Jacob T. Levy

2012-01-16T07:01:00.003-06:00

Hither and yon, England edition

Wednesday, January 18: LSE political and legal theory workshop, 5 pm, "Contra Politanism"
Friday, January 20: Southampton political theory workshop, "Contra Politanism," 2 pm
Monday, January 23: Nuffield College Oxford political theory workshop, 2:15 pm, "Rationalism, Pluralism, and Freedom"
Tuesday January 24: Institute for Economic Affairs, "Rationalism and Pluralism," 6:30 pm
Wednesday January 25, Queen Mary, University of London political theory workshop, "Rationalism, Pluralism, and Freedom," 4.30pm, Laws 1.19

2012-01-08T14:30:00.002-06:00

Passage of the day

From Jeremy Jennings' magisterial Revolution and the Republic, A History of Political Thought in France since the eighteenth century, pp 410-11:

"[W]e might turn our attention to Charles Fourier's Theorie des Quatre Mouvements, first published in 1808. With its accounts of copulating planets, the sea tasting of lemonade, and the nine degrees of cuckoldry, this is undoubtedly one of the strangest books ever written... There is no need to analyse Fourier's taxonomy of what he took to be our 'luxurious,' 'affective,' and 'distributive' passions, nor to dissect his classification fo the 810 personality types which derived from it: the point was that Fourier believed that it was a mistake to repress the passions. This explains why he allotted such a central place to 'amorous freedom' and what he termed 'combined gastronomy.' If, as Fourier believed, sensual pleasure was the primary and immutable source of human activity, the trick was to so arrange society that it should be maximized. Exquisite food and a rich diet of sexual partners would secure social harmony."

2012-01-08T06:49:00.000-06:00

The MHERC Postdoctoral Fellowship in Health Equity Research
2012 Call for Applications

The Montreal Health Equity Research Consortium (MHERC) is seeking to appoint up to four post-doctoral fellows doing research related to health equity and the social determinants of health (SDH). Applications on any dimension of this general theme will be considered, but the following areas are of particular interest:

The epistemological, conceptual, and ethical foundations of health equity and SDH.
Conceptual and practical problems raised by the measurement of health inequalities and SDH.
Experimental (e.g. cognitive psychology, behavioral economics) approaches to decision-making and health policy development.
Case studies in the analysis of health equity or SDH.

The duration of the award is 12 months, renewable for a second year, commencing on September 1, 2012. The value of each award will be CA$40,000. Fellows will be in residence at the Université de Montréal or McGill University in Montreal.

Applicants should have at the time of award completed a PhD in a relevant discipline including, but not restricted to, philosophy, cognitive psychology, epidemiology, health economics, and sociology. Applicants may not have received their PhDs more than 5 years before the beginning of the fellowship.

MHERC is a collaboration between the MEDEC Lab (http://www.medeclab.net/) at McGill University, and the Centre de recherche en éthique de l’Université de Montréal (CRÉUM), under the direction of Principal Investigators Daniel Weinstock (Université de Montréal) and Nicholas King (McGill University). Funded by a Canadian Institutes of Health Research Programmatic Grant on Health and Health Equity, the project is comprised of a multidisciplinary team of researchers conducting research in philosophy, epidemiology, sociology, and cognitive psychology.

Successful applicants will be provided with office space in one of the two participating research centers associated with the project, and will be expected to participate in all of MHERC’s activities.

Applications should be written in English, and include a cover letter describing the candidate’s background, qualifications, and research interests; a complete Curriculum Vitae; a writing sample; and the names of three referees. Applications should be sent to Pierre-Yves Néron at py.neron@gmail.com.

2011-12-12T14:06:00.003-06:00

International Conference on the Work of Charles Taylor on the occasion of his 80th birthday/ Colloque international en l’honneur de Charles Taylor à l’occasion de son 80ième anniversaire

March 29-31 2012, Musée des beaux-arts, Montréal

A conference of the Groupe de Recherche Interuniversitaire en Philosophie Politique [GRIPP] de Montréal, Centre de Recherche en Éthique de l’Université de Montréal (CRÉUM) and McGill University’s Research Group on Constitutional Studies [RGCS].

