Bertie Bassett

Bertie Bassett

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The Forbidden Texts
Happy New Year (Chat Now Open)
Dear reader, apologies for my silence of late. I have been working on my new book The Prophets of Doom. I have until 1st February to get this in. I may post some snippets in the next month. It’s been a tough book to write. There are chapters on Giambattista Vico, Thomas Carlyle, Arthur de Gobineau, Brooks Adams, Oswald Spengler, Pitirim Sorokin, Arnold Toynbee, Julius Evola, John Bagot Glubb, Joseph Tainter and Peter Turchin. Each one of these figures both wrote a small library and has a small library of books and articles devoted to them in the secondary literature. In addition, a lot of these guys led quite interesting lives. I’ve been trying to thread a needle of providing a few interesting biographical tidbits in each chapter without letting these details take over the substance of the book which is an all-out assault on the Theory of Progress. As a flavour: Carlyle was one of the most famous men in Victorian England; Gobineau was a fallen aristocrat who was sent on a mission to Iran and then became obsessed with Persian culture; Adams was from the family of John Adams and came to be influential in Theodore Roosevelt’s inner circle, despite his reputation as a moody bastard; Spengler was a staunch loner but he did meet Hitler and died amassing old books and a collection of ancient Middle-Eastern weaponry; Sorokin was a revolutionary in Russia who even served in the Russian Provisional Government before overthrow and imprisonment by the Bolsheviks, he then was exiled to the USA where he came to be hated by his colleagues at Harvard and even instituted a coup of a American Sociological Society; Toynbee was a mega-star historian who was bitterly hated by professional historians, he also served British intelligence in both World Wars, and met Hitler who he low-key defended; Evola, I’m sure you’re aware of; Glubb led the Arab legion in Jordan and stayed loyal even after his attachment was over and became a global expert in Arabic history. As such, the task has been gargantuan — much bigger than the task I’d set myself in Populist Delusion.

I was hoping to do an article over Christmas called “On Spectacle and Power” about how and why power can use spectacle but dissidents cannot. Unfortunately, I’ve been sick and am just now re-emerging. This was a topic with which Shakespeare critics, especially the new historicists, were obsessed in the late 1970s and 1980s. You may have heard of Stephen Greenblatt, from whom I have often borrowed the idea of containment, but the original analysis of the use of spectacle for power was in a book by Stephen Orgel called The Illusion of Power (1975). Shakespeare studies for about 20 or 30 years might as well have been called “power studies”.
Anyway, all that is for next year. As a little New Year gift, I’ve opened the chat. I will try to use this feature in 2023. Have a good one all. Stay sensible, stay centred.
The Forbidden Texts is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

www.tgoop.com/BertieBassett4Life/15511

4.9K viewsDec 31, 2022 at 17:51

The Forbidden Texts
Happy New Year (Chat Now Open)
Dear reader, apologies for my silence of late. I have been working on my new book The Prophets of Doom. I have until 1st February to get this in. I may post some snippets in the next month. It’s been a tough book to write. There are chapters on Giambattista Vico, Thomas Carlyle, Arthur de Gobineau, Brooks Adams, Oswald Spengler, Pitirim Sorokin, Arnold Toynbee, Julius Evola, John Bagot Glubb, Joseph Tainter and Peter Turchin. Each one of these figures both wrote a small library and has a small library of books and articles devoted to them in the secondary literature. In addition, a lot of these guys led quite interesting lives. I’ve been trying to thread a needle of providing a few interesting biographical tidbits in each chapter without letting these details take over the substance of the book which is an all-out assault on the Theory of Progress. As a flavour: Carlyle was one of the most famous men in Victorian England; Gobineau was a fallen aristocrat who was sent on a mission to Iran and then became obsessed with Persian culture; Adams was from the family of John Adams and came to be influential in Theodore Roosevelt’s inner circle, despite his reputation as a moody bastard; Spengler was a staunch loner but he did meet Hitler and died amassing old books and a collection of ancient Middle-Eastern weaponry; Sorokin was a revolutionary in Russia who even served in the Russian Provisional Government before overthrow and imprisonment by the Bolsheviks, he then was exiled to the USA where he came to be hated by his colleagues at Harvard and even instituted a coup of a American Sociological Society; Toynbee was a mega-star historian who was bitterly hated by professional historians, he also served British intelligence in both World Wars, and met Hitler who he low-key defended; Evola, I’m sure you’re aware of; Glubb led the Arab legion in Jordan and stayed loyal even after his attachment was over and became a global expert in Arabic history. As such, the task has been gargantuan — much bigger than the task I’d set myself in Populist Delusion.

I was hoping to do an article over Christmas called “On Spectacle and Power” about how and why power can use spectacle but dissidents cannot. Unfortunately, I’ve been sick and am just now re-emerging. This was a topic with which Shakespeare critics, especially the new historicists, were obsessed in the late 1970s and 1980s. You may have heard of Stephen Greenblatt, from whom I have often borrowed the idea of containment, but the original analysis of the use of spectacle for power was in a book by Stephen Orgel called The Illusion of Power (1975). Shakespeare studies for about 20 or 30 years might as well have been called “power studies”.
Anyway, all that is for next year. As a little New Year gift, I’ve opened the chat. I will try to use this feature in 2023. Have a good one all. Stay sensible, stay centred.
The Forbidden Texts is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

BY Bertie Bassett