Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2007 December 20

= December 20 =

Cosmetics and culture
Are there cultures in which, if you give a woman makeup as a gift, it's offensive because it implies she's unattractive? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.16.166.44 (talk) 00:23, 20 December 2007 (UTC)


 * "Offensive" isn't quite the word I would use. In North America, we give perfumes as gifts to both sexes, though that may be a holdover from the days when the elements of perfume were costly and rare. Now there are rare and costly perfumes, to be sure, but there are also many that are quite accessible to the population at large, and all of them are in my elevator every morning. Make-up I would not give at all because I hate it, but, if I were to give it, it might be an appropriate gift for a young girl for her first trials. Once past that age, women who wear make-up generally are quite brand and product loyal, so it would be risky to give anything not from a list. Teenage girls, though, often give each other make-up, and in that case, the gesture is usually friendly. Perhaps other cultures are different. Bielle (talk) 01:53, 20 December 2007 (UTC)


 * Not cosmetics per se, but in the (Christian) gift-giving spirit of the current holidays, be aware that women's clothing can also be dangerous for the giver. Many (most?) women are sensitive about their size, and some will choose to think the worst no matter what you give: Too large? You think she's gaining weight and will soon be able to wear them.  Too small?  You want her to lose weight so that the clothes will fit.  Fit just right?  What are you, some kind of pervert who went thru her drawers checking sizes?  Of course, you don't know if you are gift-giving to such a person until it's too late.... Cosmetics and/or perfume is a MUCH safer gift.  -SandyJax (talk) 20:27, 20 December 2007 (UTC)


 * Bear in mind both of these answers are only really applicable if you don't have an existing close relationship with the person. I presume if you do you may already know their size and if you do, I don't think they're likely to think your a pervert (well unless they never told you and you really do know because you went through the person's drawers). Of course you still have to be careful to make sure you get the right size and if you remain unsure it might be helpful to make sure the item can be changed if it is the wrong size and to make this clear when giving the gift. Similarly if you have a close relationship you're likely to know what brands and products of makeup they like. Nil Einne (talk) 10:17, 21 December 2007 (UTC)

Fine arts
with the tchnological advances of the 21st century, how will the fine arts be affected? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 72.148.95.190 (talk) 02:06, 20 December 2007 (UTC)


 * Do you mean future technological advances or present ones (since we're only a few years into the 21st century)? But in either case, it's worth noting that the trend between technology and art has been quite mixed. On the one hand there are going to be those who will try to immediately integrate new technologies into art (and probably be denigrated in the short term for it), and there will be those who insist that the fine arts are defined in part by their old heritage (even though some aspects of it are much newer than others). That's not a great answer, and certainly not a specific one, but maybe it's a start for thinking about the interplay between new technologies and art. --24.147.86.187 (talk) 02:44, 20 December 2007 (UTC)


 * There's already a lot of exploration into the possibilities of fine arts in New media, including computer generated arts, computer assisted design and computer-designed art, micro-art, flash art, technologically themed art (in fashion, etc, such as clothing with built in electronics, even a TV), as well as incorporating digital effects and concepts into classical music. As 24.147 says, some leap into the change, while others resist. Steewi (talk) 04:25, 20 December 2007 (UTC)

Use of logaritms in economics
What role do Logarithms play in economics? What exactly do economists mean when they use expressions like "log of growth rate"? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Cutesonu (talk • contribs) 02:13, 20 December 2007 (UTC)


 * Logarithms do a few useful things - they turn multiplicative relationships into additive ones, they turn a log-normal random variable into a normal one, and they take things which are centred about 1 and make them centred about 0, which in some circumstances can make analysis easier (the first two properties are more useful than the third). Confusing Manifestation (Say hi!) 04:26, 20 December 2007 (UTC)


 * Another note: Because economics is heavily influenced by humans, many of the distributions are logarithmic. A very basic example would be distribution of taxes.  Say the upper class pays $100 billion in taxes.  The middle class pays $50 billion.  The lower class pays $33 billion.  That is a logarithmic distribution.  If you plot it on a normal x-y axis, it looks like a curve.  If you plot it on a graph where the y axis is a log-scale (1, 10, 100, 1000...), it becomes a straight line.  Logarithmic distributes are extremely common in nature (as well as anything that humans strongly influence).  I believe Zipf was the first person to do a lot of studies on this phenomenon. --  k a i n a w &trade; 04:38, 20 December 2007 (UTC)


 * A note on Econometrics (which is the main topic where such expressions as "log of growth rate" may appear): You take logs of variables for a series of causes, mainly:
 * Logs reduce scales, and thus reduce possible heteroskedasticity issues.
 * Double-logaritmic regressions give out direct values of elasticities, which may be handy. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Pallida Mors 76 (talk • contribs) 17:23, 20 December 2007 (UTC)


 * Many time sequences, also in economics, display exponential growth, or something close to it. If you have something that exhibits exponential growth at a steady growth rate r per time unit (for example, per year), then you get a geometric sequence like A, Ar, Ar2, Ar3, ... . By taking logarithms, this sequence is transformed into an arithmetic sequence. Putting B = log(A), and d = log(r), you get instead the sequence B, B + d, B + 2d,  B + 3d, ... . The arithmetic increment d is the log of the growth rate r.

GRE in the UK
How common is the Graduate Record Examination in the UK? Is there an equivalent to the American GRE?217.168.3.246 (talk) 10:57, 20 December 2007 (UTC)


