Sometimes dates can be used for sending signals. For example, on 7 December 1902 Germany and Great Britain instituted their “peaceful blockade” of Venezuela. On 7 December 1917, the U.S. Navy merged with the British Navy to fight Germany. On 7 December 1941, the Japanese simultaneously attacked the United States at Pearl Harbor and the British in Hong Kong and Singapore. Does this date hold a special significance for Great Britain, the United States and Japan? Or was it just a simple coincidence three times?

The Venezuelan Crisis of 1902–1903 threatened to pit the United States and Great Britain against each other. Venezuela's European creditors were firm in their demands that President Castro pay off Venezuela's mounting foreign debts. Several European nations sent their fleets, and on 25 November 1902 Germany and Great Britain formally announced their intention to implement a “pacific” blockade of Venezuela. It was widely assumed that such an action might result in foreign domination of Venezuela.

President Theodore Roosevelt opposed this action as a violation of the Monroe Doctrine, and the U.S. Navy's “winter exercise” of 1902–1903 was timed to correspond exactly with this German-British threat. The blockade was declared on 7 December 1902, and for “eleven days, between 8 December and 18 December 1902, the future of U.S., British, German, and Venezuelan relations hung in the balance as Theodore Roosevelt discreetly pursued diplomatic negotiations between Venezuela and the two great European powers.”

The U.S. Navy was able to mobilize 53 ships to counter the 29 ships available to Britain and Germany in the Caribbean. War appeared more and more likely. On 16 December 1902, Parliament convened to debate the situation in Venezuela and the strains it was placing on Britain's relationship with America. Outnumbered and outgunned, on 17 December 1902, the two European nations conceded defeat, lifted the blockade and agreed to arbitrate the matter with Venezuela instead.

Great Britain's decision to back down had another, albeit unintended, result. The British Colonial Office drafted a secret memorandum raising questions about the defensibility of British possessions in the western Atlantic in the event of a conflict with the United States. The Admiralty response acknowledged that the United States would be in a position to “stop our supplies from Canada” and to secure all food imports from the United States itself, effectively cutting off two-thirds of Great Britain's food supply.

After World War II, the USSR occupied the two southernmost Kurile Islands, plus two of the Hobomai islands off Hokkaido. The Kurile Islands were considered strategically significant because Japan's naval fleet left from there to attack Pearl Harbor (see Map 5). Coincidentally, President Truman's Order No. 1 gave Stalin permission to occupy and hold parts of Japan “proper.” By never signing a peace treaty, the modern-day Russian government still controls these four islands under the guise of occupying Japan “proper.”

The Kurile chain consists of 36 islands stretching from the southern tip of the Kamchatka Peninsula to the northeastern edge of Hokkaido Island. The two most southern of these—Kunashiri and Etorofu (or in Russian: Kunashir and Iturup)—were traditionally thought by the Japanese to be part of Hokkaido Island. Through a series of nineteenth-century Russo-Japanese treaties, the Kuriles fell under the ownership of Japan: in the Treaty of Shimoda (1855) and the Treaty of St. Petersburg (1875), Japan handed over its interests in Sakhalin Island to Russia in return for total control of the Kurile Islands. Following the 1904–1905 Russo-Japanese War, the 5 September 1905 Portsmouth Peace Treaty allowed Japan to regain sovereignty over the southern half of Sakhalin. With the opening of Soviet-American negotiations for Soviet entry into the Pacific War, however, the centuries-old dispute over the Kurile Islands reemerged. Through a lengthy series of negotiations and agreements—including the Cairo Declaration, the Teheran Conference and the Yalta agreement—Stalin wove a diplomatic web that allowed the USSR to reoccupy the islands.

The October 1943 Cairo Conference, which the USSR did not attend, first raised the question of post-war territorial acquisitions. On 27 November 1943, the Allies issued the following declaration: “The three great Allies are fighting this war to restrain and punish the aggression of Japan. They covet no gain for themselves and have no thought of territorial expansion. It is their purpose that […] Japan will also be expelled from all other territories which she has taken by violence and greed.”

