Gordon Wood is the Alva O. Way university professor at Brown University and one of America’s foremost authorities on the history and philosophy of the American Revolution. His brilliant books “Radicalism of the American Revolution” and “Creation of the American Republic” are essential for an understanding of American politics and its political system from the Founding Fathers era to the present. The subject of this previous post is Professor Wood’s review of University of Pennsylvania professor Walter A. McDougall’s new book, ”Freedom Just Around the Corner,”which is a fine book that I am currently enjoying greatly.
Now, Professor Wood has produced what it appears to be another fine book. In this NY Times Review of Books review, the reviewer points out that one of the most intriguing aspects of Professor Wood’s new book on Benjamin Franklin — “The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin” — is the approach in which it was written:

This study is not a biography, at least not a conventional one. Wood focuses on Franklin’s personal development and constructs his narrative around various turning points in the life, almost like a bildungsroman. We learn the choices Franklin made, the conflicts he had to resolve. This is the most dramatic of the recent Franklin books.

One of Professor Wood’s points is that Franklin was hard to pin down as a personality. For example, many of today’s politically correct on the left would have a hard time dealing with Franklin:

The politically correct would most likely hector him if they could. For Franklin was a slaveholder. It’s true he turned against slavery, and ardently so, at the very end of his life, but he took a long time getting there. He could be a bigot as well. He wrote nativist diatribes against the large German population in his own colony of Pennsylvania. In 1751 he argued for excluding everyone from Pennsylvania except the English; Morgan calls him ”the first spokesman for a lily-white America.” Franklin loved the company of women, but he was no feminist. He treated his wife miserably, and he admonished young brides to attend to the word ”obey” in their vows. He worried that handouts to the poor would encourage laziness, and he was a fervent supporter of a strong military.

On the other hand, those on the right of the political spectrum would also have a difficult time embracing Franklin:

Modern right-wingers would probably be even more uncomfortable with him than left-wingers. Take his religious views. Franklin was a deist; God, in his opinion, was a distant presence in the affairs of men. He was no churchgoer. He accepted neither the sacredness of the Bible nor the divinity of Jesus. His ideas about property rights were similarly unorthodox. Beyond basic necessities, he said, all property belonged to ”the public, who by their laws have created it.” Brands calls such remarks ”strikingly socialistic.”
What most sets Franklin apart from contemporary conservatives, however, is his attitude toward that panoply of issues gathered under the heading of ”family values.” As a young man he consorted with ”low women,” and fathered an illegitimate child. In 1745 he wrote a letter to a youthful friend — long suppressed — offering advice on choosing a lover. (Older women, he declared, were preferable to younger ones.) Franklin was always an incorrigible flirt. How much actual sex was involved is anybody’s guess, but one incident stands out among the rest. When he was in his 70’s and living in Paris, he became enamored of the captivating 33-year-old Mme. Anne-Louise Brillon, one of the leading lights of Parisian society. Even the puritanical John Adams was enchanted by her. She was no less taken with Franklin, and their vivacious correspondence consisted of a determined campaign on his part to bed her and her equally stalwart resistance, based on the customs of the day and what was proper between a widower and a married woman. Their bantering give-and-take, as quoted by Brands, constitutes one of the most charming episodes in early American history and — since as far as the historians can tell they never did sleep together — also one of the most poignant.

As a result of Franklin’s extraordinary nature and accomplishments, Americans tend to sentimentalize him, which Professor Wood cautions against:

The other problematic theme concerns Franklin’s ”Americanness.” He seems almost a checklist for those national qualities Americans take pride in — and others despise us for. Yet Wood alerts us to be careful in how we think about this aspect of his character. For he was the most cosmopolitan of the founders, at home anywhere. Twenty-five of the last 33 years of his life were spent abroad, and those years were anything but a hardship for him. He was wined and dined and celebrated by the Europeans more than he ever was by his own countrymen. Soon after arriving in London he was complaining about the provinciality and vulgarity of Americans. In Paris he was quite simply a superstar, acclaimed as the equal of Voltaire, and he gave thought to settling permanently in ”the civilest Nation upon Earth.” These sentiments did not go unnoticed back home, and Franklin fell under suspicion of being a foreign agent, first for the British, then for the French. When he returned to Philadelphia for the last time in 1785, it was in part to clear his name.

