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When the Clock Broke is now out in paperback and available wherever books are sold. If you live in the United Kingdom, it’s also available there. The UK edition is also apparently available all over the world, too! I’ve received reports now of book sightings in places as far as Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and Christchurch, New Zealand. It seems relatively easy to find in Commonwealth countries and at English-language bookstores abroad.
I also do a film podcast with Jamelle Bouie of The New York Times. On our Patreon, we have a lot of bonus content, including a weekly politics discussion.
I highly recommend Will Davies and James Butler on the LRB Podcast discussing “What Happened to the Intellectual.”
William Davies joins James to consider what distinguishes intellectuals from the technocrats, academics, experts, polemicists, thought leaders, gurus and utopians who compete for our attention, and to ask whether there’s still a role for them in the public realm. They look back to Weber’s and Gramsci’s ideas about the autonomy and responsibility of the intellectual and discuss the ways in which Hayek’s anti-intellectualism has shaped discourse up to the present day. Where do politicians look for ideas and does the modern marketplace of algorithmic video platforms pose a challenge to independent thought?
It dovetails nicely with my recent pieces on the function of right-wing intellectuals but also led me to reflect a lot about what it is I’m actually doing with my life—if I may be so bold as to claim the mantle of intellectual. I’ll have to get back to you on that one.—
People are sharing something stupid about one of my favorite topics: the Popular Front era and the Fall of France in 1940. It’s a Substack essay by the co-founder of a think tank called The Centre for British Progress and an economics student. It makes the very old and fairly well-debunked argument that the implementation of the 40-hour work week by the left-wing Léon Blum government hobbled France’s productive capacity just as it needed to rearm to face the newly belligerent Nazi Germany. (This is all to argue against restrictions on AI development, by the way.)
Some version of this case has circulated since Vichy. Pétain bewailed the triumph of the “esprit de jouissance” over the "esprit de sacrifice,” basically blaming the labor accords of the previous decade—the 40-hour week, paid vacation, collective bargaining rights—for the decline and decadence of the nation. At the Riom Trial in 1942, his government attempted to make this accusation stick by prosecuting Blum and other leaders of the Third Republic. This was an effort to shift the blame from the incompetent military command to the civilian leaders. (The French officer corps trying to blame a Jew for a humiliating defeat—where have I heard that one before?) It was a useful piece of political mythology to pass the buck from a reactionary bourgeoisie and senile aristocracy to labor and the left, but it does not fare well under historical scrutiny.
The central problem here is that French rearmament—especially when combined with its allies—was a substantial success. As Philip Nord writes in France 1940: Defending the Republic:
On the eve of war, the French army had achieved rough numerical equality to the Germans in armor. France’s air force was still smaller than the Luftwaffe, but the situation was not altogether bleak. French aircraft production was accelerating at a rate the Nazis could not match, and by early 1940, France and Britain together were churning out a higher total of warplanes than Germany In 1938, France’s air arm was not yet a match for the Reich’s, but it was on course to becoming so by 1941. In the meantime, purchased US aircraft made up part of the difference, not to mention the Royal Air Force, which was a formidable force in its own right spearheaded by the redoubtable Spitfire fighter plane.
It is worth underlining in this connection how rapid and massive the French military build- up was. France’s military budget skyrocketed from 12.8 billion francs in 1935 to 93.7 billion francs in 1939. The nation was investing 2.6 times as much on armaments production on the eve of the Second World War as it had on the eve of the First. The quality of France’s new weaponry, moreover, was on the whole respectable, if not first rate.
