum. Why, it seems that Mme. Montessori has had the audacity to
sacrifice the sacred bench to the interests of the pupil! The traditional
school seems to be vanishing--that place in which an ill-assorted band of
youngsters was for a certain number of hours each day placed in the
vicinity of a text-book and a maiden lady.

I mention these experiments at random. It is not the specific reforms
that I wish to emphasize but the great possibilities they foreshadow.
Whether or not we adopt certain special bills, high tariff or low tariff,
one banking system or another, this trust control or that, is a slight
gain compared to a change of attitude toward all political problems. The
reformer bound up in his special propaganda will, of course, object that
"to get something done is worth more than any amount of talk about new
ways of looking at political problems." What matters the method, he will
cry, provided the reform be good? Well, the method matters more than any
particular reform. A man who couldn't think straight might get the right
answer to one problem, but how much faith would you have in his capacity
to solve the next one? If you wanted to educate a child, would you teach
him to read one play of Shakespeare, or would you teach him to _read_? If
the world were going to remain frigidly set after next year, we might
well thank our stars if we blundered into a few decent solutions right
away. But as there is no prospect of a time when our life will be
immutably fixed, as we shall, therefore, have to go on inventing, it is
fair to say that what the world is aching for is not a special reform
embodied in a particular statute, but a way of going at all problems. The
lasting value of Darwin, for example, is not in any concrete conclusion
he reached. His importance to the world lies in the new twist he gave to
science. He lent it fruitful direction, a different impetus, and the
results are beyond his imagining.

In that spiritual autobiography of a searching mind, "The New
Machiavelli," Wells describes his progress from a reformer of concrete
abuses to a revolutionist in method. "You see," he says, "I began in my
teens by wanting to plan and build cities and harbors for mankind; I
ended in the middle thirties by desiring only to serve and increase a
general process of thought, a process fearless, critical, real-spirited,
that would in its own time give cities, harbors, air, happiness,
everything at a scale and quality and in a light altogether beyond the
match-striking imaginations of a contemporary mind...."

This same veering of interest may be seen in the career of another
Englishman. I refer to Mr. Graham Wallas. Back in the '80's he was
working with the Webbs, Bernard Shaw, Sidney Olivier, Annie Besant and
others in socialist propaganda. Readers of the Fabian Essays know Mr.
Wallas and appreciate the work of his group. Perhaps more than anyone
else, the Fabians are responsible for turning English socialist thought
from the verbalism of the Marxian disciples to the actualities of English
political life. Their appetite for the concrete was enormous; their
knowledge of facts overpowering, as the tomes produced by Mr. and Mrs.
Webb can testify. The socialism of the Fabians soon became a definite
legislative program which the various political parties were to be
bulldozed, cajoled and tricked into enacting. It was effective work, and
few can question the value of it. Yet many admirers have been left with a
sense of inadequacy.

Unlike the orthodox socialists, the Fabians took an active part in
immediate politics. "We permeated the party organizations," writes Shaw,
"and pulled all the wires we could lay our hands on with our utmost
adroitness and energy.... The generalship of this movement was undertaken
chiefly by Sidney Webb, who played such bewildering conjuring tricks with
the Liberal thimbles and the Fabian peas that to this day both the
Liberals and the sectarian Socialists stand aghast at him." Few Americans
know how great has been this influence on English political history for
the last twenty years. The well-known Minority Report of the Poor Law
Commission bears the Webb signature most conspicuously. Fabianism began
to achieve a reputation for getting things done--for taking part in
"practical affairs." Bernard Shaw has found time to do no end of
campaigning and even the parochial politics of a vestryman has not seemed
too insignificant for his Fabian enthusiasm. Graham Wallas was a
candidate in five municipal elections, and has held an important office
as member of the London County Council.

