Sage and Political Theory roundup

I haven't said anything in this space about recent developments at the journal Political Theory; by the time all the facts were in so that anything responsible could be said, there was nothing left to say. But it's worth noting that Inside Higher Ed has picked up on the story and provided an overview.

Update: The Chronicle, too. Therein a tangential comment I made elsewhere is deemed "provocative."

I'm going to live forever, part of a continuing series

Coffee, already thought to have a prophylactic effect against Alzheimer's, may actually partially reverse its effects, at the eminently moderate level of five cups per day.

Best college towns

Via Lee Siegelman: The top 5 college towns in North America.

Amherst
Berkeley
Montreal
Washington
Boston.

Montreal:

If you can handle the frigid winters, Montréal is a great place to be a college student. Located just seven hours from New York City, Montréal has the second highest number of post-secondary students in North America, making for ample opportunities to meet college students from all over the world studying at one of Montréal's two dozen institutions.

There are a few reasons Montréal trumps other North American cities in its college-student friendliness. First, studying in Montréal is a bargain. For Americans, tuition is significantly less than at other private colleges -- international students pay about $12,000 for tuition at McGill University, widely considered the "Harvard of Canada." Also, with a student ID, students can use Montreal's extensive public transportation system, the STM (La Société de transport de Montréal), at a 50 percent discount.

Second, there is really no city in the United States that so fluidly combines European charm with North American pragmatism. Because Montréal is a truly bilingual city, students will not need to enroll in French classes to learn the language. Students here are independent and do not confine themselves to their campuses; you'll see students shopping and clubbing on St. Catherine Street and sipping coffee in the Latin Quarter at all hours of the day.

Finally, Montréalers know how to throw a party. World-class jazz, film and comedy festivals and the only Grand Prix event in North America make four years in Montréal one hot experience.

Virtual housekeeping

I've done a round of cleanups on my home page, including links where appropriate to published versions of things that previously had links to SSRN drafts, complete citations, etc. Also tied 'em all up together in a single "recent papers" list, forgoing the annual sublists.

My homepage is, well, boring. I'm still basically writing the html I taught myself in January 1996; I've never acquired any knowledge of java or javascript of xml or (etc.), and I deleted the two pictures that used to be on the page. At the end of the day, I like text. I just wish I had a better eye for the presentation of text; I find my homepage intuitive but dull.

I'm aware that some friends and colleagues have fancy homepages. But it seems to me that the more bells and whistles it has, the harder it is to update regularly-- is that so? (Or is it just a matter of having appropriate software?)

The pages I know of that are both fancy and constantly updated are more of the promotional-site-for-one's-public-intellectual-career type than of the research-and-teaching-stuff type.

In comments, I encourage readers to identify particularly good examples of academics' homepages. Who's setting a high standard?

Fleischacker wins Gittler Award

Brian Leiter notes that Sam Fleischacker has been awarded the Joseph B. Gittler Prize from the APA for his superb On Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations: A Philosophical Companion (Princeton University Press). The prize is for "an outstanding scholarly contribution in the field of the philosophy of one or more of the social sciences."

This is one of my favorite books from the past several years, and I'm delighted to see it honored. This provides a good excuse to recommend it to all and sundry.

Visions of Canadian identity: 10 equal provinces, 33 million equal citizens, or multiple nations

Interesting poll here.

New arrivals for the reading list

Recently acquired:

Sonu Bedi,Rejecting Rights.

The language of rights is ubiquitous. It shapes the way we construct our debates over issues such as abortion, affirmative action and sexual freedom. This provocative new study challenges the very concept of rights, arguing that they jeopardize our liberty and undermine democratic debate. By re-conceptualizing our ideas about limited government, it suggests that we can limit the reasons or rationales on which the polity may act. Whereas we once used the language of rights to thwart democratic majorities, Bedi argues that we should now turn our attention to the democratic state's reason for acting. This will permit greater democratic flexibility and discretion while ensuring genuine liberty. Deftly employing political theory and constitutional law to state its case, the study radically rethinks the relationship between liberty and democracy, and will be essential reading for scholars and students of political and legal philosophy.

Josiah Ober, Democracy and Knowledge: Innovation and Learning in Classical Athens

When does democracy work well, and why? Is democracy the best form of government? These questions are of supreme importance today as the United States seeks to promote its democratic values abroad. Democracy and Knowledge is the first book to look to ancient Athens to explain how and why directly democratic government by the people produces wealth, power, and security.

Combining a history of Athens with contemporary theories of collective action and rational choice developed by economists and political scientists, Josiah Ober examines Athenian democracy's unique contribution to the ancient Greek city-state's remarkable success, and demonstrates the valuable lessons Athenian political practices hold for us today. He argues that the key to Athens's success lay in how the city-state managed and organized the aggregation and distribution of knowledge among its citizens. Ober explores the institutional contexts of democratic knowledge management, including the use of social networks for collecting information, publicity for building common knowledge, and open access for lowering transaction costs. He explains why a government's attempt to dam the flow of information makes democracy stumble. Democratic participation and deliberation consume state resources and social energy. Yet as Ober shows, the benefits of a well-designed democracy far outweigh its costs.