The British World War I campaign against the Dardanelles was initially meant to be purely a naval effort, but its failure to force a passage through Turkey's defenses required a change of strategy. The new plan was to adopt a peripheral campaign to secure the Gallipoli Peninsula. If the originally planned 24 April 1915 landing was successful, land troops could clear away the Turkish shore emplacements and field artillery, and thus permit the passage of the British fleet to Constantinople. Coincidentally, on 24 April 1915 Turkey began to purge its Armenian minority in anticipation that as fellow Christians the Armenians might back the British against the Turks. Eventually, as many as a million Armenians died as a result of this Turkish repression.

General Sir Ian Hamilton, who was commander of Eastern Command, was in charge of the Gallipoli operation. He had serious doubts that a landing operation could succeed, and was warned that the Turks might fortify the coast, turning the operation into a “second Crimea,” just like a similar landing disaster some 60 years earlier in the Crimean war. Nevertheless, when Kitchener ordered the landing to be attempted, Hamilton decided that the Anzac force would land to the north of Gaba Tepe and the 29th Division would land at five beaches near Cape Helles. While the 29th went north, the Anzacs would advance east across the peninsula to block Turkish reinforcements.

This plan was too complicated. By simultaneously landing at six different beaches, Hamilton hoped to confuse the Turkish defenses. But instead the landing parties quickly got bogged down. Rather than move immediately inland, the two forces landing at Helles Y and S beaches awaited the arrival of the main force from the south. Meanwhile, further to the north, the Anzac landing was just north of Gaba Tepe. Hamilton's mistake of not leaving the beaches immediately to attack the Turkish troops was to have dire consequences.

Among his many problems, Hamilton completely underestimated the Turkish response. In mid-March 1915, they formed a new Fifth Army commanded by General Liman von Sanders, former head of the German military mission to Turkey. Soon, the Turks had moved about 40,000 men and 100 artillery pieces to the west side of the peninsula ready to oppose the landing.

The election came on. Alixe listened with intense interest to the accounts Emily received of her brother's success. The first day, the odds were greatly in favour of Everard. The second day, Alixe made [herself] sure he would be returned. Judge then of the sorrowful surprise with which the news was received of his failure. Harry Dunstan was member for M___! What dull senseless people the inhabitants of that borough must be. Everard returned fagged and out of spirits. His pride was mortified and the great aim of his life baffled, just within view of success.

“And that old foolish Lord Sunderland was so positive of his influence,” said the disappointed candidate peevishly, as he threw himself into the chair Emily wheeled round for him.

“And the fools on whose votes I depended, gaped and hurrared and drank and fought and looked at their own cockades, till I am sure they did not know Dunstan and me apart. And there again,” continued he, growing more wrathful at the recollection, as a soldier's blood warms during the recital of his past campaigns, “there I was to be fooled and insulted. I held out my hand to Dunstan when I met him, and drew back with air of an injured hero and said, ‘Now, you have already told me you cannot wish me success and we do not meet here as friends, we that have been friends ever since we were boys at College and wrote themes to the tune of Damon and Pythias!’ Oh it was shabby, confoundedly shabby. So I left him in a very ill humour, for then he did not seem to have a chance of success.”

“Yes, the tide of fortune does seem to have changed even more quickly than usual,” said Emily.

“Quickly enough. For on Friday evening, he had about 120 votes and [by] Saturday he had upwards of three hundred and forty. And then I had to make my appearance before Lord Sunderland, to thank him for his support, to regret that support had not been more efficacious, which of course I could not often attribute to his lordship's want of zeal or influence etc, etc.

Woodrow Wilson was wrongly blamed for betraying China at the 1919 Paris peace talks due to a chance clerical error. His “secret” compromise solution to the Sino-Japanese Shandong question divided the problem into “political” versus “economic” concerns. While fighting to return to China full control over all political rights, Wilson was willing to grant Japan the economic rights that Germany had previously held in the Shandong concessions, and which the Japanese government had acquired from Beijing by means of official—albeit secret—agreements. Wilson successfully negotiated this compromise with the Japanese delegation during the last week of April 1919, immediately prior to the announcement of the Paris Peace Conference's peace treaty. Coincidentally, Wilson's secretary back in Washington neglected to release this agreement, thereby helping to precipitate the 4 May 1919 student demonstrations in China that eventually resulted in the founding of the Chinese Communist Party.