In the end, Professor Wood’s book attempts to answer the difficult question: What changed Benjamin Franklin from a citizen of the world to a citizen of the United States?

The Revolution was not a conflict over taxation or home rule, not even a dispute over the rights of Englishmen. For him it represented something universal, a world-historical event, ”a miracle in human affairs.” That is, Franklin never stopped being the urbane cosmopolitan, the ultimate sophisticate. He stayed true to himself. But by 1776 he had concluded that the only way to remain a citizen of the world was to become an American.

Gordon Wood on Ben Franklin. Don’t miss it.

Ray C. Fair is a professor of economics at Yale University. In this Wall Street Journal ($) article, , Professor Fair’s new book — Predicting Presidential Elections and Other Things — is reviewed and it sounds like a winner:

How can you guess who might be having an extramarital affair? This is an important question, and it deserves to be treated with scientific rigor.
Start with a theory. As a first approximation, it seems reasonable to suppose that the likelihood of having an affair depends on income, age, number of years married, marital satisfaction and religiousness. Next, find some data — say, a sex survey published in a magazine like Psychology Today or Redbook. Now fit the data to the theory (which means having your computer run a line through a cloud of points — a technique called linear regression) and do a statistical test to see whether the theory is any good. And what do you know? It is!
Now comes the fun part: prediction. Using the results, you can guess which of your friends and neighbors might be straying from the matrimonial paddock. Likely candidates for an affair are those who (1) have a high wage rate, (2) have been married a long time, (3) are relatively young given the length of their marriage, (4) aren’t very happily married and (5) aren’t particularly religious. Want something more quantitative? Well, all else being equal, an extra 10 years of marriage increases the predicted number of adulterous encounters per year by about six. (Warning: Blackmail based on these findings is strongly discouraged.)

Predicting adultery is only one of the interesting subjects that Professor Fair addressed. However, during this political season, the most interesting subject is his model for predicting Presidential elections:

By trial and error, Mr. Fair comes up with a list of eight: the growth rate of the economy, inflation, the number of economic “good news” quarters leading up to the election, whether an incumbent is running, how long the incumbent party has held the White House, whether there is a war on and, finally, a “party variable” in case the electorate has an innate preference for one party over the other. As data, he uses election results from 1996 (when President Clinton beat Bob Dole) back to 1916 (when President Wilson beat Charles Hughes).
After fitting the data to the theory, Mr. Fair finds that all eight variables affect voting at greater than chance levels.

And applying Professor Fair’s model to the Presidential elections from 1916 through 1996 reflects that it is pretty darn accurate:

From 1916 to 1996, Mr. Fair’s theory only calls two elections incorrectly. In 1960 Nixon received 49.9% of the vote, but according to the theory he should have received a 51.1% — a relatively small discrepancy. More embarrassing to the author’s analysis is the 1992 election, in which President Bush’s predicted share of the major-party vote was a winning 50.9%, whereas his actual share was 46.5% — a whopping 4.4 percentage-point error.
Moving to the 2000 election, which lies outside the data set used to construct the theory and is therefore a good test of its validity, Al Gore should have received (a losing) 49% share of the vote that went to the two major parties, but he actually got (a losing) 50.3% share. Not bad.

So, how does the Professor size up the 2004 election?:

Mr. Fair’s analysis will be cheering to President Bush, who, as a Republican president running for re-election when the Republicans have been in power only one term, enjoys the best possible incumbency situation. The only way he can lose, the theory suggests, is if the economy suddenly tanks.

Looks like another book to add to my reading stack.

Ryan Lizza of the New Republic reviews three books from three former Democratic candidates for President — George McGovern, Gary Hart, and Mario Cuomo — in which the three provide their views on how the Democratic Party should regain control of the American government. Particularly interesting are Mr. Hart’s views toward redirecting American foreign policy, which Mr. Lizza summarizes in the following manner:

