Regular activity

Roundup, Summer and Fall 2024

Teaching: selecting new authors & reading for the Fall iteration of the course (Aristophanes, Tacitus, More, Montaigne); creation of extra-credit option (AI-powered illustration project); study of the monumental complex of Santa Maria Novella for class site visit; analysis of Casa Buonarroti for class site visit (relation with Spini’s Michelangelo politico); exploration of texts for next semester (Christine de Pizan’s Livre de la cité des Dames); ideas for future assessment: scaffolding written assignments, presentations as ongoing debates between two sides with scorekeeping and competition.

Research:

  • History of political thought: overall project: “Escaping the embrace of institutional politics in the long 19th century” (working title); anarchism; draft article on Piedmontese poet and playwright Vittorio Alfieri (1749-1803): libertine, libertarian, liberal; autobiography and literary sources; his political thought, esp. in the treatises and the comedies; servitude & freedom; classical republicanism; psychological dimension; freedom of the Moderns; rel’n w/ Machiavelli; neoclassicism; his contemporaries and posthumous fame; Pietro Verri (the Diario militare: classism, antimilitarism, proto-national consciousness); Parini (Dialogo sopra la nobiltà); Dialogues des morts as an 18th-century literary model; Alfieri’s strange afterlife as a Risorgimento icon (Foscolo’s role); Idéologues; Buonarroti (Franco Della Peruta’s intro to the Scritti Politici), Babeuvism & secret societies (anti-industrialism; importance of virtú; theory of revolutionary dictatorship; his communism accused of being ‘monkish’ by early Risorgimento patriots; Mazzini claimed he was gretto per quanto coerente; Blanqui was a disciple); Melchiorre Gioia (Pietro Themelly’s intro to the Riflessioni sulla Rivoluzione): compromising with the strong man (Napoleon) to save the social progress of the revolution in Italy; Guglielmo Pepe and his key book on insurrectionalism, L’Italia militare e la guerra di sollevazione (1836).
  • Tech and politics: main project: chapter on “Trust and Institutions” for a Handbook of Disinformation; importance of social trust; social cooperation and the existence of the public sphere; evidence: reputation budgets; low trust & suboptimal outcomes; psychological micro-foundations and aggregate levels of analysis: group beliefs and trustworthiness of corporate bodies; authoritativeness in the information ecosystem; methodological problems for trust as a concept in social theory; measurement; change in trust easier to define than trust itself (dynamics of loss of trust/trust-building); historical shift in prevalent justifications for trust (deference -> solidarity -> strategic interaction); institutions and interpersonal trust; link with liberalism of fear.

Interesting books:

  • Anderson, Perry. The H-Word: The Peripeteia of Hegemony. London New York, NY: Verso, 2017.
  • Aretino, Pietro. Operette politiche e satiriche. 2 vols. Edizione nazionale delle opere di Pietro Aretino, VI. Roma: Salerno, 2012.
  • Bessis, David. Mathematica: une aventure au cœur de nous-mêmes. Paris: Points, 2023.
  • Brunello, Piero. Storie di anarchici e di spie: polizia e politica Nell’Italia liberale. Roma: Donzelli, 2009.
  • Chabod, Federico. Storia della politica estera italiana: dal 1870 al 1896. Biblioteca universale Laterza 317. Roma Bari: Ed. Laterza, 1990.
  • Cheung, Caroline. Dolia: The Containers That Made Rome an Empire of Wine. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2024.
  • Chittka, Lars. The Mind of a Bee. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022.
  • Del Boca, Angelo. Gli italiani in Africa Orientale – 1. Dall’Unità alla marcia su Roma. Milano: Mondadori, 2014.
  • Ervin, Lorenzo Kom’boa. Anarchism and the Black Revolution: The Definitive Edition. Black Critique. London: Pluto Press, 2021.
  • Federman, Rachel, and Etel Adnan. Writing a Chrysanthemum: The Drawings of Rick Barton. New York: The Morgan Library & Museum : DelMonico Books·D.A.P, 2022.
  • Finley, M. I. Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology. New York: Penguin Books, 1983.
  • Gassendi, Pierre. Vie et moeurs d’Épicure. Translated by Sylvie Taussig. Collection Textes philosophiques. Paris: Éd. Alive, 2001.
  • Godwin, William. An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.
  • Goldthwaite, Richard A. The Building of Renaissance Florence: An Economic and Social History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980.
  • Grotius, Hugo. The Free Sea. Edited by David Armitage. Translated by Richard Hakluyt. Natural Law and Enlightenment Classics. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2004.
  • Guicciardini, Francesco. Antimachiavelli. Edited by Gian Franco Berardi. Universale idee 118. Roma: Editori Riuniti, 1984.
  • Haines-Eitzen, Kim. Sonorous Desert: What Deep Listening Taught Early Christian Monks-and What It Can Teach Us. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022.
  • John of Salisbury. Policraticus: Of the Frivolities of Courtiers and the Footprints of Philosophers. Translated by Cary J. Nederman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
  • Laursen, Eric. The Operating System: An Anarchist Theory of the Modern State. Chico: AK Press, 2021.
  • Mackintosh, James. Vindiciae Gallicae and Other Writings. Edited by Donald Winch. Indianapolis: Liberty fund, 2006.
  • Malm, Andreas. White Skin, Black Fuel: On the Danger of Fossil Fascism. London ; New York: Verso, 2021.
  • Olschki, Daniele. Gioverà Ricordare | Meminisse Iuvabit. Particelle Elementari. Firenze: Leo S. Olschki editore, 2024.
  • Saitō, Kōhei. Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism. Cambridge: Cambridge University press, 2022.
  • Valori, Niccolò. Vita di Lorenzo il Magnifico. Edited by Angela Dillon Bussi. L’Italia 12. Palermo: Sellerio, 1992.
  • Videen, Hana. The Deorhord: An Old English Bestiary. London: Profile Books, 2023.
  • Vivanti, Corrado. Lotta politica e pace religiosa in Francia fra Cinque e Seicento. Reprints Einaudi 17. Torino: Einaudi, 1974.
  • Williams, Raymond. Modern Tragedy. London: Hogarth Press, 1992.
  • Zakaras, Alex. The Roots of American Individualism: Political Myth in the Age of Jackson. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022.