President Wilson stood up for China's national sovereignty at the Paris Peace Conference ending World War I. On 29 April 1919, Wilson expressed his concerns that Japan might wrongly acquire Germany's former political rights—considered illegal by China—in Shandong province. He even went so far as to ask the Japanese envoy, Baron Makino, several detailed questions, first about underwater cables, then about railways and mines, to make sure that Japan was not being given more rights than Germany had previously enjoyed. Wilson was especially worried about Tokyo's contention that the Japanese citizens should enjoy extraterritorial rights along the railway lines in Shandong, warning the Japanese delegates that “He must say frankly that he could not do this. He asked the Japanese representatives to cooperate with him in finding a way out. He wanted to support the dignity of Japan, but he thought that Japan gained nothing by insisting on these leased rights being vested in the government.” As for Japan's insistence on using Japanese police along the railways, Wilson clarified that “he did not mind Japan asking for these rights, but what he objected to was their imposing them.”

The Pacific Ocean has three major North-South island chains, including the so-called “first island chain” that runs from the tip of the Kamchatka Peninsula down through the Kurile Islands, the Japanese home islands, Okinawa, Taiwan and on through to the Philippines. The so-called “second island chain” splits away from Japan, and runs southward toward the Bonins, Guam and the Marshall Islands. Meanwhile, the so-called “third island chain” runs from the end of the Aleutian Trench southward along the Emperor Seamount, through Midway, and ends up in the Hawaiian Islands (see Map 1).

During the late nineteenth century, Japan expanded along the first and second island chains and into the Western Pacific. In 1876, Japan obtained all of the Kurile Islands in exchange for ceding the southern half of Sakhalin Island to Russia, and also seized the Bonin Islands, about 1,300 kilometers to the southeast of Japan. In 1879, the Ryukyu Islands were formally annexed by Japan and became the prefecture of Okinawa. Finally, after the first Sino-Japanese War (1894–95), Japan obtained the island of Taiwan—in theory in perpetuity—in 1895, which gave it unbroken control from Kamchatka to Taiwan. Japan's expansion effectively cut the U.S. sea line of communication (SLOC) to China, which was considered to be a major trading partner.

In 1897, assistant secretary of the Navy, Theodore Roosevelt, and Commander C. J. Goodrich, president, U.S. Naval War College (NWC), carried on a confidential correspondence discussing how Japan's recent expansion impacted the United States. The original letters are in the NWC Historical Archives. On 23 June 1897, Goodrich explained that a Japanese attack on the United States would have to be staged from either Dutch Harbor (Unalaska) in the Aleutians or from Hawaii:

Caroline Norton's forgotten novel, which has remained unpublished until now, tells of the perils of courtship facing a naïve young girl Alixe, who has been launched onto the London social season. Her encounters with both a worthy and an undesirable suitor open an intriguing window onto the fashionable society of the 1820s in which Love in “the World” takes place. Caroline was able to draw upon her own experiences of the bon ton and those of her elder sister, Helen. The time in which the novel was set coincides with her first ball in the late summer of 1825. It was then that her sister Helen asked their mother to relate “every little incident […] and whether she is admired or no.” In anticipation of her younger sister's entrée to society in March 1826, Helen wrote to her: “I wish you joy with all my heart of all the pleasing anxious cares of coming out and all attending circumstances.” That Spring Caroline burst upon the scene with all her beauty and brilliance, later recalling “the night upon which she made her début, coming down dressed to the room where her mother and aunt were awaiting her.” She added, “I came out […] to find all London at my feet.”

Caroline believed that London, “where the cry of the drowning suicide is lost in the hum of gathered multitudes restlessly pursuing the pleasures or the business of life,” could be as callous as the metropolitan social scene might prove treacherous, and in alerting the reader to the dangers of fashionable society, she could make ample use of her own observations as a debutante at her first London season. In a highly readable and coherent narrative with an indeterminate ending, which throws a spotlight onto her life and times, the plot of Love in “the World” initially follows a pattern broadly representative of her own experience and anticipates that of her young heroine Beatrice Brooke in her later novel, Lost and Saved (1863). All three women had to respond to the advances of an apparently virtuous, but in reality immoral, suitor. For Alixe, this is Everard Price, for Beatrice, the Jekyll and Hyde persona of Montagu Treherne, while Caroline had to grapple with the advances of George Norton, who had first proposed to her when she was about sixteen.