 * I think it would be fair to say that it is virtually unknown in the UK. Graduates here would quote their degree, degree class and their university and the employer would make a judgement based on their perception of the relative valuations of the three. SaundersW (talk) 17:07, 20 December 2007 (UTC)
 * The GRE has nothing to do with employment. It is used as part of the admission process for graduate school (Master and PhD programs). Our article claims "Many graduate schools in English-speaking countries (especially in the United States) require GRE test results as part of the admission procedure." I don't know how true that is. Rmhermen (talk) 18:33, 20 December 2007 (UTC)
 * My comments apply equally to postgraduate qualifications. There are very few places that could be regarded as graduate schools in the first place. One exception might be Cranfield Institute of Technology. In general masters degrees are run by the same departments as undergraduate degrees, and PhDs are generally run on an apprenticeship principle, that is by individual supervision. SaundersW (talk) 19:47, 20 December 2007 (UTC)
 * Think of graduate schools as a colllege within a university. The U.S. has relatively few stand-alone graduate-level schools as well. But simply getting a degree at a university/college will not qualify you to begin work in its graduate division (often refered to as a school or college). A separate admission process is required - just like applying to undergraduate but (usually) using the GRE test instead of the ACT or SAT test. My question remains: Is our GRE article incorrect about the wide use of the test outside the U.S.? Rmhermen (talk) 15:23, 22 December 2007 (UTC)
 * It looks like the GRE is not so widely used as the articles states. Probably it is more of an American thing. And not even that, depending of the university, the GRE is highly relevant or not relevant at all.217.168.3.246 (talk) 01:08, 23 December 2007 (UTC)
 * In New Zealand, if you have a local degree your GPA and class (if you did honours or Masters) will usually be the main factors taken into account. The university won't matter much (we only have 7). The type of degree does of course matter, if you majored in Chemistry you might need to at least do a graduate diploma before undertaking further work in Biology for example. If you're degree isn't local, they used to ask graduates from universities outside New Zealand they don't trust (India I think was one but I'm guessing many developing countries fit the bill) to do a graduate diploma first before undertaking a Masters. Now that you usually do a postgraduate diploma first (well unless you have a Honours degree) and then a 1 year Masters instead of a 2 years Masters I don't know whether things have changed. I don't think GRE is used much if at all for entry into local universities. It may help if you're applying for scholarship although even then I suspect it'll only be a minor advantage. GRE does appear to be used in Singapore for entry into postgraduate programmes but only the general part not the subject specific part. Nil Einne (talk) 11:47, 21 December 2007 (UTC)

Nazi voters
What sort of people voted for the Nazis and why? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.156.3.178 (talk) 12:24, 20 December 2007 (UTC)
 * The articles Hitler's rise to power and Nazi Party will be able to answer this question for you. User:Krator (t c) 15:05, 20 December 2007 (UTC)

The base of support was largely middle-class, from the traditional Mittelstand to the new white-collar workers. Politically speaking the Nazis managed to reintegrate a group that had largely fragmented after 1918. For further reading I would suggest the following; Thomas Childers, The Nazi Voter (University of North Carolina Press, 1983) and (ed) The Formation of the Nazi Constituency (University of North Carolina Press, 1986); Conan Fischer (ed) The Rise of Nazism and the Working Classes in Weimar Germany (OUP, 1996); Richard Hamilton, Who Voted For Hitler? (Princeton University Press, 1983); Michael Kater, The Nazi Party (Blackwell, 1983); Helen Boak,’Women in Weimar Germany: The “Frauenfrage” and the Female Vote’ in Richard Bessel and E.J. Feuchtwanger (eds), Social Change and Political Development in the Weimar Republic (Croom Helm, 1981). Clio the Muse (talk) 01:54, 21 December 2007 (UTC)

What did the Marxists get right?
While acknowledging that Marx and his immediate followers had insightful things to say about commodity fetishism, the nature of the bourgeoisie and so on, I have never seen Marxian science, namely its historical and economic theories, greeted with anything less than derision. I'm familiar with some of the howlers (labor theory of value, communism taking root in the most advanced country, a dialectical certain path from feudalism to stateless communism etc.) but what I'm interested in finding out is what, if any, non-obvious, empirically verifiable scientific predictions did the Marxists get 'right''? Skomorokh incite 17:20, 20 December 2007 (UTC)


 * Well, for one thing you're using a different definition of science than they are. Their "science" of history is not what we would consider a natural science at all and shouldn't be judged as such. In any case, some Marxist approaches have proved fruitful in the field of history, but it's overall neo-Hegelian "this will happen and it is inevitable" program is, well, trash, at least to this historian. The only time there are "laws of history" are when you are either ignoring the complexity of it (either purposefully or accidentally) or you are saying things so broad as to be useless.
 * Now if you want to talk about natural sciences, it actually is a more complicated question. Aside from all of the bad science done in the name of Marxism—let's just get Lysenkoism out of the way here—there actually was quite a lot of good science done in its name and, according to practitioners, according to its values and based on its ideological preoccupations (e.g. dialectical materialism). A Western scholar would probably say, "well, the correctness of their scientific findings/theories is coincidental/incidental to the philosophy under which it was done" but this can be a somewhat problematic argument to put forward, at least if one takes philosophy and history of science seriously and isn't willing to simply divide science into the "facts" and its "context" with no real back-and-forth between the two.
 * If I can venture an opinion—Marxism is simply not a "science" in the more methodologically limited way we use the term in the West and especially in the modern period. Treating Marxist historical approaches as one of many arrows in an analytical quiver, at least for a historian, is no big problem; treating it as the only system that produces correct answers is, of course, ludicrous. Marxist approaches have informed American historiography to a point where much of it is not really noticed anymore, but none of its "big theories" about history are taken terribly seriously, except by that occasionally Cold War holdout, the academic Marxist (sad bunch, them). --140.247.240.65 (talk) 19:01, 20 December 2007 (UTC)
 * I don't think any of classical Marxist theory is about "empirically verifiable scientific predictions", including the derided labour theory of value, which was normative rather than predictive. How so did Marx' expectation fail that communism would first take root in the most advanced country? Unless you believe that history is over, you can still hope that some day, somewhere, people will realize that the current dog eat dog mega-greed-driven system steamrollering over cultural diversity and all values on a human scale, demanding unlimited access of international corporations to the world's resources in the name of freedom and democracy – never mind how the local population feels about it – is a dead end, and replace it by a system embodying the maxim From each according to his ability, to each according to his need. If that ever happens, it is most likely to start in one of the most advanced countries, and unlikely to start, let alone be successful, in countries struggling to supply basic needs to all citizens. The main contribution (if any) of Marxism today is that of a method for analyzing developments in society, including both historical and economical aspects. --Lambiam 20:28, 20 December 2007 (UTC)
 * It should be noted that Marx got his economics from Smith, etc.; in Das Kapital, the "labor theory of value" was very explicitly credited to Smith and called a great discovery of the economists. (I.e., not his discovery.)  Moreover, it is true to the extent that it was significant within Marx's theory; it has been rejected by economists only because it is not precise enough to handle what economists do with economic theory (manage financial institutions, etc.).  Marx was not trying to predict prices, only to explain the basis of the difference between the price of labor and the value of labor.  His explanation of the discrepancy seems adequate to me, even if he fails to take into account the fact that value varies with the quantity of production; we could interpret his work as having merely made the simplifying assumption that quantities of production are fixed (which certainly makes sense as far as the production of the means of subsistence is concerned) and that would solve the problem.  (That is, the problem of falsehood; not the problem of being useless to the Fed.)  Most of Das Kapital seems to be Marx's verbose, tedious rendering of Econ 101 as it was understood in 1860; the only worthwhile passages I have come across are basically asides dealing with the psychological consequences of the commensurability of labor and commodities.


