The Thirty-Third Canto continues both the overall theme of history and the narrower and recent topic of the earliest years of the United States.

It opens with a fragment of a letter from 1815 by “Quincey” on how, though he says it in a roundabout fashion, democracies and representative democracies can be just as despotic as a tyrannical king. Though it’s never said, I wonder whether “Quincey” isn’t the artistocratic and idealistic John Quincy Adams?

The whole thing consists of these incomplete fragments of letters and diaries, seeming to chronicle a democracy’s corruption by “land jobbers and stock jobbers,” as he once writes. Clearly, part of this is directed at the United States, though not exclusively, as Bonaparte is mentioned, and virtually any reference to Bonaparte must always, to me, seem to entail the idea of a democratic revolution betrayed (not that he was the only betrayer of the better angels of the French Revolution, of course).

Also, there is mention of reading Marx and Das Kapital and I always appreciate a good reference to Marx.