Thomas Mann Books

Thomas Sowell is a pretty smart guy. It's unfortunate that he wastes his skills on reinforcing peoples' existing political opinions. Much of what he says in this book is right, but the new ideas it offers don't seem like they ought to change the political opinions of anyone who has thought much about racial politics. And the old but wise arguments are written in a style that seems designed to turn off anyone who isn't already a fan of Sowell's ideas.
He presents interesting evidence that the culture of black ghettos came from parts of Britain that were uncivilized at the time its bearers moved to the southern U.S. This is the kind of subject where it's virtually impossible for most readers to tell whether he's being objective or selecting evidence to fit his biases. More importantly, it's hard to tell why it matters. Some people pay lip service to the authenticity of black culture, but I find it hard to believe that the origins of the culture several centuries ago plays an important role in peoples' choice to adopt the culture.
One interesting aspect of Sowell's story is that the large migration from the rural south to the urban north after WWII did not result in the usual assimilation of the migrants into the culture of the area they moved to. How much of that was due to the number of migrants, to their culture, or to their race? Sowell ignores this subject.
Sowell's argument that western civilization was responsible for the nearly worldwide abolition of slavery seems mostly right, but I'm disturbed by his exaggerations. He misleads readers into thinking that the first abolitionists were western, but a quick web search told me that Cyrus the Great wanted to abolish slavery worldwide two millennia earlier.
There are several places in the book where he makes confident, unsupported assertions as if they were certain, when I doubt anyone has enough evidence to make anything better than a rough guess. For instance, he thinks George Washington couldn't have gotten a prohibition on slavery into the constitution without driving the south out of the union (plausible, but it depends on hard-to-verify assumptions about his powers of persuasion), and that slavery would have lasted longer without the union (a controversial enough claim that abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison seemed to reject it, claiming the north would be a better haven for runaway slaves if it seceded and repealed the Fugitive Slave Law). There are probably some leftists who unfairly attack Washington for failing to accomplish more than he could possibly accomplish, but I don't see signs that they get respect from anyone who would listen to Sowell.
I'm quite suspicious of Sowell's claim that Hitler's pretenses of having been provoked into military action were intended only to fool people in Germany. Even if people in other countries had enough information to know Hitler was lying, it's easy to imagine that a fair number of them were looking for a way to rationalize neutrality, and that Hitler was helping them to fool themselves.

The Kindle format of this book is a poor choice -- the lines of text are not reflowed, so you get annoying half-length lines all down the page.

There is no index in THOMAS MANN LAST ESSAYS, but only four topics and an Appendix with a short story (7 pages from 1905) by Thomas Mann about Schiller are listed in the contents: Schiller (pp. 3-95), Goethe (pp. 96-140), Nietzsche (pp. 141-177), and Chekhov (pp. 178-203). The picture on the cover and at the front of the book shows Thomas Mann wearing glasses, a white shirt, bow tie, and suit jacket, holding a pen and papers in his final year at eighty in June 1955, near Zurich, Switzerland, where he had lived since 1952. Poems by Schiller and Goethe are printed in German, with a utilitarian attempt to provide English verse translations that conform to the German text.

Americans began to take serious interest in the works of Nietzsche in the 1950's, and Mann's essay is called "Nietzsche's Philosophy in the Light of Recent History." The first serious comparison is of Nietzsche with Hamlet. "Its central factor is tragic pity for an overburdened soul, a soul upon whom too many charges have been laid -- one only called to knowledge, but not really born for it and, like Hamlet, shattered by it; a delicate, fine, warmhearted soul in need of love, formed for noble friendships and not at all made for solitude. . . . This mind was compelled to violate its own nature, to become the mouthpiece and advocate of blatant brute force, of the callous conscience, of Evil itself." (p. 142).

"Dr. Paul Julius Mõbius has been severely censured for having written a book in which he described Nietzsche's development as a case history in progressive syphilis. I have never been able to share this censure. In his own fashion the good doctor has told the incontestable truth." (p. 144). "With complete naïveté Nietzsche glorified the blissful obverse of his disease, those euphoric compensations and overcompensations which are part of the clinical picture." (p. 147). The link Nietzsche projects between such states and feelings of inspiration might illustrate how well brilliant nationalistic politicians in recent history excited entire nations to take part in global ambitions with little regard for the consequences, but Thomas Mann seems a bit slow to make this comparison. `What he is "in truth" describing -- but what is truth, the experience or the medical interpretation? -- is a dangerous condition of over-stimulation which ironically precedes tertiary-luetic collapse.' (p. 148).

