It's 1860, the year before the end of “Kingdom of the Two Sicilies.” In 1814, the Congress of Vienna had put together the Kingdom of Naples (the southern half of Italy's “boot”) and the Kingdom of Sicily under the rule of a Bourbon, in Naples. This is the backdrop for a spellbinding story. “For everything to stay the same, everything has to change,” says Tancredi in Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s 1963 novel, The Leopard.
The Salina family is an upper-class family of landowners, with some minor titles. Setting the tone of the patriarch’s life, di Lampedusa says, “Between the pride and intellectuality of his mother and the sensuality and irresponsibility of his father, poor Prince Fabrizio lived in perpetual discontent under his Jovelike frown, watching the ruin of his own class and his own inheritance without making, still less wanting to make, any move toward saving it.”
A decadent, dying Sicilian aristocracy threatened by the approaching forces of democracy and revolution comes through the life of the Salinas. Garibaldi is coming, and like a virus he lands in Sicily. His intentions are to unify all of Italy for the first time since the Roman Empire. To change the color of the flag, some soldiers will die. Fabrizio is with the Bourbon order, but his nephew Tancredi switches sides, joining the Garibaldi forces to save his class and inheritance.
As Tancredi tells his uncle Don Fabrizio: nothing will really change. To give you an idea of the mood of the times, “…the abolition of feudal rights has swept away duties as well as privileges; wealth like an old wine had let the dregs of greed, even of care and prudence, fall to the bottom of the barrel, leaving only verve and color.”
Tancredi assures the place of the Salina family in the battlefield and by marrying the daughter of the newly appointed (and enriched) mayor. “Don Fabrizio… provoked a strange sensation in Salina, woven from the warp of the crude cotton of sensual jealousy and the woof of silken pleasure at his dear Tancredi’s success.” There's a new type of men on the rise, their money comes from trade and industry rather than land. They're rougher and less cultured, but also with the drive to perhaps effect real change for the first time in centuries.
“I’m seventy-three years old, and all in all I may have lived, really lived, a total of two… three at the most. And the pains, the boredom, how long had they been? Useless to try to make himself count those; all of the rest: seventy years.” And yet we see these new men ambitious to marry their children to the children of the old aristocracy, effectively buying their way into the existing ruling class, and we wonder if Fabrizio’s cynicism is right, that gradually the new men will become indistinguishable from the class they are replacing.
Di Lampedusa weaves a story of love and lust, along with the competing rivalries they invoke among men and women. “…the first months of a love-match with the frenzies and acrobatics of the senses approved and encouraged by all the hierarchies of angels, benevolent though surely surprised…” But there's also much beauty in the book. When the Leopard's daughter Concetta realizes that Tancredi, the man she loves, has fallen at dinner for the beautiful daughter of a peasant born mayor called Angelica:
“Concetta had an intuition, an animal intuition... and the little frown between her nose and forehead deepened; she wanted to kill as much as she wanted to die. But being a woman she snatched at details: Angelica's little finger in the air... a reddish mole on the skin of her neck... and to these details, which were really quite insignificant as they were cauterized by sensual fascination, she clung as trustingly and desperately as a falling builder's boy snatches at a leaden gutter.”
The Catholic Church sides with the upper classes in an unholy alliance to please their generous patrons amongst the rich. “…the few hundred people who made up ‘the world’ never tired of meeting each other, always the same ones, to exchange mutual congratulations on still existing.” 50 years of history going back to the many invasions Sicily has sustained form the larger narrative. Sicily always thwarted the designs of the invaders with minor accommodations.
Twenty years later in 1883 we find out how Fabrizio’s life played out after the revolution. In 1910, we meet again with some of his children and are shown how the aristocratic class has continued to fade, their once glittering homes now looking tawdry and tarnished, and their lives an anachronism in their own time. The author also notes how a bomb in 1943 destroyed an attractive ceiling that was made in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Which is of a later time.
Di Lampedusa doesn't shy away from difficult truths. And this is one of the main reasons why I read so much fiction: authors have more leeway to be sincere. Though The Leopard is a novel, it's an excellent primer to get under the hood of the events leading to the Risorgimento and the unification of Italy under Garibaldi and the Savoys. I commend Archibald Colquhoun for the excellent translation that brought to life the Italian prose in English. It's not a small feat.
And it's not a small feat to show the emotional toll of believing in the wrong story. It's much harder to do without seeming to preach in non-fiction books. Business books some dead last in succeeding. Which is why I often look for books that have a broader set of categories. Though, from experience I know they're a harder sell because they don't fit neatly into any one bucket.
Right now I'm enjoying Free Market: The History of an Idea by Jacob Soll. I picked it up because “Free Market” and “The Invisible Hand” are two of the most misinterpreted, miscomprehended, misapplied and mismanaged phrases in the lexicon of economics and political philosophy.