This conference will feature two and a half days of papers engaging with the many various themes in Charles Taylor's uniquely wide-ranging academic work, including agency, philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, Hegel, political theory, modernity, Canada, and secularism and religion. It will also feature a special session on Taylor's career as a public intellectual and political actor, from his work in the early days of the New Democratic Party through his interventions in Canadian constitutional debates about the judiciary and about Quebec and federalism to his recent work on religious accommodation in Quebec. Professor Taylor will respond to the papers.

The final conference schedule is forthcoming. The current list of those giving papers at the conference includes (see the list below):

-------------------

29 au 31 mars 2012, Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal

Un colloque international organisé par le Groupe de Recherche Interuniversitaire en Philosophie Politique [GRIPP] de Montréal et le Centre de Recherche en Éthique de l’Université de Montréal (CRÉUM) et le Research Group on Constitutional Studies [RGCS] de l’université McGill.

Ce colloque regroupera des chercheurs de réputation internationale dans le domaine des sciences humaines et sociales qui seront réunis pour commenter, comprendre et interpréter l’œuvre de Charles Taylor. Les grands thèmes de celle-ci y seront abordés, du multiculturalisme à l’interprétation de la modernité en passant par la philosophie de l’identité personnelle, la philosophie de l’esprit et du langage, la politique canadienne et la sécularisation. Il est à noter que ce le colloque sera complété par la tenue d’un évènement public portant sur l’engagement public de Taylor sur des enjeux comme l’avenir de la sociale démocratie et la pensée progressiste au Canada, la constitution canadienne, le fédéralisme, les accommodements raisonnables et la gestion de la diversité culturelle.

Programme complet à venir. La liste des conférenciers invités :

K. Anthony Appiah (Princeton University)
Ronald Beiner (University of Toronto)
Richard Bernstein (New School for Social Research)
Rajeev Bhargava (Delhi/Center for the Study of Developing Societies)
Craig Calhoun (New York University)
José Casanova (Georgetown University)
John Christman (Pennylvania State University)
William Connolly (Johns Hopkins University)
Nigel DeSousa (U. Ottawa)
Hubert Dreyfus (University of California at Berkeley)
Jeanne Bethke Elshtain (Georgetown University)
Rainer Forst (University of Frankfurt)
Shaun Gallagher (University of Central Florida)
Ian Gold (McGill University)
Joseph Heath (University of Toronto)
Nancy Hirschmann (U. Penn)
Cécile Laborde (University College, London)
Guy Laforest (Université Laval)
Jacob T. Levy (McGill University)
Dominique Leydet (Univeristé de Québec à Montréal)
Tariq Modood (University of Bristol)
Michelle Moody-Adams (Columbia University)
Michael Rosen (Harvard University)
Hans-Julius Schneider (University of Potsdam)
Evan Thompson (University of Toronto)
James Tully (University of Victoria)
Jeremy Webber (University of Victoria)

Conference co-organizers: Daniel Weinstock (Montreal), Jocelyn Maclure (Laval), Jacob T. Levy (McGill).

Paper titles and abstracts, a complete conference schedule, and registration information will be posted as they become available at http://www.mcgill.ca/rgcs/gripp/events/taylor.

2011-12-01T11:22:00.003-06:00

Waldron on Dignity

The pieces in the forthcoming ASU Law Journal symposium on Jeremy Waldron's Schoen Lectures are gradually appearing on SSRN.

Jeremy Waldron, "Dignity, Rights, and Responsibility"

Brian Bix, "Rights, Responsibilities, and Roles"

Katherine Franke, Dignifying Rights

Jacob T. Levy, "The Right to be Dignified, or the Dignity of Liberty

I'll post more as I become aware of them.

2011-11-22T10:53:00.002-06:00

Oxford graduate political theory conference

Theme: Political Theory and the ‘Liberal’ Tradition

Department of Politics and International Relations, Oxford University, 19-20 April 2012

Graduate students are invited to submit paper proposals for the inaugural Oxford Graduate Conference in Political Theory, to be held at the Department of Politics and International Relations on 19-20 April 2012.

The theme for this conference is “Political Theory and the ‘Liberal’ Tradition”, and there will be two keynote addresses, given by Jeremy Waldron (NYU; All Souls’ College, Oxford) and Charles Mills (Northwestern University). The theme may be broadly construed, and we welcome papers addressing any of the following themes:

• The ‘liberal’ tradition and history of political thought: The canon of great political works is still believed to offer crucial insights for current theorising, thanks to their perception as continuous sources of wisdom about the salient principles of good government. But why are certain thinkers traditionally included, whilst others are not? Why are most ‘great’ thinkers dead, white, and male? Has liberalism been insensitive to the grievances of minorities, and to certain forms of oppression and exclusion? Finally, is the ‘liberal’ tradition a retrospective construct, which paradoxically includes thinkers who never considered themselves ‘liberals’?

