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Annotated Bibliography 04-238 z1 Bib 8/9/04 11:05 AM Page 291 Annotated Bibliography s I am not presenting this book as a work of scholarly research, but Arather in the nature of a connected series of essays suggesting some new perspectives and their consequences, I have chosen not to insert nu- merical reference citations in the main text. As I do draw extensively on a range of books, and particularly upon several works I consider to be foun- dational to the Anglosphere idea, I have chosen to use the collective ref- erence approach. This section is therefore divided into a “general source works” section, presenting and commenting upon the works whose rele- vance applies throughout the book, followed by a chapter-by-chapter ref- erence, relating various points and arguments to works of particular rele- vance to that section. GENERAL SOURCE WORKS ON THE ANGLOSPHERE QUESTION The following books are among the principal works of scholarship and thought on which I have drawn in proposing the idea of the Anglosphere perspective; their influence underlies the entire book. My describing them as “General Source Works on the Anglosphere Question” indicates their importance to my thinking, rather than implying that their authors en- dorse or agree with the arguments of this work in part or in full, credit or blame for which is entirely mine. David Hackett Fischer’s work Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in North America presents an effective challenge to one of the central myths 291 04-238 z1 Bib 8/9/04 11:05 AM Page 292 292 Annotated Bibliography of American exceptionalism: the Turner’s frontier thesis. He argues con- vincingly that American culture exhibits great continuity from the British Isles to the New World, and that differences between American regional cultures are overwhelmingly the product of the differences between re- gional cultures of the British Isles. Turner’s theories of a transformation through the frontier experience is effectively disproved, particularly in light of a continual evolution of the Anglosphere cultures through ongo- ing frontier experiences within the British ideas and subsequently. Fischer’s picture of Anglosphere continuity is consistent with the An- glosphere exceptionalism whose English roots are shown by Macfarlane to be deep, and whose overall characteristics are shown by Véliz to be wide and distinct when viewed through a comparative lens. Together, they add up to an Anglosphere culture that is persistent and pervasive over many generations, distinct throughout its history from other European-origin civilizations around it, and bearing for its time a partic- ularly strong variety of civil society. Francis Fukuyama’s Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Pros- perity (New York, Free Press, 1995) is an excellent book for thinking about, and comparing and contrasting cultures and subcultures, and particularly about the role of high trust in successful civil societies. It builds on previous scholarly work of a more academic nature, most par- ticularly Edward Banfield’s The Moral Basis of a Backward Society, and the subsequent discussions of social trust, in a broader and more accessible manner. Alan Macfarlane’s work, primarily The Origins of English Individualism (Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1978) is certainly one of the critical foundations underlying modern Anglosphere thought. It refutes in detail the prevail- ing Marxist assumption that England had been just another European peasant society before the modern era and the Industrial Revolution. Macfarlane makes a strong case for the distinctness of English-speaking civilization and its unique social mode reaching back to at least the fif- teenth century, and possibly well before. This stands much Marxist and other economic determinist thinking on its head. Rather than a product of the Industrial Revolution, Anglosphere individualism may have been one of the leading causes of it. Although English Individualism is a highly academic study (written in a dense academic style) that concentrates primarily on land tenure in me- dieval England, its implications, like those of Fisher’s, are profound and have gone remarkably unnoticed in many circles that should be aware of them. Macfarlane’s concluding chapter, in which he speculates on wider implications and possibilities, is an invitation to further Anglospherist scholarship that has been largely unexploited to date by thinkers other than Macfarlane himself. 