In this book we try to pry open the door to the Islamic universe. We are not interested in evaluating Islam from within those dominant perspectives of modern scholarship that make various contemporary modes of self-understanding the basis for judging the subject. Instead, we want to portray Islam from the perspective of those great Muslims of the past who established the major modes of Koranic interpretation and Islamic understanding.

This is not to say that we will simply translate passages from the classical texts in the manner of an anthology. The classical texts ask too much from beginning readers. They were not written for people coming from another cultural milieu. Rather, they were written for people who thought more or less the same way the authors did and who shared the same world view. Moreover, as a general rule they were written for those with advanced intellectual training, a type of training that is seldom offered in our graduate schools, much less on the undergraduate level.

The classical texts did not play the same role as contemporary textbooks, which attempt to explain everything in a relatively elementary format. On the contrary, they were usually written to present a position in a broad intellectual context. Frequently the texts would present only the outline of the argument---the rest was supplied orally by the teacher. Students did not borrow these books from the library and return them the following week. They would often copy the text for themselves (by hand, of course), and spend several months or years studying it word by word with a master. We ourselves have attended sessions in which classical texts were being studied in the Islamic World, and we can attest to how easily a good teacher can choose a word or a sentence and draw out endless meaning from it.

[...]

We are perfectly aware that many contemporary Muslims are tired of what they consider outdated material: they would like to discard their intellectual heritage and replace it with truly "scientific" endeavors, such as sociology. By claiming that the Islamic intellectual heritage is superfluous and that the Koran is sufficient, such people have surrendered to the spirit of the times. Those who ignore the interpretations of the past are forced to interpret their text in light of the prevailing world view of the present. This is a far different enterprise than that pursued by the great authorities, who interpreted their present in the light of a grand tradition and who never fell prey to the up-to-date---that most obsolescent of all abstractions.

The introductory texts on Islam that we have encountered devote a relatively small proportion of space to the Muslim understanding of reality. The reader is always told that the Koran is of primary importance and that Muslims have certain beliefs about God and the afterlife, but seldom do the authors of these works make more than a cursory attempt to explain what this means in actuality. Usually the reader encounters a short history of Islamic thought that makes Muslim intellectuals appear a bit foolish for apparently spending a great amount of time discussing irrelevant issues. More sympathetic authors try to explain that these issues were important in their historical context. Rarely is it suggested that these issues are just as important for the contemporary world as they were for the past, and that they are constantly being discussed today in our own culture, though with different terminology.

We like to think that the Islamic tradition provides many examples of great answers to great questions. The questions are those that all human beings are forced to ask at one time or another, even if contemporary intellectual predispositions tend to dismiss them as irrelevant or immature or unanswerable or self-deconstructing. We have in mind the great whys and whats that five-year-olds have the good sense to ask---though they soon learn to keep quiet in order to avoid the ridicule of their elders. Why are we here? What is the meaning of life? Where did we live before we were born? Where do we go after we die? Where did the world come from? Where does God come from? What are angels? Why is the world full of evil? What are devils? If God is good, why did he create Satan? Why does God allow good people to suffer? How can a merciful God predestine people to hell? Why do I have to go through all this?

Texts on Islam often tell the reader, in extremely cursory fashion, what Muslim thinkers have concluded about such issues; what they do not address is the universe of discourse that informs Islamic thinking and allows the conclusions to make sense. Studies usually highlight the differences of opinion; what they do not clarify is that the logic of either/or is not always at work. Perspectives differ in accordance with differing interpretations of the sources, and the perspectives do not necessarily exclude each other. We are told that people took sides, for example, on free will and predestination. But any careful reading of a variety of texts will show that the common intuition was that the true situation is neither/nor, or both/and. The extreme positions were often formulated as intellectual exercises to be struck down by the thinker himself, if not by his followers.

[...]