• The core values of liberalism: The basic liberal tenets of liberty, democracy, solidarity, and equal rights have often been used as the basis for analysis of contemporary issues such as multiculturalism, human rights, and concern for future generations. Liberal political thought has also been closely entwined with Western conceptions of statecraft and diplomacy, and has significantly shaped the development of international norms in an era of increasing global interrelation. But how have these fundamental values been interpreted and balanced, and what are the tensions between them? Can there be new ways to apply the core values of liberalism to key questions in contemporary political philosophy?

• Liberalism and ideology: Historically, the liberal tradition competed with, and evolved alongside, many other political ideologies—including conservatism, socialism, anarchism, nationalism, and green politics— with which it has often combined to form important new hybrids. Is it possible to write about a fixed substantive content of liberal ideology? What are the commonalities and overlaps between liberalism and other traditions? How have the various ‘liberalisms’ present in modern political thought developed historically and ideationally? And what is the relationship between liberal ideology and ‘real’ liberal politics at national and international levels?

Up to twelve papers will be accepted overall; each panel will be led by an Oxford Faculty member and include a graduate student as respondent.

Proposals of no more than 500 words are requested by 15 January 2012, with accepted papers to follow by 31 March 2012. Please submit abstracts formatted for blind review, along with your name, educational status, and institutional affiliation, to oxford.poltheory.conference@gmail.com. Details on how to register for the
conference to follow shortly.

2011-11-21T19:06:00.001-06:00

Princeton Graduate Conference in Political Theory

Graduate Conference in Political Theory

Princeton University

April 6-7, 2012

Call for Papers (deadline January 16, 2012)

The Committee for the Graduate Conference in Political Theory at Princeton University welcomes papers concerning any topic in political theory, political philosophy, or the history of political thought. Papers should be submitted via the conference website by January 16, 2012. Approximately eight papers will be accepted.

The Graduate Conference in Political Theory at Princeton University will be held from April 6-7, 2012. This year, we are excited to include Professor Elisabeth Ellis, Texas A&M University, as keynote speaker and conference participant.

The conference offers graduate students from across institutions a unique opportunity to present and critique new work. Each session, led by a discussant from Princeton, will focus exclusively on one paper and will feature an extensive question and answer period with Princeton faculty and graduate students. Papers will be pre-circulated among conference participants.

Submission Information:
· Due date January 16, 2012
· Submissions must be made in PDF format via the conference website: http://politicaltheory.princeton.edu
· Papers should be no more than 7500 words.
· Format for blind review; include title but exclude all personal and institutional information.
· Submissions by email or postal mail will not be accepted.

Papers will be refereed on a blind basis by political theory graduate students in the Department of Politics at Princeton. Acceptance notices will be sent in February.

Assistance for invited participants' transportation, lodging and meal expenses is available from the committee, which acknowledges the generous support of University Center for Human Values and the Department of Politics at Princeton University.

Questions and comments can be directed to: polthry@princeton.edu

For more information, please visit the conference website at http://politicaltheory.princeton.edu

2011-11-21T19:04:00.001-06:00

According to blogger, and with apologies to Bilbo

this is my eleventy-eleventh post.

2011-11-19T21:04:00.001-06:00

Newly posted on SSRN

"The Right to be Dignified, or the Dignity of Liberty," forthcoming Arizona State Law Journal in a symposium on Jeremy Waldron's Schoen Lecture.

2011-11-14T07:38:00.002-06:00

Other platform alert

I've been tweeting about the McGill protest and police response.

2011-11-09T13:20:00.002-06:00

I'm puzzled.

I'm also unsympathetic, but I mean to keep that separate from this puzzle.

Some Arts undergraduates are "striking" tomorrow to demand the abolition of tuition.

They are also mass-emailing professors asking the professors to cancel classes in support of the strike.

But if the professors cancel classes, in what way are the students on strike? The professors are then on strike for a day. Students-- if we continue to use the labor law language that doesn't really make sense in this context anyways-- are then being subjected to a lockout. But their refusal to show up becomes irrelevant, because there's nothing to show up to.