Understanding how democracy can lead to prosperity and security is among the most pressing political challenges of modern times. Democracy and Knowledge reveals how ancient Greek politics can help us transcend the democratic dilemmas that confront the world today.

The holiday season

I liked this series enough last year that I'm going to rerun it.


Bonne fete nationale!

And a good Jean-Baptiste. This kicks off the holiday season: Jean-Baptiste, Canada Day, and the Fourth of July in the space of 10 days (along with the Jazz Festival, of course). Viewing recommendations for the national holiday of Quebec: I am not a Canadian (if you don't know what it's a reference to, see here); and just to throw something more interesting and more francophone, if less directly thematic, into the mix, my favorite Montreal movie, Le Golem de Montreal.

Update: I seem to have forgotten to rerun it. Click on the "holiday season" tag to read last year's entries.

Obviously false dichotomies

One sees this kind of thing from time to time, and it baffles me.

“The issue of the burqa is not a religious issue; it is a question of freedom and of women’s dignity,” Mr. Sarkozy said. “The burqa is not a religious sign; it is a sign of the subjugation, of the submission of women.”

Why would one possibly think that either of those sentences contains two mutually-exclusive categories? What generates the idea that something cannot be both a religious symbol and a symbol of women's subjugation? Is it polyanna-ism about religion?

I'm not commenting here on the merits of Sarkozy's insistence that "the burqa is not welcome in France" (though I'll probably do so at some point). But the attempt here, I guess, to deny that there are any costs or trade-offs in banning it (if it's not a "religious issue," then there's no constitutional value to balance against the constitutional value of sex equality-- that kind of thing) seems to me pointlessly dishonest.

Update

There's sophistry aplenty in the following section, expanding on why a prohbition on the burka would be costless in terms of liberty:

Où en sommes-nous avec la liberté ? Qu'en avons-nous fait ?

La liberté, ce n'est pas le droit pour chacun de faire ce qu'il veut. Être libre, ce n'est pas vivre sans contrainte et sans règle. Quand il n'y a pas de règles, quand tous les coups sont permis, ce n'est pas la liberté qui triomphe, c'est la loi de la jungle, la loi du plus fort ou celle du plus malin.

C'est le débat que nous avons sur l'école : rendre service à nos enfants, c'est leur enseigner qu'il n'y a pas de liberté sans règle.

C'est le débat que nous avons sur l'économie, sur la finance, sur le capitalisme. Nous voyons bien que le capitalisme devient fou quand il n'y a plus de règles.

C'est le débat aussi que nous avons sur le droit d'auteur. Car enfin, comment pourrait-il y avoir dans notre société de zones de non-droit ? Comment peut-on réclamer en même temps que l'économie soit régulée et qu'Internet ne le soit pas ? Comment peut-on accepter que les règles qui s'imposent à toute la société ne s'imposent pas sur Internet ? En défendant le droit d'auteur, je ne défends pas seulement la création artistique, je défends aussi l'idée que je me fais d'une société de liberté, où la liberté de chacun est fondée sur le respect du droit des autres. C'est aussi l'avenir de notre culture que je défends. C'est l'avenir de la création. Voilà pourquoi j'irai jusqu'au bout. (Applaudissements.)

Le débat sur la liberté, c'est aussi le débat sur la sécurité et sur les prisons. Quelle est la liberté de celui qui a peur de sortir de chez lui ? Quelle est la liberté pour les victimes si leurs agresseurs ne sont pas punis ? Comment peut-on parler de justice quand 82 000 peines ne sont pas exécutées parce qu'il n'y a pas assez de places dans les prisons ?

So: imprisoning women who go out of the house fully covered prevents the law of the jungle; prisons are liberty; restrictions on capitalism are liberty; copyright restrictions are liberty. No rules can possibly restrict liberty, because liberty is not the absence of rules.

I suppose I should view it as ideologically useful to have the French economic model linked so closely to the French model of laicite, both in opposition to Anglo-Saxon liberalism. But it just makes me cranky.

Journal rankings

The 2008 ISI journal rankings are out. Impact factors for selected journals of interest around here:

APSR: 1.725
Journal of Politics: 1.685
Philosophy & Public Affairs: 1.500
Ethics: 1.053
Journal of Political Philosophy: .902
Political Studies .625
Political Theory .403

Coverage remains bizarrely spotty in the rankings, and many journals covered by ISI's citation indices aren't included. History of Political Thought, European Journal of Political Theory, Review of Politics, Journal of the History of Ideas, and Polity are among the journals not listed in the rankings, while Critical Review, the Indpendent Review, the Nation, Commentary, Dissent, and the New Republic all show up. (Remember, this is supposed to be a list of scholarly journals.)

The APSR is ranked *tenth* in political science by 2008 impact factor. Five-year impact factor and the new Article Influence Score both give the expected result that the APSR is ranked first. Eyeballing the lists, it looks to me as if the 5-year IF, the AIS, and my intuitions all line up in most cases, while the one-year IF has some weird anomalies.