 * In any case, I suspect that most people who hold opinions about Marx have not read any of his work. My advice to you is not to listen to anyone who won't tell you what he has read.  (I suppose I should add that I say the above based on an incomplete reading of Das Kapital.) —Jemmytc 00:43, 21 December 2007 (UTC)

I can only answer from the perspective of historical scholarship. What did the Marxists get right? Why, nothing; nothing at all. Now, how is that for a sweeping value judgement!? Radical comprehension still continues to be popular, though, at least in some quarters, in a way that the old prophet could never have predicted. But if you want to know the value of the Marxist and Hegelian model of history as a telelogical process, then you could do no better than look at this. On second thoughts I'm sure, Skomorokh, you could use your valuable time much more productively. Clio the Muse (talk) 00:57, 21 December 2007 (UTC)

Arbitrary section break
Ho hum, I guess I overstretched in couching my question in such empiricist terms; I take Lambiam's point about post-Soviet communists still holding out, unrefuted for a Marxist alternative; I also take anon's point about using a different conception of science than the Marxists ere. To reformulate, coming from an economists background wherein Marxian economics was accorded such respect as a major school of thought (see academic Marxists comment above) though I could see, following the Muse, no value in it, I wish to know which falsifiable predictions/analyses/whatever Marxist theorists - in any field - made that are deserving of merit when viewed from our vantage point. My concern is that I am one of those identified by Jemmy who deride Marx's work (and, unquestionabl, Hegel's) without having read it, and I'm interested in hearing alternative points of view, or at least a devil's advocacy. So if I were to drop the term science and ask simply, what did the Marxists get right, in the broadest sense, that no one else did? Although I remain unsated, thanks ever so much for your responses thus far Skomorokh  incite 01:54, 21 December 2007 (UTC)

Your question has a certain flaw in it. Marx was not someone who worked in the Natural Sciences, or Hard Sciences. Instead, his work was within the Social Sciences, or Soft Sciences. In the Natural Sciences the goal of researchers is to arrive at ways to empirically predict the outcome of various phenomena that occur in the universe. In Social Science the goal of researchers is not to predict, but rather to understand the underlying forces that work within human society and in individual human lives. The reason there is a difference is that the Social Sciences study human behavior mostly through Qualitative Research, and to a lesser degree through Quantitative Research. In the Natural Sciences the focus is to formulate and work with rules and laws that are natural in origin. Because of mankind's freedom to choose how to react or behave (as opposed to being driven purely by instinct or natural laws), it is impossible to predict behavior except in certain very generalized cases that involve huge numbers of people, and only then in certain circumstances (such as predicting the outcome of an election based on polls). But even then, it is quite often the case that predictions made within the Social Sciences turn out to be incorrect.

So, in other words, one cannot say that Marx made any "empirically verifiable scientific predictions". He did make some predictions through Dialectic Materialism about the evolution of society from Capitalism to Socialism and then on to Communism. And he got some (not all) of those predictions wrong. There were reasons for this, and much has been written elsewhere. However, I am one who believes that Marx came up with a number of things that are worthy of study, and which may be said that he "got right".

In Sociology Marx's ideas are the basis for the incredibly influential Conflict theory and its related Social conflict theory, which still - even after the collapse of Soviet style Communism in the 1990s - continue to be used quite extensively by sociologists and others to understand changes and movements within human society. Another contribution of Marx that is still very influential is Historical materialism, something you touched a bit on in your question. Because Marx has fallen out of favor so much, some scholars and theorists try to distance themselves from him, even though they use theories that Marx espoused. There are a number of such fields of study where Marx's influence is very great, but he is not credited for them. If you look at the article on Post-Marxism it talks more about this.

Now, one of the ways to know whether someone really understands what Marx was talking about is if the person says that Marxism is completely dead and has completely failed as a philosophy. By no means is this correct. There are many scholars who are of the opinion that Marx might have been wrong about the timing of things, but that overall his theory of progression from Capitalism to Socialism is going along right now, and that ultimately there may come a day when Capitalism no longer will have the overriding influence that it does now. The underlying idea that Marx pushed so strongly that stated that under Capitalism it is unjust how the few are able to exploit the capital and labor of the many, while maintaining a certain percentage of the population in poverty and starvation is a very powerful concept. The principle that the worker should have stronger say in how his or her capital is put to use is also very powerful. These ideas have not gone away, no matter how powerful capitalism may seem right now, it is highly doubtful that it will last forever, and what will replace it might very well resemble something along the lines of what Marx was predicting. I include all this not to try to push my own point of view, but to balance out the conversation a bit, which seems to have gone all one way. Myself, I appreciate what Marx has to say, especially I love reading quotes from him, but I am not a Marxist. However, one cannot be a serious student of history without first fully understanding Marx. He operated at such an all-encompassing level that in order to comment or debate his philosophy, one must rise also to that level, and that is something that many people do not want to do. This is why Marx is so misunderstood today. In my opinion, of course... -- Saukkomies 20:46, 20 December 2007 (UTC)


 * I must take exception to Saukkomies' dichotomy between natural and social sciences. Many within the social sciences are rigorous in their methodology seek and establish predictive laws, just as in the natural sciences, and certainly seek laws which have their origin in nature. There is overlap, in other words. See the Journal of Experimental Psychology for example. Edison (talk) 20:28, 21 December 2007 (UTC)


 * I would love to take credit for my "dichotomy" between natural and social sciences, however it is entirely NOT my idea at all. I merely pass on what has been considered to be standard accepted agreement among academic scholars for over a century. Not only was this precisely what I was taught in my Introduction to Sociology class in college, but it also reflects the common perception among the vast majority of people who hold professional degrees in the Social Sciences. If you have reason to dispute this, take it up with them, not with me. As far as pushing my own theories, I would say that if anyone is guilty of this it would be you in using such a pitififul example to support your thesis as citing one journal out of countless others in the field of the Social Sciences to support your claim.


 * It is true that in recent years there has been more of a "blurring" between the two fields of the Social Sciences and the Natural Sciences. For instance, it says this in the very first paragraph of Wiki's article on the Social sciences. But this still does not mean that what I stated was my own opinion, as you seemingly wish to attribute it to me. Thank you, but no thanks - this is very much something that is common knowledge in academia - that there is a substantive difference between the two fields, and that this difference hinges on the fact that in the Social Sciences the aim is not to try to predict but to understand what is happening within human society and among human individuals. -- Saukkomies 20:25, 21 December 2007 (UTC)


 * I am willing to be unfashionable and acknowledge some value in Marx's work. I agree with critics that his historical predictions are mostly wrong. Also, I think that his work has to be viewed critically and not as scripture. Where I think Marx is valuable and still relevant is in his analysis of the dynamics of capitalism.  His theoretical framework helps make it clear how capitalism works and how the benefits are divided. In Marx's framework, for example, "exploitation" is not a meaningless word with an emotional charge.  It refers to the relationship whereby an employer pays a worker less than the value of the worker's labor.  The difference between what the worker is paid and what the employer gains from the worker's labor is surplus value, which is the basis for profit and for capital accumulation.  In an unfettered competitive market, employers will outcompete and buy one another out until there is a virtual oligopoly or monopoly of employers in a given industry.  The limited number of employers can force workers to compete for jobs by bidding down their wages toward a subsistence level.  The only way to counter this trend, as Marx pointed out, is for workers to organize industrially and politically into blocs that can demand better wages and a greater share of the value of their labor.  This insight was crucial to the success of labor unions in the 20th century, and it is to this insight that most of us in the industrialized countries owe our standard of living.  This was just one of Marx's valuable insights.


