Combative Politics: The Media and Public Perceptions of Lawmaking by Mary Layton Atkinson

     Combative Politics is more of a study than a survey book, and goes into the empirical details of Atkinson's research on the news and perceptions of politics and policy. There are a few major findings. First, the news media tends to use the conflict framing when covering politics, meaning that the primary way of framing news from Congress is "Democrats say this, Republicans say that." Without getting too deep into the details of why this happens, she does mention that this may be because it satisfies a feeling of objectivity to "get both sides" and that it may be more interesting to news consumers than a discussion of policy. Second, this framing serves to reduce the esteem of the public for the lawmaking process. That is, rather than see policy disagreement as part of healthy public debate, most of the public see it as "playing politics." Politicians themselves also feed into this narrative by accusing their opponents of putting party over country, rather than focusing on the merits of their opponents' arguments. And third, this framing also serves as a useful tool for the minority party or group to drag out opposition to legislation, because simply opposing a bill for long enough and loudly enough is usually enough to convince independents that it is a bad bill. And so the study finds tons of examples of laws where people agree with all the actual provisions of the law, but go from supporting the law to opposing it after months or years of high-profile opposition without the bill changing. For instance, on laws supporting gay marriage in the mid-2000s, Atkinson finds that prolonged opposition led support for the laws to drop ten to twenty percentage points, with most of the drop coming from independents. 

    It would probably be better for the public discourse if journalists focused less on the partisan conflict "game" and more on the fundamental reasons for conflict. This coverage would reinforce a different public view, that genuine differences of opinion motivate policy debate. Until this happens, many Americans will continue to see policy not as an attempt to solve a problem, but as bickering to advance partisan interests. But the partisan framing used in the media turns the legislation from an attempt to solve a problem into a piece on the larger chessboard of partisan conflict. It makes me think that a possible solution is to actually make politics more like the Senate, with a higher standard of decorum. Thinking about how people see the Supreme Court, for example, may show that higher standards of civility are what the public want from lawmakers. A lot of the book seems to suggest that the media and the public take their cues from lawmakers, so if lawmakers practice better decorum, that might improve public discourse. But partisanship also means that whatever a Democrat favors, a Republican will oppose, so that may backfire if it becomes partisan. Education may also be a solution, as more highly educated voters are more likely to believe that members of Congress are trying to do what they think is right for the country. And another solution, which is not sustainable on a large scale, is "stealth democracy." Using the ADA as an example, Atkinson shows how major legislation can be passed when there is bipartisan agreement and it doesn't make news. After it was enacted, only 18% of Americans were aware of what happened.

The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir

 Volume One: Facts and Myths

    The first volume of The Second Sex is a really amazing book all about the questions of who is a woman, what makes a woman, and why women are subordinated to men. Beauvoir is one of these writers who is very clearly an amazing intellectual, and this is a book that should probably be read and re-read again and again. As I read it, it is amazing that it came out in the 1940s because it still feels so present. My only complaints with the book are that Beauvoir seems to get a bunch of "hard" information slightly wrong, and that her use of myths and literature to prove her points don't compel me as much as the science she uses earlier in the book. I would also say that all the discussion of Freudianism just felt weird and out of place. It seems like another thing that made more sense to discuss in the 1940s but wouldn't hold much relevance today. But I should just emphasize here that my criticisms only come from the fact that the book invites the reader to engage with it critically, and that is a huge strength.

    A critical point Beauvoir makes in the reason for the subjugation of women is that women form a perpetual "other." She illustrates this by discussing how proletarians and black Americans can say "we." Women, she writes, do not use "we." Men say "women," and women use that word for themselves. Women accept themselves as the "other" compared to the default of men, she writes, because women have no ability to separate from their oppressors. She might be a unfair to women's activists of the past when she writes that women, "have won only what men have been willing to give to them; they have taken nothing, they have received." Women lack solidarity and lack their own space, which is useful to "communities of American blacks, the Jews in ghettos, or the workers in Saint-Denis or Renault factories." Instead, women "live dispersed among men, tied by homes, work, economic interests, and social conditions to certain men--fathers or husbands--more closely than to other women." And so bourgeois women feel more solidarity with bourgeois interests than women's interests, white women feel more solidarity with white interests than women's interests, and so on. So while proletarians can dream of killing the ruling class and Jews or Black people can dream of overthrowing their oppressors and some can even dream of exterminating their oppressors, women generally cannot and will not dream of exterminating men. And so, "This is the fundamental characteristic of woman: she is the Other at the heart of a whole whose two components are necessary to each other."