But the original Fabian enthusiasm has slackened. One might ascribe it to
a growing sense that concrete programs by themselves will not insure any
profound regeneration of society. H. G. Wells has been savage and often
unfair about the Fabian Society, but in "The New Machiavelli" he touched,
I believe, the real disillusionment. Remington's history is in a way
symbolic. Here was a successful political reformer, coming more and more
to a disturbing recognition of his helplessness, perceiving the
aimlessness and the unreality of political life, and announcing his
contempt for the "crudification" of all issues. What Remington missed was
what so many reformers are beginning to miss--an underlying philosophical
habit.

Mr. Wallas seems to have had much the same experience. In the midst of a
bustle of activity, politics appeared to have no center to which its
thinking and doing could be referred. The truth was driven home upon him
that political science is a science of human relationship with the human
beings left out. So he writes that "the thinkers of the past, from Plato
to Bentham and Mill, had each his own view of human nature, and they made
these views the basis of their speculations on government." But to-day
"nearly all students of politics analyze institutions and avoid the
analysis of man." Whoever has read the typical book on politics by a
professor or a reformer will agree, I think, when he adds: "One feels
that many of the more systematic books on politics by American University
professors are useless, just because the writers dealt with abstract men,
formed on assumptions of which they were unaware and which they have
never tested either by experience or by study."

An extreme example could be made of Nicholas Murray Butler, President of
Columbia University. In the space of six months he wrote an impassioned
defense of "constitutional government," beginning with the question, "Why
is it that in the United States the words politics and politician have
associations that are chiefly of evil omen," and then, to make irony
complete, proceeded at the New York State Republican Convention to do the
jobbery of Boss Barnes. What is there left but to gasp and wonder whether
the words of the intellect have anything to do with the facts of life?
What insight into reality can a man possess who is capable of discussing
politics and ignoring politicians? What kind of naivete was it that led
this educator into asking such a question?

President Butler is, I grant, a caricature of the typical professor. Yet
what shall we say of the annual harvest of treatises on "labor problems"
which make no analysis of the mental condition of laboring men; of the
treatises on marriage and prostitution which gloss over the sexual life
of the individual? "In the other sciences which deal with human affairs,"
writes Mr. Wallas, referring to pedagogy and criminology, "this division
between the study of the thing done and the study of the being who does
it is not found."

I have in my hands a text-book of six hundred pages which is used in the
largest universities as a groundwork of political economy. This
remarkable sentence strikes the eye: "The motives to business activity
are too familiar to require analysis." But some sense that perhaps the
"economic man" is not a self-evident creature seems to have touched our
author. So we are treated to these sapient remarks: "To avoid this
criticism we will begin with a characterization of the typical business
man to be found to-day in the United States and other countries in the
same stage of industrial development. _He has four traits which show
themselves more or less clearly in all of his acts._" They are first
"self-interest," but "this does not mean that he is steeped in
selfishness ..."; secondly, "the larger self," the family, union, club,
and "in times of emergency his country"; thirdly, "love of independence,"
for "his ambition is to stand on his own feet"; fourthly, "business
ethics" which "are not usually as high as the standards professed in
churches, but they are much higher than current criticisms of business
would lead one to think." Three-quarters of a page is sufficient for this
penetrating analysis of motive and is followed by the remark that "these
four characteristics of the economic man are readily explained by
reference to the evolutionary process which has brought industrial
society to its present stage of development."

If those were the generalizations of a tired business man after a heavy
dinner and a big cigar, they would still seem rather muddled and useless.
But as the basis of an economic treatise in which "laws" are announced,
"principles" laid down, reforms criticized as "impracticable," all for
the benefit of thousands of college students, it is hardly possible to
exaggerate the folly of such an exhibition. I have taken a book written
by one eminent professor and evidently approved by others, for they use
it as a text-book. It is no queer freak. I myself was supposed to read
that book pretty nearly every week for a year. With hundreds of others I
was supposed to found my economic understanding upon it. We were actually
punished for not reading that book. It was given to us as wisdom, as
modern political economy.