Academic freedom, SSHRC, and York U conference on Israel and Palestine

Les Green has been doing yeoman's work at keeping information flowing about the genuine threat to academic freedom posed by Minister of Science Gary Goodyear's intervention in the SSHRC peer-reviewed grant-making procedure. Academics who are on facebook, please come join the group he's formed and read and circulate the open letter from York faculty, also quoted below.

Sometimes there's a tendency to cry "academic freedom" only when one's own ox is being gored-- especially on Israel/ Palestine questions. If I were to attend the conference at York, I'm pretty sure that I'd be annoyed-to-outraged by a great deal of what I'd hear. And lots of invocations of academic freedom these days are just complaints that one is being criticized.

But politicized interference in what are supposed to be arm's-length impartial systems of peer review-- that's an absolutely clear violation of academic freedom. SSHRC has already compromised itself by agreeing to the extraordinary review of the grant at ministerial request; it needs to not only maintain the funding but also make a strong statement about the inappropriateness of political intervention in peer review.

Anyway, please come join the facebook group both to follow the news and to convey the support of the academic community for the York faculty who are taking the lead in this fight.

Open Letter to SSHRC President from Faculty members of Osgoode Hall Law School

June 14, 2009

AN OPEN LETTER FROM MEMBERS OF THE FACULTY OF
OSGOODE HALL LAW SCHOOL AT YORK UNIVERSITY

Dr. Chad Gaffield
President
Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council
350 Albert Street, P.O. Box 1610
Ottawa, Ontario, K1P 6G4

Dear Dr. Gaffield:

Re: Review of SSHRC Funding for Conference at York University: “Israel/Palestine: Mapping Models of Statehood and Paths to Peace”

We are writing as members of the faculty of Osgoode Hall Law School at York University to express our extreme dismay that SSHRC appears to be acceding to political pressure by revisiting its decision to fund the above-noted academic conference.

As you know, two of our esteemed colleagues, Professors Susan Drummond and Bruce Ryder, have taken a lead role in planning this event and we write in part to support them and their co-organizers, Professor Sharry Aiken and PhD Candidate Mazen Masri. However this issue has grown far beyond the need to support individual colleagues. Your decision as SSHRC President to require a special pre-conference accounting from the conference organizers, outside the normal post-conference reporting procedures for conference grants, raises the much larger question of your agency’s integrity as a funder and promoter of independent university-based research in Canada.

As a group we have extensive experience with the organization of academic conferences and with SSHRC granting procedures. We believe there is no basis at all for the suggestion that “major changes” were made to the plan for this conference after the grant application had been peer reviewed and funding granted. Nor do we believe that you could
possibly see any basis for this suggestion. Rather, it appears that the special accounting was demanded of our colleagues in direct response to the unprecedented and entirely inappropriate political intervention of Minister Goodyear.

We believe that SSHRC made a serious error in acceding to political interference in this manner. Whether or not SSHRC ultimately submits to the demand for a new peer review that better meets the Minister’s political ends, and whether or not the funding for this conference is ultimately jeopardized, we fear that SSHRC has already compromised the autonomy of academic research in this country. By intruding into the planning of an academic event after a funding decision has been made, SSHRC’s actions are likely to have a most unfortunate chilling effect on academics considering the exploration of controversial or unpopular topics. In addition, by casting doubt on the integrity of its own procedures, SSHRC has empowered those who would devalue academic research and discourse by insisting that academic freedom be reserved only for those who happen to share their point of view.

We hope that SSHRC will very shortly stand up to defend its own granting procedures and the values of academic excellence and autonomy they are designed to protect.

Sincerely,

Harry W. Arthurs, Professor Emeritus, Former Dean, Former President

Margaret E. Beare, Professor

Neil Brooks, Professor

Ruth Buchanan, Associate Professor

Jamie B. Cameron, Professor

Mary G. Condon, Professor

Carys J. Craig, Associate Professor

Giuseppina D’Agostino, Assistant Professor

Paul D. Emond, Associate Professor

Trevor C.W. Farrow, Associate Professor

Simon R. Fodden, Professor Emeritus

Shelley A.M. Gavigan, Professor

Joan M. Gilmour, Associate Professor

Leslie Green, Professor

Richard Haigh, Visiting Professor

Balfour J. Halévy, Professor Emeritus

Doug Hay, Professor

Allan C. Hutchinson, Distinguished Research Professor

Shin Imai, Associate Professor

Shelley Kierstead, Assistant Professor

Sonia Lawrence, Associate Professor

Jinyan Li, Professor

Michael Mandel, Professor

Ikechi Mgbeoji, Associate Professor

Louis Mirando, Chief Law Librarian

Janet Mosher, Associate Professor and Associate Dean

Mary Jane Mossman, Professor of Law (sign. after initial release)

