Endnotes

There was a bit more activity on this blog than last year, though still very little (only 5 posts); my New Year’s resolution is to write more. In any case, I especially enjoyed writing on Utopia and Revolution and reading KCNA’s headlines as literature. I also wrote a couple of R packages that I hope are useful to others. Offline, I managed to edit a volume on “democratic moments” in political thought. Unlike many such collections, this one (forthcoming in February 2018) will also be freely available online (under a Creative Commons license), though of course you can always buy a physical copy. Thank you readers!

As usual, some end of the year reading recommendations:

• This year, I read fewer books than I had hoped. There was a fair amount on the Russian Revolution; beyond Richard Stites’ fantastic Revolutionary Dreams, I also recently picked up Yury Slezkine’s The House of Government which is so far excellent (but will take me a while to get through, at over 1000 pages), and Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate, perhaps the most important Russian novel of WWII.
• I also visited Beijing for the first time in my life (exceedingly interesting!), which led me to pick up some books on Chinese history (many via recommendations from Razib Khan); so far, I’ve really liked Timothy Brooks’ The Troubled Empire, and I’m currently finishing Jonathan Spence’s The Search for Modern China, which I have found useful.
• Seva Gunitsky’s Aftershocks was excellent; it’s in part about how the prestige of power helps drive regime change. I hope to write more about it next year.
• I also read a lot of sci-fi (I have no taste in literary fiction – for that, look at David Auerbach’s amazing list), but the only things that really stood out were Cixin Liu’s The Three-Body Problem trilogy and Charles Stross’ novels; the Laundry files novels strike me as great “novels of bureaucracy,” in particular. But everybody knows about those, right?
• Scott Alexander’s reviews of Eichmann in Jerusalem, Surfing Uncertainty, and Seeing Like a State are well worth reading.
• Lots of Ribbonfarm, including Chris Reid’s Games, Videogames, and the Dionysian Society; Sarah Perry’s Idiots Scaring themselves in the Dark and Feeling the Future; and especially Venkatesh Rao’s How to Make History (which is a really interesting use of Hannah Arendt to think about Silicon Valley).
• Joseph Heath on Iain M. Banks’ “Culture” novels - an excellent exploration of what a purely “memetic culture” would entail.
• Mike Travers on eclipses and rituals.
• Other web pieces worth mentioning (at least, things that stuck in my mind or found interesting): Christian Thorne’s Fulfilling the Fascist Lie (on Adorno’s Authoritarian Personality); Randall Collins’ Faces Around a Dictator; The Sacred Monarchies that survive into the postmodern age; The Conservation of Coercion.

There was much more worth sharing, but this is enough for now. Happy new year everyone!

Manchu Status Taxes

The Manchus had their own aristocracy of a kind, formed from the descendants of Nurhaci and other famous warriors, and from the powerful Chinese generals who had submitted early to the rising Qing state. But the Manchus’ ingenious policy held that, within a system of nine aristocratic ranks, a given family dropped one rung on the ladder with each noble incumbent’s death: thus, a title of the third rank would be inherited as a fourth-rank title and then drop to the fifth. Ultimately – unless the emperor repromoted a member for conspicuous merit – the once-noble family would would re-enter the ranks of the commoners. (Jonathan Spence, The Search for Modern China, p. 45).

This is clever: automatic family status depreciation acts as an incentive for the younger generation to prove itself in the eyes of the emperor. Spence does not say much how this system actually worked (or even whether it worked at all – was there a lot of status churn or mobility? did some families retain their status generation after generation?) but it’s still an interesting twist on the idea of aristocracy. Are there any other aristocratic societies where this sort of tax on status inheritance has existed?