But what goes by the name to-day is a potpourri in which one can
distinguish descriptions of legal forms, charters and institutions;
comparative studies of governmental and social machinery; the history of
institutions, a few "principles" like the law of rent, some moral
admonitions, a good deal of class feeling, not a little timidity--but
almost no attempt to cut beneath these manifestations of social life to
the creative impulses which produce them. The Economic Man--that lazy
abstraction--is still paraded in the lecture room; the study of human
nature has not advanced beyond the gossip of old wives.

Graham Wallas touched the cause of the trouble when he pointed out that
political science to-day discusses institutions and ignores the nature of
the men who make and live under them. I have heard professors reply that
it wasn't their business to discuss human nature but to record and
interpret economic and political facts. Yet if you probe those
"interpretations" there is no escaping the conclusion that they rest upon
some notion of what man is like. "The student of politics," writes Mr.
Wallas, "must, consciously or unconsciously, form a conception of human
nature, and the less conscious he is of his conception the more likely he
is to be dominated by it." For politics is an interest of men--a tool
which they fabricate and use--and no comment has much value if it tries
to get along without mankind. You might as well try to describe food by
ignoring the digestion.

Mr. Wallas has called a halt. I think we may say that his is the
distinction of having turned the study of politics back to the humane
tradition of Plato and Machiavelli--of having made man the center of
political investigation. The very title of his book--"Human Nature in
Politics"--is significant. Now in making that statement, I am aware that
it is a sweeping one, and I do not mean to imply that Mr. Wallas is the
only modern man who has tried to think about politics psychologically.
Here in America alone we have two splendid critics, a man and a woman,
whose thought flows from an interpretation of human character. Thorstein
Veblen's brilliant descriptions penetrate deeply into our mental life,
and Jane Addams has given new hope to many of us by her capacity for
making ideals the goal of natural desire.

Nor is it just to pass by such a suggestive thinker as Gabriel Tarde,
even though we may feel that his psychology is too simple and his
conclusions somewhat overdriven by a favorite theory. The work of Gustav
Le Bon on "crowds" has, of course, passed into current thought, but I
doubt whether anyone could say that he had even prepared a basis for a
new political psychology. His own aversion to reform, his fondness for
vast epochs and his contempt for current effort have left most of his
"psychological laws" in the region of interesting literary comment. There
are, too, any number of "social psychologies," such as those of Ross and
McDougall. But the trouble with them is that the "psychology" is weak and
uninformed, distorted by moral enthusiasms, and put out without any
particular reference to the task of statesmanship. When you come to
special problems, the literature of the subject picks up. Crime is
receiving valuable attention, education is profoundly affected,
alcoholism and sex have been handled for a good while on a psychological
basis.

But it remained for Mr. Wallas to state the philosophy of the matter--to
say why the study of human nature must serve politics, and to point out
how. He has not produced a political psychology, but he has written the
manifesto for it. As a result, fragmentary investigations can be brought
together and applied to the work of statecraft. Merely by making these
researches self-conscious, he has made clearer their goal, given them
direction, and kindled them to practical action. How necessary this work
is can be seen in the writing of Miss Addams. Owing to keen insight and
fine sympathy her thinking has generally been on a human basis. Yet Miss
Addams is a reformer, and sympathy without an explicit philosophy may
lead to a distorted enthusiasm. Her book on prostitution seems rather the
product of her moral fervor than her human insight. Compare it with "The
Spirit of Youth" or "Newer Ideals of Peace" or "Democracy and Social
Ethics" and I think you will notice a very considerable willingness to
gloss over human need in the interests of an unanalyzed reform. To put it
bluntly, Miss Addams let her impatience get the better of her wisdom. She
had written brilliantly about sex and its "sublimation," she had
suggested notable "moral equivalents" for vice, but when she touched the
white slave traffic its horrors were so great that she also put her faith
in the policeman and the district attorney. "A New Conscience and an
Ancient Evil" is an hysterical book, just because the real philosophical
basis of Miss Addams' thinking was not deliberate enough to withstand the
shock of a poignant horror.

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