Tag Archives: Readings

Regular activity

Roundup, early 2025

Teaching: selecting new authors and editions for the Spring iteration of the Great Books course (Plato, Sophocles, Sallust, Augustine, Rabelais, De la Boétie), moving the balance of the material more firmly back to the early Modern period; searching for the optimal anthologization of the City of God for the purposes of the history of political thought. Devising a new texts-first pedagogical format, organized around in-class reading of tricky passages and group activities to match broad themes with textual loci. Writing a new AI policy for LLM use (“you can use ’em, but do you need ’em?”). Attempting to make assessment methods fairer for non-native speakers of English. Updating teaching materials and slides.

Research:

  • History of political thought: further work on the Alfieri piece; identifying other primary works of relevance (“Odi all’America libera”, “Parigi sbastigliato”, “Avvertenza alle potenze italiane”, “Elogio di re Luigi XVI”, Satire, and the speech on Machiavelli…); comparisons with other reactions to the French Revolution both contemporary (Burke) and later (Maurras); reflections on framing and argument; initial exploration of conference options for presentation.
  • Tech and politics: chapter on “Trust and Institutions” for the Disinformation Handbook on the final stretch: reviews and publisher input. Investigating adjoining projects.

Interesting books:

  • Accetto, Torquato, and Salvatore S. Nigro. Della dissimulazione onesta. Biblioteca Einaudi. Torino: Einaudi, 1997.
  • Awrey, Dan. Beyond Banks: Technology, Regulation, and the Future of Money. 1st ed. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2024.
  • Bolingbroke, Henry St John. The Idea of a Patriot King. Edited by S. W. Jackman. Library of Liberal Arts. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965.
  • Commynes, Philippe de. Mémoires sur Louis XI: 1464-1483. Edited by Jean Dufournet. Folio. Paris: Gallimard, 1979.
  • Coolidge, Calvin. The Autobiography of Calvin Coolidge, 1929.
  • Fredriksen, Paula. Ancient Christianities: The First Five Hundred Years. 1st ed. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2024.
  • Garin, Eugenio. Ermetismo del Rinascimento. Pisa: Scuola normale superiore, 2006.
  • ———. La cultura filosofica del rinascimento italiano: ricerche e documenti. Saggi tascabili 34. Bergamo: Bompiani, 1994.
  • La Mothe Le Vayer, François de. De la patrie et des étrangers: et autres petits traités sceptiques. Edited by Philippe-Joseph Salazar. Collection XVIIe siècle. Paris: Desjonquères, 2003.
  • Magid, Shaul. Meir Kahane: The Public Life and Political Thought of an American Jewish Radical. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021.
  • Peng, Li Jun. One and All: The Logic of Chinese Sovereignty. Stanford (Calif.): Stanford university press, 2024.
  • Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni. De hominis dignitate, Heptaplus, De ente et uno, e scritti vari a cura di Eugenio Garin. Edizione nazionale dei classici del pensiero italiano. Firenze: Vallecchi, 1942.
  • Reill, Dominique Kirchner. Nationalists Who Feared the Nation: Adriatic Multi-Nationalism in Habsburg Dalmatia, Trieste, and Venice. Stanford Studies on Central and Eastern Europe. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2012.
  • Russell, George William. The National Being, 1916.
  • Sextus Empiricus. Outlines of Pyrrhonism, Against the Dogmatists, Against the Professors. Edited by Robert Gregg Bury. 4 vols. Loeb Classical Library. London, Cambridge, Mass.: W. Heinemann ; Harvard Univ. Press, 1971.
  • Vairasse, Denis. L’histoire des Sévarambes. Edited by Aubrey Rosenberg. Libre pensée et littérature clandestine 5. Paris: H. Champion, 2001.

Interesting events/visits: Good exhibitions in Palermo (“PINAKOTHEK’A: Da Cagnaccio a Guttuso, da Christo e Jeanne-Claude ad Arienti” at Palazzo Sant’Elia) and Paris (“Heinz Berggruen, a dealer and his collection” at the Musée de l’Orangerie and “Suzanne Valadon” at the Centre Pompidou).

Rabbit holes: other victims of religious intolerance in the 16th-17th centuries (e.g. Cardano, Vanini, Sarpi). Philippe de Commynes; what Sainte Beuve thought of him; comparison with Froissart; the issue of malice and the end of chivalry; relation with Machiavelli and Tacitus; his use of the term ‘vertu‘. Humanist erudites in baroque Rome and Naples: the Accademia degli Umoristi and the Accademia degli Oziosi; the case of Margherita Sarrocchi (La Scanderbeide). Coluccio Salutati’s house in Piazza de’ Peruzzi in Florence; his manuscript library (one of the largest private collections in Western Europe: 600+ titles!); his relations with Leonardo Bruni. Other Italian philosophers of the later Renaissance and the Seicento (Telesio, Patrizi, Pietro d’Abano, Zuccolo…). René Pintard (Rev. Ét. It., 1936) on the influence of Italian thought in French cultural life in the 17th century. Demography, migration, public order, and insurrections in unified Italy during the 1870s (two major anarchist uprisings; 500k people left the country over a decade). Ficino’s non-boring revisitation of Platonism, as told by Garin (Magic! Alchemy! Philosophical debates squatting in churches!)— Platonism as risk and adventure…

Sundry: Experiments with various alternative browsers and search engines.