 * Another was his recognition that capital accumulation can reach a state called overaccumulation. This is a state at which capital yields a declining rate of real return, largely because, by maximizing surplus value, capitalists minimize the income available to workers as consumers.  At this point, productive capacity exceeds effective demand.  One of the explanations of the Great Depressions of the 1930s and the 1870s is that a speculative financial boom led to overinvestment.  A financial boom brought with it an expansion of debt (as speculators borrowed to invest into a rising market).  Eventually, however, as workers' incomes failed to rise proportionately, the returns on these investments were no longer sufficient to service the debts on which they were based.  The result was widespread insolvency, bankruptcy, and liquidation, which became a vicious cycle of shutting down productive capacity, further eroding workers' incomes, requiring additional shutdowns of productive capacity and so on.  We may very well be at the end of another cycle of overaccumulation, this time due to overinvestment in real estate, financial instruments, and productive capital in East Asia that cannot possibly yield a return sufficient to service the debt on which it is based, because real wages for the workers who are expected to generate that return have failed to rise while the prices of the assets based on those expected returns have soared.  If so, this insight of Marx's will be borne out yet again over the next decade or so.  Marco polo (talk) 16:57, 21 December 2007 (UTC)

When, I wonder, can we expect to see the end of Capitalism in Communist China?! Ha! Ha!

Alas, my problem is that I seem to have read too much Marx, even Das Kapital (well, most of volume one), to come anywhere close to understanding what he is talking about. I am left with notions of Capitalism that seem devoid of understanding how real economies work, or of understanding the way in which they adapt to circumstances. I am left with notions not of a dynamic and historically evolving set of relationships, but of an Entity moving blindly, preprogrammed towards destruction. I confess, though, I was always puzzled by the adaptability of the Monster and the increasingly desperate attempts by the Marxists to keep up with its evolutions; for the theory, in other words, to capture and imprison the practice. Was imperialism, then, the highest stage of Capitalism? No, not quite. It had to be Fascism, then, the last stage of degenerate monopoly Capitalism? Again, sadly not. Who now believes that the rise of Hitler was a function of the conscious interest and intentions of Big Business? Oh, yes; I almost forgot. There is always David Abraham and The Collapse of the Weimar Republic! Capitalism goes forward, drawing on new sources of strength. Business is simply a way of doing business. Marxism tries to keep up with all of the enemy's subtle permutations; it falters; it atrophies; it turns into slogans; it dies. A theory that prides itself as a vehicle for changing the world becomes little more than a rather out-moded way of interpreting it; the vanity of moth-eaten dons in university common rooms. Ironic, is it not?

Yes, of course; I'm being highly polemical; it's one of my arts, after all. Marxism, for me, is an intellectual dinosaur, and we surely understand, from our reading of twentieth century history, that it is not a path and a method that should be chosen by the careful and the wary. For it is a dialectic that moves in ever more dreadful circles; from Stalin, to Mao, to Pol Pot; to politics and systems that make even the worst forms of Dickensian Capitalism seem harmless and benign. Give me Scrooge and give me Gradgrind! Do not, please, give me Marx, who in his dissertation On the Jewish Question seems to take on the mantel of a materialist Martin Luther, loving only what he hopes to destroy.

I am a historian; I look at these matters historically and in practical terms. Social being does not determine consciousness, which is a multi-faceted and complex phenomenon. Social classes do not trot on and off the stage of history, playing the wooden parts allotted to them by Marxist materialism. I know of no area of serious historical scholarship where Marxism is of any practical use, other than in a highly etiolated form, dependent for its survival on liberal transfusions of the life blood of 'Bourgeois' theory. I'm not even sure that we have any clear idea anymore of what Marxism is, beyond a vague series of precepts handed down in the nineteenth century. Who, now, are the heroes? Who has the authority to interpret the holy writ? Holy writ? An appropriate description is it not, for something that begins to resemble a debased form of Christianity. What, after all, is distinctive about Marxist historiography? Is there a Marxist historiography? I recall some words I read in a paper headed Chronicles of a Death Foretold, which concludes;

''On the whole, the effect of the 'death of Marxism' has been to fold what used to be Marxist history writing back into the general body of historical scholarship, distinctive only on those occasions when it resolutely refuses to acknowledge the reality of its own disappearance, and shamelessly reproduces the clichés of the forgotten past. In that respect it is simply inadequate history. In a Tolstoyan vein, then, one might conclude that, for the time being, all good histories resemble one another, but each bad history is bad in its own way.'' Clio the Muse (talk) 01:01, 22 December 2007 (UTC)


 * I completely believe you when you say that you do not have a clear idea of what Marxism is, Clio. However, I do believe that you are overlooking a lot of what Marx contributed (and is still contributing) to the analysis of history and the study of economic theory. Of course, this may be due to your not having a clear idea of what Marx was talking about, which is understandable. Let me put it this way: if one is prepared to accept that the ultimate and finest system that can possibly be achieved is Capitalism, then there really is no way that one could perceive what some of Marx's greatest contributions were. If on the other hand one sees the results of Capitalism are to continue to maintain a system in which a certain percentage of the world's population is to be kept below the poverty level, to make certain that a certain percentage of babies are starved to death each year, and to continue to insure that the working person's labor/capital is stolen from him or her and used to aggrandize the filthy rich Capitalists, then perhaps Marx's ideas have not completely died. Capitalism is unjust, unfair, exploitative, and it will eventually die just as slavery did because people will insist on taking ownership of their own capital. Not this year, not this Century even, but some day this will happen. Of this I am sure. And when it does, Marx will be seen as the one who originally invisioned it. -- Saukkomies 20:38, 21 December 2007 (UTC)