Few Americans have more right to say ”I told you so” than Gary Hart. During the 1990’s, when the foreign policy establishment was obsessed with Star Wars and other issues left over from the cold war, Hart headed a commission on national security with another former senator, Warren Rudman. Its report, issued early in 2001, warned of catastrophic terrorist attacks in which ”Americans will likely die on American soil, possibly in large numbers.” Incredibly, the work of the Hart-Rudman commission was widely ignored by the press and the Bush administration.
”The Fourth Power” builds on the many ideas of the commission, offering sweeping recommendations for how America should orient its foreign policy in the 21st century. Hart’s timely central argument — an alternative to both the neoimperialist impulses of the Bush administration and the creeping Kissingerian realism of the Kerry campaign — is that the traditional military, political and economic powers of American foreign policy should be constrained by and imbued with a fourth power, America’s unique principles. To those who advocate a crusading foreign policy of preemption to ”rid the world of evil” and spread democracy — even at the point of a gun — Hart argues that the first casualty would often be America’s moral authority: ”There is a vast difference between advocating, as I do, that America live up to its own principles and advocating, as the Bush administration does, that the rest of the world live up to America’s principles.” At the same time, Hart counters Kerry’s retreat to a Kissinger-style foreign policy, based largely on America’s interests, with a humble but still idealistic internationalism, with the spread of liberal democracy at its core. It’s a call for nation building without Abu Ghraib.
In 1993, Hart sent President Clinton a memo arguing that the end of the cold war was the ideal occasion to reorient the military ”for new missions relating to hostage rescue, counterterrorism, low intensity conflict, guerrilla warfare and stabilization of new democracies.” Much of this prescient document is reprinted as an appendix. We were told.

This NY Times Book Review reports on the controversial new book, Imperial Hubris by a current Central Intelligence Agency officer who was able to publish the book on the condition that his real name not be revealed. This is the second book by “Anonymous” (his first was Through Our Enemies’ Eyes: Osama Bin Laden, Radical Islam and the Future of America) and his latest book is certain to generate controversy among both hardliners on Iraq and critics of the administration’s policy.
As Gerald Posner noted in his earlier Why America Slept : The Failure to Prevent 9/11, Imperial Hubris excoriates America’s political, military and intelligence establishment (going back to the mid-70’s, with the qualified exception of President Reagan and his C.I.A. director, William J. Casey). Moreover, the book also calls for a complete re-evaluation of the nation’s foreign policy toward Muslims and the Middle East:

If the country’s foreign policy remains status quo, Anonymous warns, “America’s military confrontation with Islam” will broaden “with escalating human and economic expense.” He predicts that Al Qaeda “will attack the continental United States again, that its next strike will be more damaging than that of 11 September 2001, and could include use of weapons of mass destruction.”
In addition, Anonymous accuses United States leaders, elites and media of being in denial about the nature of the Qaeda threat and the balance sheet on the war on terror: he argues that America must stop using the terrorist paradigm for Al Qaeda and accept “the fact” that the group is “leading a popular, worldwide, and increasingly powerful Islamic insurgency,” and he asserts that United States victories against Al Qaeda have thus far been tactical ones that have failed to slow “the shift in strategic advantage toward al Qaeda.”

And even though he advocates a harsher approach to fighting radical Islamic fascists, Anonymous is not a supporter of the Bush Administration’s decision to invade Iraq:

[Anonymous] sees the American invasion of Iraq as “an avaricious, premeditated, unprovoked war against a foe who posed no immediate threat but whose defeat did offer economic advantages.” For Osama bin Laden, Anonymous argues, the American invasion and occupation of Iraq were like “a Christmas present you long for but never expected to receive” ? a gift from Washington that “will haunt, hurt, and hound Americans for years to come.” He sees Iraq becoming another breeding ground for Al Qaeda, and the postwar insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan as magnets for anti-American fighters.
“U.S. forces and policies are completing the radicalization of the Islamic world, something Osama bin Laden has been trying to do with substantial but incomplete success since the early 1990’s,” he writes. “As a result, I think it fair to conclude that the United States of America remains bin Laden’s only indispensable ally.”

Anonymous even disputes the Bush Administration’s assessment of Al Qaeda’s goals for its war against the United States:

Anonymous contests the argument put out by members of the Bush administration that Mr. bin Laden wants to destroy America because he hates our values, freedoms and ideas. In Anonymous’s view, the Qaeda leader hates us “because of our policies and actions in the Muslim world” and Al Qaeda’s attacks are meant to advance a set of clear, focused and limited foreign policy goals: namely, an end to American aid to Israel: the removal of American forces from the Arabian Peninsula; an end to the American occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq; an end to American support for repressive, apostate Muslim regimes like Saudi Arabia; an end to Amerian support for Russia, India and China against their Muslim militants; and an end to American pressure on Arab energy producers to keep oil prices low.

