Re: Obituary: Franco Modigliani

["Matias Vernengo" <matias.vernengo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Obituary: Franco Modigliani by Martin Wolf Published: September 26 2003
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Franco Modigliani, who has died at the age of 85, was
the winner of the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1985
and one of Hitler's many unwitting gifts to the intellectual vitality of the
United States. During his distinguished career, Modigliani made seminal
contributions to macroeconomics - particularly the "life-cycle" savings
hypothesis, which he developed in collaboration with Richard Brumberg -
and to the theory of corporate finance, which he revolutionised together with
Merton Miller.
Born in Rome in 1918, to Jewish parents, Modigliani began his studies in the
Faculty of Law, but switched to economics shortly before leaving Italy, for
France and then the US. He arrived there in September 1939 as the second
world war broke out. He took with him his bride, Serena Calabi and the
couple later had two sons. Inititally Modigliani became a student at the New
School for Social Research in New York.
Subsequently he taught there and at a number of other American colleges
finally settling at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he worked
from 1962, becoming emeritus professor in 1988. In the mid-1960s,
Modigliani also served as a consultant to the board of governors of the
Federal Reserve System, for which he built a model of the American
economy, in collaboration with Albert Ando.
The life-cycle theory of savings arose out of an interest in Keynesian
economics, which suggested that people would save an ever higher proportion
of their incomes the richer they became. The consequent excess of savings
could, it was feared, lead to depression. But, as Modigliani remarked in his
Ruminations on my Professional Life: "I didn't believe that the savings rate
would tend to grow and grow. It just didn't sound right to me."*
Modigliani's first response, published in 1949, was the idea that savings are
determined more by a person's income relative to his accustomed level than
by his absolute income in a given period. In 1954, Modigliani published the
first paper on the life-cycle hypothesis - co-authored by his pupil, Richard
Brumberg. In this model, current consumption is determined by expected life-
time incomes. As people would, argued the authors, wish to consume the
same amount (in real discounted terms) each year, savings would be
determined by the difference between current incomes and planned
consumption. Consequently, an individual's life-time savings would show a
hump: low in early adulthood, high during the middle years and negative in
retirement.
The life-cycle hypothesis also has implications for the behaviour of savings in
the economy as a whole. Even if individuals consume their entire lifetime
incomes, an economy will have positive savings, provided incomes are rising.
Each generation is then richer than its predecessor and so saves more in
middle-age than its predecessor dissaves in its old age.
Modigliani's work on corporate finance was as path-breaking. In the late
1950s he and Merton Miller produced two papers on the financial structure of
the firm and on dividend policy. The first, published in 1958, argued that the
debt-equity ratio of a firm should have no effect on its market valuation in a
perfect capital market. The second, published in 1961, maintained that the
dividend policy of the firm should also have no bearing on its valuation. The
approach taken in these papers is that investors can create leverage by
borrowing against shares, they can undo leverage by buying a company's
bonds and they can create dividends by selling a company's shares.
Modigliani himself claimed that the most important contribution of the first
of the two papers was "in changing the method of attack regarding the choice
of financial structure and investment policy: the focus should be on the
maximisation of the market value of the firm rather than on the traditional,
but not operational, maximisation of profits. This contribution was much
more general than the specific one about the fact that leverage doesn't count."
For some time after the war Modigliani refused to have anything to do with
Italy, but he returned as a lecturer in 1955, only to be shocked by the
hierarchical structure of Italian universities. Subsequently, he became deeply
involved in contemporary Italian economic debate, writing a column for the
Corriere della Sera for five years from 1972. In the column he opposed the
"scala mobile", the form of wage-indexation adopted in the mid-1970s.
Modigliani remained loyal throughout his careeer to what he thought of as
wise Keynesianism. As for his character, that is exemplified by the
remarkable success of his collaborations. Fruitful in his own work, he was
also a source of inspiration to others.




Date sent:      	Fri, 26 Sep 2003 11:11:54 -0400
From:           	"Henry C.K. Liu" <hliu@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To:             	pkt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx,
  	"TheNewForum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx" <TheNewForum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject:        	[Fwd: Re: [A-List] Edward Said]

>
>
> -------- Original Message --------
> Subject: Re: [A-List] Edward Said
> Date: Fri, 26 Sep 2003 11:10:41 -0400
> From: Henry C.K. Liu <hliu@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> To: a-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> References: <002501c3842c$f5186530$8d5094c3@xxxxxxxxx>
>
> Excerpt from
> The Abduction of Modernity
> by
> Henry C.K. Liu
>
> Edward Said of Columbia University, one of the pioneers of post-colonial
> studies, has written extensively on the subject of cultural imperialism.