Interesting events/visits: Steinbeck’s family home in Salinas, CA (June); gave a presentation on AI and higher ed at NYU Florence’s Community of Practice faculty meeting (September); Marvin Trachtenberg’s lecture in The Pazzi Chapel of Santa Croce in Florence (October); the Musei Capitolini in the Palazzo dei Conservatori (Rome) & Ian Bostridge performing Schubert in the Aula del Rettorato at the University of Rome La Sapienza, in front of a Fascist-era fresco by Sironi (November); Geremek room-naming event at EUI (December).

Rabbit holes: Golden Age of Piracy in the Caribbean; Alciato; Leopardi’s Zibaldone; Von Aubel’s Theorem; Renaissance representations of St. Matthew in Rome; Justus Lipsius and neo-stoicism (ure, seca!); Thomas Hodgskin as a Biedermeier era thinker; satire as literary genre; Kropotkin’s (1899) distinction of three strands of non-Marxian socialism in the 19th century: Saint Simonism (-> statist emphasis, social democracy), Fourierism (-> anarchism), Owenism (-> trade unionism, cooperation, municipal socialism); historical development of tragedy vs. comedy as literary genres in modern society; good editions of Petrarch and Poliziano; Donato Giannotti, Coluccio Salutati (humanist politics); contemporaneity in comparative literature (Montaigne, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Bruno…); Gabriel Naudé (not just a Reason of State theorist!); French utopianism (Sévarambes); clerics: Charron to Raynal (where are the modern editions?!); Bayle; Gassendi & the rehabilitation of Epicureanism; Fénelon; La Bruyère & Fontenelle; portaits of Pico della Mirandola (the Cosimo Rosselli frescos in S. Ambrogio in Florence: Pico with Marsilio Ficino & Agnolo Poliziano); Menabrea: general, politician, diplomat— CS pioneer; Seneca’s Letters to Lucilius; clay ‘Yixing’ teapots.

Sundry: new laptop (August); new glasses (December); overhaul of the website (December).

Comparative and international policy-making

Workshopping trust and speech at EDMO

It was a great pleasure to convene a workshop at the European Digital Media Observatory today featuring Claire Wardle (Brown), Craig Matasick (OECD), Daniela Stockmann (Hertie), Kalypso Nicolaidis (Oxford), Lisa Ginsborg (EUI), Emma Briant (Bard) and (briefly) Alicia Wanless (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace). The title was “Information flows and institutional reputation: leveraging social trust in times of crisis” and the far-ranging discussion touched on disinformation, trust vs. trustworthiness, different models of content moderation, institutional design, preemptive red-teaming of policies, algorithmic amplification, and the successes and limits of multi-stakeholder frameworks. A very productive meeting, with more to come in the near future on this front.

Organizational behavior and reputation

Independent technology research

This looks like a very worthwhile coalition, advocating for open access to aggregate social media data for research purposes (not necessarily only for academics and journalists), while emphasizing a duty of independence in research and upholding standards and oversight. The coalition is US-focused, but its efforts dovetail with draft legislation currently making its way through the European institutions that seeks to guarantee similar rights of access. Inasmuch as large platforms lay a claim to embodying the contemporary public sphere, such calls for openness will only persist and intensify.

Information and the public sphere

Excess skepticism and the media trust deficit

An interesting presentation at the MISDOOM 2022 conference earlier this week: Sacha Altay (Oxford) on the effectiveness of interventions against misinformation [pre-print here].

Altay lays out some established facts in the academic literature that at times get lost in the policy debate. The main one is that explicit disinformation, i.e. unreliable news such as that generated on propaganda websites that run coordinated influence operations, represents a minuscule segment of everyday people’s media consumption; however, the public has been induced to be indiscriminately skeptical of all news, and therefore doubts the validity even of bona fide information.

Thus, it would appear that a policy intervention aimed at explaining the verification techniques employed by professional journalists to vet reliable information should be more effective, all else being equal, than one that exposes the workings of purposeful disinformation. On the other hand, as Altay recognizes, misinformation is, at heart, a mere symptom of a deeper polarization, an attitude of political antagonism in search of content to validate it. But while such active seeking of misinformation may be fringe, spontaneous, and not particularly dangerous for democracy, generalized excess skepticism and the ensuing media trust deficit are much more serious wins for the enemies of open public discourse.

Research on politics