Question to Self
A puzzle: how and when, precisely, did I acquire the Hilles Library copy of Arno Mayer's The Persistence of the Old Regime?
It is a great book. It is also an incredibly frustrating book--frustrating because it is grossly under-footnoted and also extraordinarily vague in its lac of definition of the "Old Regime." The "Old Regime" of 1914--social Darwinist (or, rather, social Lamarckian as Eric Scott Kaufman would correct us), expansionist, imperialist, hiwrarxhial, absorptive--do not regard itself as "persisting" but rather as under mortal threat from democracy, liberalism, and socialism, and was in any case not "old" but rather "new": Franz Ferdinand von Habsburg and Chancellor Bethman-Hollweg are at least as much precursors of William Kristol, George W. Bush, and Richard Cheney as they are successors of the Earl of Chatham, Henri Quatre, and William the Silent.
