One doesn’t have to look far, even within the received canon of English literature, to find impatient dissent from the idea of the natural superiority of democratic government. Shakespeare found nothing good to be said for democracy or egalitarian impulses, trusting entirely to order and compassion to lubricate the joints of the state, even though he is the author, in “King Lear,” of the greatest of lines on the social perils of privilege: “Take physic, pomp, / Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel.” Dr. Johnson thought that democracy was obviously silly, and Dr. Johnson, let us remember, was a prescient, 1619 kind of guy, seeing the impending American Revolution as a slaveholders’-protection enterprise. (“How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”) It is not only possible to be an anti-liberal and not be reactionary but easily done.
These days, liberal, representative democracy—moribund in Russia, failing in Eastern Europe, sickened in Western Europe, and having come one marginally resolute Indiana politician away from failing here—seems in the gravest danger. Previously fringe views certainly find new forums, with monarchists speaking loudly, if a touch theatrically, but that is mostly strut and noise. What would a plausible alternative actually look like? “We’d all love to see the plan,” John Lennon sang sensibly about revolution.
Pupetta, who died last December at 86, may be the star but she is hardly the only engaging figure in this crisply written, dutifully researched book exploring the role of women in a sector of Italian society not noted for its embrace of a #MeToo ethos. Criminal groups — be it the Camorra, the Sicily-based Mafia, the Calabria-rooted ’Ndrangheta or newcomers like the Rome-focused Mafia Capitale and assorted Nigerian arrivals — hardly feel bound by Title IX imperatives. Still, Nadeau observes, women in an organization like the Camorra “are making far more progress climbing the ladder and being treated as equals than their law-abiding peers.”
Although she is not universally known to Americans, Marguerite Steinheil is a household name in France, the subject of books, plays and television specials — and with some reason. As Sarah Horowitz, a professor of history and the head of the Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies program at Washington and Lee University, recounts, Steinheil’s salon was adorned by the great eminences of the Third Republic, and among her lovers was the French president, Félix Faure.