Roxanne Mykitiuk, Associate Professor

Obiora Chinedu Okafor, Professor

Lisa Philipps, Associate Professor

Marilyn L. Pilkington, Associate Professor and Former Dean

Poonam Puri, Associate Professor

Sean Rehaag, Assistant Professor

Benjamin J. Richardson, Professor

Brian Slattery, Professor

Sara Slinn, Assistant Professor

James Stribopoulos, Associate Professor

Craig M. Scott, Professor

Kate Sutherland, Associate Professor

François Tanguay-Renaud, Assistant Professor

Eric M. Tucker, Professor

Gus Van Harten, Assistant Professor

Robert S. Wai, Associate Professor

Garry D. Watson, Professor

Cynthia Williams, Osler Chair in Business Law

Stepan Wood, Associate Professor

Alan N. Young, Associate Professor

Peer Zumbansen, Canada Research Chair & Associate Dean (Research, Graduate Studies and Institutional Relations)

Cc:
Bruce B. Ryder, Associate Professor, Osgoode Hall Law School
Susan G. Drummond, Associate Professor, Osgoode Hall Law School
Sharry J. Aiken, Assistant Professor, Faculty of Law, Queen’s University
Mazen Masri, Ph.D. candidate, Osgoode Hall Law School
Mamdouh Shoukri, President, York University
Stan Shapson, Vice-President (Research & Innovation), York University
Patrick Monahan, Dean of Law and VPA-Elect, York University
Mr. J. Craig McNaughton, Senior Program Officer Strategic Grants and joint Initiatives, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council
James L. Turk, Executive Director, Canadian Association of University Teachers
The Hon. Gary Goodyear, Minister of State (Science & Technology)
The Rt. Hon. Stephen Harper, Prime Minister of Canada
Dr. Marc Garneau, Liberal Critic for Industry, Science and Technology
Mr. Jim Maloway, NDP Critic for Science and Technology
M Robert Vincent, Bloc Critic for Science and Technology

Biblio-summertime

Recent acquisitions now added to the reading list:

Andrew March, Islam and Liberal Citizenship The Search for an Overlapping Consensus

Some argue that Muslims have no tradition of separation of church and state and therefore can't participate in secular, pluralist society. At the other extreme, some Muslims argue that it is the duty of all believers to resist western forms of government and to impose Islamic law. Andrew F. March demonstrates that there are very strong and authentically Islamic arguments for accepting the demands of citizenship in a liberal democracy, many of them found even in medieval works of Islamic jurisprudence. In fact, he shows, it is precisely the fact that Rawlsian political liberalism makes no claims to metaphysical truth that makes it appealing to Muslims.

Daniel Nexon, The Struggle for Power in Early Modern Europe: Religious Conflict, Dynastic Empires, and International Change

Scholars have long argued over whether the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, which ended more than a century of religious conflict arising from the Protestant Reformations, inaugurated the modern sovereign-state system. But they largely ignore a more fundamental question: why did the emergence of new forms of religious heterodoxy during the Reformations spark such violent upheaval and nearly topple the old political order? In this book, Daniel Nexon demonstrates that the answer lies in understanding how the mobilization of transnational religious movements intersects with--and can destabilize--imperial forms of rule.

Taking a fresh look at the pivotal events of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries--including the Schmalkaldic War, the Dutch Revolt, and the Thirty Years' War--Nexon argues that early modern "composite" political communities had more in common with empires than with modern states, and introduces a theory of imperial dynamics that explains how religious movements altered Europe's balance of power. He shows how the Reformations gave rise to crosscutting religious networks that undermined the ability of early modern European rulers to divide and contain local resistance to their authority. In doing so, the Reformations produced a series of crises in the European order and crippled the Habsburg bid for hegemony.

Nexon's account of these processes provides a theoretical and analytic framework that not only challenges the way international relations scholars think about state formation and international change, but enables us to better understand global politics today.

Anna Stilz, Liberal Loyalty: Freedom, Obligation, and the State

Many political theorists today deny that citizenship can be defended on liberal grounds alone. Cosmopolitans claim that loyalty to a particular state is incompatible with universal liberal principles, which hold that we have equal duties of justice to persons everywhere, while nationalist theorists justify civic obligations only by reaching beyond liberal principles and invoking the importance of national culture. In Liberal Loyalty, Anna Stilz challenges both views by defending a distinctively liberal understanding of citizenship.

Drawing on Kant, Rousseau, and Habermas, Stilz argues that we owe civic obligations to the state if it is sufficiently just, and that constitutionally enshrined principles of justice in themselves--rather than territory, common language, or shared culture--are grounds for obedience to our particular state and for democratic solidarity with our fellow citizens. She demonstrates that specifying what freedom and equality mean among a particular people requires their democratic participation together as a group. Justice, therefore, depends on the authority of the democratic state because there is no way equal freedom can be defined or guaranteed without it. Yet, as Stilz shows, this does not mean that each of us should entertain some vague loyalty to democracy in general. Citizens are politically obligated to their own state and to each other, because within their particular democracy they define and ultimately guarantee their own civil rights.