    I thought the earlier portions about biological differences between humans and other animals were interesting in using different forms of reproduction to explain differences between the sexes. This is important to Beauvoir because she posits that women have been subjugated by men due to the fact that women are weaker than men. By having menstruation and childbirth and breastfeeding and menopause, and by having less muscle mass and height than men, women are physically weaker. Beauvoir says women are enslaved to the species, and this is the source of oppression. However, she also points out that women are not just female members of the species, and that this biological source of oppression has become a social concept that continues to degrade women.

    So she talks about fish, toads, and other creatures. She points out that in fish, the mother expels the ova and the father expels the sperm, and then there is no more reason for the mother to recognize the eggs as her own more than the father. The mother fish does not carry her children inside her for months, and is not tied to them by breastfeeding. And so in some species, the father may raise the young, and in others they may be abandoned, to develop without parental help. Beauvoir writes of animals that, "What is noteworthy in all these cases in which fathers play a nurturing role is that spermatogenesis stops during the period they devote to their offspring; busy with maintaining life, the father has no impetus to bring forth new life-forms." This is a more egalitarian form of child-rearing. Each parent is involved, or it may be balanced to the opposite, with the father being more involved. And so when you compare the human female to any other animal female, Beauvoir alleges, woman is the most subordinated to the species. "She is the most deeply alienated of all the female mammals, and she is the one that refuses this alienation the most violently; in no other is the subordination of the organism to the reproductive function more imperious nor accepted with greater difficulty." Beauvoir writes that, "Because the body is the instrument of our hold on the world...they are one of the keys that enable us to understand woman. But we refuse the idea that they form a fixed destiny for her. They do not suffice to constitute the basis for sexual hierarchy; they do not explain why woman is the Other; they do not condemn her forever to this subjugated role."

    One issue I had with this book is that I struggled to understand Beauvoir's historical narrative; sometimes it seemed to me that she was suggesting women were always greatly subjugated to men, but she indicates certain fluctuations as well, in which women are still subjugated, but to a lesser degree. It was hard to understand to exactly what degree Beauvoir argues women were subjugated at any given time. And sometimes her explanations are weak. Like that nomadic, pre-historic peoples did not value women even though we would have expected them to; this is supposed to be because of something about how they do not fear death, did not seek to survive as a species, and did not seek heirs. She "proves" this by saying that infanticide has always been frequent in nomadic peoples. And then she argues that women enjoyed the most independence in ancien regime France, but I just find this hard to believe. She says that in old farming societies, woman is necessary to man and he respects her for it, but that seems like a contradiction of a lot of what she's saying. Well I don't know how things worked in the 1940s, but I don't think we would accept these sweeping generalizations in work published today. It's especially confusing because while she says in one part that women in early societies were not valued, she argues that there was still some earlier time where women were considered closer to equals with men because there were more female goddesses in pre-history. But it is hard to see what she is actually saying besides some vague notions of "duality." But it is also possible that I am just not understanding.

    Beauvoir argues that a critical factor in woman's otherization and subjugation is that "life is not the supreme value for man but that it just serve ends far greater than itself." So childbirth may create life, but that is the end, and serves nothing beyond the creation of life. It is the hunt that exalts man, because he risks his life to kill to feed the community. And so, "The worst curse on woman is her exclusion from warrior expeditions; it is not in giving life but in risking his life that man raises himself above the animal; this is why throughout humanity, superiority has been granted not to the se that gives birth, but to the one that kills." Moreover, "The male will for expansion and domination transformed feminine incapacity into a curse." Beauvoir talks about certain values of men that include the desire to exhaust new possibilities of new inventions and technologies. Men valued domination, and so men saw the incapacity that women suffered to bring about the reproduction of the species as a weakness or inefficiency rather than a strength. Slave labor was more efficient than women's labor, so she lost her economic role completely, and then was looked down upon even more by men for not contributing economically, even though she really had the more important role in the continuation of the species.

    I thought Beauvoir also had some interesting thoughts about prostitution. She compares prostitutes to Jews in Europe. Just as the Church banned usury and money lending, the Church banned extra-conjugal sex. But since society cannot do without interest or without adultery, these functions fell to those outside of good society, who often lived in ghettos or reserved neighborhoods. I thought this was especially interesting having just visited the Jewish ghetto of Rome, where a guide explained that Jewish women were made to wear symbols similar to those that prostitutes were made to wear, and that the ghetto was next to the area where the prostitutes were also made to live. So the comparison seems especially appropriate.