As a whole, Nietzsche's life and work are appreciated as a series of steps: first, a passionate relationship with Richard Wagner (p. 150), "He remained Schopenhauer's disciple long after he had rejected his master;" (p. 151), "Invocation of the drunken god occurs first in the mystical aesthetic work of his youth, THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY FROM THE SPIRIT OF MUSIC," (p. 152), which was followed by "His brilliant diatribe against the smug and senile book by a theologian, David Friedrich Strauss," (p. 153). At that point, Nietzsche was openly attacking public opinion in Germany, and Mann proclaimed, "Nietzsche already knows in the depths of his heart that he will do his utmost, not stopping short of madness, to infuriate the philistines." (p. 153).

Discussing the philosophy of Nietzsche, Mann mentions "All that he formerly called Socratism" in comparison with "vain tilts against morality with which, at approximately the same time, Oscar Wilde was shocking and amusing his public." (p. 157). The philosophy gets pretty deep before Mann finally reaches the current historical condition. "Far more pressing is the danger that life on this planet may abolish itself by means of the atom bomb. But that, too, is unlikely. Life is a cat with many lives, and so is humanity." (p. 162).


That might seem like a brief interval in this essay, but our history stills shows the triumph of "A gang of megalomaniacal petty bourgeois, the very sight of whom would have nauseated Nietzsche." (p. 163). Nietzsche was inclined to see that "Life is an outgrowth of war; society itself is an instrument of war." (p. 164). Mann and history are ready to contradict him with how much more we have seen "-- and how can we not see? -- the destruction, ruin, and corruption engendered by even a war waged for humanity, the demoralization, the unleashing of every brutal, selfish, and antisocial instinct;" (pp. 164-165). But Nietzsche was already expecting as much "with a voluptuous zest" (p. 165). I appreciate Nietzsche for saying so because this seems to be the part of modern warfare that is always already unthunk in the statements of the polite advocates of the kill and win strategy. Mann's emphasis on how Nietzsche "alarms us for the sanity of the noble mind which is here raging so lustfully against itself" (p. 165) fails to affirm how raging becomes a normal response when people have a lot to fear. My senator, Mark Dayton of Minnesota, is closing an office in Washington, D.C. because of special dangers he associates with that place just before an election, and citizens are calling that giving in to fear. Recent history, or current events? Nietzsche and Hamlet are returned to for the idea of "some secrets of the highest man's soul. Perhaps everyone who guesses them is destroyed." A former two-term Senator from Minnesota, Paul Wellstone, died shortly before an election in 2002, and the booing at his funeral was maddening to some people. Recent history, or wild imagination? "I would say not that Nietzsche created fascism, but that fascism created him." (p. 167). But on a deeper level, "The cause-and-effect interpretation of events is false, he holds. What takes place is rather a struggle . . ." (p. 171).

I read this weak book, here in Brazil.This book has twelve chapters and a glossary.This book is about peacefull uses of atomic energy and was writen in late 1950 decade.Chapter 8 is about atomic uses in agronomy.Chapter 9 is about atomic uses for medicine.
Being writen more than 50 years ago, this book is outdated and has many absurds.To example, this book talks about atomic explosions for making harbors and other works.Atomic aircrafts and other atomic absurds are discussed as real future, in this book.
Even so, this isn't a trash-book.The atomic energy is described in this book as a great possibility for the future.Even not being so universal or cheap as proposed in this book, atomic energy is the source for 80% of electric energy of France today.

The role of values in public policy is certainly a topic worthy of discussion. Unfortunately, this book does not do a fine job of discussing the matter. It presents the typical think tank view of the world - rigidly ideological defenses of policy backed by a boatload of numbers. Values don't work well when forced into the defense of a viewpoint, and work even less when they are being quantified. The ideas of many of the writers, such as James Q. Wilson's notion of an underclass mentality, had been discredited even before they appeared in this work. For a serious discussion of the role of values in public policy, read a book by Rev. Jim Wallis or a like-minded soul, not by a bunch of think-tank technocrats.