 * Ah, well; irony is clearly a dying art! I understand Marxism all too well, its theory and its practice.  It seems to me to be a pernicious and benighted illusion that justice lies just beyond the horizon of a particular mode of economic organisation; that absolute bad is on one side and absolute good on the other.  And if Marx envisaged paradise he also envisaged hell; for hell, practically speaking, is what he bequeathed in the pursuit of perfection; that is what all attempts at perfection encompass.  Anyway, your rather emotive style of argument is not one with which I am comfortable.  You and I clearly have nothing more to discuss.  I think it best if I leave you with dreams of a Marxist paradise.  I do offer my apologies, though, for wounding your sensibilities.  Clio the Muse (talk) 02:43, 22 December 2007 (UTC)


 * I do apologize if I came across as seeming to be too emotional. Perhaps I was too tipsy, since I'd written that after just returning from a winter solstice celebration that involved a couple of glasses of champagne. No, quite the contrary, Clio, I find it quite invigorating to discuss Marx - his flaws and his good points both. And I'll be the first to say that those who have called themselves Marxists have been some of the most wretched examples of any resemblance to a fair and just society. Marx to me is sort of like Wagner - it is unfortunate that both of these men have had a legacy of other people who came after them using them as inspiration to do evil. For myself, I believe the biggest flaw in Marx's theories was that he could not foresee that the earth's resources would be limited. To him (and almost all others of his day) the world was full of an endless supply of untapped natural resources, and such things as pollution and overexploitation of the fisheries and global warming never occurred to him. Another major flaw of Marx was that he assumed that industrial development would happen more quickly than it did. He assumed that within a short time that nobody would be doing any manual labor anymore because machines would be doing everything. When this didn't turn out to be the case it became impossible for anyone to subsequently follow what Marx's plans for a proletarian revolution were. When one of the most technologically backward nations in Europe (Russia) became the nation that assumed the role of leadership in bringing about Communism, it was so totally against what Marx had preached about as to be a ridiculous travesty. Nobody has practiced what Marx was teaching and hoping for, and nobody could because he did not accurately predict what was going to happen even within a couple of decades after his death. However, as I mentioned above, there are still things about his theories that are worth looking at. He wasn't a complete bone head in everything. Sorry to cause any offense or defense - I have nothing but respect for you Clio. I do hope you will continue to share your ideas and discourse with this lowly Caliban. -- Saukkomies 03:43, 22 December 2007 (UTC)


 * Well, "what Marx preached about" (say in the Communist Manifesto) was the proletariat seizing power and overthrowing the bourgeois class. That is what happened in Russia, is it not?  The problem may be that dictatorships are inherently prone to corruption; anyway, that is often said, although I don't know that it's true. (Are they more prone to corruption than democracies?  Haven't there been dictatorships that were not prone to corruption?  The tendency toward corruption may be a feature of the society rather than the form of government.)  Cuba's communist government seems to be genuinely serving the Cubans, although the idea that communism is, as Marx put it, "the definitive resolution of the antagonism between man and nature, and between man and man; the true solution of the conflict between existence and essence, between objectification and self-affirmation, between freedom and necessity, between individual and species" is really quite pushing it.  All the Cubans have done is solve poverty, and it is clear that communism is not the only possible solution to poverty.


 * Yet Marx's point about "social being determining consciousness" as Clio put it, in denying it, actually seems to me quite a good one. Erich Fromm's book Beyond the Chains of Illusion elaborates on this with many quotations from Marx.  (It is much more fun to read Marx when someone has edited him down to short quotations.)  It is often said that "you are what you do" and it is merely taken for granted that "what you do" is what part you play in the capitalist economy.  Does the stunning fact of this cliche prove that "social being determines consciousness?"  Well, I'm not sure exactly what that means; in any case, as Clio says, it is very complex.  But I'm not sure Marx had nothing to contribute here.  Perhaps at least he popularized a good idea.  Here is what Fromm said:


 * <<[Historical materialism's] main postulate is that the way in which man produces determines his practice of life, his way of living, and this practice of life determines his thinking and the social and political structure of his society. [...] Marx's idea that man is formed by his practice of life was not new as such. Montesquieu had expressed the same idea in terms of "institutions form men"; Robert Owen expressed it in similar ways. What was new in Marx's system is that he analyzed in detail what these institutions are, or rather, that the institutions themselves were to be understood as part of the whole system of production which characterizes a given society. [...] Man himself, in each period of history, is formed in terms of the prevailing practice of life which in turn is determined by his mode of production. [...] Marx's main criticism of capitalist society is precisely that this society makes the wish to "have" and to "use" into the most dominant desire in man; Marx believed that a man who is dominated by the desire to have and to use is a crippled man. His aim was a society organized in such a way that not profit and private property, but the free unfolding of man's human powers are man's dominant aims. Not the man who has much, but the man who is much is the fully developed, truly human man.>>


 * I think there's some merit here. Look at the sort of men capitalist society produces today, and compare them to the sort of men that we read about native American societies producing.  Is it possible to produce the latter sort of people and yet retain the whole edifice of high-tech industrial capitalism?  Or could you take the one form of society, add industry to it, and yet retain its culture?  Is that possible to imagine?  Not to me, although I am told that "the friendly and flowing savage" is a myth, anyway.  I suppose ultimately we can reduce the principle to the rather obvious fact that economic institutions and culture develop interdependencies in their evolution, or rather that economic institutions are not distinct from culture at all and it all evolves together--but then you have to admit, economic institutions are quite more limited by "material" factors than "culture" is normally said to be.  So, yeah, I think there is some merit here. —Jemmytc 13:31, 22 December 2007 (UTC)


 * - quoting Jemmy: "what Marx preached about (say in the Communist Manifesto) was the proletariat seizing power and overthrowing the bourgeois class."
 * I think that it was more complicated than that. There are several areas in which Marx's theories went, one of which was yes the area of class struggle between the proletariat class and the rest of society. However, one of the other areas that Marx explored was precisely how this was to take place, which he believed would be an inevitable process as Capitalism basically transformed itself into Socialism. Marx believed that this transformation was something that could not be stopped, just as the transformation from Feudalism to Capitalism had been an unstoppable force. He felt that Capitalism contained the seeds of its own destruction, and that given enough time these seeds would sprout and bear fruit, resulting in the eventual transformation of society into Socialism. What Marx was trying to figure out, though, was how to speed the process of this transformation up. He theorized that through revolution social "progress" could be expedited. He had as his working model for this the French Revolution, which did actually speed the process of transforming French society from Feudalism (which was dying out in France in the late 18th Century) to Capitalism. He felt that if the Proletariat could seize the reins of power in what he called a "Dictatorship of the Proletariat", that they could hasten society's transformation through the passage of laws and creation of government programs and entirely new social systems to create a Socialist - and then ultimately a Communist - society.