Readers need to be warned at the outset that this book is not designed to provide the "historical acts." In the last section of the book, we will say something about the Islamic view of history. That will help explain why the concerns of the modern critical study of history are not our concerns. To write history, after all, is to read meaning into the events of the past on the basis of contemporary views of reality. The events themselves cannot make sense until they are filtered through the human lens. If the Koran and the Islamic tradition are read in terms of contemporary scholarly opinions or ideologies, their significance for the Islamic tradition is necessarily lost to sight.

Naturally, we as authors have our own lenses. In fact, some people may criticize us for trying to find Islam's vision of itself within the Islamic intellectual tradition in general and the Sufi tradition in particular. But it is precisely these perspectives within Islam that provide the most self-conscious reflections on the nature of the tradition. If we did not take seriously the Muslim intellectuals' own understanding of their religion, we would have to replace it with the perspectives of modern Western intellectuals. Then we would be reading the tradition through critical methodologies that have developed within Western universities. But why should an alien perspective be preferable to an indigenous perspective that has survived the test of time? It does not make sense to us to employ a methodology that happens to be in vogue at the moment and to ignore the resources of an intellectual tradition that is still alive after a thousand-year history.

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For the Progressives, many of whom had roots in Republican reformism, charity was an ineffective and insufficient system for promoting the general welfare and for ameliorating perceived economic and social injustice. At the heart of the Progressive diagnosis of the problem was a view of charity as an unsystematic, temporary, and superficial ointment that failed to address the root causes of problems. Many commentators thought that charity might improve conditions for the individual but left undisturbed the diseased social order that contributed to poverty. Some commentators went further in their critique, arguing that charity not only failed to assist even its recipients but left them increasingly in a state of pauperization, dependent on the handouts of others. For other reformers, the voluntary decentralized nature of charity administration led to needless duplication and waste.

[...]

Contributing to the diagnosis and prescription for charity reformation were several currents that further eroded more traditional views that rooted charity in the soil of religious obligations and the practices of mutual aid and charity. The emerging Social Gospel movement merged secular and religious concerns into what was perceived as a “higher” form of Christianity and demanded more wholesale remediation of social ills. The moral fulcrum of aid was no longer to be the personal discretion of givers about the moral fitness of a recipient but was to be anchored in a postmillennial pietism that sought to build the kingdom of God on earth.

Defining pauperism and justice in broadly social terms required looking for environmental and structural, as opposed to moral, causes of pauperism. The pursuit of structural problems and solutions eliminated the need for distinctions between the deserving and undeserving poor that had not only guided Victorian philanthropists but had also been a useful tool for mutual aid and other cooperative societies that depended on expectations of reciprocity among deserving, if occasionally unfortunate, peers.

The movement from the moral world of charity to the moral world of social activism displaced the virtue of liberality expressed in gift-giving and traditional forms of mutual aid and voluntary association. By elevating the state as the central agent for the distribution of welfare goods, the Progressives paved the way for the displacement of dispersed, conscientious, personal judgment of citizens by the centralized, rationalized, professional administration of civil servants.

[...]

III. Social Science and Modern Philanthropy
The Progressive-era confidence in social scientific technique as a means of social control informed the changing view of the role of philanthropy in society. The quest for a more “scientific philanthropy” shared the Progressive desire to diagnose and treat through orderly systematic means the “root causes” of poverty. Government was seen by many as a benign and appropriate partner in this pursuit.

As early as 1899 it was common to define as philanthropists not merely those among the wealthy who endowed foundations but “all persons who have devoted themselves in any systematic way to charitable or educational work.” Joseph Lee argued that philanthropists had “a duty to perform in the systematic study and promotion of progressive social legislation.” For Lee, this “promotion” could include calling in experts to advise on the implementation of beneficial legislation and to develop rational programs and measures for the “cure of all social ills.”

Writing in The Atlantic Monthly in 1900, Charles Richmond Henderson suggested that the application of science in philanthropy required greater “practical coordination of the special knowledge of economists, lawyers, physicians, [and] educators.” This coordination would be best realized by centralizing supervisory power over charitable institutions in state level boards and by promoting the principles of civil service reform in charitable and correctional institutions to ensure that they were in the hands of trained administrators.