> His work highlights the misconceived assumptions about cultures and
> societies and is influenced by Michel Foucault's concepts of discourse
> and power. Foucault views the intellectual's role as no longer to place
> himself somewhat ahead and to the side in order to express the stifled
> truth of the collectivity. Rather, it is to struggle against the forms
> of power that transform him into its object and instrument in the sphere
> of knowledge, truth, consciousness, and discourse. In this sense theory
> does not express, translate, or serve to apply practice: it is practice.
> But it is local and regional and not totalizing. This is a struggle
> against power, a struggle aimed at revealing and undermining power where
> it is most invisible and insidious. It is not to awaken consciousness
> that we struggle but to sap power, to take power; it is an activity
> conducted alongside those who struggle for power, and not their
> illumination. Colonialism, the political theory governing imperialism,
> is based on a belief that the mores of the colonizer are superior to
> those of the colonized on the basis on power. This colonial mentality
> explains why former colonies such as Hong Kong cling to the myth of the
> superiority of their colonial culture.
>
> According to Said, the Orient signifies a system of representations
> framed by political forces that brought the Orient into Western
> learning, Western consciousness, and Western Empire. The Orient exists
> for the West, and is constructed by and in relation to the West.
> Orientalism refers to the study of Near and Far Eastern societies and
> cultures, generally by Westerners. It is a mirror image of what are
> inferior and alien ("Other") to the West. Although this term had been
> abandoned as archaic by the late 20th century, Said argues that the term
> should be redefined to apply to any current study of such societies to
> correct current accounts of the Middle East, India, China, and elsewhere
> that reflects long-held Western biases. The discourse and visual imagery
> of Orientalism are laced with notions of power and superiority,
> formulated initially to facilitate a colonizing mission on the part of
> the West and perpetuated through a wide variety of discourses and policies.
>
> Critical theorists regard Orientalism as part of an effort to justify
> colonialism through the concept of the "white man's burden", and to
> wield the sword of modernity against allegedly "backward" civilizations.
> A critical theory is an account of morality that is sensitive to the
> historically contingent nature of the culture that spawned it: by
> adopting a hypothetical stance toward their own traditions and on this
> basis grasping their own cultural relativity, participants in the
> formation of a critical theory take a questioning stance toward their
> own practices while nonetheless avoiding the paralysis of moral
> relativism. The current coercive application of the Western concept of
> democracy, rule of law, individual freedom and market fundamentalism as
> universal truth is a legitimate target of critical theory.
>
> Promoters of this Western version of modernity see its birth in the West
> through a radical transformation of its past. The West of the Middle
> Ages, built around a world view of Christian Scholasticism, was a
> society of religious philosophy, feudal law, and an agricultural
> economy. Out of this past, the Renaissance and Enlightenment produced a
> substantially new mentality of science, individualism, industrial
> capitalism and imperialism. The cultural foundation of this new
> mentality is that reason, not revelation, is the instrument of knowledge
> and arbiter of truth; that science, not religion, leads to truth about
> nature and life; that the pursuit of happiness in this life, not the
> quest for spiritual fulfillment, or suffering in preparation for the
> next, is the cardinal purpose of existence; that reason can and should
> be used to increase human control through economic and technological
> progress; that the individual person is an end in him/herself with the
> capacity to direct his/her own life, not a communal member of society
> with a prescribed social role; that individuals should be encouraged to
> indulge in inalienable rights to freedom of thought, speech, and action;
> that religious belief should be a private affair rather than a
> collective awareness, that intolerance is a social disease, and that
> church and state should be kept separate.
>
> As the West grows stronger, tolerance of other cultures and of those
> within the West itself who refuse to participate is viewed increasingly
> as a sign of weakness. Domination takes on sophisticated, less visible
> forms. National sovereignty is pushed aside in the name of replacing
> command economies with markets, warfare with trade, and rule by king or
> commissar with token democracy. To resist neo-imperialism is to resist
> modernity. This view justifies the new empire of the sole superpower,
> self-proclaimed inheritor of Western civilization.
>
> Yet this view of modernity misreads history. Thomas Aquinas (1225-71)
> benefited intellectually from his exposure to translations of works of
> Aristotle from Greek into Latin by Arab scholars to whose world view he
> became much indebted. He also profited intellectually from the rise of
> universities in Europe during 12th and 13th centuries, notably the
> University of Bologna (1088), known for its studies in law, the
> University of Padua (founded by dissidents from Bologna), the University
> of Paris, and Oxford University, all founded as centers of learning in
> theology, not science. In this new intellectual milieu in Europe,
> Aquinas applied Aristotelian syllogism as interpreted by Arab minds to
> medieval mysticism of revelation. His Summa Theologica (1267-73) was a
> systematic exposition of theology on rational philosophical principles
> worked out by the ancient Greeks as modified by Arab precision and
> algebra, which pioneered the use of variables in problem-solving in logic.