 * What he envisioned was that this would take place in a highly industrialized country in which Capitalism was at its peak. This would allow the transformation process to be much more successful because it would insure that much of the process would already have been put into play. Far from hating Capitalism, Marx felt it was a fantastic thing - it produced enormous gains in the production of goods and services. What he wanted to do was to transfer the ownership of production from the elite few to the working class many. Of course, none of this played out. Russia had only about 3 or 5% of its population in the Middle Class, and was very backward in terms of being capable of its manufacturing and industrial capability at the time of its revolution.


 * A reporter once asked Marx what he thought about the Irish struggle for independence from Great Britain (this was before Irish independence of course). Marx replied that before Ireland could have its revolution, that first Great Britain must have its revolution, and then naturally the Irish would have their's as a consequence of that. What this means is that Marx felt that countries with little or no industry (such as Ireland in the late 19th Century) could not successfully adopt his model of change from Capitalism to Socialism - that this must FIRST be done in industrialized and highly Capitalist countries such as Great Britain. Since Marx died before the Russian Revolution and then the takeover by the Bolsheviks, he wasn't around to comment on what he thought about it all. However, one may take what he said in this above case to show that he probably would have NOT APPROVED of the Bolsheviks' revolution in Russia - that he would have said - "First the revolution must take place in Germany, and then in Russia" - or something to that effect.


 * The fact that the Communists' push for power in Germany failed after WWI - and also in Great Britain - was the death knoll for Communism in Europe for the 20th Century. What took place in the Soviet Union had only a twisted, farcical resemblance to what Marx had envisioned. The Soviet Union was a travesty of Communism. As a result of the botched efforts by countries that were only in the periphery of Capitalism in the early to mid 20th Century (Russia, China, Cuba, Yugoslavia, etc.), the result was that Communism and Marxism was NOT successful, and moreover, it created a "taint" that has lasted to this day. However, no nation on earth has yet to date actually practiced (or come even close to practicing) what Marx preached. However, there is one thing that is still moving along the way that Marx predicted: Capitalism is in the process of becoming increasingly more powerful until it will take over all the earth. Marx predicted this. Part of the process that will take place, according to what Marx theorized, is that the struggle that will ensue between the Capitalist rich elite and the working masses will ultimately create transformations in society that will lead to Socialism. This is a process that has increasingly made slow changes in societies around the planet as Capitalism reaches it maturity. It's a slow, organic process, but it is happening - even in such very strong Capitalist hold-outs as the United States, which is getting prepared to adopt National Health Care probably within the next decade (as just one example).


 * Although Marx's theory that this process could be sped up through a Proletarian Revolution has failed, it does not mean that history has stopped - it does not mean that the process of society's transformation from Capitalist to Socialist has halted. And in this regard perhaps Marx was indeed correct: that eventually the "progress" of human society will move on to the next phase, and in a few hundred years or so Capitalism will have gone the way of all the other stages of human society in the past (such as Feudalism and Slavery), and the world's nations will be Socialist. Who knows for sure, but there are indications this is indeed how things are developing around the world. And if this is the case, then Marx has by no means become irrelevant. His perceptions of social change and historical development are still important to understand - even if one disagrees with them. -- Saukkomies 09:29, 22 December 2007 (UTC)

Second Arbitrary section break
I certainly don't mean to say that the seizure of power by the proletariat is all that there is to Marx. Yet that is what he called for, and it is what happened in Russia. In the end, it didn't work out the way it was supposed to. I don't know that its preindustrial status was the reason for this; it may have been, although I don't see why it would be. (It's interesting to note that all successful communist revolutions have been in largely preindustrial societies. Perhaps they are just more susceptible to revolutions?)  To try and suggest that the development of the welfare state fits into the Marxist model seems a bit of stretch to me. Marx couldn't conceive of capitalism as anything but unadulterated laissez-faire capitalism. The existence of a minimum wage, of child labor laws, of the official shortening of the work week, and also of the techniques used to manage currency and interest rates, tax and spend jobs policies, and outright welfare--these all invalidate the foundational premises of Kapital and its predictions of the progressive immiseration of the proletariat, production crises, etc.. The welfare state, far from constituting revolution, actually only makes it all the less likely. Ousting the bourgeois on your model would perhaps mean (and would at least have to mean) abolishing inheritance. Yet the bourgeois clearly have enough control over the state to prevent this. The welfare state provides the means to the bourgeois class to ensure the welfare of the proletariat without altering the social order. The bourgeois cannot increase wages simply by increasing wages in businesses, for that would be suicide to any individual business; but it can increase wages as a class, through collective action with the participation of every business enforced by the state, and doing so ensures its ability to survive as a class. Economists would say that the welfare state is a public good for the bourgeois class. Of course it is good for the proletariat as well. In any society, it is good for the powerful to keep the powerless happy. —Jemmytc 16:03, 22 December 2007 (UTC)

Okay, here's where we are in agreement, then, Jemmy:

1. There is more to Marx than the Proletarian seizure of government.

2. Marx was opposed to labor unions, the passage of child labor laws, shortening of the work week, and anything else that would ameliorate the complete despondency that the working classes were heading towards, which would ultimately put off their support for revolution.

3. The powerful use welfare programs and support labor laws in order to keep the working class happy and avoid revolution.

Here's where we disagree (and please correct me if I've got this wrong):

1. That there has ever been a successful revolution that truly represented Marx's philosophy. (I don't think there has, and I believe it seems that you do).

2. A national health care system is part of the welfare state and not a socialist program. (I believe it is a socialist program, and hence something that we have inherited indirectly from Marx's ideas, and I believe you feel that it is a welfare program).

3. This we don't necessarily disagree over, but I'm including it: that Russia's (and other so-called Communist) revolution failed due to its being pre-industrial. I believe it did, you I think don't.

Now, as per the last point, I would also point to what Lenin himself admitted after the Civil War following the Bolshevik's seizure of power in 1918 - 1922. The Soviet Union's economy had completely gone down the toilet, and Lenin's government was facing incredibly grim times if it was to succeed. In 1921 Lenin pushed through a policy to change how the Soviet Union's economy would be run. His program was called the New Economic Policy, and it incorporated certain aspects of Capitalism to provide a boost to the Soviet economy. Lenin, describing why he was doing this, said "We are not civilized enough for socialism". By that he meant that the Soviet Union had not acquired a strong enough Capitalist base before trying to adopt Communism. Lenin felt that if the Soviet Union could somehow build up a strong Capitalist economy - under the watchful eyes of a Proletariat Dictatorship - that it could more speedily arrive at a point where it could then transform itself into true Communism. This was sort of trying to fit a square peg into a round hole by trying to take backwards Russian society and pushing it to fit into a Marxist/Communist model. It didn't work of course. And neither has any other attempt at Communism worked, because (as we've both pointed out), every country that has tried to make Communism work has each been an undeveloped country in which Capitalism has not had a chance to take full effect.