But make no mistake about it, Anonymous definitely does not propose dealing with Al Qaeda with kid gloves:

If current American policies toward the Muslim world are not changed, Anonymous writes near the end of this harrowing and often deliberately provocative volume, America will be left with only a military option for defending itself ? an option he says that should be used not “daintily,” as it has been in recent years, but with the sort of bloody-minded ferocity used “in France and on Pacific islands, and from skies over Tokyo and Dresden” during World War II.

Larry McMurtry, Texas’ finest novelist and the author of the incomparable 1986 Pulitzer Price winner Lonesome Dove, reviews former President Bill Clinton‘s autobiography My Life in this NY Times Review of Books review. Mr. McMurtry gives the book a generally positive review, and observes the following:

During the silly time when Clinton was pilloried for wanting to debate the meaning of “is,” I often wondered why no one pointed out that he was educated by Jesuits, for whom the meaning of “is” is a matter not lightly resolved.
To judge from this book, Clinton has never been able to understand why Kenneth Starr, the special counsel appointed to investigate Whitewater, pursued him so ferociously. The answer is to be found in the soil Kenneth Starr sprang from. His hometown, Thalia, Tex., lies along what local wits sometimes refer to as the “Floydada Corridor,” a bleak stretch of road between Wichita Falls and Lubbock that happens to run through the tiny town of Floydada, Tex. It’s a merciless land, mostly, with inhabitants to match. Towns like Crowell, Paducah and Matador lie on this road, and nothing lighter than an elephant gun is likely to have much effect on the residents. Proust readers and fornicating presidents will find no welcome there.

In this NY Times Review of Books review, my favorite novelist — Larry McMurtry, author of the incomparable “Lonesome Dove” and many other fine novels — writes about Mark Perry’s new book, “Grant and Twain: The Story of the Friendship that Changed America.” This is a magnificent review about the fascinating General Grant, who never seemed to be able to live up to other people’s expectations except President Lincoln’s. The entire review is a must read, and I pass along an the following excerpt that McMurtry uses from Grant’s “Personal Memoirs” that is the central focus of Mr. Perry’s book:

Put Grant in a fresh uniform and within half an hour it would look as if he had fought the Battle of the Wilderness in it. In uniform or out, Grant rarely seemed at ease, neither in his clothes nor in his skin. His penchant for casual, if not ragged, garb is never better illustrated than in the famous passage in his Personal Memoirs when he goes, at last, to meet Lee at Appomattox Courthouse in hopes of receiving the surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia?as poignant a moment, in my view, as one will find anywhere in the history of war:

When I had left the camp that morning I had not expected so soon the result that was then taking place, and consequently was in rough garb. I was without a sword, as I usually was when on horseback on the field, and wore a soldier’s blouse for a coat, with the shoulder straps of my rank to indicate to the army who I was. When I went into the house I found General Lee. We greeted each other, and after shaking hands took our seats….
What General Lee’s feelings were I do not know. As he was a man of much dignity, with an impassible face, it was impossible to say whether he felt inwardly glad that the end had finally come, or felt sad over the result, and was too manly to show it. Whatever his feelings, they were entirely concealed from my observation; but my own feelings, which had been quite jubilant on the receipt of his letter, were sad and depressed. I felt like anything rather than rejoicing at the downfall of a foe who had fought so long and valiantly….
General Lee was dressed in a full uniform which was entirely new, and was wearing a sword of considerable value, very likely the sword which had been presented by the State of Virginia; at all events it was an entirely different sword from the one that would ordinarily be worn in the field. In my rough traveling suit, the uniform of a private with the straps of a lieutenant-general, I must have contrasted very strangely with a man so handsomely dressed, six feet high and of faultless form. But this was not a matter that I thought of until afterwards….
We soon fell into conversation about old army times…. Our conversation grew so pleasant that I almost forgot the object of our meeting….

This David Brooks NY Times books review discusses Ron Chernow‘s new book, “Alexander Hamilton.” Hamilton is the architect of American capitalism, and Mr. Brooks’ review concludes that Mr. Chernow has written the best biography yet of this fascinating but underappreciated man. For example, Hamilton’s youth was no picnic:

When Alexander Hamilton was 10, his father abandoned him. When he was around 12, his mother died of a fever in the bed next to his. He was adopted by a cousin, who promptly committed suicide. During those same years, his aunt, uncle and grandmother also died. A court in St. Croix seized all of his possessions, sold off his personal effects and gave the rest to his mother’s first husband. By the time he was a young teenager, he and his brother were orphaned, alone and destitute.