    Beauvoir also spends a lot of time discussing women's bodies, and the repulsion that many men have for them. On woman's impurity, Beauvoir points out that the text in Leviticus about how a woman can purify herself after a period is exactly the same for the text about how a man can purify himself after having gonorrhea. Similarly, Christianity is a religion that worships a "God with an ignominious death, but saves him the stain of birth," making him virgin-born. While the original church fathers asserted that Mary had given birth in "blood and filth like other women," the opinions of Saint Ambrose and Saint Augustine prevailed to make it so the doctrine would be that Mary's womb remained closed. Just having a body was a form of ignominy for women. The lust and disgust that men have for women makes things confusing at this point. Because men form all these different and contradicting ideas about women, it is hard to get a read on exactly Beauvoir is saying men think.

    But all of this duality stuff seems like Hegelian thing or something about how the point is that woman's duality in man's eyes leads to his resentment for her. Beauvoir writes, 

Here, then, is why woman has a double and deceptive image: she is everything he craves and everything he does not attain. She is a wise mediator between auspicious Nature and man; and she is the temptation of Nature, untamed against all reason. She is the carnal embodiment of all moral values and their opposites, from good to bad; she is the stuff of action and its obstacle, man's grasp on the world and his failure; as such she is the source of all man's reflection on his existence and all expression he can give of it; however, she works to divert him from himself, to make him sink into silence and death. As his servant and companion, man expects her to also be his public and judge, to confirm him in his being; but she opposes him with her indifference, even with her mockery and her laughter. He projects onto her what he desires and fears, what he loves and what he hates. And if it is difficult to say anything about her, it is because man seeks himself entirely in her and because she is All. But she is All in that which is inessential: she is wholly the Other. And as other she is also other than herself, other than what is expected of her. Being all, she is never exactly this that she should be; she is everlasting disappointment, the very disappointment of existence that never successfully attains or reconciles itself with the totality of existents.

What I get from this is that the primary reason for woman's otherization today is that men create an idea of what woman should be and then find women lacking for not meeting their standard. And women can never meet the standards of men because the standards imposed by men are contradicting. To be a virgin is to satisfy an expectation of purity, but to violate a standard of sexuality and attractiveness. To be a servant is to satisfy an expectation of subordinance, but to violate an expectation to be a confidant. And so the problem is that men do not see women as people or as individuals. Men mystify women and therefore create some idea that they call women, and are disappointed when real human females don't conform to that expectation. And this myth of "mystery" allows man to flatter his laziness and his vanity at the same time. This same concept is used by most masters to think of their subordinates as "others." It serves to dehumanize the subordinated by refusing to imagine them as real human individuals, instead actively choosing to not understand them. And so there is no "masculine" mystery, even though woman certainly does not always understand man.

    Part of why men need to create these ideas about women is that women are needed for men to reaffirm their own masculinity/virility. But Beauvoir isn't calling this a bad thing. She calls it a truth, which some men (like Napoleon for some reason) have failed to understand. Man, she writes, should not affirm his singularity, but his existence has a pole that needs the existence of the opposite pole. And, "whether male or female, an individual should never seek the triumph of pride or the exaltation of his self in erotic relations; to use one's sex as a tool of one's will is the irreparable error; it is essential to break the barriers of the ego, to transcend the very limits of consciousness, and renounce all personal sovereignty." She continues: "This ecstasy is neither sacrifice nor abandon; there is no question of either sex letting itself be swallowed up by the other; neither the man nor the woman should be like a broken fragment of a couple; one's sex is not a wound; each one is a complete being, perfectly polarized; when one is assured in his virility, the other in her femininity, 'each acknowledges the perfection of the polarized sex circuit'; the sexual act is without annexation, without surrender of either partner, the marvelous fulfillment of each other."

Volume II: Lived Experience

    Beauvoir starts the second volume by declaring that, "One is not born, but rather becomes, woman." Her thesis is that woman is socially constructed as a gender, and not predestined by biology. I think that this book is the first major work to distinguish in that way between sex and gender, which then gets picked up by Judith Butler later. This volume of the book deals with a lot more Freudian psychoanalysis, often to criticize it, but I found those portions to be the most irrelevant and difficult to understand. The second volume also continues the major theme of the first of contradictions that create impossible-to-achieve double-standards, except that in this volume she also discusses some of the contradictory ways that women view themselves, men, and the world that contribute to woman's own unhappiness.