Edward Devine surveyed the field of “voluntary philanthropy” in 1913 and identified three principal strands worth considering: “those programs which have to do with making governmental action more effective, or extending its sphere,” “foundations for the study of and improvement of social conditions,” and “these philanthropic agencies which our generation has inherited, such as hospitals, relief societies, orphan asylums, and the like.”

Devine identified the latter class of organizations as those that would preserve “the ideal of an independent citizen of an industrial democracy, earning his own living, providing for his own emergencies, and relying for support even in old age on the accumulated savings of his productive period.” By contrast, the bureaus of research and various reform agencies falling into the first class of organizations were those that sought to improve conditions not primarily for individuals but for society as a whole. Participants in these organizations “looked toward better government as a prime means of securing social welfare reform.” This did not imply paternalism but reflected “the deliberate intention to use the governmental machinery for the doing of those things for which experience shows it to be more efficient and more economical than any other means yet devised.”

Interestingly, Devine was agnostic about the future of the emerging foundations and believed that for the most part they were conservative institutions that were more comfortably aligned with traditional charity organizations than with emerging reform agencies. Devine suggested that the foundations for the most part represented the vested interests of old wealth more than the well-being of future generations and claimed that “their natural attitude toward state action for the social welfare is one of distrust, or at least of hesitation about greatly enlarging its functions.” Nevertheless, Devine acknowledged the strong influence of their founders on the foundations’ approaches to solving social problems, and believed that future foundations would have to stake their ground either with “the Bureau of Municipal Research type of philanthropy” or with “the type of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.”

Devine’s characterization of Carnegie as ultimately more sympathetic with the ends of charity organization than more bureaucratic social reform seems apt. While Carnegie shared the “scientific” desire to address root causes of social problems and saw traditional charity through alms as injurious to individuals, examination of his giving practices reveals a comparatively traditional focus with the emphasis on administration of gifts at the local community level rather than through national bureaus.

What was unique and unfamiliar about the newly endowed foundations was the potential magnitude of their philanthropy and the fear that the application of such great wealth would allow for personal influence and control “beyond the legitimate boundaries implied in their benefactions.” Devine, for example, was critical of Carnegie’s pension fund for teachers for trying “to eradicate sectarian control of colleges.”

Another challenge faced by foundation philanthropists was how to effectively manage the disbursement of large amounts of money. Undoubtedly the industrialists who founded the endowments hoped to enjoy some form of psychic satisfaction from their beneficence, whether by realizing a desire for fame, fulfilling a sense of indebtedness to the public, or perhaps implementing a hopeful program of social reform. Nevertheless, the administration of grant making on this scale entailed special challenges. George Iles commented on the problems of “large giving” in The Century in 1897: “It is hard for rich and forceful men to learn that they must rein their instinct for command when they enter an unfamiliar field. The tactful adjustment of relations between men who have and do not know, and men who know and do not have, is familiar enough in the sphere of business. The same adjustment arrives, sometimes after sharp conflicts, in the administration of large gifts.”

Clearly, the stage was set in the Progressive era for “men who know” to exert their influence not only in the field of civil service but in the administration of philanthropic and charitable institutions as well. The professionalism and presumption of technical expertise of the emerging administrative class, however, could often exist in tension with the express intent of donors, the insights of grassroots, local knowledge, and the common sense of American cultural and legal traditions.

[...]

VI. The Progressive Legacy in Philanthropy
In the end we are left with the challenge of evaluating the Progressive legacy for modern philanthropy. Progressive-era foundations emerged from the confluence of several streams. Industrial organization enabled the creation and accumulation of vast wealth by entrepreneurial individuals. Industrial urbanization and immigration generated widespread social dislocation and the transformation of labor. Legal developments in corporate organization made possible the creation of endowed foundations with corporate status, despite a continuing ambivalence toward the role of endowments in a free society. The rise of formal social science disciplines fostered a new ethic of public service and a newly placed hope in the social scientists as pilots of the national course.