Conceptually, wouldn't faculty compliance with this request abolish the student strike and just turn it into a faculty strike?

2011-11-09T10:06:00.002-06:00

Political philosophy rankings

The top 20 programs in political philosophy, from the new round of Leiter's Philosophical Gourmet Report

Group 1 (1): rounded mean of 4.5 (median, mode)
University of Arizona (4.5, 4.5)

Group 2 (2-9): rounded mean of 4.0 (median, mode)
Brown University (4, 4)
Duke University (4, 4)
Harvard University (4.25, 5)
New York University (4.5, 4.5)
Oxford University (4, 5)
Princeton University (4, 4)
Stanford University (4, 4)
Yale University (4, 4)

Group 3 (10-20): rounded mean of 3.5 (median, mode)
Australian National University (3.5, 4)
Queen’s University (Canada) (3.5, 4)
Rutgers University, New Brunswick (3.5, 3.75)
University College London (3.5, 3.5)
University of California, San Diego (4, 4)
University of Chicago (3.5, 3.5)
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (4, 4)
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (4, 4)
University of Pennsylvania (3.5, 3.5)
University of Toronto (3.5, 4)
University of Virginia (4, 4)

JTL: I have friends and colleagues who've been involved in the serious pushes and investments Arizona, Brown, and Duke in particular have made in political philosophy in the past several years, and am very pleased to see their excellence and progress recognized.

2011-11-04T15:51:00.002-05:00

Reading list

Two former McGill theory faculty and one recent McGill theory visitor with new or forthcoming APSR pieces.

Alan Patten, Rethinking Culture: The Social Lineage Account.

James Booth, "'From This Far Place': Social Justice and Absence.

Andrew Rehfeld, "The Concepts of Representation

2011-11-01T18:29:00.002-05:00

Federalism and freedom

Quebec rejects and refuses to pay for a draconian [and dumb] new federal crime bill.

2011-10-18T11:20:00.002-05:00

TERRITORIALITÉ, IDENTITÉ NATIONALE ET JUSTICE MONDIALE

3-4 November, 2001

Colloque jeunes chercheurs organisé par le Centre de recherche interdisciplinaire sur la diversité au Québec (CRIDAQ).

Salle D-R 200 (pavillon Athanase-David)
Université du Québec à Montréal

PROGRAMME
JEUDI 3 NOVEMBRE
8h45 : Mot de bienvenue

Première séance : Territorialité, identité, justice mondiale : perspectives théoriques
9h00 à 10h00
Quel territoire en partage? L’étude de la territorialité à l’heure de la mondialisation
Alexandre Germain, doctorant en science politique, Université du Québec à Montréal

Commentaire : Jean-François Thibault, science politique, Université de Moncton

Pause
10h15 à 11h15

Violence de masse et sécession : le cas du Kosovo
Philippe Roseberry, Doctorant, Université Queen’s

Commentaire : Frédérick-Guillaume Dufour, sociologie, Université du Québec à Montréal

Pause
11h30 à 12h30

Immigration, Territoriality, Societal Cultures and the Conceptual Limits of Liberal Multiculturalism
Arjun Tremblay, doctorant en science politique, University of Toronto

Commentaire : Christine Straehle, philosophie, Université d’Ottawa

Deuxième séance : Territoire et identités nationales
14h00 à 15h00
De sub-nationalisme à nationalisme : le nationalisme insulaire expliqué et appliqué au cas de Terre-Neuve
Valérie Vézina, doctorante en science politique, Université du Québec à Montréal

Commentaire : Daniel Kofman, philosophie, Université d’Ottawa

Pause

15h15 à 16h15
Les diasporas contigües et le multiculturalisme libéral
Jean-François Caron, postdoctorant en sciences politiques, Université Libre de Bruxelles

Commentaire : Stéphane Courtois, philosophie, Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières

Pause
16h30 à 17h30

Grande conférence
Margaret Moore, science politique, Queen’s University
Commentaire : Arash Azibadeh, science politique, McGill University

17h30
Cocktail
19h30 Banquet

VENDREDI 4 NOVEMBRE

Troisième séance : Territorialité et nations autochtones
10h00 à 11h00

La collectivisation des droits des peuples autochtones et tribaux sur le territoire et les ressources naturelles : regard croisé des juges régionaux de protection des droits humains
Doris Farget, postdoctorante, section de droit civil, Faculté de droit, Université d’Ottawa

Commentaire : Ingride Roy, Université de Montréal.