Incredibly, however, Hamilton overcame his tortured youth quickly to excel in the American revolutionary society and government:

Within three years he was a successful businessman. Within a decade he was effectively George Washington’s chief of staff, organizing the American revolutionary army and serving bravely in combat. Within two decades he was one of New York’s most successful lawyers and had written major portions of The Federalist Papers. Within three decades he had served as Treasury secretary and forged the modern financial and economic systems that are the basis for American might today.

Finally, Mr. Brooks notes that the vicious political rhetoric of our day has its roots in Hamilton’s legendary disputes with Thomas Jefferson:

Though they were historic, Hamilton couldn’t have enjoyed his years at the Treasury Department. These days we think our politics are nasty and partisan. But our discourse looks like a Platonic symposium compared with the vicious fighting that marked the early Republic. While they were secretaries of treasury and state, Hamilton and Jefferson waged internecine warfare that was, as Chernow notes, of ”almost pathological intensity.” Members of each man’s camp wrote abusive newspaper essays against the other. The secretary of state proposed Congressional legislation censuring the secretary of the Treasury. The Jeffersonians fabricated crude lies about Hamiltonian embezzlement schemes.
This fight was about what sort of country America should be, and what sort of people should govern. Hamilton embraced the urban, enterprising virtues: vigor, drive, competition. Jefferson dreamed of a country that would be pastoral, egalitarian and decentralized. Hamilton won the battle, but not the affections of posterity.

Hamilton has always been one of the most fascinating and enigmatic of the Founding Fathers. In many ways, he is the most quintessential American of them all. As such, I am looking forward to reading this interesting new book.

Joshua Rubenstein, a regional director of Amnesty International and the author of “Stalin’s Secret Pogrom” pens this Wall Street Journal ($) review of James H. Billington‘s new book, “Russia In Search of Itself,” and notes as follows:

More than a decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the West has only begun to confront a disheartening paradox: That at the height of Mikhail Gorbachev’s program of glasnost and perestroika in the late 1980s, the prospects for democratic reform seemed more promising than they do today in a nominally democratic post-Soviet era.
The Russian media, including television news, once carried far more critical discussions of Stalin’s crimes. Intellectual journals reached millions of readers and explored the country’s history and politics, and its economic failings. And the parliamentary elections of 1989 confirmed that liberal, independent-minded figures, like the physicist and veteran dissident Andrei Sakharov, could run against the Communist Party and command sizable support.
But the country’s badly managed attempts at capitalism and democracy in the 1990s have soured a majority of the population. Privatizatsiia, or privatization, of the country’s industrial and natural resources has resulted in such an audacious pattern of grand theft that Russians have coined the term prikhvatizatsiia, or confiscation, to mock the process. The brutal war in Chechnya continues to inflict untold suffering on civilians. Meanwhile the rule of law is a hollow shell. Since 1994, nine members of the country’s Parliament, and 130 journalists, have been murdered, no doubt because they either sought to expose the truth about official corruption and organized crime or because their political activity got in the way of someone’s plans to turn a fast buck.

And Mr. Billington does not lay the blame for these developments solely at the feet of Russian President Vladimar Putin:

Vladimir Putin alone is not responsible for this collapse of liberal hopes. It was Boris Yeltsin who insisted on too much power for the office of the presidency. And with increasing government control of the mass media, there remain few outlets for critical reporting on Mr. Putin’s policies. The increasing appeal of Russian nationalism has brought with it frequent, physical attacks on foreign-looking outsiders, including dark-skinned people from the Caucasus, African students and even U.S. Embassy Marine guards, as well as assaults on Jews and Jewish institutions. Mr. Putin has condemned such provocations only half-heartedly. . . Under Mr. Putin’s leadership, the country is moving toward “some original Russian variant of a corporatist state ruled by a dictator, adorned with Slavophile rhetoric, and representing, in effect, fascism with a friendly face.” In other words, a type of regime that seeks to maintain order “through a Pinochet interlude.”