Many ideas and attitudes from the era seem to persist in the self-understanding of foundation philanthropy today. Here we simply highlight some of these:

• Public-private partnerships are not a bad idea
• Hope and idealism — progress is possible
• Faith in the power of organization
• Foundation focus on institutional change
• An almost unmitigated faith in the power of reason and an equally strong faith in “science” and technical expertise, with the result that today’s philanthropy is often seen as a matter of expertise, organization, and effectiveness rather than of a richer, deeper social conversation
• A distinctive interpretation of American history, a la Croly, embracing Jeffersonian democracy and Hamiltonian centralization. A suspicion of “interests.”
• Belief that a middle way could be found between state socialism and a laissez faire republic
• An absence of constructive humility
• A European perspective on America marked by the importation of the European “social problem” and the pursuit of European, especially Prussian, solutions
• Pragmatism unrestrained by healthy skepticism
• Weak attention to the unintended consequences of institutional change
• A belief that centralized, large scale solutions were feasible and necessary and the attack of problems (such as the conquest of communicable diseases) that lent themselves to this model
• A largely instrumental approach to local, grassroots organizations leading to the pursuit of economies of scale often without attention to the key elements of real success

[...]

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From Patricia Fara’s Science: A Four Thousand Year History:

Armed with impressive arrays of accurate instruments, [Alexander von] Humboldt demonstrated that accumulating meticulous measurements could reveal patterns in nature’s vagaries, and so impose mathematical order on variable phenomena such as air pressure, magnetism, and plant distribution. Figure 33 [above] shows his visual argument that there must be general laws describing how temperature varies across the Earth’s surface. Humboldt’s chart stretches from the east coast of America on the left over to Asia on the right, and it illustrates a new and crucially important statistical approach to nature. Instead of plotting actual temperatures on any particular day, Humboldt calculated the annual mean temperature for each place, thus amalgamating many thousands of observations into a few curved lines, called isotherms. By averaging out fluctuations, Humboldt ordained and displayed global regularity.

Humboldt was a visual innovator. Although it now seems obvious that diagrams enable scientists, advertisers, and politicians to summarize evidence and present it persuasively (if not always fairly), Figure 33 is an extremely early example. In the first half of the nineteenth century, graphs, bar charts, and so forth were only just being introduced, and they were slow to catch on. Scientists trying to interpret diagrammatic data had to learn a new visual language—just like reading, deciphering graphs and maps only becomes automatic with practice. Even contour lines, which directly represent actual mountain heights, seemed alien and were not routinely used until the early twentieth century. Humboldt’s isotherms involved yet a further conceptual leap, because they were idealized summaries with no physical reality. By recording averages as lines, Humboldt made statistical regularities visible, short-circuiting masses of detailed numerical readings to present scientific relationships at a glance.

This impetus to think and understand through diagrams was encouraged by new printing techniques, which made it possible to reproduce images cheaply and also to incorporate them within the text rather than binding in separate sheets of paper. Gradually, ingenious visualizing techniques became important in many scientific disciplines. Faraday, for example, knew little mathematics but was an inspired three-dimensional visualizer who developed the concept of electromagnetic fields by imagining lines of force extending out through space with a quasi-real existence. Geology’s great visual innovator was Darwin’s friend Charles Lyell, who included an increasing number of diagrams in successive volumes of his hugely influential Principles of Geology (1830–3). As geologists learnt how to interpret schematic cross sections down through the Earth’s crust, they gradually acquired the skill of automatically translating the vertical scale into vast expanses of time.