Liberal Loyalty is a persuasive defense of citizenship on purely liberal grounds.

Avery Kolers, Land, Conflict, and Justice: A Political Theory of Territory

Territorial disputes have defined modern politics, but political theorists and philosophers have said little about how to resolve such disputes fairly. Is it even possible to do so? If historical attachments or divine promises are decisive, it may not be. More significant than these largely subjective claims are the ways in which people interact with land over time. Building from this insight, Avery Kolers re-evaluates existing political theories and develops an attractive alternative. He presents a novel link between political legitimacy and environmental stewardship, and applies these new ideas in an extended and balanced discussion of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. The result is the first systematic normative theory of territory, and an impressive example of applied philosophy. In addition to political theorists and philosophers, scholars and students of sociology, international relations, and human geography will find this book rewarding, as will anyone with wider interests in territory and justice.

Plus the next batch of planned purchases and additions to the reading list:

Cary Nederman, Lineages of European Political Thought: Explorations Along the Medieval/Modern Divide from John of Salisbury to Hegel

Elisabeth Ellis, Provisional Politics: Kantian Arguments in Policy Context

Alan Houston, Benjamin Franklin and the Politics of Improvement

Andrew Jainchill, Reimagining Politics after the Terror: The Republican Origins of French Liberalism

Helena Rosenblatt, Liberal Values: Benjamin Constant and the Politics of Religion

Julian Franklin, Jean Bodin and the Rise of Absolutist Theory

Those were the days

Matt Yglesias points to this entertaining clip of a c. 1991 CBC TV news report on the amazing new phenomenon of Internet.

I love that c. 2:18, we switch directly from a shot of the names of usenet groups to a paean to the no-cursing, no-swearing, no-putdowns, no-personal-attacks norms of Internet from the guy who looks like Steve Gutenberg. Yes, it's true that usenet groups did have norms, and norm-enforcement. But they sure as heck also had flamewars and viciousness-- and indeed had flamewars and viciousness about what the norms were and who had authority to enforce them. As one would expect, the more intimate and specialized the group, and the more the participants had real-world reasons to care about one another's opinions, the more civilized things were. High-traffic groups with regular influxes of newbies (e.g. every September when a new generation of college freshmen got internet access), or groups about controversial topics like politics or religion, or fandom groups where geek passions ran high-- all of these were prone to, well what we now recognize as normal internet behavior.

It was only a couple of months after I first encountered Mosaic in 1993 that I met a guy who told me about the huge quantity of porn he'd downloaded from online sources. (This conversation was in front of his sister, which I found especially odd.) I think he was spending his time on porn BBS sites, not on the newly-html'ed World Wide Web, but it did serve as an early hint to me that adding pictures and graphics to the existing online universe of words wasn't necessarily going to improve the world.

Also chez Yglesias: the safety of bike-riding in cities goes up as the number of riders goes up. I think that the terrific new bixi program in Montreal has already noticeably increased traffic in the city's bike lines-- and that drivers are learning to respond appropriately, and remembering that the bike lanes exist.

Good for Obama

From the Cairo address:

Likewise, it is important for Western countries to avoid impeding Muslim citizens from practicing religion as they see fit – for instance, by dictating what clothes a Muslim woman should wear. We cannot disguise hostility towards any religion behind the pretence of liberalism.
[...]

The sixth issue that I want to address is women's rights.

I know there is debate about this issue. I reject the view of some in the West that a woman who chooses to cover her hair is somehow less equal, but I do believe that a woman who is denied an education is denied equality. And it is no coincidence that countries where women are well-educated are far more likely to be prosperous.

It's an extraordinary speech overall, hitting lots of very important themes and ideas. I started off a little annoyed, because the only terrorist attack mentioned is 9/11 and the reaction to it is made to seem like a purely American one. I understand that it's vital to avoid describing a civilizational war, and that this generates an impulse to compartmentalize 9/11. Making 9/11 a localized security threat against the United States, and the response to it a localized war in Afghanistan, is a way of forestalling Bush-era maximalism.

But it also makes the security account seem parochial: the U.S. responded to Al Qaeda's attacks on New York and Washington, and that's the extent of the American interest. I don't want to see the deaths in Madrid, London, Bali, Casablanca, Jakarta, Riyadh, and Istanbul disappear from our historical memory of 9/11 and its aftermath. And invoking them doesn't have to mean describing a global civilizational struggle-- indeed it allows one to emphasize that much of Al Qaeda's violence is committed against targets within Muslim countries. Through Obama's address, 9/11 is mentioned several times, and other attacks are only alluded to.

But that's my only substantial objection to a very important, and very effective, speech. And I was of course especially glad to see the passages with which I began, and don't at all mind the implied swipe at France and Turkey. The American doctrine of religious freedom does have a distinct position from the Jacobin doctrine of laicite, and it's worthwhile to stress the implication for Muslim liberty in America.

Odd search that brought someone here

similarities and differences in liberal thought by bill, rawls and barry

Who, I wonder, is "bill"?