Stalin needed the support of the Allies to secure his victories in Eastern Europe and in Asia. During January 1945, Stalin promised to uphold the Yalta Conference's “Declaration on Liberated Europe,” which guaranteed that open elections would be held in the Eastern European countries under his control. But Stalin quickly broke his promises in Europe, and in Asia too. For example, on 11 January 1943, the United States and Great Britain had completely eliminated all of their remaining extraterritorial rights and special privileges in China. But during the same year, Chiang Kai-shek for the first time confirmed that “the Sino-Soviet Agreement concluded on the basis of equality was not fully carried out.”1 Following the end of World War II, the Soviet government did not renegotiate its unequal treaties with China, but instead worked hand in hand with the Chinese communists to overthrow the Kuomintang. Stalin also consolidated Soviet control over Outer Mongolia.

Historians have previously attributed Chiang Kai-shek's 14 August 1945 decision to hold a plebiscite granting Outer Mongolia full independence from China to the 11 February 1945 Yalta agreement, in which Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin decided: “The status quo in Outer-Mongolia (the Mongolian People's Republic) shall be preserved.”2 But when President Roosevelt agreed to support the status quo he never intended to push China into granting Outer Mongolia its independence. In fact, according to international law, the juridical status quo appeared to be based on the 31 May 1924 Sino-Soviet treaty, in which Moscow publicly recognized that Outer Mongolia was an integral part of China: “The Government of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics recognizes that Outer Mongolia is an integral part of the Republic of China and respects China's sovereignty therein.”

But the true status quo was not what it appeared. China's sovereignty over Outer Mongolia was in fact undermined by a 31 May 1924 secret protocol with the USSR that recognized the 1915 tsarist tripartite treaty signed by Tsarist Russia, China and Outer Mongolia granting Outer Mongolia its autonomy from China. Although the 1924 protocol specified that the 1915 treaty was not to be enforced, Outer Mongolia's de facto autonomy was assured so long as Moscow refused to negotiate new terms. When Roosevelt promised to uphold the status quo at Yalta, therefore, he unwittingly provided Stalin with important leverage during secret Sino-Soviet negotiations that followed the Yalta Conference.

The Emergence of a Multilingual Paradigm

Dorina Michelutti, better known as Dôre Michelut (the Friulian version of her name), is also an Italian-Canadian author. She was born in 1952 in Sella di Rivignano, a town near Udine, in the region of Friuli. Her family migrated to Canada in 1958 and settled in Toronto. After graduating from high school in 1972, she spent five years in Florence, studying Italian at the University of Florence. She returned to Canada in 1981, where she continued to study at the University of Toronto. Meanwhile, she began to write and publish in literary magazines. Her first book of poems, Loyalty to the Hunt, was published in 1986 by Guernica Editions. In 1994, this book also appeared in the French version, entitled Loyale à la chasse. In 1989, she published Coming to Terms with the Mother Tongue. In 1990, in cooperation with five writers, she published Linked Alive and the simultaneous French edition, Liens. In 1990, she also published Ouroborous: The Book That Ate Me, containing poems in English, Italian and Friulian. In 1993, she published A Furlan Harvest, a collection of poems written in Italian, English and Friulian, by women of Friulian descent living in Canada. After 1996, Michelut started travelling and working around the world. In 2005, she received a Master of Arts in Applied Communication from Royal Roads University in Victoria, BC. She died of cancer in Oman in March 2009. She was teaching advanced speech, multimedia and technical communication at Al Akhawayn University in Ifrane.

Michelut's works have appeared in many literary publications and have been anthologized both in Canada and Italy. Her literary production constitutes a form of experimental fiction, that is, a form of writing defined by its innovative nature. She continually breaks linguistic, narrative and stylistic norms and conventions, combining different styles and discourses. On the level of content, her poems are thematically obscure, difficult to analyse, and engage the reader with different levels of interpretation. Through this innovative approach to writing, ‘discursive borders are constantly relativized and transgressed, thereby intensifying the work's migratory character’ (Frank 2008, 20). This inventive approach is also evident in her experiments with different poetic forms, such as a series of renga, an Asian form of social poetry.

Having analyzed the satiric, comic, and tragic actions that form the plots of Tristram Shandy, we might adopt the posture of Shakespeare's Polonius, who would only have to decide whether Sterne's work should be labeled tragicomic satire or satiric tragicomedy. Indeed, one might legitimately question the usefulness of the definitions of satire, comedy, and tragedy borrowed here from the work of Alvin Kernan and Northrop Frye, as none of these definitions, by itself, lets us describe the complex action of Tristram Shandy.