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If you assume that todays science, along with its technological applications, represents the summit of human achievement, then Islamic philosophers do indeed appear to have ground to a halt after four hundred years [8th to the 12th century CE]. But for Muslims who believe that the quest for spiritual perfection is more important than dominating the material world through reason, then it is the science of Europe that took the wrong track.…

Modern science places a great premium on originality. In contrast, [Abū Ali al-Husain] Ibn Sīnā’s [Latinized: Avicenna] writing was valued by his contemporaries not for its novely but for its throughness and systematic organization. Like Newton, Islamic scholars studied the world because they wanted to  approach God—and also like Newton, whole swathes of their lives have been cut out of the history books to make them appear as proto-scientists. Ibn Sīnā preached the Islamic goal of striving for stability. For him, understanding nature was not an end in itself, since the physical, divine and spiritual worlds are inextricably twined together. The word islam means both submission and peace, or being at one with God. Ibn Sīnā’s aim was not to pick apart the structure of the universe, but to be led towards the unity of God.

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In the mid-1990s, as first the Internet and then the World Wide Web swung into public view, talk of revolution filled the air. Politics, economics, the nature of the self---all seemed to teeter on the edge of transformation. The Internet was about to "flatten organizations, globalize society, decentralize control, and help harmonize people," as MIT's Nicholas Negroponte put it. The stodgy men in gray flannel suits who had so confidently roamed the corridors of industry would shortly disappear, and so too would the chains of command on which their authority depended. In their place, wrote Negroponte and dozens of others, the Internet would bring about the rise of a new "digital generation"---playful, self-sufficient, psychologically whole---and it would see that generation gather, like the Net itself, into collaborative networks of independent peers. States too would melt away, their citizens lured back from archaic part-based politics to the "natural" agora of the digitized marketplace. Even the individual self, so long trapped in the human body, would finally be free to step outside its fleshy confines, explore its authentic interests, and find others with whom it might achieve communion. Ubiquitous networked computing had arrived, and in its shiny array of interlinked devices, pundits, scholars, and investors alike saw the image of an ideal society: decentralized, egalitarian, harmonious, and free.

But how did this happen? Only thirty years earlier, computers had been the tools and emblems of the same unfeeling industrial-era social machine whose collapse they now seemed ready to bring about. In the winter of 1964, for instance, students marching for free speech at the University of California at Berkeley feared that America's political leaders were treating them as if they were bits of abstract data. One after another, they took up blank computer cards,punched them through with new patterns of holes---"FSM" and "STRIKE"---and hung them around their necks. One student even pinned a sign to his chest that parroted the cards user instructions, "I am a UC student. Please do not fold, bend, spindle or mutilate me." For the marchers of the Free Speech Movement, as for many other Americans throughout the 1960s, computers loomed as technologies of dehumanization, of centralized bureaucracy and the rationalization of social life, and, ultimately, of the Vietnam War. Yet, in the 1990s, the same machines that had served as the defining devices of cold war technocracy emerged as the symbols of its transformation. Two decades after the end of the Vietnam War and the fading of the American counterculture, computers somehow seemed poised to bring to life the countercultural dream of empowered individualism, collaborative community,and spiritual communion. How did the cultural meaning of information technology shift so drastically.

As a number of journalists and historians have suggested, part of the answer is technological. By the 1990s, the room-sized, stand-alone calculating machines of the cold war era had largely disappeared. So too had the armored rooms in which they were housed and the army of technicians that supported them. Now Americans had taken up microcomputers, some the size of notebooks, all of them available to the individual user, regardless of his or her institutional standing. These new machines could perform a range of tasks that far exceeded even the complex calculations for which digital computers had first been built. They became communication devices and were used to prepare novels and spreadsheets, pictures and graphs. Linked over telephone wires and fiber-optic cables,they allowed their users to send messages to one another, to download reams of information from libraries around the world, and to publish their own thoughts on the World Wide Web. In all of these ways,changes in computer technology expanded the range of uses to which computers could be put and the types of social relations they were able to facilitate.