Pause
11h15 à 12h15

Les rapports entre les nations autochtones et la nation québécoise en vertu d’objectifs concurrents
Jean-Olivier Roy, doctorant en science politique, Université Laval

Commentaire : Pierre Trudel, Collège du Vieux-Montréal

13h30 à 14h30
Grande conférence
Dominique Leydet, philosophie, Université du Québec à Montréal

Commentaire : Christine Straehle, philosophie, Université d’Ottawa

Pause
14h45 à 17h00 Table ronde présidée par Michel Seymour, philosophie, Université de Montréal

2011-10-18T07:26:00.000-05:00

THE ANNUAL MONTREAL POLITICAL THEORY MANUSCRIPT WORKSHOP AWARD

Call for applications: The Groupe de recherche interuniversitaire en philosophie politique de Montréal (GRIPP), spanning the departments of political science and philosophy at McGill University, l'Université de Montréal, Concordia University, and l'Université du Québec à Montréal, invites applications for its 2012 manuscript workshop award. The recipient of the award will be invited to Montreal for a day-long workshop in April/May 2012 dedicated to his or her book manuscript. This "author meets critics" workshop will comprise four to five sessions dedicated to critical discussion of the manuscript; each session will begin with a critical commentary on a section of the manuscript by a political theorist or philosopher who is part of Montreal's GRIPP community. The format is designed to maximize feedback for a book-in-progress. The award covers the costs of travel, accommodation, and meals.

Eligibility:

A. Topic: The manuscript topic is open within political theory and political philosophy, but we are especially interested in manuscripts related to at least one of these GRIPP research themes: 1) the history of liberal and democratic thought, especially early modern thought; 2) moral psychology and political agency, or politics and affect or emotions or rhetoric; 3) democracy, diversity, and pluralism. 4) democracy, justice, and transnational institutions.

B. Manuscript: Book manuscripts in English or French, not yet in a version accepted for publication, by applicants with PhD in hand by 1 August 2011, are eligible. Applicants must have a complete or nearly complete draft (at least 4/5 of final draft) ready to present at the workshop. In the case of co-authored manuscripts, only one of the co-authors is eligible to apply. (Only works in progress by the workshop date are eligible; authors with a preliminary book contract are eligible only if no version has been already accepted for publication).

C. Application: Please submit the following materials electronically, compiled as a single PDF file: 1) a curriculum vitae; 2) a table of contents; 3) a short abstract of the book project, up to 200 words; 4) a longer book abstract up to 2500 words; and, in the case of applicants with previous book publication(s), (5) three reviews, from established journals in the field, of the applicant's most recently published monograph. Candidates are not required to, but may if they wish, submit two letters of recommendation speaking to the merits of the book project. Please do not send writing samples. Send materials by email, with the subject heading “2012 GRIPP Manuscript Workshop Award” to Arash Abizadeh . Review of applications begins 10 January 2012. Contact Arash Abizadeh with questions.

Previous GRIPP Manuscript Workshops:
May 2011: James Ingram (McMaster), Radical Cosmopolitics: The Ethics and Politics of Democratic Universalism
April 2010: Hélène Landemore (Yale), Democratic Reason: Politics, Collective Intelligence, and the Rule of the Many
April 2009: Alan Patten (Princeton), Equal Recognition: The Moral Foundations of Minority Cultural Rights
March 2009: Kinch Hoekstra (UC Berkeley), Thomas Hobbes and the Creation of Order

------------------------------------------------

LE PRIX ANNUEL DE L’ATELIER DE MANUSCRIT DE PHILOSOPHIE POLITIQUE DE MONTRÉAL

Appel à candidature: Le groupe de recherche interuniversitaire en philosophie politique de Montréal (GRIPP), qui réunit des chercheurs des départements de science politique et de philosophie de l’Université McGill, de l’Université de Montréal, de l’Université Concordia et de l’Université du Québec à Montréal, fait un appel à candidature pour son prix 2012 de l’atelier de manuscrit. Le lauréat sera invité à Montréal en avril ou mai 2012 pour un atelier d’une journée complète consacré au manuscrit de son livre. Cet atelier du type « l’auteur rencontre ses critiques » comprendra quatre ou cinq séances de discussions critiques sur le manuscrit ; pour chacune d’entre elles, un spécialiste de théorie politique ou un philosophe membre de la communauté montréalaise du GRIPP lancera la discussion par un commentaire critique d’une des sections du manuscrit. Ceci a pour but de faciliter les échanges sur un livre en chantier. Le prix couvre les dépenses de voyage, d’hébergement et de repas.