Frye himself would have answered this question, I believe, by pointing out that modal complexity represents the hallmark of great literature. The tragic action of Tristram Shandy, as we have seen in Chapter 4, can be partly categorized under Frye's “high mimetic” mode, in which protagonists Yorick and Tristram stand strong in their bold criticisms of grave, reputable dullness. Yet ironically, as Yorick and Tristram come to recognize, their strong moralrhetorical stances leave them weak, vulnerable to the swarms of the dull who come together long enough to slander and destroy.

We have also seen the tragic action of Tristram Shandy blend with comic action as it falls to what Frye would call the “low mimetic” stories of Walter and Toby, stories inseparable from Tristram’s. In telling the stories of his precursors, Tristram illustrates the benevolent “moral character” he would place at the center of a new comic Shandean society, which he would populate with his “hearty, laughing” friends (2: 132; 4: 402). But as we have discovered, within the fictional world created by Sterne, neither Tristram nor his forebearers succeed in drawing friends, in renewing life on the foundation of society's ruins. Tristram, Walter, and Toby may all be fairly counted among the protagonists of “low mimetic” tragedy, for they find themselves excluded from the society they would regenerate (Frye 1957, 39). But this bimodal action, we have found, does not resolve tragically, as Tristram resurrects Yorick regularly and ends his cock-and-bull story with a joke, not with a catastrophe. Neither does the action resolve comically, for despite the joking at the end, we find no harmony, no regeneration, and no shared vision—only Toby's embarrassment, Mrs. Shandy's confusion, and Walter's rhetorical nonsense (9: 803–9).

Introduction

Much ink has been spilled on the problem of sociology's “Eurocentrism” in recent years. Whether understood as a cognitive myopia resultant from the universalization of the particularities of European social and political development, or as a tendency to narrate Western modernity in endogenous terms, shorn of the constitutive histories of colonial-imperialism and Transatlantic slavery, the critique of Eurocentrism has shed light on how the formation of sociology is a power-saturated process with ongoing historical effects that continue to frame the relations between “the West and the rest” (Hall 1992; Steinmetz 2013; Bhambra 2014; Meghji 2021).

In this chapter, I argue that Zygmunt Bauman's project can be read as an intervention into contemporary discussions about Eurocentrism in the discipline of sociology and the imperative to “decolonize” its canon and operative concepts, even if he did not explicitly frame it as such. In making this argument, I re-tread several paths in Bauman's sociological thinking which, to varying degrees, have been elided in commentaries on and critical appraisals of his work. These are his reflections on colonialism and decolonization, the Jewish experience and interpretation of modernity, and the communist project in east-central Europe and its dissolution.

In my book Zygmunt Bauman and the West: A Sociological of Intellectual Exile (Palmer 2023), I track each of these paths across Bauman's thought as it develops from the late 1960s until his death in 2017. I emphasize the essayistic constitution of Bauman's sociology which, when not sufficiently appreciated, has tended to render his overall contribution to the critique of the West not immediately accessible. Bauman's reflections on colonialism and decolonization, for example, crisscross over the long duration of his work and are not contained in neatly-bound, self-contained tracts. His sociology as a whole constitutes a multiplicity of “forking paths,” to borrow the expression from the Jorge Luis Borges (1964) short story which was hugely influential for Bauman.

Roland Barthes once wrote that “in the multiplicity of writing, everything is to be disentangled, not deciphered” (Barthes 1977, 147). The disentanglement that I attempt here isolates the forking paths in discrete phases of their unfolding. Over the course of the first and second sections, I outline Bauman's engagements with themes of colonialism and decolonization as developed in his work “before postmodernity,” taken to stretch from the late 1960s into the 1970s, across the twin poles of his exile: Poland and Britain.

Around that time, Rodolphe was very much in love with his cousin Angele even though she couldn't stand him. Meanwhile, Chevalier's thermometer had plunged to twelve below zero.