>
> http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/EG11Ad01.html
>
>
>
> New York Times
> Edward Said, Leading Advocate of Palestinians, Dies at 67
> By RICHARD BERNSTEIN
>
> dward Said, a polymath scholar and literary critic at Columbia
> University who was the most prominent advocate in the United States of
> the cause of Palestinian independence, died in New York City today. He
> was 67.
>
> The cause of death was leukemia, which Mr. Said had been battling for
> several years.
>
> Mr. Said, who was born in Jerusalem during the British mandate in
> Palestine and emigrated to the United States when he was a teenager,
> spent a long and productive career as a professor of comparative
> literature at Columbia and was the author of several widely discussed books.
>
> He was an exemplar of American multiculturalism, at home both in Arabic
> and English, but, as he once put it, "a man who lived two quite separate
> lives," one as an American university professor, the other as a fierce
> critic of American and Israeli policies and an equally fierce proponent
> of the Palestinian cause.
>
> Though a defender of Islamic civilization, Mr. Said was an Episcopalian
> married to a Quaker. He was also an excellent pianist who for several
> years was the music critic for The Nation.
>
>  From 1977 to 1991, he was as an unaffiliated member of the Palestine
> National Conference, a parliament-in-exile. Most of the conference's
> members belong to one or another of the main Palestinian organizations,
> most importantly the Palestine Liberation Organization led by Yasir
> Arafat, but some were members of smaller organizations believed
> responsible for terrorist operations against Israelis and Americans,
> such as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
>
> "The situation of the Palestinian is that of a victim," Mr. Said told
> Dinitia Smith in New York magazine in 1989, making the kind of statement
> that put him at the center of the roiling debate about the Middle East.
>
> "They're the dispossessed, and what they do by way of violence and
> terrorism is understandable," he said. " But what the Israelis do, in
> killing Palestinians on a much larger scale, is a continuation of the
> horrific and unjust dispossession of the Palestinian people."
>
> He added: "'I totally repudiate terrorism in all its forms. Not just
> Palestinian terrorism I'm also against Israeli terrorism, the bombing of
> refugee camps."
>
> Mr. Said was a widely recognized figure in New York, a frequent
> participant in debates on the Middle East, and an outspoken advocate of
> a Palestinian homeland. For many years he was an ardent supporter of Mr.
> Arafat, whom he called "the leader of a genuinely national and popular
> movement, with a clearly legitimate goal of self-determination for his
> people."
>
> But Mr. Said became a bitter critic of Mr. Arafat after the 1993 Oslo
> accords between Israel and the P.L.O., believing that the agreement gave
> the Palestinians too little territory and too little control over it.
>
> In the years after Oslo, he argued that separate Palestinian and Jewish
> states would always be unworkable and, while he recognized that emotions
> on both sides were against it, he advocated a single binational state as
> the best ultimate solution.
>
> "I see no other way than to begin now to speak about sharing the land
> that has thrust us together, and sharing it in a truly democratic way,
> with equal rights for each citizen," he wrote in a 1999 essay in The New
> York Times. "There can be no reconciliation unless both peoples, two
> communities of suffering, resolve that their existence is a secular
> fact, and that it has to be dealt with as such."
>
> Among the criticisms leveled against Mr. Said by Jews and others was his
> failure to condemn specific acts of terrorism by Palestinian groups,
> including some that served alongside him on the Palestine National Council.
>
> One such person, for example, was Abu Abbas, a member of the P.L.O.
> executive committee who is believed responsible for the hijacking of the
> Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro and the murder of a wheelchair-bound
> American passenger, Leon Klinghoffer.
>
> In his interview with New York, Mr. Said called Abu Abbas "a
> degenerate," but he then argued that important Israeli leaders, like
> former prime ministers Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir, had been
> terrorists responsible for the killing of women and children.
>
> Among the political views of Mr. Said that were cited by his defenders
> was his unambiguous condemnation of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran
> for his call on his followers to assassinate the writer Salman Rushdie.
>
> Mr. Said, while opposing the American-led Persian Gulf War in 1991,
> called the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein "an appalling and dreadful
> despot," and he made similar statements at times about the Syrian
> president Hafez al-Assad. But Mr. Said was throughout his long career
> far more critical of the West and of Israel and their attitudes and
> practices in the Arab world than he was of the Arabs or their leaders.
>
> While Israel and its supporters saw the crux of the Middle East conflict
> as the Arabs' unwillingness to accept the existence of Israel and the
> constant Arabic threat to Israeli security, Mr. Said saw matters in
> terms of Zionist atrocity and Palestinian victimhood.