Éligibilité :

A- Sujet : De façon générale, le manuscrit doit traiter de théorie politique ou de philosophie politique, mais nous sommes tout particulièrement intéressés aux manuscrits qui correspondent à l’une des thématiques de recherche du GRIPP : 1) l’histoire de la pensée libérale et démocratique, et notamment du début de la pensée moderne; 2) la psychologie morale du sujet (ou encore de l’agent) politique, ainsi que la politique et les affects, les émotions ou la rhétorique; 3) la démocratie, la diversité et le pluralisme; 4) la démocratie, la justice et les institutions transnationales.

B- Manuscrit : Sont éligibles tous les manuscrits de livres en français ou en anglais, non encore publiés et non en version acceptée par une maison de presses, et dont l’auteur a reçu un doctorat avant le 1er août 2011. Les candidats devront avoir une version complète, ou presque (au moins 4/5e de la version finale), à présenter à l’atelier. Pour ce qui concerne les manuscrits coécrits, seul l’un des coauteurs est éligible.

C- Soumission : Vous voudrez bien fournir les documents suivants, en format électronique, dans un seul fichier PDF : 1) un curriculum vitae; 2) une table des matières; 3) un court résumé du projet du livre de moins de 200 mots; 4) un résumé plus long, de moins de 2 500 mots; et, dans le cas de candidats ayant déjà publié, 5) trois recensions parues dans des revues spécialisées et reconnues dans le domaine de la plus récente monographie publiée. Les candidats peuvent, s’ils le souhaitent, joindre deux lettres de recommandation présentant l’intérêt de leur projet de livre. Nous vous prions de ne pas envoyer d’extraits de manuscrit. Envoyez ces documents par courriel, avec le sujet « 2012 GRIPP Manuscript Workshop Award » à Arash Abizadeh . L’examen des candidatures commencera le 10 janvier 2012. Pour toute information supplémentaire, veuillez contacter Dominique Leydet

Ateliers de manuscrit précédents:
Mai 2011: James Ingram (McMaster), Radical Cosmopolitics: The Ethics and Politics of Democratic Universalism
Avril 2010: Hélène Landemore (Yale), Democratic Reason: Politics, Collective Intelligence, and the Rule of the Many
Avril 2009: Alan Patten (Princeton), Equal Recognition: The Moral Foundations of Minority Cultural Rights
Mars 2009: Kinch Hoekstra (UC Berkeley), Thomas Hobbes and the Creation of Order

2011-10-11T07:10:00.001-05:00

Egalitarianism workshop at McGill

Egalitarianism Workshop 2012
Call for Papers
Egalitarianisms: Current Debates on Equality and Priority in Health, Wealth, and Welfare

March 30th -31st, 2012

McGill University, Montreal, Canada

Confirmed Speakers

Nir Eyal (Harvard)
Iwao Hirose (McGill)
Nils Holtug (Copenhagen)
Dennis McKerlie (Calgary)
Shlomi Segall (Hebrew University of Jerusalem)
Workshop Description

Egalitarian theories of distributive justice have recently encountered fundamental challenges. Is egalitarianism susceptible to the leveling down objection? Is it less plausible than prioritarianism? Does it support reducing the inequalities resulting from brute luck, but not option luck? Does it aim to equalize the distribution of welfare at each time or over a lifetime? What does egalitarianism make of the strong correlation between inequalities in health and inequalities in socio-economic conditions? In this two-day workshop, we will discuss current theoretical issues and seek common and unified grounds for future research into egalitarian theories of distributive justice.

Call for Papers

We invite high quality papers on the recent philosophical challenges to egalitarian theories of distributive justice. We will include at least 5 submitted papers in the program. Papers should be suitable for blind-review and no longer than 6,000 words (must include a 200 word abstract in the first page). Please submit paper (Word or PDF file) through www.mcgill.ca/aggregation/submit We welcome submissions from graduate students. For accepted papers, the organizers will cover the cost of accommodation (up to 3 nights in downtown Montreal) and workshop banquet.