    Other portions of the book felt somewhat dated. To be sure, Beauvoir specifies that unless otherwise stated, the reader should assume that she is talking about the Western world at the time of publication. In those ways, this book felt like the last book of an older era rather than the first book of a new era. The style and organization of the book felt older, and it certainly would not be published today with as little empirical evidence as was provided in 1949. And while very radical in most ways, in other ways the book is more conservative than a feminist book would be today- I think Beauvoir engages in lots of stereotyping about women. For example, she says that men are more rational than women. But I don't really fault her for this because she was writing in a very different time. She describes women who knew nothing about sex or their bodies, and women who thought babies were born from their belly buttons until they were in their twenties.

    The biggest criticisms Beauvoir makes that feel the most un-feminist today are her criticisms of interior design and care for one's appearance as distractions for women. To her, both are symptoms of woman's imprisonment- first in her home, and second in her body. As a reaction to imprisonment, woman begins a never ending battle to make her home spotless and her appearance perfect. Men don't care about these things according to Beauvoir because they are enriched by the outer world. For men, their home is just a place to sleep and their body gets them from place to place. I found this criticism to be a little too accepting of the masculine as the default and "right" way of living. Maybe because I favor more individual/personal choice than Beauvoir I think as long as presenting a beautiful home and a beautiful body make someone happy, then that is the right thing for them to do.

    A major theme in this volume, which charts the course of a girl becoming a woman more or less chronologically throughout her life, is how a woman comes to terms with that. While Beauvoir doesn't put it in these terms, there is a sort of "stages-of-grief"-like process in which girls deny femininity until their first menstruation, and then deny sex and sexuality as well. There are lots of quotes from women and girls, describing how they became aware of their gendered identity, often as teenagers, when they noticed men staring at them, and how they wished they could be invisible to escape it. The major marker of initiation into womanhood, menstruation, is dreaded by girls, writes Beauvoir, not because it is painful or disgusts them inherently, but because it signifies that there is no way out of the degraded category of "woman," and that they will never be male. It is the final point after which there can be no denying one's gender. Girls experience ideal love, but fear sexual love. There are practical reasons, like the fact that it can lead to diseases or pregnancy, but there are also more symbolic reasons according to Beauvoir, like the fear of penetration and domination. Beauvoir explains the dirty stories high school girls tell each other as a way to cope with this fear by laughing at sexuality, so as to conquer it. Sex scares young women more than men, she writes, because "Woman does not have the option of transforming her flesh into will;" because man takes the aggressive role, he is less afraid of how his body will be perceived. Since men are viewed less than women, his appearance does not form an integral part of his self-identity.

    And arriving at the ultimate question of why women are "inferior" to men in society, she writes that it is because woman was restricted to repeating life by giving birth, while men gave society reasons for living. While women's prime years are spent in pregnancy and childbirth, "confined to motherhood," men could hunt, build, and transcend life itself through ideas. The current revolution in gender relations is really the result of abortion, birth control, and changing responsibilities as women enter what used to be a man's world. I thin Beauvoir would be very interested in seeing how feminism has successfully delayed the age at which men are able to "surpass" women from the teenage years to the twenties and thirties, when women begin to have children. By delaying marriage and children, women are able to succeed more in schooling, but they hit a point where it is time to either have children or not have them, and if they choose to have them, that fundamental inequality has not been defeated, only delayed. Unfortunately, it means that anti-feminists are able to argue that women are unable to succeed even with equal treatment, ignoring that major biological constraint. It is interesting to think about how today compares to 1949 France. Beauvoir imagines the world that the Soviet revolution "promised" and it sounds strikingly similar to our world today in progressive places:

women raised and educated exactly like men would work under the same conditions and for the same salaries; erotic freedom would be accepted by custom, but the sexual act would no longer be considered a remunerable 'service'; women would be obliged to provide another livelihood for themselves; marriage would be based on a free engagement that the spouses could break when they wanted to; motherhood would be freely chosen--that is, birth control and abortion would be allowed--and in return all mothers and their children would be given the same rights; maternity leave would be paid for by the society that would have responsibility for the children, which does not mean that they would be taken from their parents but that they would not be abandoned to them. 

It seems like we have created small pockets of this world in some countries in Europe and some states in the US, but true equality has not resulted, likely from the difficulties of motherhood still driving women back into the home, if not permanently, for long enough that their salaries decrease. And there are still societal expectations that result in women in relationships doing far more housework than men, even if both work or the woman works more outside the home.