>
> "In sheer numerical terms, in brute numbers of bodies and property
> destroyed, there is absolutely nothing to compare between what Zionism
> has done to Palestinians and what, in retaliation, Palestinians have
> done to Zionists," he wrote in "The Question of Palestine" (1979).
>
> Mr. Said's best-known and most influential book was "Orientalism,"
> published in 1978, which was an amalgamation of his scholarly position
> and his political views. In it, Mr. Said laid out a vision of history in
> which cultural power the power to define others is inextricably linked
> with the political power to dominate. The theory he outlined in
> "Orientalism" was that the Western view of the East as sensual and
> corrupt, vicious, lazy, tyrannical and backward, exemplified this power.
>
> "The relationship between Occident and Orient is a relationship of
> power, of domination of varying degrees of a complex hegemony," Mr. Said
> wrote in Orientalism." The idea, which seemed to be anchored in Mr.
> Said's own sense of belonging to a dispossessed people, was that the
> West invented the East as a way of reinforcing the power of colonialism
> over the colonized. Influenced by French thinkers like Franz Fanon,
> Michel Foucault and Claude Levi-Strauss, Mr. Said was one of the first
> scholars to introduce such notions of culture and power into the
> American academy.
>
> In one of his later books, "Culture and Imperialism," Mr. Said argued
> that 19th-century and 20th-century British novelists even so apparently
> nonpolitical a writer as Jane Austen provided a cultural legitimization
> for colonialism.
>
> Mr. Said maintained that writers like E. M. Forster, Joseph Conrad and
> Rudyard Kipling engaged in a "novelistic process, whose main purpose is
> not to raise more questions, not to disturb or otherwise preoccupy
> attention, but to keep the empire more or less in place."
>
> Mr. Said's entire life's work drew on his experiences in both East and West.
>
> Edward Said was born in Jerusalem on Nov. 1, 1935, and spent his
> childhood in a well-to-do neighborhood of thick-walled stone houses that
> is now one of the main Jewish districts of the city. His father, a
> prosperous businessman who had lived in the United States, took the
> family to Cairo in 1947 after the United Nations divided Jerusalem into
> Jewish and Arab halves.
>
> The 12-year-old Edward went to the American School in Cairo, then to
> Victoria College, an elite institution where among his classmates were
> the future King Hussein of Jordan and the actor Omar Sharif.
>
> In 1951 his parents sent him to the Mount Hermon School in
> Massachusetts. He went on to Princeton University and then to graduate
> school at Harvard, where he got his Ph.D. in English literature in 1964.
> The year before that, Mr. Said became an assistant instructor in the
> English Department of Columbia, moving up to full professor in 1970.
>
> In 1977 he was appointed to an endowed chair, becoming the Parr
> Professor of English and Comparative Literature and later the Old
> Dominion Foundation Professor in the Humanities, a position he held
> until he was named a university professor, the highest academic position
> at Columbia.
>
> Mr. Said's first book was "Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of
> Autobiography," in which he began to explore some of the themes that led
> to his theories about culture and imperialism.
>
> His second book, "Beginnings," was an examination of literary
> inspiration, the way a writer lives out what Mr. Said called the "new
> and the customary."
>
> The book, praised by Richard Kuczkowski in The Library Journal as "an
> ingenious exploration of the meaning of modernism," won Columbia's
> Lionel Trilling Award in 1976. His next book was "Orientalism" with its
> theory that the Orient and especially the Arab world have been created
> by the Western imagination, as a series of demeaning, reductive stereotypes.
>
> John Leonard, reviewing the book in The New York Times praised the book
> as "not merely persuasive, but conclusive."
>
> "Orientalism" established Mr. Said as a figure of enormous influence in
> American and European universities, a hero to many, especially younger
> faculty and graduate students on the left for whom "Orientalism" was a
> kind of intellectual credo, the founding document of the field that came
> to be called post-colonial studies.
>
> Central to Mr. Said's argument was the notion that there was in essence
> no objective, neutral scholarship on Asia and especially on the Arab
> world. The very Western study of the East, in his view, was bound up in
> the systematic prejudices about the non-Western world that turned it
> into a set of clichés. Since the Enlightenment, Mr. Said wrote, "Every
> European, in what he could say about the Orient, was a racist, an
> imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric."
>
> This view did not go unchallenged, even among specialists on the Middle
> East who acknowledged that there was much in the book that was true but
> who rejected many of its assertions as overdrawn, hyperbolic, and
> over-simplistic.
>
> "It is a pity that it is so pretentiously written, so drenched in
> jargon, for there is much in this book that is superb as well as
> intellectually exciting," wrote the British historian J. H. Plumb in The
> New York Times Book Review. But Mr. Plumb and others contended that Mr.