04-238 z1 Bib 8/9/04 11:05 AM Page 293 Annotated Bibliography 293 Among Macfarlane’s other works, Marriage and Love in England: Modes of Reproduction 1300–1840 (Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1986), is also of inter- est to the question of English, and by extension Anglosphere exceptional- ism. Just as Macfarlane’s work on land tenure suggests that English indi- vidualistic family patterns predated (and have contributed to the origin of) the Industrial Revolution, so Marriage and Love suggests that English mores on the status of women gave sex far more value outside of the role of motherhood far earlier than Continental cultures. Similarly, the view of marriage as primarily a contract between individuals rather than as a sacrament, or as a contract between families, is usually thought of as a re- sult of the Protestant Reformation and Calvinism in particular. Macfar- lane points out English law long predating the Reformation that treats marriage as an individualistic contract and, in contrast to Roman-derived Continental law, denies either a Church or a family veto on the right to marry. Subsequent to the writing of the text of this work, Macfarlane’s The Rid- dle of the Modern World became available. This is an extended discussion of what Ernest Gellner calls “the conditions of the Exit”—specifically, the exit from the cycle of the rise and fall of bureaucratic authoritarian em- pires caused by the linked phenomena of the Scientific-Technological and Democratic Revolutions. Written in the form of a discussion of four criti- cal thinkers on this topic—Montesquieu, Adam Smith, Tocqueville, and Gellner—it goes into much greater detail on some of the interesting ques- tions raised in English Individualism and serves as further substantiation of the general issue of Anglosphere exceptionalism. It is also worth noting that Macfarlane and the authors he discusses in The Riddle of the Modern World properly place the emergence of the Anglo- sphere’s complex social system built around individualism in the wider context of the emergence of individualism in the West in general, a process that extends at least as far back as ancient Greek civilization. A particularly useful reference on the early emergence of individualism in consciousness is found in The Marvellous Century: Archaic Man and the Awakening of Reason, by George Woodcock (New York, W. W. Norton, 2000). Kevin Phillips has written in The Cousins’ Wars: Religion, Politics, and the Triumph of Anglo-America (Basic Books) an excellent, comprehensive, and accessible treatment of the three principal internal conflicts of the Anglosphere—the English Civil War, the American Revolution, and the American Civil War. Phillips mentions the prospect for closer Anglo- American collaboration at the end of the book, but he fails to elaborate. He is also not conversant with the issues of the Information Economy and the next likely phases of the Scientific-Industrial Revolution, and is therefore unduly pessimistic about the Anglosphere’s future. He sees the 04-238 z1 Bib 8/9/04 11:05 AM Page 294 294 Annotated Bibliography fact that the Anglosphere is further into the transition than the rest of the world as a weakness (because of the decline of traditional Industrial Age manufacturing) than as a strength. This is like fearing (in, say, 1860) that the transition from sailing to steamships was going to doom British and American naval power because their advantages in timber-framing and sailmaking were fading. Claudio Véliz, in The New World of the Gothic Fox: Culture and Economy in English and Spanish America (University of California Press, 1994) ap- proaches the Anglosphere question from a comparative viewpoint, quite successfully. It would not be excessive to say that Véliz is to today’s emerging Anglosphere what Tocqueville was to nineteenth-century America, the perceptive outsider who sees the forest where natives see only trees. His book is an extremely erudite and impressive survey of the contrasting natures of the “Gothic Foxes” of the Anglosphere and the “Baroque Hedgehogs” of the Hispanosphere. Professor Véliz, a Chilean who has lived much of his life in Australia, England, and America, knows both spheres intimately. Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York, Touchstone, 1996) is the canonical book on the “civi- lizational” analysis of the world political structure. He discusses briefly the idea of an English-speaking alliance as a civilizational-based unit, al- though without including the nations of the British Isles. CHAPTER 1 Some new books appear: Ezra Vogel’s Japan as Number One and Herman Kahn’s The Emerging Japanese Superstate began this trend; Jean-Jacques Servant-Schreiber’s The American Challenge (Simon and Schuster, 1979) was the European equivalent, with America as the foreign challenger. Thinking about the Revolutions of the Singularity five revolutions: Some interesting books describing possible Singularity breakthroughs include the work of K. Eric Drexler (Engines of Creation, Nanosystems, and Unbounding the Future, the later coauthored by Christine Peterson and Gayle Pergamit) and Robert A. Freitas’s Nanomedicine, Vol- ume 1: Basic Capabilities (Landes Bioscience, 1999). Less radical but still transformative visions include such works as Elizabeth McCaughey Ross’s discussion of nongenetic medical advances in American Outlook (Spring 2000). A wild card, but again a potentially transformative one is Thomas Gold’s The Deep Hot Biosphere (New York, Springer-Verlag, 1999), which deals with the possibility of a biogenic origin of petroleum.
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