Now, if one looks at what is going on right now in China, it is quite interesting to see that their country is adapting to Capitalism with leaps and bounds, and may ultimately surpass European and North American economies in sheer economic power. Does this mean that Communism/Marxism has died in China? Why is the government still Communist? Why does the Communist government allow all this Capitalism? The answer is that the Chinese Marxists are successfully pulling off what Lenin tried to do in the 1920s - allow their country to develop through its Capitalist phase under the watchful eye of a Communist government with the goal of eventually reaching the point where they will be at able to successfully move from Capitalism to Socialism of a kind in which everyone has enough of the necessities of life so that the economy can afford to do this. In addition to this, the current policy of Chinese Communists has been to abandon the approach of violent revolution as a means to achieving their goals through the application of a policy called China's Peaceful Rise. Deng Xiaoping addressed these points in a speech he gave in 1984 at the beginning of the internal push to enact the reforms in China we see taking fuller fruition today. He stated:

"''What is socialism and what is Marxism? We were not quite clear about this in the past. Marxism attaches utmost importance to developing the productive forces. We have said that socialism is the primary stage of communism and that at the advanced stage the principle of from each according to his ability and to each according to his needs will be applied. This calls for highly developed productive forces and an overwhelming abundance of material wealth. Therefore, the fundamental task for the socialist stage is to develop the productive forces. The superiority of the socialist system is demonstrated, in the final analysis, by faster and greater development of those forces than under the capitalist system. As they develop, the people's material and cultural life will constantly improve. One of our shortcomings after the founding of the People's Republic was that we didn't pay enough attention to developing the productive forces. Socialism means eliminating poverty. Pauperism is not socialism, still less communism." — Chinese paramount leader Deng Xiaoping on June 30, 1984''[27]

If any country will ultimately pull off an economic transformation of the kind that Marx envisioned, it could very well be that China might be the one to do it. If, as some here have claimed, we are to completely throw out all study of Marx's teachings, advising people who come here with questions to not bother studying Marx or Marxism, then we as Wiki Reference Desk editors would be making a big mistake because Marx's philosophies are still being used as a reference guide by the country with the second largest economy in the world. How can anyone with integrity state that Marx's ideas are unimportant or not worthy of study when we are faced with the possibility of China doing what it said it will do: to make long range goals of using the strength of a highly developed Capitalist economy to propel it into a Socialist transformation? I say that Marx is incredibly relevant today, and if people neglect to study his philosophies, they will be unequipped to understand the world that is unfolding in the 21st Century. -- Saukkomies 14:27, 22 December 2007 (UTC)

More on the crusades
I am interested in some of the points being raised above about the crusades. Would it not be possible, I wonder, to put a positive interpretation on the movement? After all it was only an attempt to recapture christian lands that had fallen to the muslims after the battle of Yarmouk. I would appreciate your views.86.151.240.196 (talk) 17:44, 20 December 2007 (UTC)


 * It is possible to put a positive interpretation on anything. Humans are great at rationalizing things. --  k a i n a w &trade; 17:55, 20 December 2007 (UTC)


 * It played an important part in renewing religious vitality in Europe. It also brought the west in closer contact with Islam. Both of these things were key to the rise of Scholasticism, which was a medieval Renaissance of sorts. Wrad (talk) 18:18, 20 December 2007 (UTC)
 * That may depend on which Crusade you mean, also. The Children's Crusade was, at the very least, a lot of wasted effort. As Wrad mentions, there were some silver linings to the affair, and you can find fallout of both positive and negative effects from just about every major event in history, but then you have to consider the ends vs. the means issue also.  ◄   Zahakiel   ►  19:02, 20 December 2007 (UTC)


 * Textbooks typically mention that the Crusades helped to reopen long-distance trade between Europe and the Levant (which in turn spurred trade within Europe). The growth of trade spurred the rise of cities, and with it a general increase in prosperity and population. Contact especially between Italy and the eastern Mediterranean ultimately (200-300 years later) led to the rediscovery of classical learning and the adoption and adaptation of Muslim learning that produced the Renaissance and helped shape the modern era.  Marco polo (talk) 18:58, 20 December 2007 (UTC)
 * Italy benefited a lot from the newfound spice trade that grew from the crusades. This helped Italy gain the wealth it needed to begin the Renaissance. Wrad (talk) 19:44, 20 December 2007 (UTC)

What goes around comes around. I've been here before! Addressing myself specifically to your final statement, 86.151, here, slightly adapted, is what I said.

It does not seem to me to be in any sense legitimate to attempt a direct comparison between the Muslim occupation of the Holy Land after Yarmouk and the incursion of the Crusaders at the end of the eleventh century. This cross roads between Africa and Asia has been fought over for centuries; and of all the invasions that of the Muslim armies was, as far as I am aware, far less destructive of human life than the original incursion of the Jewish tribes at the time of the Exodus, or the wholesale massacre carried out when the crusaders took Jerusalem in 1099, or even the invasion of the Persians earlier in the reign of the Emperor Heraclius. Indeed, far from the land being Christian in any unified sense it had, prior to the Battle of Yarmouk, seen an intense factional dispute between the local Monophysites and the orthodox authorities in Constantinople. The Monophysites, who rejected the doctrine laid out by the Council of Chalcedon, settled down with very little resistence to Muslim rule, and the Byzantine state made no attempt to recover the lost heretical provinces.

The Crusades, therefore, most assuredly, did not follow follow from the conquest of Yarmouk, but came almost five hundred years later ( a time span which seperates contemporary England from the reign of Henry VII), and under very specific historical circumstances. Under pressure from the Turks in Anatolia, who had been steadily moving westwards ever since the Battle of Manzikert in 1071, the Emperor Alexius I Comnenus appealed to Pope Urban II for military aid. He wanted professional mercenaries; he got something quite different. Urban conjured up a popular movement at the Council of Clermont. Thus the crusades began, and with it began centuries of massacre and atrocity, from the pogrom of the Jews in the Rhineland, moving through the wholesale murder and rape of Christian communities in the Balkans, to the ultimate sack of Jerusalem. And so it continued.