> Said made no effort to actually examine the real, historical relations
> between West and East, or to sort out what was true "in the Western
> representation" of the East from what was false and caricatural.
>
> They argued that Mr. Said's assumption was that the Orientalists simply
> invented the East to satisfy the requirements of cultural superiority
> and Western imperialism and he ignored the vast body of scholarship that
> grappled with the East on its own terms.
>
> "The tragedy of Mr. Said's `Orientalism', '` wrote Bernard Lewis, a
> leading scholar of the Middle East who is criticized in Mr. Said's book,
> "is that it takes a genuine problem of real importance and reduces it to
> the level of political polemic and personal abuse."
>
> During his years at Columbia, Mr. Said also came to play a more active
> role as a spokesman for the Palestinian cause, becoming a member of the
> Palestine National Council in 1977 and helping, in 1988, to draft a new
> Palestinian constitution.
>
> Though seen by most American supporters of Israel as a radical, many
> Palestinians identified him as a moderate, a figure who reportedly urged
> Mr. Arafat to help break the Middle East impasse by acknowledging
> Israel's right to exist. In interviews, he identified himself as a kind
> of perpetual outsider, a man influenced by two cultures, the Arabic and
> the American, but belonging fully to neither.
>
> "I've never felt that I belonged exclusively to one country, nor have I
> been able to identify `patriotically' with any other than losing
> causes," Mr. Said wrote in The Nation in 1991. As Mr. Said became more
> prominent, defending Palestinians in written statements and in
> interviews, as victims of Israeli brutality, he came under attack from
> supporters of Israel who accused him of supporting terrorism. He was at
> one point reportedly put on a "hit list" by the Jewish Defense League.
>
> It was in its way an acknowledgement of Mr. Said's importance that an
> Israeli scholar, Justus Reid Weiner, spent some three years researching
> his early life in order to show that Mr. Said had falsified his
> biography. In an article in Commentary magazine in 1999, Mr. Weiner
> argued that Mr. Said had cultivated a moving personal story of a
> Palestinian childhood brought to an abrupt and tragic end by the
> creation of Israel in 1947, when, in fact, according to Mr. Weiner, Mr.
> Said's childhood home was Cairo.
>
> Interviewed by a reporter for The New York Times, Mr. Said replied that
> he had never denied that he had grown up in Cairo as well as Jerusalem.
> "I don't think it's that important in any case," Mr. Said said. "I never
> have represented my case as the issue to be treated. I've represented
> the case of my people, which is something quite different."
>
> Another, earlier article in Commentary, entitled "Professor of Terror,"
> elicited a spirited response, with both Jews and non-Jews coming to Mr.
> Said's defense. "To portray Said as a devotee of terrorist politics is a
> gross distortion of his life's work as a scholar and militant," wrote
> Richard A. Falk, a political scientist at Princeton.
>
> In 1991, Mr. Said, who learned during a routine visit to his doctor that
> he had leukemia, quietly stepped down from the Palestine National
> Council. But when Israel and the P.L.O. signed a peace agreement in
> 1994, Mr. Said spoke out angrily against the leadership of Mr. Arafat,
> not only, in his view, for giving away too much to Israel but also for
> the corruption and tyrannical nature of his rule.
>
> "He's sold his people into enslavement," Mr. Said said of Mr. Arafat in
> 1994. Speaking of the P.L.O., he said, "They're a leadership without
> credibility and without moral authority, and I don't know any
> Palestinian today who considers the P.L.O. in its current form anything
> but an organization of losers and has-beens."
>
> In his last years, Mr. Said's literary production became more and more
> political. In 1979 he published "The Question of Palestine" and two
> years after that, "Covering Islam" in which he tried to show how
> Westerners depicted Arabs as "synonymous with trouble rootless,
> mindless, gratuitous trouble."
>
> Mr. Said's last book was "The Politics of Dispossession," which extended
> his criticism of Western attitudes toward the Palestinians but also
> portrayed the Palestinian leadership as profligate and corrupt.
>
> Reviewing that book in The New York Times, David Shipler wrote: "Reading
> Mr. Said is like being yelled at for hours on end, and it takes a good
> and willing ear to appreciate his calmer passages of insight, to hear
> the essential melodies that run beneath the discordant onslaughts."
>
> Mr. Said's first marriage, to Maire Jaanus, ended in divorce. He is
> survived by his wife, Mariam Cortas, a son, Wadie, and a daughter, Najla.