Richard Pipes, a professor emeritus of history at Harvard, reviews Simon Sebag Montefiore’s new book on Josef Stalin, ”Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar” in today’s NY Times Review of Books. The entire review is well worth reading, and this tidbit about Stalin’s post-WWII mood is a good sample:

Stalin emerged from the war utterly exhausted and more than ever convinced of his infallibility. In his last years he became inordinately capricious, suspecting everyone and ready to jettison on trumped-up charges even his most loyal followers. He spent much time vacationing in his lavish palaces. He indulged in drunken orgies, where he would force his ministers to dance for his amusement: ”He made the sweating Khrushchev drop to his haunches and do the gopak that made him look like ‘a cow dancing on ice.’ ” The Polish security boss, Jacob Berman, was made to waltz with Molotov.

In this NY Times Review of Books piece, Adam Cohen reviews Stanford professor Larry Lessig‘s important new book, “Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity” (Penguin Press 2004). The illegal downloading of music over the Internet has brought attention to copyright issues more than at any time in America’s history, and Professor Lessig has been at the forefront of the “copyleft” movement, which advocates a common sense rethinking of our copyright laws to facilitate creativity and the free exchange of knowledge. As Mr. Cohen notes in his review, Professor Lessig has an entertaining way of pointing out the frivolous nature of many copyright disputes:

For the silliness to which copyright battles frequently descend, it is hard to improve on Lessig’s story of the Marx brothers telling Warner Brothers, after it threatened to sue if they did a parody of ”Casablanca,” to watch out because the Marx brothers ”were brothers long before you were.”

Professor Lessig’s theories are based upon the historical use of ideas, points out Mr. Cohen:

Lessig grounds his argument about the new rules’ impact on the culture in a basic observation about art: as long as it has existed, artists have been refashioning old works into new ones. Greek and Roman myths were developed over centuries of retelling. Shakespeare’s plays are brilliant reworkings of other playwrights’ and historians’ stories. Even Disney owes its classic cartoon archive — Snow White, Cinderella, Pinocchio — to its plundering of other creators’ tales. And today, technology allows for the creation of ever more elaborate ”derivative works,” art that builds on previous art, from hip-hop songs that insert, or sample, older songs to video art that adds new characters to, or otherwise alters, classic films.

The societal threat of the copyright explosion ultimately is constriction to the development of new ideas:

The result of this explosion of copyright, Lessig argues persuasively, is an impoverishment of the culture. Corporations now have veto power over the use of copyrighted materials, in many cases long after the creators themselves have died, and they can use that power to lock up a significant part of our cultural legacy. At a ridiculous extreme, Lessig tells the story of a filmmaker who tried to get clearance for a several-seconds-long shot, in a documentary about Wagner’s Ring cycle, of stagehands watching ”The Simpsons” backstage during a performance. The Simpsons’ creator, Matt Groening, gave permission. But Fox’s vice president for licensing, as Lessig tells it, demanded $10,000 for the rights and added, ”If you quote me, I’ll turn you over to our attorneys.”

In the meantime, Stephen Manes over at Forbes.com is not as impressed with Professor Lessig’s book:

Man the barricades for your right to swipe The Simpsons! According to Stanford law professor and media darling Lawrence Lessig, a “movement must begin in the streets” to fight a corrupt Congress, overconcentrated media and an overpriced legal system conspiring to develop “a ?get permission to cut and paste’ world that is a creator’s nightmare.”
That’s the gist of Lessig’s inflammatory new screed, Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity ({(C1)}Penguin Press{(T1)}, $25; free online starting Mar. 25). A more honest title? Freeloader Culture: A Manifesto for Stealing Intellectual Property.
“There has never been a time in our history when more of our ?culture’ was as ?owned’ as it is now,” Lessig huffs. Huh? In the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s a handful of companies exerted ironclad control over the movie, radio and record businesses; Xeroxes and tape recorders were nonexistent. Though “cut and paste” was limited to scrapbooks, creators of all stripes somehow managed to flourish.
Contrary to Lessig’s rants, today’s technology has made creators freer than ever to devise and distribute original works. But technology has also given consumers powerful weapons of mass reproduction with strong potential for abuse. The intellectual property issue of our time is how to balance the rights of creators and consumers.

In this post, Professor Lessig responds to Mr. Manes’ criticism.
We all need to become better informed about this increasing risk, and Professor Lessig is a valuable teacher on these issues. You can bet that his book is on my reading list.