Mlle Angele was the daughter of M. Monetti, the stove maker we encountered earlier. Mlle. Angele was eighteen years old and had come from the Bourgogne region where she’d spent five years with a female relative who was expected to leave everything to her when she died. The relative was an elderly woman who had never been young or beautiful, but who had always been unpleasant although (or perhaps because) she was very religious. When Angele left to live with her, she’d been a charming child and her adolescence was already bringing her the promise of a charming youth. When she returned after five years she’d become a beauty but also cold, hard and unfeeling. Her life of rural seclusion, her excessive religious observance and an education based on narrow-minded principles had filled her with coarse and ridiculous prejudices, shrunk her imagination and made her heart into an organ that was satisfied with merely carrying out its function like a pendulum. In other words, Angele had holy water running in her veins instead of blood. She welcomed her cousin with icy reserve when she returned and he was wasting his time whenever he tried to play on the tender strings of memory, recalling the time when they were in the early stages of a love like Paul and Virginie, a love that traditionally arises between a male and female cousin.2 Still, Rodolphe was very much in love with this cousin who couldn't stand him and when he learned one day that the young woman was to attend a wedding party for one of her friends, he found the courage to promise Angele a bouquet of violets for the occasion. After asking her father for his permission, Angele accepted her cousin's gallant offer, on the condition that the violets must be white.

Delighted with his cousin's kind acceptance, Rodolphe danced and sang all the way back to Mont Saint Bernard, the place he called home. We will soon see why. As he crossed the Palais-Royal and passed the shop of Mme. Provost, the famous florist, he saw white violets in the shop window.

Introduction

How do we make theory? What are the criteria for judging the power of ideas and concepts in the practice of social theory? The work of theory does not always involve building, or the construction of systems, though this may have been the dominant model in postwar sociology from Talcott Parsons to Anthony Giddens. Sometimes it involves something more modest or experimental, a matter of successive approximations, circling, following hunches and leaving hints (Beilharz 2020a). Sometimes it may be more like tracking a snail trail than attempting to capture every detail of the world in a corresponding concept. Even some of the more ambitious of classical precedents, like Karl Marx's Capital, may be said to contain as much in their hints as in their broad architecture. The section on the fetishism of commodities is elusive at only a few pages; the image of the architect and bee is less than that, but highly suggestive. The last chapter of Capital, on colonization, is indicative of a theory of surplus population and colonization as part thereof. Primitive accumulation is a global process; it represents the modernization part of modernity. Then there is the book's own structural undergirding, indebted to Dante's inferno. In the sprawling text of Marx's Grundrisse, some of the most interesting legacies again are mere fragments: on method, on automation, and on time–space compression. And in Max Weber, the image of the iron cage is a throwaway that has yet become highly generative for critical thinking about modernity, along with various other chilling anticipations as to what the new century would bring.

Karl Marx and iMax Weber come into play here as central sources for Bauman's thinking. In this chapter, I indicate their influences on Bauman, separately and together in the amalgam called “Weberian Marxism.” This junction is one key source for the tradition we call Critical Theory. From Marx to Zygmunt Bauman is a long way—from 1867, for Capital, to 2000, for Liquid Modernity, from the Crystal Place to IM Pei's glass pyramids, from Marx's coat to the costumes of Vivienne Westwood. Liquid Modernity may also be said to be a hint, rather than a theory, though the book by that title is methodical enough: its chapters lead with “Emancipation” and “Individuality,” and follow on to “Time/Space,” “Work,” and “Community” (Bauman 2000).

The welfare state is not what it was. Decades of liberalisation have transformed how governments provide social policy and how citizens experience social protection. Services that were once the sole domain of public sector workers are now run by non-profit, even for-profit, firms. Payments that were once straightforward to access and understand are increasingly conditional and stingy, or require expert advice to invest in complex financial products. Even within the public sector, new public management and competition policy have created markets within the state, transforming the public sector into something that looks much more like the private sector.

Yet for all this transformation, predictions of a crisis of the welfare state have proven premature. Across the OECD, and particularly in Australia, the welfare state is on the march. The growth is both quantitative and qualitative. Through the height of neoliberalism social spending grew, and even before Covid-19, had moved closer to the OECD average (OECD 2022c). Areas of social need, such as child, disability and elder care, are supported in ways they were not before. And even though inequality overall has increased, social spending has also become more redistributive, doing more to ease inequalities than in the past (Whiteford 2017).

Much of this change is structural. As populations age there is more need for pensions and healthcare, two of the biggest components of the welfare state. As family structures change and women enter paid work in greater numbers, demands for paid care expand and parenting payments increase. Welfare states redistribute more when our initial market incomes are less equal, as happens when labour and capital markets are deregulated. However, deliberate policy also played a role. New programs have been introduced, and existing spending increased under both Labor and Coalition governments.