    In conclusion, I would say that this was an excellent book, although flawed in many ways. Most of all it is thought-provoking, even 75 years later. Beauvoir's concepts of gender as differentiated from sex and the "otherization" of women that leads to double-standards have become so fundamental to modern thinking that they are almost background. In that, her book is a classic. The Freudian analysis certainly feels less relevant today. And it is weird to read this book having learned about her support for statutory rape laws being repealed in France and the accusations against her by her students of sexual abuse. So I leave the book feeling much better versed in feminism, but not completely accepting everything Beauvoir says. I think it would be interesting to try to cut down the book to some essential chapters, since I think that it would be useful for more people to have a smaller version of the book that focuses on the parts that are still highly relevant.

Miscellaneous Facts:

• It seems like Beauvoir's original publication was poorly edited. There are a few examples of things being slightly wrong and corrected by the modern translators. The funniest one I saw was when Beauvoir says that silk workers used to labor from three in the morning to eleven at night, which adds up to seventeen hours a day. The translators added an asterisk to say "Beauvoir's calculation" and that had me laughing.
• Another interesting point Beauvoir makes is that the women who enter history and gain fame are the most unusual women. Whereas men can spring forth from history and be carried to fame by circumstances, women needed to always spring forth in spite of circumstances. Women tend to be exemplary figures rather than historical agents. That is to say that famous women of history like Joan of Arc are rarely making large changes in history like men who found themselves in the right place at the right time. Instead, these women just become examples of incredible people. This can show how it is not women's inferiority that makes them historically insignificant, but how women's historical insignificance has doomed them to inferiority.
• On homosexuality, Beauvoir seems to have a totally nurture-based philosophy. My reading is that she doesn't think anyone is born straight, gay, or anything else, but that it is all "chosen in situation."
• I thought this was an interesting quote: "Marriage is often a crisis for man as well: the proof is that many masculine psychoses develop during the engagement period or the early period of conjugal life. Less attached to his family than his sisters are, the young man belongs to some group: a special school, a university, a guild, a team, something that protects him from loneliness; he leaves it behind to begin his real existence as an adult..." This reminds me of the current crisis of male loneliness that gets talked about now, and how it might be increased by the fact that men get married much later now.
• Another good quote, this one being quoted from Wilhelm Stekel by Beauvoir: "Children are not substitutes for one's disappointed love; they are not substitutes for one's thwarted ideal in life, children are not mere material to fill out an empty existence. Children are a responsibility and an opportunity. Children are the loftiest blossoms upon the tree of untrammeled love...They are neither playthings, nor tools for the fulfillment of parental needs or ungratified ambitions. Children are obligations; they should be brought up so as to become happy human beings."
• Another interesting quote from the book: "Her whole destiny is at stake in every glance her lover casts at another woman since she as alienated her entire being in him. And she becomes irritated if for one instant her lover turns his eyes to another woman; if he reminds her that she has just been dwelling on a stranger for a long time, she firmly answers: 'It's not the same thing.' She is right. A man looked at by a woman receives nothing: giving begins only at the moment when the feminine flesh becomes prey. But the coveted woman is immediately metamorphosed into a desirable and desired object; and the neglected woman in love 'returns to ordinary clay.'"
• Out of the 321 people recognized with stigmata recognized by the Catholic Church, only 47 are men.
• Something else interesting is a passage in the conclusion where Beauvoir attempts to refute the claims of anti-feminists that women's liberation will result in a depression of desire and the "spice of life." I think we could say that is broadly true, as a more puritan culture has come about, but it is hard to say for how long, and whether that is a problem when it has largely been the result of the exposure and prosecution of sexual predators. And as Beauvoir points out: "new carnal and affective relations of which we cannot conceive will be born between the sexes: friendships, rivalries, complicities, chaste or sexual companionships that past centuries would not have dreamed of are already appearing."

