Alan B. Spitzer

Social Science Fiction

Periodically, books appear that claim to be, and are celebrated as, “fundamental,” or even revolutionary—intended to transform received opinions as to how the world works. Sulloway’s Born to Rebel is such a book, not least in the author’s own assessment of its signiacance. Sulloway’s self-evaluation is shared by such distinguished scholars—quoted on the cover—as Edward O. Wilson, I. B. Cohen, Steven Pinker, and Robert Merton. Although a long, densely footnoted, statistically complex work by a scholar with sterling academic credentials—including a MacArthur Fellowship—it has enjoyed (with some notable exceptions) respectful, and even deferential, reviews in popular and highbrow journals from Newsweek to the New York Review of Books. Sulloway and his book were featured in a New Yorker proale, and received the imprimatur of the New York Times’ Book Review: “[D]espite both particular and general limitations this book is a stunning achievement.” Born to Rebel is an immensely ambitious attempt to apply evolutionary theory to human history through the accumulation

Malicious Memories: Restoration Politics and a Prosopography of Turncoats

One appeal to historical memory consists of reminding people of what they would prefer to forget. During the Restoration (1814–30) the struggle for the authority of dominant memory undermined the stability of the restored monarchy. Grub Street’s contribution to collective memory was the conceit of a Dictionnaire des girouettes. A girouette (weathervane) is in politics a synonym for turncoat. The dictionnaires were collective biographies of turncoats, with Talleyrand as the supreme exemplar. The justification given by Constant, MolÈ, Pasquier, and many others for their service to successive regimes expressed the political ethic of the July Monarchy elite: the best should govern, regardless of the political system they represent.