This book attempts to understand the varied politics of liberalisation in Australia and understand how to change it. Of course, we can exaggerate difference. Australia never developed a comprehensive welfare state equivalent to those in Europe, or even the UK. We have always had sizeable private sectors in health, education and care and relatively low social benefits. Social policy and the politics of welfare have changed since the 1980s, however less dramatically than many imagine. Liberalisation has not meant the end of the state, but the expansion of markets alongside welfare.

Among the real bohemians of the real bohemia I once knew a young man, Jacques D_____, a sculptor who showed signs of great talent. But poverty denied him the opportunity to realize his potential. He died of exhaustion in the month of March 1844, at Saint-Louis Hospital, in the Saint Victoire room, in bed 14

.I came to know Jacques in the hospital, where I myself was staying during a long illness. Jacques, as I mentioned, was an extremely promising artist but he didn't let it go to his head. During the two months I was near him, even while he felt cradled in the arms of death, I never once heard him complain or give way to those lamentations that make neglected artists seem so ridiculous. He died without any posturing, but with an awful grimace of agony. As I think back on his death, in fact, I’m reminded of one of the worst scenes I’ve ever witnessed in the whole parade of human suffering. Learning what had happened, Jacques's father came to claim his son's body and he haggled with the hospital office for a long time over the thirty-six francs they were charging. He also haggled so aggressively over the cost of the church service that they gave him a six franc discount. As the corpse was being placed into the coffin, the nurse removed the hospital sheet and asked one of Jacques's friends who would be paying for the shroud. The poor fellow didn't have a sou so he turned to the father, who became enraged and demanded to know if they ever going to stop bothering him.

The nurse, a nun who was present for this whole dreadful discussion, looked over at the body, and the words she spoke were tender and innocent: “Oh monsieur! We can't bury him like that. The poor boy! He’ll get so cold. At least give him a shirt so he doesn't arrive stark naked to meet our good Lord.”

The father gave the friend five francs to get a shirt but told him to go to a second-hand shop in Rue Grange-aux-Belles that sold used clothes.

“It’ll be cheaper,” he added.

I came to understand the cruelty of Jacques's father later; he was furious that his son had chosen to become an artist and his anger never subsided, not even as he faced the coffin.

Schaunard and Marcel, having maintained a valiant focus on work all morning, suddenly suspended their labors.

“My God, I’m so hungry!” said Schaunard. And, as an afterthought, he added, “Don't we get to have lunch today?”

Marcel seemed astonished by this highly inopportune question. “Since when do we have lunch two days in row?” he asked. “Yesterday was Thursday.” He finished his answer by waving his maulstick in the air and reciting the church commandment:

On Friday you must take no meat

Nor anything like it may you eat.

Schaunard was at a loss for a reply so he turned back to his painting, an image of an open field on which a red tree and a blue tree could be seen shaking hands with their branches. It was a clear allusion to the pleasures of friendship and was, without a doubt, profoundly philosophical.

Just then the concierge knocked at the door to deliver a letter for Marcel.

“That will be three sous,” he said.

“Are you sure?” the artist replied. “Well that's alright, you can pay us later.”

And he closed the door in the concierge's face. Taking the letter, Marcel broke the seal.

After reading the first few words, he began leaping around the studio like an acrobat and singing the following famous ballad at the top of his lungs, thus demonstrating that he had attained jubilation's summit:

Four young men who lived in the town

With sickness they were all struck down

To hospital they were taken away

Hey hey! Hey hey! Hey hey! Hey hey!

“Yes!” Schaunard said as he joined in:

They were placed side by side in a very large bed

Two at the foot and two at the head.

“We both know it!” said Marcel as he continued:

A Sister of Mercy soon came their way

Hey hey! Hey hey! Hey hey! Hey hey! “

If you don't quiet down,” said Schaunard, who was starting to feel symptoms of madness closing in, “I’ll play the allegro from my symphony The Influence of Blue in the Arts.” And he began to approach the piano.

This threat had the effect of cold water falling on a boiling liquid. Marcel became quite calm almost as though a spell had been cast on him.

“But wait!” he said, handing the letter to his friend. “Look at this.”