In view of all of this it would hardly be surprising if the word 'crusade' had negative conotations. But it has not; at least not until recently. It was used in positive terms for centuries, long after the atrocities and outrages had been forgotten, as something good, noble and Christian, a myth of purity washed clean of blood. The negativity now associated with the word comes as a consequence of ever closer western military engagement with the Islamic world. From memory, I believe George W Bush actually used the 'C' word in the early days of the Iraq conflict, until he was reminded of the implications of this for Muslim people, and the history he was bringing to mind. I think it safe to assume that many Islamic people feel, rightly or wrongly, that they are threatened with a new crusade. We have now, it would seem, created Outremer once again; and it remains to be seen if it will be as long lasting, or if, in the end, Baibars will walk over the ghost of Richard the Lionheart. Clio the Muse (talk) 00:38, 21 December 2007 (UTC)


 * You might be able to say that it gave a different focus to fighting, allowing people to fight the infidels rather than each other. It could also reduce the impact of the growing European population as the 'dark' ages ended. Steewi (talk) 01:21, 21 December 2007 (UTC)


 * Please, let's not use the term "Dark Ages". -- Saukkomies 02:25, 21 December 2007 (UTC)


 * Lots of these things are not exactly true about the Crusades, since Europe already had plenty of contact with Islam - in Spain. Spain was the source of all the Latin translations of Arabic manuscripts originally translated from Greek; the Qur'an was translated into Latin from Spain; crusade-like events had been happening there long before 1095. For some reason we never really hear about that in school, it's always the story that Italy benefitted from increased trade in the 12th century and that led to the Renaissance, etc. That's true, but there was already lots of trade in exotic goods coming through Spain, and Italian cities like Venice and Genoa already had extensive trade with the Byzantine Empire (where they had autonomous trade centres, just like they did later in crusader cities), as well as with the Fatimids in Egypt. But it is true to say the crusades helped, especially since it was an aborted crusade that led to Venice's total dominance of the sea after they captured Constantinople (which also benefitted Genoa, and, by the way, directly led to the plague entering Europe!)


 * Clio says that the crusades did not directly follow Yarmuk, but one of the current vogues in crusade historiography would argue the opposite. This goes all the way back to the original crusade histories in the 12th century, actually. William of Tyre begins his history with the war between Heraclius and the Persians, and the subsequent fall of Jerusalem to the Arabs.  Even back then (perhaps especially so) they realized the connection.  And now some historians would argue the same thing, that the threat of Islam overrunning the whole world was imminent, and the crusade was a reaction to the fall of Jerusalem in the 7th century, which for various reasons took 400 years to manifest itself (and meanwhile was developed in fits and starts in Spain). Adam Bishop (talk) 02:10, 21 December 2007 (UTC)


 * This is all true. The vast majority of translations from Arabic came from Spain. Only a few came from the Crusades, and most of those were medical ideas, as Europeans encountered medical needs in Arab lands. Even so, Crusaders were less interested in translating ideas a more interested in religious zeal, commerce, and saving their skins from the angry Arabs surrounding them. Spain probably churned out way more medical translations than the Crusaders. Wrad (talk) 02:14, 21 December 2007 (UTC)


 * Do our articles on the Crusades answer these questions? If they don't, they probably should. I've got a lot about Arabic and Greek translations I can add. Wrad (talk) 02:26, 21 December 2007 (UTC)


 * I think they do to some extent. Personally, on top of not having much time to improve the crusade articles lately, I find them almost impossible to maintain. They are constant targets for vandalism, and for edits by well-meaning people who just don't know what they are talking about. If you can improve them, it would be appreciated! Adam Bishop (talk) 05:12, 21 December 2007 (UTC)


 * I'll keep you posted. Wrad (talk) 17:37, 21 December 2007 (UTC)

Some concrete non-mystical rationales for the first crusade were: 1) Christians remembered that Al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah had destroyed the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in 1009. 2) After Manzikert, some strategically-minded Christians were worried about Christian Europe being caught in a pincer of Muslim advances through both Spain and the Balkans. Part of the idea of the crusades was to take the battle directly to the enemy on his own home ground. I don't know how many Europeans had the battle of Yarmouk specifically in mind, but in general the whole history of Islam was a continuous 450-year span of aggression from the Christian point of view of 1095 A.D... AnonMoos (talk) 01:58, 22 December 2007 (UTC)

Domestic life in Georgian England
Could anyone recommend books (fiction or non-fiction) which describe domestic & married life in Georgian England? I'm specifically interested in the middle- and upper-classes. Thanks, -- Kateshort forbob  18:15, 20 December 2007 (UTC)


 * Can I call you Kate?! Anyway, Kate or Bob, for a question of this nature I would always suggest that you begin with the novels of Jane Austen, a great social commentator as well as a great writer. I am thinking in particular of Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Sense and Sensibility, Mansfield Park and Persuasion.  Though less well known Susan Ferrier's 1818 novel, Marriage, is an interesting exploration of contemporary attitudes.  Looking now at matters from a quite different, and altogether more radical perspective, there is Maria: or, The Wrongs of Woman, Mary Wollstonecraft's fictional continution of some of the themes she outlined in A Vindication of the Rights of Women.  Wollstoncraft also deals with marriage in her other novel, Mary: A Fiction.  Be warned, though: she is a great radical thinker; she is not a great novelist!


 * As for non-fiction, there is a wealth of material you might choose from, depending on how you wish to approach the issue. I would suggest Sex in Georgian England by A. D. Harvey; The Gentleman's Daughter: Women's Lives in Georgian England by A Vickery; Wives and Daughters: Women and Children in the Georgian Country House by J. Martin; and High Society in the Regency Period by V. Murray.  To put matters in a slightly wider context I would also recommend English Society in the Eighteenth Century by R. Porter.  And that, I think, is enough to be going on with!  Clio the Muse (talk) 00:22, 21 December 2007 (UTC)


 * Clio, thanks so much for your recommendations! Jane Austen's novels are actually what's got my mind onto this track (sorry, I should have mentioned that!). I'm reading Jane Austen: The World of Her Novels at the moment, which I'm really enjoying, but has just piqued my interest. Marriage, in particular, and all of the non-fiction you suggested seems just what I was looking for - I think you've sorted out my Christmas holiday for me! Thank you once again (oh, and I'm a Kate, rather than a Bob!) -- Kateshort forbob  01:25, 21 December 2007 (UTC)


 * Happy reading, Kate (and I'm glad you are a Kate!) Clio the Muse (talk) 02:15, 21 December 2007 (UTC)

Kate, I agree with Clio on her choices, just adding to the list: Evelina by Frances Burney is a precursor to Austen, with the heroine nicely positioned to comment on and compare the middle and upper classes. Also Wollstonecraft's Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark deals with marriage and the care of a new-born son. Hope these help Lord Foppington (talk) 11:51, 21 December 2007 (UTC)
 * Thanks, Lord Foppington, much appreciated! I've never read anything by Mary Wollstonecraft before, and Evelina looks like a great read.-- Kateshort forbob  01:25, 22 December 2007 (UTC)