Pronunciation

L'affaire Sotomayor has clearly given me fodder for the next round of revisions on Multicultural Manners. It's just the right kind of case; there's lots of local variation in what's reasonable (anglophones in China and Chinese in English-speaking countries-- maybe it's true of westerners/ Europeans in general, I just don't know-- routinely adopt new locally-appropriate names rather than either put up with hearing their name mangled all the time or trying to force locals to wrap their mouths around unfamiliar sounds, but I don't think this is widespread in other cases); neither an ironclad rule of "always pronounce the name the way it was pronounced in its original language" or "always localize pronunciation" seems even plausible, much less reasonable; there will be questions of local respect in deciding which languages are so homegrown that keeping the original pronunciation is tied up with questions of political equality (Puerto Rico is part of the United States, and it's more problematic to exotify Spanish in that "we can't be expected to talk furriner talk!" way than it would be with, say, Russian); and the question exists in that same interpersonal space between rights-bearers, especially acute in crowded multiethnic cities, that is the focus of the paper. Isolated Amish folks don't often run into the problem of how outsiders pronounce their names, and probably don't care much.

Language cases get short shrift in the paper as it is, even though I knew they were relevant, as I got interested in the idea that seeing-and-being-seen united a whole bunch of cases of interest. But hearing-and-being-heard is structurally similar.

Also related: the inconsistent mess of customs about how to pronounce place-names (cf the by-now-famous Obama shift from an Anglicized "Afghanistan" to a less-Anglicized "Pakistan" within the same set of remarks), and whether to translate words within place names. There's no possibility of consistency here; only a pretentious nitwit walks around saying "Paree" in English for "Paris," but only a clod would say "San Joo-an" or "Saint John" for "San Juan." So we're inevitably in the muddled middle. Someone who says "Me-hico" in English sounds ridiculous to me. But I understand that there's a generation of English speakers to whom my "Bay-jing" instead of Peking sounds just as absurd. And I say Bay-jing with very English sounds; it's no close approximation of how the word sounds in Mandarin.

But being stuck in the muddled middle is not the same as denying that their are locally-right and locally-wrong answers, things that are polite and things that are otherwise.

Huh?

"Sotomayor’s Rulings Are Exhaustive but Often Narrow ">, NYT, Adam Liptak:

Judge Sotomayor’s six years on the trial court and more than a decade on the Second Circuit probably confirmed those intuitions, in part because of the idiosyncratic dockets of the federal courts in New York. They hear many important cases involving business, securities, employment, white-collar crime and immigration. But they do not regularly confront the great issues of the day.

Because everyone knows that securities law is boring local concern of Manhattanites and, on a national level, pretty trivial; that's been one of the great lessons of the last year, right? And the prosecution of (real or alleged) white-collar crime on Wall Street has sure never been newsworthy. And there's nothing morally weighty in immigration law, or anything. Not like the exciting Supreme Court where one gets to decide whether a requirement that strippers wear pasties infringes on the right of free speech.

What on earth can this mean-- that only constitutional law offers Great Issues? That only abortion and gay marriage count? Note: speculation on my part; he doesn't name those issues. I just don't know how one can write that list of things the Second Circuit's docket centers on and then dismiss it in the next sentence.

Now available: Toward a Humanist Justice

Toward a Humanist Justice: The Political Philosophy of Susan Moller Okin, edited by Debra Satz and Rob Reich.

The late Susan Moller Okin was a leading political theorist whose scholarship integrated political philosophy and issues of gender, the family, and culture. Okin argued that liberalism, properly understood as a theory opposed to social hierarchies and supportive of individual freedom and equality, provided the tools for criticizing the substantial and systematic inequalities between men and women. Her thought was deeply informed by a feminist view that theories of justice must apply equally to women as men, and she was deeply engaged in showing how many past and present political theories failed to do this. She sought to rehabilitate political theories--particularly that of liberal egalitarianism, in such a way as to accommodate the equality of the sexes, and with an eye toward improving the condition of women and families in a world of massive gender inequalities. In her lifetime Okin was widely respected as a scholar whose engagement went well beyond the world of theory, and her premature death in 2004 was considered by many a major blow to progressive political thought and women's interests around the world.

This volume stems from a conference on Okin, and contains articles by some of the top feminist and political philosophers working today. They are organized around a set of themes central to Okin's work, namely liberal theory, gender and the family, feminist and cultural differences, and global justice. Included are major figures such as Joshua Cohen, David Miller, Cass Sunstein, Alison Jaggar, and Iris Marion Young, among others. Their aim is not to celebrate Okin's work, but to constructively engage with it and further its goals.