As dramatic as they were, however, these changes alone do not account for the particular utopian visions to which computers became attached. The fact that a computer can be put on a desktop, for instance, and that it cant be used by an individual, does not make it a "personal" technology. Nor does the fact that individuals can come together by means of computer networks necessarily require that their gatherings become "virtual communities." On the contrary, as Shoshanna Zuboff has pointed out, in the office, desktop computers and computer networks can become powerful tools for integrating the individual ever more closely into the corporation. At home, those same machines not only allow schoolchildren to download citations from the public library, they also turn the living room into a digital shopping mall. For retailers, the computer in the home becomes an opportunity to harvest all sorts of information about potential customers. For all the utopian claims surrounding the emergence of the Internet, there is nothing about a computer or a computer network that necessarily requires that it level organizational structures, render the individual more psychologically whole, or drive the establishment of intimate, though geographically distributed, communities?

How was it, then, that computers and computer networks became linked to visions of peer-to-peer ad-hocracy, a leveled marketplace, and a more authentic self? Where did these visions come from? And who enlisted computing machines to represent them?

If that hanging question doesn't make you want to read the book, I don't know what will.

I just bought a copy of this book for a coworker. I used to frequently give out copies of Richard Bach's Illusions to friends, but this is a little heavier reading.

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And then came Betty Friedan. Her book, Collins writes, hit in 1963 “like an earthquake.” The shameful, confusing malaise felt by many women after the war now had a legitimate source, and the source had a name: The Feminine Mystique. Friedan busted the myth of the happy housewife so thoroughly that it took decades before women who were happy housewives dared to say anything about it. Women, Friedan said, “were being duped into believing homemaking was their natural destiny.” The dueling desires of motherhood and selfhood were articulated at last, and the feminist movement turned from the clear-cut demands of suffragism and equal pay to the less-defined realm of empowerment.

Accordingly, criticism of Third Wave Feminism is quite similar to that of self-actualization (from Rushkoff's Life, Inc.):

Instead of fueling people to do something about the world, as the Weathermen and Yippies had hoped, spirituality became a way of changing one’s own perspectives, one’s own experiences and one’s own self. By pushing through to the other side of personal liberation, the descendants of Reich once again found self-adjustment the surest path to happiness.

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Precision instruments are designed to achieve an idea, dimensional precision, whose perfection is impossible. There is no perfectly shaped part of the motorcycle and never will be, but when you come as close as these instruments take you, remarkable things happen, and you go flying across the countryside under a power that would be called magic if it were not so completely rational in every way. It’s the understanding of this rational intellectual idea that’s fundamental. John looks at the motorcycle and he sees steel in various shapesand has negative feelings about these steel shapes and turns off the whole thing. I look at the shapes of the steel now and I see ideas. He thinks I’m working on parts. I’m working on concepts.

I was talking about these concepts yesterday when I said that a motorcycle can be divided according to its components and according to its functions. When I said that suddenly I created a set of boxes with the following arrangement:

And when I said the components may be subdivided into a power assembly and a running assembly, suddenly appear some more little boxes:

And you see that every time I made a further division, up came more boxes based on these divisions until I had a huge pyramid of boxes. Finally you see that while I was splitting the cycle up into finer and finer pieces, I was also building a structure.

This structure of concepts is formally called a hierarchy and since ancient times has been a basic structure for all Western knowledge. Kingdoms, empires, churches, armies have all been structured into hierarchies. Modern businesses are so structured. Tables of contents of reference material are so structured, mechanical assemblies, computer software, all scientific and technical knowledge is so structured—so much so that in some fields such as biology, the hierarchy of kingdom-phylum-class-order-family-genus-species is almost an icon.

The box “motorcycle” contains the boxes “components” and “functions.” The box “components” contains the boxes “power assembly” and “running assembly,” and so on. There are many other kinds of structures produced by other operators such as “causes” which produce long chain structures of the form, “A causes B which causes C which causes D,” and so on. A functional description of the motorcycle uses this structure. The operator’s “exists,” “equals,” and “implies” produce still other structures. These structures are normally interrelated in patterns and paths so complex and so enormous no one person can understand more than a small part of them in his lifetime. The overall name of these interrelated structures, the genus of which the hierarchy of containment and structure of causation are just species, is system. The motorcycle is a system. A real system.