>
>
> Michael Keaney wrote:
>
> > Edward Said
> >
> > Controversial literary critic and bold advocate of the Palestinian cause in
> > America
> >
> > Malise Ruthven
> > Friday September 26, 2003
> > The Guardian
> >
> > Edward Said, who has died aged 67, was one of the leading literary critics
> > of the last quarter of the 20th century. As professor of English and
> > comparative literature at Columbia University, New York, he was widely
> > regarded as the outstanding representative of the post-structuralist left in
> > America. Above all, he was the most articulate and visible advocate of the
> > Palestinian cause in the United States, where it earned him many enemies.
> >
> > The broadness of Said's approach to literature and his other great love,
> > classical music, eludes easy categorisation. His most influential book,
> > Orientalism (1978), is credited with helping to change the direction of
> > several disciplines by exposing an unholy alliance between the enlightenment
> > and colonialism. As a humanist with a thoroughly secular outlook, his
> > critique on the great tradition of the western enlightenment seemed to many
> > to be self-contradictory, deploying a humanistic discourse to attack the
> > high cultural traditions of humanism, giving comfort to fundamentalists who
> > regarded any criticism of their tradition or texts as off-limits, while
> > calling into question the integrity of critical research into culturally
> > sensitive areas such as Islam.
> >
> > Whatever its flaws, however, Orientalism appeared at an opportune time,
> > enabling upwardly mobile academics from non-western countries (many of whom
> > came from families who had benefited from colonialism) to take advantage of
> > the mood of political correctness it helped to engender by associating
> > themselves with "narratives of oppression", creating successful careers out
> > of transmitting, interpreting and debating representations of the
> > non-western "other".
> >
> > Said's influence, however, was far from being confined to the worlds of
> > academic and scholarly discourse. An intellectual superstar in America, he
> > distinguished himself as an opera critic, pianist, television celebrity,
> > politician, media expert, popular essayist and public lecturer.
> >
> > Latterly, he was one of the most trenchant critics of the Oslo peace process
> > and the Palestinian leadership of Yasser Arafat. He was dubbed "professor of
> > terror" by the rightwing American magazine Commentary; in 1999, when he was
> > struggling against leukaemia, the same magazine accused him of falsifying
> > his status as a Palestinian refugee to enhance his advocacy of the
> > Palestinian cause, and of falsely claiming to have been at school in
> > Jerusalem before completing his education in the United States.
> >
> > The hostility Said encountered from pro-Israeli circles in New York was
> > predictable, given his trenchant attacks on Israeli violations of the human
> > rights of Palestinians and his outspoken condemnations of US policies in the
> > Middle East. From the other side of the conflict, however, he encountered
> > opposition from Palestinians who accused him of sacrificing Palestinian
> > rights by making unwarranted concessions to Zionism.
> >
> > As early as 1977, when few Palestinians were prepared to concede that Jews
> > had historic claims to Palestine, he said: "I don't deny their claims, but
> > their claim always entails Palestinian dispossession." More than any other
> > Palestinian writer, he qualified his anti-colonial critique of Israel,
> > explaining its complex entanglements and the problematic character of its
> > origins in the persecution of European Jews, and the overwhelming impact of
> > the Zionist idea on the European conscience.
> >
> > Said recognised that Israel's exemption from the normal criteria by which
> > nations are measured owed everything to the Holocaust. But while recognising
> > its unique significance, he did not see why its legacy of trauma and horror
> > should be exploited to deprive the Palestinians, a people who were
> > "absolutely dissociable from what has been an entirely European complicity",
> > of their rights.
> >
> > "The question to be asked," he wrote in the Politics Of Dispossession
> > (1994), "is how long can the history of anti-semitism and the Holocaust be
> > used as a fence to exempt Israel from arguments and sanctions against it for
> > its behaviour towards the Palestinians, arguments and sanctions that were
> > used against other repressive governments, such as South Africa? How long
> > are we going to deny that the cries of the people of Gaza... are directly
> > connected to the policies of the Israeli government and not to the cries of
> > the victims of Nazism?"
> >
> > He insisted that the task of Israel's critics was not to reproduce for
> > Palestine a mirror-image of a Zionist ideology of diaspora and return, but
> > rather to elaborate a secular vision of democracy as applicable to both
> > Arabs and Jews. Elected to the Palestine national council (PNC) in 1977, as
> > an independent intellectual Said avoided taking part in the factional
> > struggles, while using his authority to make strategic interventions.
> > Rejecting the policy of armed struggle as impermissible - because of the
> > legacy of the Holocaust and the special conditions of the Jewish people - he
> > was an early advocate of the two-state solution, implicitly recognising
> > Israel's right to exist. The policy was adopted at the PNC meeting in
> > Algiers in 1988.
