Three-Toed Sloth

Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur, September 2022

Attention conservation notice: I have no taste, and no qualifications to opine on political sociology or the history of the Second International. Also, most of my reading this month was done at odd hours and/or while bottle-feeding a baby, so I'm less reliable and more cranky than usual.

Robert Michels, Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy [1911; translated by Eden and Cedar Paul, 1915] [full text via Library of Congress]

I'd read a lot about this book, but the second-hand accounts didn't do it justice. At one level, it's a study of the socialist parties of the Second International during their peak, with the thought being if they couldn't manage to be effectively democratic, controlled by their members rather than their leadership, what hope does any other organization have?

His conclusion is, not much hope at all. And this is the other level of the book, and why it has had a life after 1914.

By a universally applicable social law, every organ of the collectivity, brought into existence through the need for the division of labor, creates for itself, as soon as it becomes consolidated, interests peculiar to itself. The existence of these special interests involves a necessary conflict with the interests of the collectivity. Nay, more, social strata fulfiling peculiar functions tend to become isolated, to produce organs fitted for the defense of their own peculiar interests. In the long run they tend to undergo transformation into distinct classes. [Part 6, ch. 2]

This is the source for the famous "iron law of oligarchy". Paraphrasing: Effective and efficient social groups must employ a division of labor, and must create specialists. Those specialists genuinely know more about how to make the group work than most of its members, and to be effective they need to stay in their roles for extended periods of time, and to be replaced by other specialists. They inevitably become leaders, with different interests than others. Michels: "Who says organization, says oligarchy" [pt. 6, ch. 4].

In terms of what's to be done about this, Michels trembles on the verge of advocating competition among would-be elites and their frequent rotation in office, or at least the threat of their frequent rotation. (He borrows the phrase "circulation of elites" from Pareto, but not quite in the relevant way.) He also trembles on describing democratic control of elites as a collective action problem --- though that's also the sort of thing which people need to organize to solve.

I am not convinced that there's no way out of Michels's dilemmas, that the iron law of oligarchy is as iron as all that. (I have some thoughts.) My gut feeling is that it's like Malthus's iron law of population, or the prisoners' dilemma, or Mancur Olson's ideas about collective action, or Hardin's "tragedy of the commons" --- if you accept the premises, the distressing conclusion does indeed follow. The questions of interest then are when the premises hold, or the ways in which they fail to hold. (Cf., and see footnote *.) That is a major accomplishment, and this is a deserved classic of political thought. §

(Michel's later personal political beliefs, like Pareto's, were deeply unfortunate, to say the least, but are not implied by this book.)

*: Thus Malthus is checked by the industrial revolution and the demographic transition; the prisoners' dilemma by a whole field of the evolution of cooperation; Hardin by Ostrom. (Olson himself emphasized that collective action happens, and the puzzle is understanding how, when and why.) ^

Linda Nagata, Needle

Mind candy science fiction, latest in Nagata's "Inverted Frontier" series. Someone online (name lost, sorry) said the plot outline could easily be that of a Star Trek episode, and I can't quite unsee that (the split-colony parts especially), but it's still very good. In particular it benefits from Nagata's slightly detached and clinical view on these characters and their emotions (which is not very Trek-y at all). §

Michel Talagrand, What Is a Quantum Field Theory?

Talagrand is a probabilist who decided, at the end of a long and distinguished career, that he was finally going to understand what physicists are up to in quantum field theory, and in particular what on earth is going on with calculations that produce infinities somehow being re-jiggered to not produce infinities, a.k.a. "renormalization". This led to an actual mathematician encountering what passes among physicists under the names of "theorems" and "proofs", resulting in a great deal of confusion, exasperation and (reading between the lines) moments of near despair. But it also led to what must be one of the more interesting, and is definitely one of the most personal, books on QFT ever written. Talagrand builds up from scratch all the way to things like \( \phi^4 \) theory, though not covering any serious theory of physical interactions like quantum electrodynamics. But he does succeed in making mathematical sense of a huge part of the framework of QFT, and is frank about where he just can't.

I enjoyed this book tremendously, but I might as well have been reverse-engineered to be its target audience --- I studied QFT as a physics graduate student a quarter century ago (before changing my specialty), and now works in a discipline more affected, or afflicted, by mathematicians' notions of rigor. Whether there are many others who will be similarly interested in 800 pages of careful math being used to do conceptual clarification on one of the more recondite branches of natural science, I couldn't say. §

Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur; The Progressive Forces; Physics; Mathematics; Scientifiction and Fantastica; Commit a Social Science