Table of Contents
Introduction: Toward a Humanist Justice , Debra Satz, (Stanford University) and Rob Reich, (Stanford University)

PART 1: Rethinking Political Theory

1. Okin's Liberal Feminism as a Radical Political Theory , Nancy Rosenblum, (Harvard University)
2. Justice and Gender: Reflections on Susan Moller Okin , Joshua Cohen, (Stanford University)
3. Okin's Contributions to the Study Of Gender in Political Theory , Elizabeth Wingrove, (University of Michigan)
4. Can Feminism be Liberated from Governmentalism? , John Tomasi, (Brown University)

PART II: Gender and the Family

5. Equality of Opportunity and the Family , David Miller, (Oxford University)
6. "No More Relevance than One's Eye Color": Justice and Okin's Genderless Society , Molly Lynn Shanley, (Vassar College)
7. On the Tension Between Sex Equality and Religious Freedom , Cass Sunstein, (University of Chicago)

PART III: Feminism and Cultural Diversity

8. From Liberal to Post-Colonial to Multicultural Feminism: Competing Approaches to the study of Gender, Citizenship and Fate of Religious Arbitration , Ayelet Shachar, (University of Toronto)
9. Okin and the Challenge of Essentialism , Alison Jaggar, (University of Colorado at Boulder)
10. The Dilemma of a Dutiful Daughter: Love and Freedom in the Thought of Kartini , Chandran Kukathas, (London School of Economics)

PART IV: Development and Gender

11. Reinventing Globalization to Reduce Gender Inequality , Robert Keohane, (Princeton University)
12. The Gendered Cycle of Vulnerability in the Less Developed World , Iris Marion Young, (University of Chicago)

That last chapter will be one of the final pieces by Iris Young to see print.

Kymlicka interviewed about Canadian multiculturalism...

in the Globe and Mail. Includes some discussion of the Tamil community's distinctive political profile, as well as discussions about the Canadian high-skill immigration model.

I Can't Quite Believe My Eyes

From the AP and currently appearing on the NYT front page: Church of Scotland Votes to Appoint Gay Minister

The Church of Scotland has voted in favor of appointing an openly gay minister -- the latest case involving sexuality to create a division in the Anglican Communion.

[...]

The case has divided Scottish religious leaders and follows tensions within the worldwide 77 million-member Anglican Communion. About 900 elders and ministers took part in a debate on Rennie's case, but many chose to abstain from casting a vote.

Anglicans have conducted lengthy debate over sexuality issues since the Episcopal Church -- the Anglican body in the U.S. -- consecrated the first openly gay bishop, V. Gene Robinson of New Hampshire in 2003.

Emphasis added.

It is a matter of some considerable historical importance that the Church of Scotland is not an Anglican church or part of the Anglican Communion. There is a church in Scotland that is part of the Communion, the Scottish Episcopal Church, but this is not that; this is the much larger, and official, Church of Scotland. A reporter who lacked any knowledge of the history, or of Scotland, but who knew a little bit about religion, might have noticed that the decisionmaking structure involving "about 900 elders and ministers" judging a minister didn't seem very much like that involved in confirming Robinson's appointment as bishop, insofar as it lacked a House of Bishops. Decisionmaking by "ministers and elders" is an institutional form distinctively associated with Presbyterianism ("presbyter" = "elder"). Episcopal churches have bishops ("episcopos" = "bishop.") The Church of Scotland is Presbyterian. Anglican Churches are Episcopal.

Pluralism and civicness

I'm going to past here something that could have been a comment on this post of Russell Arben Fox's. But it ends up being my own rant about the idea of civil religion more than an engagement with Russell's own arguments-- I'm interested in using one paragraph of his as a point of departure, while recognizing that he goes from it to other ideas to which my comments below aren't really germane. And that gives me the excuse to get a new substantive post up on this site!

Russell is investigating the potential contours of an era-appropriate civil religion.

But rather than picking apart different aspects of the thread, I want to focus on [Damon Linker's] original claim: namely, that with the fortunate passing of the Bush administration's attempt to instantiate a more or less "public orthodoxy" of a particular evangelical-Catholic persuasion, and with the tremendous unlikelihood of any kind of liberal mainline Protestantism regaining its hold upon America's character, what then will be our civil religion? This, of course, is really a two-part question: first, do we need one, and two, if we do, what should it be? My answer to the first part is, very simply, yes, because you can't not have one; religious establishments--defining the term fairly broadly, of course--our an inevitability in democratic societies, because people the great bulk of human beings bring religion with them wherever they go, and so long as you allow the unwashed masses to occasionally vote and even run for office--that is, so long as you actually have some elements of democracy--then you're going to have majorities looking to order their communities along the lines of their beliefs, and so some kind of "civil" belief ought to emerge and be established so as to provide such majorities with both guidelines and boundaries.

Note: he asks "do we need one?" and answers "yes, because you can't not have one."

But it seems to me that there's important omitted emphasis: one might ask "do we need one?" And the response "yes, because you can't not have one" seems a little more suspect when phrased that way.

Russell notes that we will inevitably have "majorities looking to order their communities along the lines of their beliefs." Sure. But "majorities" and "communities" are both plural nouns; and minorities will try to do the same thing, as well. The national unity that "civil religion" arguments aspire to seems to me illusory.