> >
> > In adapting the English version of the Arabic draft text, Said used his
> > influence to rephrase the Arabic; although his modifications were
> > insufficient to satisfy the Reagan administration, which ended by dictating
> > the crucial words that appeared in Arafat's speech to a special session of
> > the UN general assembly (convened in Geneva because the US state
department
> > refused to grant Arafat a visa to attend the UN in New York), there can be
> > little doubt that Said's tireless representations in the American media,
> > explaining that the declaration amounted to a "historic compromise" on the
> > part of the Palestinians towards the Jewish state, opened the way for the
> > US-PLO dialogue that would lead to the Madrid conference and the Oslo peace
> > process.
> >
> > As the peace process gained momentum, however, Said adopted an increasingly
> > critical stance and, in 1991, resigned from the PNC. The Oslo declaration,
> > he argued, was weighted unfairly towards Israel; the scenario, previsioning
> > an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and Jericho in advance of the other
> > territories and agreement on the final status of Jerusalem, amounted to "an
> > instrument of Palestinian surrender, a Palestinian Versailles".
> >
> > To the end, he remained a thorn in the side of the Palestinian authority.
> > The best-known and most distinguished Palestinian exile became the subject
> > of censorship by the representatives of his own people, one of the
> > standard-bearers of the liberal conscience in the increasingly illiberal
> > climate of intolerance and corruption surrounding President Arafat and his
> > regime.
> >
> > Said was born in Jerusalem into a prosperous Palestinian family. His father
> > Wadie, a Christian, had emigrated to the US before the first world war. He
> > volunteered for service in France and returned to the Middle East as a
> > respectable Protestant businessman - with American citizenship - before
> > making an arranged marriage to the daughter of a Baptist minister from
> > Nazareth.
> >
> > In Out Of Place (1999), the memoir of his childhood and youth, Said
> > described his father, who called himself William to emphasise his adopted
> > American identity, as overbearing and uncommunicative. His Victorian
> > strictness instilled in Said "a deep sense of generalised fear", which he
> > spent most of his life trying to overcome. To his father, Said owed the
> > drivenness that brought him his remarkable achievements. "I have no concept
> > of leisure or relaxation and, more particularly, no sense of cumulative
> > achievement," he wrote. "Every day for me is like the beginning of a new
> > term at school, with a vast and empty summer behind it, and an uncertain
> > tomorrow before it."
> >
> > Wadie Said revealed little about himself or the source of his money, but
> > certainly Edward and his sisters never wanted for anything, travelling with
> > battalions of servants, summering (after 1947) in the cultivated comfort of
> > Dhour el Shweir in Lebanon, enjoying sumptuous dinners on transatlantic
> > liners. Said described his mother, whom he evidently adored, as brilliant
> > and man- ipulative, neurotically difficult to please, giving always the
> > impression that "she had judged you and found you wanting" - yet instilling
> > in him a love of literature and music.
> >
> > Said's first name, improbably inspired by the Prince of Wales, was the
> > creation of his parents, whom he would come to see as "self-creations" out
> > of an eclectic blend of elements and aspirations: American lore culled from
> > magazines and his father's memories, missionary influence, incomplete and
> > hence eccentric schooling, British colonial attitudes. Arabic was forbidden
> > at home, except when speaking to servants; even the waiters at Groppis, the
> > fashionable Cairo cafe, were addressed in bad French.
> >
> > According to Said, his un-Arab Christian name induced a split in his
> > adolescent sense of identity, between "Edward", his outer self, and the
> > "loose, irresponsible, fantasy-ridden metamorphoses of my private inner
> > life". Bright but rebellious, he described himself as having been a leading
> > troublemaker at Cairo's Victoria College, the British-style public school
> > whose snooty captain Michael Shalhoub would later achieve celebrity as Omar
> > Sharif.
> >
> > Sent at his father's insistence to Mount Hermon, a private school in
> > Massachusetts, he blossomed academically, but lacked the right attitude to
> > be acknowledged as an outstanding student. He responded positively to the
> > American approach to essay-writing, which he found more imaginative and
> > stimulating than the buttoned-up British approach in Cairo.
> >
> > The contrast between his burgeoning academic distinction and the absence of
> > formal recognition clearly marked him deeply. He would claim that it was
> > this experience, as much as the work of his more widely acknowledged
> > intellectual mentors, including RP Blackmur, Antonio Gramsci, Theodor
> > Adorno, Raymond Williams and Michel Foucault, that influenced his anti-
> > authoritarian outlook.
> >
> > Said's engagement with Palestine drew on deep emo tional roots, particularly
> > his affection for his Jerusalem aunt Nabiha, his father's sister, who, after
> > 1948, devoted her life to working with Palestinian refugees in Cairo,
> > although she never discussed the political aspects of the dispute in Said's
> > presence. Until his 30s, Edward was too preoccupied with his studies,
> > progressing smoothly through Princeton and Harvard graduate school,
> > developing his critical methodologies and indulging his passion for music,
> > especially the piano, at which he achieved an almost professional level of
> > competence, to take much interest in the politics of his homeland.
