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I had a dinner with a friend tonight and we spoke of how the new era which has just begun makes lots of our knowledge, or the ways of thinking, about international relations, economic policies, poverty and wealth etc. seem obsolete, old-fashioned, quaint and at times silly. We talked about people whose writings were influential and incisive twenty or more years ago, and who have nothing to say today except repeat what we have heard from them hundreds of times before. And doing it in a most boring and tedious way.
A year ago I listened to a famous economist who at the time when either a nuclear war between Russia and the US, or a conventional war between US and China, were on the horizon, and Gaza was bombed to smithereens, spoke---as if nothing was happening and we were hack to the halcyon days of the 1990s—about countries cooperating in fighting the climate change. And one was left wondering: the nations are just about to annihilate each other and you are talking about them collaborating in fighting an invisible, non-political, force—when the only thing they can think of is how to destroy each other.
I read a part of a book (I definitely could not stomach the whole book) of another famous economist that could have been written in 2000: the same clichés, the same authors, the same discussions interspersed with, for good measure, a mention of Trump here and there. Nonsense on stilts in today’s world.
It makes you realize that intellectual influences are so crucially dependent on time.
We then tried to make it into a broader statement about intellectual history.
There are writers who have a very short and very bright influence at a point in time. Let's say it is similar to what Yuvan Noah Harari has done recently. He became an intellectual celebrity. I am ready to wager though not only that no-one will read him in ten years’ time (actually no-one reads him right now) but that he would not even be remembered. Writers like him are like passing stars: they are with us for a bit and then nobody recollects they were ever around. No-one reads them, nobody quotes them: like comets that suddenly appear and then disappear in the darkness forever.
And there are other writers, the second category, who also become famous at a given point in time but they do more than the first set. They define a certain epoch. When we need to explain how that epoch was seen by the contemporaries we go back to their names, quote them—although we seldom read them. They have become synonymous with the age they described. If you need to explain what was the thinking of the golden cosmopolitan elite in the pre-World War I in Western Europe and England Norman Angell is your man. Everybody knows what he wrote although probably no one reads him today. He has become synonymous with an age.
The same fate, or glory, recently befell Francis Fukuyama. He had become a synonym. Even the title of his book is something we use to define the period from approximately 1990 to 2008.
And then there is a third category of writers who are singularly lucky (or perhaps there was something more in them?) whose influence extends much beyond their age. They did write though about a certain period of time, were concerned about the problems of the time—but somehow the fundamental issues they wrote about turned out to be timeless. We do not need to go back to Aristotle and Plato for that. Think of somebody closer to us like Machiavelli. When one looks at his writings, word by word, they are about the narrowly-circumscribed political issues of the Italian peninsula and France and Spain. They were written by Machiavelli in order to garner support, or to get back into the good graces, of the _potenti_. They have all the trademarks of the time. They are entirely specific, limited to the places they were written about. But strangely—then—they transcended the time and the place. They are read today the way that were read one or two hundred years ago and the way they will be read one or two hundred years from now. We ignore the places, armies and the princes about whom they were written, and whom Machiavelli tried to cajole, influence and please. We focus on the “residue”, on what the story is regardless of the time and the names of participants.
There is a great amount of accident and luck in that. But perhaps there was something that was said that carried over time. Perhaps the reason why we do not care about most of what was written twenty or thirty years ago is because it was really not worth reading: it was simply a distillation of what was believed then, and this was found wanting as the new beliefs have taken over. Yet there could be a sleeper author, somebody whom we might have overlooked and who, seemingly limited to the times and places of the neoliberal era, told a much broader story. Who is he or she?
To transcends historical events that are being described and thus to be applied in many different places and historical circumstances is the dream. But we shall never know if we are successful or not until the time has passed.