The Founding Legend of Western Civilization: From Virgil to Vietnam by Richard Waswo (review)

97 admit, but what he and Hume remind us of, in the spirit of contemporary thinkers like Alasdair MacIntyre, is that we need not revel in this fragmentation, in thisdistance from the body and the senses—we ought to try to recover embodiment and community while holding on to a cultivated and limited reason. Suma Rajiva Skidmore College JANET GLEESON. Millionaire: The Philanderer , Gambler, and Duelist Who Invented Modern Finance. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999. Pp. 304. $24. The subtitle may exaggerate, but the amazing life of John Law is a story worth telling. Though derivative, Ms.Gleeson’s account ought to give popular history a good name, yet for all her lively writing, Law’s intriguing personality still seems ratherabstract,probablybecausesomuch of the evidence is derived from thirdparty observations. Some of his letters survive. Those to his common-law wife are surprisingly touching, but it was the way his deals and schemes worked, not the papers recording them, that reveal the machinations of an arrogantgamblerwho took on the French financial system and imposed paper money on a reluctant public . Along with paper money, chimerical riches were promised by his creation, the Mississippi Company. Once Law had started the inflation roundabout, he could not jump off it without breaking his neck. Lionized as long as stock pricesremained high, reviled of course when they crashed, Law—watched carefully from London all the while—was even held responsible for the South Sea Bubble. You cannot help sympathizing with a man haunted and hunted for years by a murder charge after he won a duel in England . Law seemed to think honesty would pay, which eventually it did in a twisted way. He was not exactly a killer on the run, but a man who did not belong in the company of more powerful men. As would happen frequently, he had misplaced his trust in others. Although Ms. Gleeson depends too often on statements such as ‘‘There had always been a daredevil strand to his personality,’’ unsupported by evidence, by the end of her story of Law’s hounding, he has become sympathetic for his apparently genuine philanthropic desire. A trained art historian, Ms. Gleeson describes portraits of Law; it is a shame that she or her publisher can find room to reproduce only one engraving. The vernacular is comfortably used when she accounts for Law’s taste in his buying of paintings and books as investments. Straining to connect Law to the modern world, she quotes the authority of Warren Buffett twice and claims that shopping malls, the euro, and the Internet stem directly from this Scottish adventurer with a gift for calculating probability.Scholars will continue to rely on Antoin Murphy, the more antiquated Charles Mackay,and the many contemporaries, Defoe included , who described themania, butasageneral survey of Law’s career, this is the book. RICHARD WASWO. The Founding Legend of Western Civilization: From Virgil to Vietnam. Dartmouth: New England, 1997. Pp. xviii ⫹ 366. $29.95. This book starts innocuously enough. ‘‘Our’’ founding myth, propagated by Virgil’s Aeneid and supported by his Georgics and Eclogues, involves transport to a new place. The basisofthis‘‘plot of displacement’’ is that ‘‘we’’ are unlike ‘‘primitive’’ peoples. By the time Mr. Waswo is done, he has indicted everything Western imperialism standsfor,and 98 representative demons include Spenser, Pope, Conrad, and the World Bank. Unlike the founding myths of most other cultures, the naissance of any Western European power repeats the founding of Rome by Aeneas. Agriculture enters this pattern as a justification of what is civilized, although, as Mr. Waswo points out, civilization is, in effect, warfare. The ancient portrayal of civilization connecting agriculture and cities means thatthere is no place for ‘‘hunters, gatherers, and nomads’’—of course not, because they are the barbarians that ‘‘we’’ once were. This leads Western civilization to create itself in history and literature at the expense of others. Windsor-Forest is thus a celebration of ‘‘a national myth.’’ More startling, the poem ‘‘offers a virtual blueprint for both the theme and the outcome of Clarissa’’because Pope introduces the classical trope of Apollo chasing Daphne and the attendant idea that death is the consequence of possession. Mr. Waswo...