To speak of certain government and establishment institutions as “the system” is to speak correctly, since these organizations are founded upon the same structural conceptual relationships as a motorcycle. They are sustained by structural relationships even when they have lost all other meaning and purpose. People arrive at a factory and perform a totally meaningless task from eight to five without question because the structure demands that it be that way. There’s no villain, no “mean guys’ who wants them to live meaningless lives, it’s just that the structure, the system demands it and no one is willing to take on the formidable task of changing the structure just because it is meaningless.

But to tear down a factory or to revolt against a government or to avoid repair of a motorcycle because it is a system is to attack effects rather than causes; and as long as the attack is upon effects only, no change is possible. The true system, the real system, is our present construction of systematic thought itself, rationality itself, and if a factory is torn down but the rationality which produced it is left standing, then that rationality will simply produce another factory. If a revolution destroys a systematic government, but the systematic patterns of thought that produced that government are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves in the succeeding government. There’s so much talk about the system. And so little understanding.

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Even those sympathetic to subsidies do not grasp just how prevalent they have been in American history. From the days of Washington, Jefferson and Madison through those of Andrew Jackson to the mid-nineteenth century, enormous printing and postal subsidies were the order of the day. The need for them was rarely questioned, which is perhaps one reason they have been so easily overlooked. They were developed with the intention of expanding the quantity, quality and range of journalism–and they were astronomical by today’s standards. If, for example, the United States had devoted the same percentage of its GDP to journalism subsidies in 2009 as it did in the 1840s, we calculate that the allocation would have been $30 billion. In contrast, the federal subsidy last year for all of public broadcasting, not just journalism, was around $400 million.

The experience of America’s first century demonstrates that subsidies of the sort we suggest pose no threat to democratic discourse; in fact, they foster it. Postal subsidies historically applied to all newspapers, regardless of viewpoint. Printing subsidies were spread among all major parties and factions. Of course, some papers were rabidly partisan, even irresponsible. But serious historians of the era are unanimous in holding that the extraordinary and diverse print culture that resulted from these subsidies built a foundation for the growth and consolidation of American democracy. Subsidies made possible much of the abolitionist press that led the fight against slavery.

Our research suggests that press subsidies may well have been the second greatest expense of the federal budget of the early Republic, following the military. This commitment to nurturing and sustaining a free press was what was truly distinctive about America compared with European nations that had little press subsidy, fewer newspapers and magazines per capita, and far less democracy. This history was forgotten by the late nineteenth century, when commercial interests realized that newspaper publishing bankrolled by advertising was a goldmine, especially in monopolistic markets. Huge subsidies continued to the present, albeit at lower rates than during the first few generations of the Republic. But today’s direct and indirect subsidies–which include postal subsidies, business tax deductions for advertising, subsidies for journalism education, legal notices in papers, free monopoly licenses to scarce and lucrative radio and TV channels, and lax enforcement of anti-trust laws–have been pocketed by commercial interests even as they and their minions have lectured us on the importance of keeping the hands of government off the press. It was the hypocrisy of the current system–with subsidies and government policies made ostensibly in the public interest but actually carved out behind closed doors to benefit powerful commercial interests–that fueled the extraordinary growth of the media reform movement over the past decade.

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Above is from the addendum of Zadok Cramer’s The Navigator from which I have quoted previously. Written buoyantly, it  makes jokes of specie (‘new notes of the “first water“‘ refers to the breadth of bank notes available at the time) and law (“club law” is the lynch mob). The text:

[i2] STACK ISLAND, not long since, was famed for a band of counterfeiters, horse thieves, robbers, murderers, &c. who made this part of the Mississippi a place of manufacture and deposit. From hence they would sally forth, stop boats, buy horses, flour, whiskey, &c. and pay for all in fine new notes of the “first water.” Their villages, after many severe losses sustained by innocent, good men, unsuspecting the cheat, became notorious, and after several years search and pursuit of the civil, and in some cases the club law, against this band of monsters, they have at length disappeared.

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