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).

Domestic politics and elections

Russian pre-electoral disinformation in Italy

An interesting blog post by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue discusses Russian propaganda in the run-up to the recent Italian general elections.

Basically, the study identifies 500 Twitter accounts of super-sharers of Russian propaganda in Italian and plots their sentiments with regard to party politics, the conflict in Ukraine, and health/pandemic-response policy during the electoral campaign. This is not, therefore, a network of coordinated inauthentic behavior, but rather a bona fide consumption of Russian propaganda.

There are some interesting takeaways from the data, the main one being the catalyst function of coverage of the Covid-19 response: a significant proportion of users in the group began sharing content from Russian propaganda websites in the context of vaccine hesitancy and resistance to public health measures such as the “green pass“, and then stayed on for Ukraine and Italian election news.

What remains unclear, however, is the extent of the influence in question. The examples given of Kremlin-friendly messages hardly suggest viewpoints without grassroots support in the country: it is fairly easy, for instance, to find the same arguments voiced by mainstream news outlets without any suspicion of collusion with Russia. Also, the analysis of candidate valence does not support the conclusion of a successful misinformation campaign: the eventual winner of the election, Giorgia Meloni, comes in for similar amounts of opprobrium as the liberal establishment Partito Democratico, while the two major parties portrayed in a positive light, Matteo Salvini’s Lega and the 5 Star Movement, were punished at the polls. Perhaps the aspect of the political views of the group that was most attuned to the mood of the electorate was a generalized skepticism of the entire process: #iononvoto (#IDontVote) was a prominent hashtag among these users, and in the end more than a third of eligible voters did just that on September 25th (turnout was down 9% from the 2018 elections). But, again, antipolitical sentiment has deep roots in Italian political culture, well beyond what can be ascribed to Russian meddling.

In the end, faced with the evidence presented by the ISD study one is left with some doubt regarding the direction of causation: were RT and the other Kremlin-friendly outlets steering the political beliefs of users and thus influencing Italian public discourse, or were they merely providing content in agreement with what these users already believed, in order to increase their readership?

International relations and power politics

Disinformation isn’t Destiny

As the war in Ukraine enters its sixth week, it may prove helpful to look back on an early assessment of the informational sphere of the conflict, the snapshot taken by Maria Giovanna Sessa of the EU Disinfo Lab on March 14th.

Sessa summed up her findings succintly:

Strategy-wise, malign actors mainly produce entirely fabricated content, while the most recurrent tactic to disinform is the use of decontexualised photos and videos, followed by content manipulation (doctored image or false subtitles). As evidence of the high level of polarisation, the same narratives have been exploited to serve either pro-Ukrainian or pro-Russian messages.

This general picture, by most all accounts, largely holds half a month later. The styles of disinformation campaigns have not morphed significantly, although (as Sessa predicted) there has been a shift to weaponize the refugee angle of the crisis.

Most observers have been struck overall by the failure of the Russians to replicate previous information successes. The significant resources allotted from the very beginning of the conflict to fact-checking and debunking by a series of actors, public and private, in Western countries are part of the explanation for this outcome. More broady, however, it may be the case that Russian tactics in this arena have lost the advantage of surprise, so that as the informational sphere becomes more central to strategic power competition, relative capabilities revert to the mean of the general balance of power.

Information and the public sphere

More interesting cybersecurity journalism (finally)

A study (PDF) by a team led by Sean Aday at the George Washington University School of Media and Public Affairs (commissioned by the Hewlett Foundation) sheds light on the improving quality of the coverage of cybersecurity incidents in mainstream US media. Ever since 2014, cyber stories in the news have been moving steadily away from the sensationalist hack-and-attack template of yore toward a more nuanced description of the context, the constraints of the cyber ecosystem, the various actors’ motivations, and the impactof incidents on the everyday lives of ordinary citizens.

The report shows how an understanding of the mainstream importance of cyber events has progressively percolated into newsrooms across the country over the past half-decade, leading to a broader recognition of the substantive issues at play in this field. An interesting incidental finding is that, over the course of this same period of time, coverage of the cyber beat has focused critical attention not only on the ‘usual suspects’ (Russia, China, shadowy hacker groups) but also, increasingly, on big tech companies themselves: an aspect of this growing sophistication of coverage is a foregrounding of the crucial role platform companies play as gatekeepers of our digital lives.