History

Yes, I have a Ph.D. in history. Not only in history, but in French intellectual history. And not only French intellectual history, but avant-garde cultural movements in France in the 1950s and 1960s. Existentialism? people sometimes ask. No - some people after the existentialists, who were much less interesting and even less important.

For a while I was actually embarrassed by this. My biography on my company's web site, for example, used to say just that I had a Ph.D. from UC-Berkeley - on the assumption that readers would assume I got the degree in CS, or EE, or something more relevant to what I do for a living. (This was a calculated ruse, since of the three doctorates on the founding team, one was in history, one in philosophy, and one, I think, in psychology.) I think I was embarrassed by having studied something so esoteric that it turned out not only to be useless in the usual sense of the term, but useless to me, in that it was not a topic of even enough academic interest (and the phrase "academic interest" already means that something has little relevance) to land me a decent academic job.

But I'm not embarrassed any more, whether due to age, or maturity, or having more or less succeeded in career #3. Looking back, not only did I have a lot of good "life experiences" (lived in Berkeley, went on strike, learned how to throw a dinner party, lived in Paris, ate at lots of great places, lived in Berlin when it was still rough around the edges, traveled throughout southern Italy), but I had the academic experience as well, the one where you immerse yourself deeply in a specific topic until thinking and writing about it becomes second nature. And I know it must have been second nature at the time, because now that I have been out of that world for more than ten years it seems like a distant planet to me.

I'm on this topic because this is the first full week this year that I'm not flying anywhere, so I'm at home, and I'm reading The House in the Garden: The Bakunin Family and the Romance of Russian Idealism, by the path-breaking Russian historian John Randolph - a work of history so specialized that if you type "The House in the Garden" into Amazon it will show up on the 3rd page of the results, and its current ranking in books is 974,644. Why am I reading this book? Because John was a friend of mine in graduate school, and he actually should have introduced me to my wife (because his mother worked with her before she came to Berkeley), but we met independently. I have an occasional habit of buying books and CDs by friends of mine (a number of whom are professional classical musicians, but that's another story), although I haven't invested in the medieval historians yetbecause their books cost over $80 a pop. (Sorry Jay and Jason, I'm waiting for you to sell out and write your popular books.)

Anyway, The House in the Garden is a beautiful example of the historian's art: it takes a miniature as its subject (in this case, the actual house that the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin grew up in - there, now John will be mad at me for having reduced Mikhail Bakunin to "the anarchist"), examines it and the people who lived there in loving detail, and shows how it either exemplifies or is influenced by the larger historical trends of its time. And that is only a crude description of the portrait painted and the arguments made by the book.

Unlike the vast majority of what I read, it is also a book I have to read slowly, because I'm re not reading it just to get information and move on (what information could the non-specialist possibly need about some the philosophical inclinations of early-nineteenth-century Russian noblemen); I'm reading it to re-immerse myself in that world of ideas that I left when I entered the business world. And like with my friend Peter's book about Franz Rosenzweig, it takes effort to re-enter that world and suspend not disbelief, but the feeling that I could be doing something more productive with my time. If I spend enough time with the book, I can get back to the feeling that ideas, and their history, are crucially important and valuable in and of themselves, which is a feeling I had for most of the 1990s. And clearly they are at least as important as most of what most people spend most of their time doing.

There may not be many people who will buy John's book, but part of me envies him all the same for his ability to immerse himself in his field to the point where it is as natural as breathing. Academic research is hard work, and depressing at times, and knowing that few people will read your work doesn't make it easier. But in this case, I believe this book got him tenure the University of Illinois. And we should all be so fortunate.