In God and Gold I write about three elements of England’s success. Roger asks how I combine the three into one story – and wonders whether the whole story hangs together. In response, let me describe the three pieces of my story, and show how I think they fit. First, England was a lucky country – the Goldilocks of early...
Part Three of God and Gold focuses on the question of how the Anglo-Saxons were able to put together the economic and military resources that enabled them to defeat their enemies and build a global order. Mead argues that the decisive factor in the success of the English-speaking world was that they came from a culture that was uniquely...
Chris Borgen taxes me with not paying enough attention to the ways in which the responses of non-Anglo-American powers to the Anglo-Americans may reflect their own hopes and plans for the world, rather than a simple dislike of Anglo-American plans or values. I think the two are connected; people dislike the Anglo-Americans both because they don’t like what we...
Mike Lind asks in effect, what makes England and America special compared to other commercial powers, especially the Italian city states – and why shouldn’t the Anglo-American political tradition be seen as more closely integrated into the history of republican, humanist letters passing through the Italian states back into antiquity? In effect he is asking whether there isn’t too...
There is an interesting paradox in Mead's book between luck and the spoils of war. On the one hand, Mead spends much of the book suggesting that the English were just plain lucky. "By luck or ...
I’d like to begin by thanking Roger Alford and his colleagues for offering this opportunity to engage in a discussion about God and Gold. Writers are like new parents; there is nothing we would rather do than discuss the latest production; if new books sometimes get a chillier reception than new babies, well, that is just the way of the world. As...
God and Gold is a timely and welcome contribution to the rediscovery of America’s political traditions, particularly the characteristic American tradition of internationalism. In this important book Walter Russell Mead makes explicit what has been a subdued theme in his earlier books, including his groundbreaking Special Providence—namely, the rejection of the idea that because American foreign policy has been...
Like Roger, and the rest of the Opinio Juris bloggers, I want to thank Walter Russell Mead for joining us this week. I found God and Gold to be provocative and to contain wonderful insights, particularly concerning why the Anglo-Saxon powers have done remarkably well in conflicts over the last 300 years. But my first comment in this discussion will...
Let me begin by saying that God and Gold is an ambitious book. According to Walter Russell Mead, the book is not about history, but about the meaning of history. What is the overarching plot of world history? Mead argues that history is best viewed from the perspective of Anglo-American power. He writes, “It is not...
When I was in grad school, my friends and I loved to play the "alive or dead" game, in which one of us would name an intellectual and the others would then try to guess whether that person was alive or dead. My ace in the hole was always Claude Levi-Strauss, the great structuralist French philosopher. My friends...
Human rights reporting season is upon us, and HRW is first out of the blocks with their annual report. This year's report highlights the disconnect between elections, democracy and human rights. Here's an excerpt from the press release:States claiming the mantle of democracy, including Kenya and Pakistan, should guarantee the human rights that are central to it, including the...
In order to get our readers thinking about Mead's book, let me highlight the key questions he seeks to answer in his book. These questions are, in Mead's view, the "six key questions about the world we live in" (p. 12): 1. What is the distinctive political and cultural agenda that the Anglo-Americans bring to world politics? 2. Why...