For the current era, Russell notes the likely triumph of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism over the conservative evangelical-Catholic fusion. But the latter cluster of beliefs doesn't thereby disappear. It's not held a Rousseauian minority that is at all likely to think "the fact that we were outvoted shows that we were wrong." But that's just what Rousseau thought minorities were like in a well-ordered society. And a Rousseauian civil religion is one with boundaries between the permissible and the impermissible-- between, in the local context, religious beliefs that are American and those that are un-American.

Moralistic Therapeutic Deism may be one of two things going forward. One, it may be the language that state officials are permitted to use in talking about religion in public. Two, it may be the de facto religion of a majority of northern whites. I can't see anything more than those that it could possibly be. To name only the two biggest outlier groups: The black church rests on beliefs and languages that are incompatible with it; neither jeremiad nor prophecy sits at all comfortably with this other thing that sits halfway between Episcopalianism-lite and Unitarianism. The white southern evangelicals, charismatics, and fundamentalists (overlapping, not identical, groups) who made up the core constituency of the Republican civil religion (Catholics were well-represented among its intellectual class but not its voting class) aren't going anywhere, and aren't going to be persuaded to join the MTD civil religion. They never have been; they might withdraw from politics as they did post-Scopes, but that only makes them a disaffected, partly-seceded internal minority, not part of the hoped-for consensus.

And if I'm right that MTD can't be a consensus set of actual substantive religious commitments, then it also can't be a permanent set of parameters or guidelines around public religiosity. Rejecting MTD isn't un-American, and won't become un-American. When the electoral tide turns again, MTD's conservative rival will again look like the dominant expression of white Christianity. And, again, it will be no more than that.

There are a variety of different ways of political-religious being in a religiously plural society. The attempt to have a civil religion, whatever else it means, is typically an attempt to willfully deny that fact, or to make it cease to be true through especially coercive denials that it is true. Consider one of my betes noirs: the Pledge of Allegiance.

The Pledge is perhaps the apex of American civil religiosity. It states a public creed, one that eventually (though not originally) incorporated God, one that is recited ritualistically like the Lord's Prayer in front of an idol fetish golden calf object of veneration. It was the creation of the nationalist Protestant socialist Francis Bellamy, at a moment of very high immigration from southern and eastern Europe-- and very high native anxiety about that. It was also written within living memory of the Civil War. "One nation, indivisible" was not neutral consensus talk! The Pledge insisted that Lost Causers were un-American, as were the ultramontanist immigrant believers in post-First Vatican Catholicism (whose allegiance couldn't be pledged in the same way, or so it was thought-- foreign princes and potentates and all). It was an episode in a particularly ugly era in American nationalism-- the era of the Spanish-American War, allotment and a new level of brutal assimilationism directed at Indians, the coerced 1890 Declaration from the Mormons and the concomitant Late Church of LDS vs US, which held that Congress could dissolve the Mormon Church and confiscate its assets (not merely criminalize polygamy), the Chinese Exclusion Act, and all of the well-known ideological panic about southern and eastern European immigrants. I think it's important that we remember the Pledge as part of that era, and as expressing the same determination to coerce one American identity.

The Pledge was Liberty Cabbage for the previous generation-- an attempt to simultaneously claim a greater national unity than actually existed and to bring it into being by casting dissidents beyond the pale. But the substantive pluralism and disagreements remained. And the boundaries of the pale were only as stable as a victorious electoral coalition.

Yes, free persons organizing their lives democratically will do so in ways that are informed by their religious commitments-- no doubt to a degree that I as a nonbeliever find unpalatable. But they will do so according to their various religious commitments. Sometimes some of them will say that their cluster of political-religious views represent the unified view of a nation; but their saying it doesn't make it so. And so I think Russell's wrong to say that we must have a civil religion, because we will have a civil religion-- where a is a singular article. We have religions, and hence in a democratic society we will have politicized religions, and religiously-infused political movements, and local religious minorities of varying stripes. By saying that I don't mean to say that the story ends there; I'm all for constitutional constraints on the ways and degree to which religion can legitimately infuse politics. But I don't think there's some plausible future in which those constitutional constraints become a new consensus religion that trumps the religious pluralism of the society, and I oppose dressing up my understanding of the appropriate constraints in nationalist-religious garb. And I don't think that the attempt to do so-- the attempt to marry the attenuated religiosity of some northern whites to a vision of the American constitutional order-- will do much of anything to prevent the next turning of the religious-political wheel.

Steve's place

My colleague Steve Saideman is having his new-blogger burst of ideas and posts. (By contrast: I've had one post in the last month that included even a single paragraph-long thought. It's been mostly link-and-quote posts or conference announcements or book announcements or coffee jokes around here for quite a while now.) Go have a look.

Someone's probably noted this before, but...

isn't there something odd in the party of "A Choice, Not An Echo" embracing the identity of "dittoheads"?

Multicultural Manners

I've posted a new paper on SSRN: Multicultural Manners. It's my first real paper about Montreal. It's also a bit earlier of a draft than I usually post, so comments would be especially welcome.

Audio of conference on Bouchard-Taylor report

The GRIPP conference on the Bouchard-Taylor report blogged about here can now be listened to online here.