Soll had me at Cicero, because he was the first one to describe culture. Of lower noble origins, Cicero always maintained his connection with the earth. Which is why even when he became consul, the highest rank in Rome, he maintained the unshakeable belief that if men of privilege and stature focused on agriculture while exchanging goods in a moralistic and righteous fashion, the markets would need no intervention and would function like clockwork thereby leading to a prosperous republic. Cicero’s works influenced Adam Smith, the pioneer of the “Invisible Hand.”
Two centuries after Cicero was decapitated under the orders of Mark Antony and his head (along with his hands) nailed on the Rostra in the Forum Romanum, Saint Augustine gave the free market theory an eschatological twist. Marrying Christian appeal with economic thoughts, Saint Augustine decreed that there was a ‘higher power’ that regulated all wealth. All that was required for people transacting with one another was to ‘enter’ God’s system and fulfill the necessary exchange. God’s grace would take over the rest. The Franciscan monk Peter John Olivi foretold the law of diminishing marginal utility by proposing that increased access to and consumption of a good would lead to the product diminishing in value.
But the lion share (if you'll pardon me mixing cat metaphors) of the argument unfolds through Soll's undisguised admiration for Jean Baptiste Colbert, the Prime Minister of the eccentric Sun King of France, Louis XIV. Colbert’s philosophies and practices formed the precursor for the introduction of the field of development economics. Colbert’s State would assist commerce and industry attain a competitive edge. For business to function unhindered, the internal market of France needed to be freed, and the necessary infrastructure constructed. Colbert’s unparalleled vision led to the establishment of industries such as the Gobelins tapestry works and the Saint-Gobain glass works. Colbert also anticipated the now ubiquitous and sprawling Special Economic Zones by welcoming investors into France, luring them with state pay and even enticing them with the prospects of monopolies to commence new industries and introduce novel technologies.
Colbert’s works were published in his memoirs titled ‘Commercial Code.’ Co-authored with Jacques Savary, a trade expert, this stellar publication earned Colbert a relief portrait along with 23 of the great law givers in the gallery of the US House of Representatives. Colbert now shares rarefied space with the likes of Justinian, Lycurgus and Thomas Jefferson.
Soll also talks about the works of lesser known economists such as Pierre le Pesant, sieur de Boisguilbert, and Jean Domat. Boisguilbert wedged the theory of pacifism into the machinery of free market by contending that conflicts created famines, eviscerated agriculture, exacerbated taxes, before undermining trade.
Francois Quesnay led the free market physiocrats economist guild against the advancement of industry by advocating the cause of agriculture. Thomas Malthus, David Ricardo and Adam Smith himself (with some variations) echoed Quesnay's thoughts. He labeled merchants “idiots” and termed industry itself as “sterile,” attempting to upend the wisdom of Colbert by proposing taxes on traders and exemptions from all levies for the farming community. Quesnay called all nonagricultural products “destructive” and classified manufactured goods as falling under the ambit of a “sterile class.” Adam Smith wholeheartedly concurred with Quesnay's philosophy that wealth stemmed from agriculture and the basis of any industrial wealth production was agricultural surplus.
Franciscan monks, Roman Statesmen, English monarchs, French philosophers and Italian guild participants all joust and jostle with and against one another as they provide incremental shape to an idea that has held the imagination of an entire globe in literal thrall. Soll ends his book with a plea to exercise a great degree of common sense while furthering the cause of free markets. Private enterprises needs to work with the Government for the furtherance of any economy. Apple and Microsoft initially had government contracts. Amazon’s early use of the US Postal service and McDonald’s reliance on Medicaid are two examples of social welfare programs.
The other book I just picked up is Between Us: How Cultures Create Emotions by Batja Mesquita, a psychologist who has researched the connection between emotions and cultural her entire career, and expounds on what she’s learned in this book. According to Mesquita, emotions are “situated within relationships between people, who themselves are confined by the bodies that make them up. Human relationships and bodies have a lot in common across cultures, but they also allow for much variation.”
You may not be aware of it, but 90 percent of psychological studies ignore 85 percent of the world's population because the subjects studied are all WEIRD (Western Educated Industrialized Rich Democratic). The Westernized version of what constitutes the emotion for “happiness” is not the same for all cultures. Some cultures even feel that “happiness” in the way we perceive it and present it is “wrong” or “unnatural.” In addition, some cultures believe that showing any kind of “anger,” regardless of the situation, is immature and completely unwarranted.
Emotions such as anger, shame, love or happiness do not have universal signatures. Instead, the experience, expression, associated physiological/neural response as well as the moral/social connotations differ across instances, individuals, interactions, relationships and cultures.
[Image by Michael Siebert from Pixabay]