Talleyrand by Duff Cooper

     I ended up liking this book way more than I thought I would. It was a biography of a fascinating subject and it was told in a stylized way that was extremely engaging. Cooper knew how to write to entertain. He also has an excellent view of history that he shares with readers in short, pithy quotes. For example: "In feudal times the king had had to reckon with a free and powerful nobility, living upon their own land, and relying upon the support of their own adherents. The struggle between king and landed aristocracy had resulted in France in the defeat of the aristocracy, just as in England it had resulted in the defeat of the king." But he's also got a lot of personality as a writer, like when he casually insults people from history: "a tender father of a family and a faithful husband of an ugly wife." Why did he feel the need to say that? And he has a clear sense of morality, like when he writes that, "A dictator cannot blame others for what is done in his name unless he punishes them." He also writes that, "Extremists, to whatever camp they belong, are the disease germs in the body politic. They can never create, but when the general health of the body is weak, they can bring destruction. They are reckless as to the means they employ, and because their passion-blinded eyes can discern no difference between the most moderate and the most violent of those who differ from them, they are ready to combine with the latter in order to defeat the former."

    Talleyrand is an important historical figure because he served in nearly all French governments from the time of the Revolution, when he was elected to the first Estates-General in 1789, during the Directory, under the First Empire, and under both the Restoration governments of Louis XVIII and Louis-Philippe. He is especially interesting because he was Bishop who didn't believe in God and spent most of his life feuding with the church, for which he was excommunicated. His worst act against the church was his earliest: in 1789 he brought forward the motion for the State to seize all church property. He was then excommunicated for ordaining prelates in direct disobedience to the Pope. Talleyrand joined the church against his will, forced into it so that the inheritance of his father's estate could go to his younger brother. Talleyrand was disfavored because of a birth deformity that caused him to limp. And he wasn't fit for the church because he was a rationalist: he supported measures for the emancipation of the Jews, stabilization of weights and measures, and a system of public education (among others). In 1790, he was elected the President of the National Assembly.

    Talleyrand was also corrupt, as we would understand it today. But Cooper is clear on telling us that Talleyrand would not have considered his solicitation of bribes to be corruption, but rather the proper remuneration for his services. For example, he always favored the re-creation of Poland after it was partitioned by Prussia, Russia, and Austria in 1795. So he didn't see anything wrong with taking money from Polish elites to advocate that same cause to his superiors, and in fact Talleyrand returned the money when he failed to achieve it. But Talleyrand became famous for bribery because, Cooper writes, "he took millions where [others] took thousands." As a person, it seems like people generally all had the same impression. First, they regard him as repulsive, and like a snake. But then, they get to know him and really love him and his cleverness.

    Talleyrand was clearly a master diplomat. He understood the lesson that was lost at Versailles in 1919, that a state should be hard and vicious in war but friendly and merciful in peace. Talleyrand's advice would have preserved the French Empire had it been heeded. He advocated to Napoleon to offer Austria a good peace that would grant it territories away from France, so that it might focus elsewhere. But instead, Napoleon forced Emperor Francis to pay 1/6 of his revenue and an indemnity of fort million francs while losing nearly three million subjects. Cooper writes of this that Napoleon's fatal error was to never decide his war aims before going to war. The result was that war was fought for the sake of war with unconditional surrender by the enemy being the only thing that could end it. And so when Napoleon fought Prussia, the Prussian King Frederick William accepted Napoleon's peace proposal from October, but since matters had gone better for Napoleon in the meantime, Napoleon demanded more by November. Prussia lost half its territory and lost over five million subjects in population. These peace treaties in fact engendered even more hatred on the part of the conquered, and meant that they would be back to fight Napoleon again. And then this bit Napoleon in the back when he rejected borders that would have given him the natural borders of France: the Rhine, the Alps, and the Pyrenees. Because he felt such a strong offer was due to his strong position, he rejected it. Then he regretted that rejection two weeks later, when he was losing and it was too late. Then, he was given terms that would have given him France's 1791 borders. But since he'd just won two successes he refused. And from that point the Allies were determined to eliminate him once and for all since they couldn't rely on negotiations with him.

    A theme that keeps coming up in my readings is nationalism. It emerges in this book again when Napoleon has managed to trick the King of Spain into losing his throne, which Napoleon handed to his brother, Joseph. Cooper points out that this trick could not work against the nobility of Europe, because they saw it as him breaking the rules, but that it also couldn't work against the normal people, because they had developed a national identity. By the 19th century, Spaniards would not consent to being ruled by the French. On the basis of war against Portugal, Napoleon got the permission of the Spanish royals to bring an army through Spain. But once he was there, he struck against them. It was that treachery that caused Europe to turn against him completely and irrevocable. Cooper writes that, "No dynasty could feel secure after the manner in which the Spanish Bourbons had been treated; no nation could despair of liberty when they saw how the Spanish people were refusing to accept an alien domination."

    I'll just finish by saying I really liked this book and especially this author. I am going to try to find some more of his books.