> >
> > It was the trauma of the Arab defeat in 1967, which unleashed a second wave
> > of refugees (many of them already refugees from the 1948 exodus), that
> > shocked him out of what he would come to see as his earlier complacency,
> > reconnecting him with his former self.
> >
> > Said's writings on English literature, such as Culture And Imperialism
> > (1993), and western classical music drew heavily on his sense of being an
> > outsider. Like Joseph Conrad, the subject of his PhD thesis and first
> > published book, he retained an "extraordinarily persistent residual sense of
> > his own exilic marginality", which enabled him to deploy a kind of double-
> > vision in his readings of the English novel, discerning the invisible
> > colonial plantations that guarantee the domestic tranquillity of Mansfield
> > Park, or finding in Conrad's self-consciously circular narrative forms the
> > sense of the potentiality of the challenges to western hegemony that would
> > erupt during the post-colonial era.
> >
> > Where African writers such as Chinhua Achebe dismissed Conrad as a racist,
> > suggesting that, whatever his gifts as a writer, his political attitudes
> > must make him despicable to any African, Said saw such reasoning as
> > amounting to spiritual, intellectual and aesthetic amputation. Contrary to
> > the assumption sometimes made about him, he did not consider that the hidden
> > political agendas and attitudes of cultural supremacy that he regarded as
> > informing the canons of western culture from Dante to Flaubert necessarily
> > diminished their artistic integrity or cultural power.
> >
> > His achievement may have been to enhance artistic comprehension by drawing
> > attention to unstated political dimensions in the knowledge that art must
> > always escape enlistment for partisan ends. In a brilliant essay on Die
> > Meistersinger that grapples with Wagner's anti-semitism, he quoted, with
> > approval, Pierre Boulez's remark that "Wagner's music, by its very
> > existence, refuses to bear the ideological message that it is intended to
> > convey."
> >
> > A similar statement could be made about Said's work as a critic. The
> > anti-colonial perspective that animates his work does not issue in
> > ideological consistency. Rather, it challenges conventional assumptions
> > about art, music and literature, opening up new avenues of inquiry and
> > questioning the criteria by which knowledge is organised and husbanded. Like
> > his hero, Theodor Adorno, Said was "the quintessential intellectual, hating
> > all systems, whether on our side or theirs, with equal distaste".
> >
> > Versatile and subtle, he was better at elucidating distinctions than
> > formulating systems. A Christian humanist with a healthy respect for Islam,
> > he was a member of the academic elite; yet he inveighed against academic
> > professionalism, venturing into territories well outside his area of
> > speciality, insisting always that the true intellectual's role must be that
> > of the amateur, because it is only the amateur who is moved neither by the
> > rewards nor the requirements of a career, and who is therefore capable of a
> > disinterested engagement with ideas and values.
> >
> > The unusual complexity of his background - privileged yet marginal, wealthy
> > yet powerless - allowed him to empathise with dispossessed people,
> > especially the victims of Zionism and its western supporters, while enjoying
> > in the fullest measure the cultural riches of New York, a city that rang
> > louder than any other with Jewish achievement and success.
> >
> > In his final years, Said's health grew ever more fragile, and, though
> > passionately concerned with the unfolding Palestinian disaster in the wake
> > of 9/11 and the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq, he took a conscious
> > decision to withdraw from political controversy and channel his energies
> > into music. The West-Eastern Divan Orchestra he founded with the Israeli
> > citizen Daniel Barenboim in 1999 grew out of the friendship he forged with
> > the musician who shares his belief that art - and, in particular, the music
> > of Wagner - transcends political ideology. With Said's assistance, Barenboim
> > gave master classes for Palestinian students in the occupied West Bank,
> > infuriating the Israeli right.
> >
> > The orchestra received a tumultuous reception at the BBC Proms last month.
> > It may prove a fitting legacy for an intellectual whose work illuminated our
> > crisis-ridden world by embracing its contradictions and celebrating its
> > complexities.
> >
> > In 1970, he married Mariam Cortas, by whom he had a son and a daughter.
> >
> > · Edward Wadie Said, writer and academic, born November 1 1935; died
> > September 25 2003
> >
> >
> >
>
>
>


Matias Vernengo
Assistant Professor
Dept of Economics
University of Utah
1645 Campus Center Dr, Room 326
Salt Lake City, UT 84112
801 581-8318
801 585-5649 (fax)
http://www.econ.utah.edu/vernengo/