Deadline for submission: November 20, 2011 (Notification of acceptance by December 20, 2011)

Click here to submit your paper

2011-10-09T19:13:00.002-05:00

Indians in Madison's Constitutional Order

This paper is now online. One of the two epigraphs is one of my favorite Madison quotes:

‘‘What’’—they [the Indians] may say—‘‘have we to do with the Federal Constitution, or the relations formed by it between the Union and its members? We were no parties to the compact and cannot be affected by it.’’ And as to a charter of the King of England—is it not as much a mockery to them, as the bull of a Pope dividing a world of discovery between the Spaniards and Portuguese, was held to be by the nations who disowned and disdained his authority?

2011-10-08T07:29:00.000-05:00

The Political Safeguards of Federalism: Dead or Alive?

The Center for the Study of Federalism at the Meyner Center invites paper proposals for the 2012 APSA Annual Conference

The Political Safeguards of Federalism: Dead or Alive?

Submission deadline: December 15.

The Center for the Study of Federalism at the Meyner Center invites papers on the vitality of the “political and institutional safeguards of federalism” conceived broadly. Consistent with the conference theme of Representation and Renewal, we invite papers that especially examine the extent to which the interests of state and local governments continue to be represented in and protected by the political safeguards of federalism, such as representation in the U.S. Senate, the electoral college, and Senate confirmation of judicial appointments. In its 1985 Garcia decision, the U.S. Supreme Court opined that states should rely on such political safeguards rather than on the Court to protect their powers. We invite a range of papers, from normative and philosophical to historical and empirical, that examine the effectiveness of these safeguards generally and across different branches of government and different policies. Possible questions to consider include: Are the political safeguards of federalism fundamental to the American federal system or has the United States evolved beyond them? How do federalism's political and/or institutional safeguards affect citizen representation? How have the political safeguards fared under united and divided government of the last two decades? Do the political safeguards protect states from unwelcome federal intrusions? Finally, given that 2012 will be the tenth anniversary of the demise of the Supreme Court’s so-called federalism revolution, one can ask what happened to that revolution and are there any signs of a federalism revival from the Roberts’ Court? Papers on other federalism topics will be considered as well, depending on CSF’s panel allocation.

Submit your proposals to: Troy Smith at troy.smith@byuh.edu

2011-10-07T08:12:00.000-05:00

The McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society at Stanford Postdoctoral Fellowship Opportunities for 2012-2013

For 2012-2013, we seek up to four new postdoctoral fellows. We welcome candidates with substantial normative research interests from diverse backgrounds including philosophy, the social sciences, and professional schools. We are especially interested in candidates with research interests in inequality, human rights, immigration, and environmental justice, but we welcome all applicants with strong normative interests that have some practical implications. Fellows will teach one class, participate in a Political Theory Workshop, interact with undergraduates in the Ethics in Society Honors Program and help in developing an inter-disciplinary ethics community across the campus.

The appointment term is September 1, 2012 - August 31, 2013; however, the initial term may be renewed for an additional year. Applicants must have completed all requirements for their PhD by June 30, 2012. Candidates must also be no more than 3 years from the awarding of their degree (i.e., September 2009).

Stanford University is an equal opportunity employer and is committed to increasing the diversity of its faculty. It welcomes applications from women and members of minority groups, as well as others who would bring additional dimensions to the university's research and teaching missions. Salary is competitive.

The application deadline is January 11, 2012 (5:00pm Pacific Standard Time).

To access the online application system, click here.

For more information on the Center and our fellowship program, click here.

For inquiries, please contact Joan Berry: joanberry@stanford.edu

2011-10-02T07:35:00.003-05:00

The virtues and the economist

A series of exchanges on facebook about this comic with people trained in economics who seemed to me to miss the point of it entirely made me remember running across the abstract for this article, which I then dug back out and read and appreciated, and which I now recommend.

Lisa Herzog, "Higher and lower virtues in commercial society: Adam Smith and motivation crowding out," forthcoming, Politics, Philosophy, and Economics.

Abstract:

Motivation crowding out can lead to a reduction of ‘higher’ virtues, such as altruism or public spirit, in market contexts. This article discusses the role of virtue in the moral and economic theory of Adam Smith. It argues that because Smith’s account of commercial society is based on ‘lower’ virtue, ‘higher’ virtue has a precarious place in it; this phenomenon is structurally similar to motivation crowding out. The article analyzes and systematizes the ways in which Smith builds on ‘contrivances of nature’ in order to solve the problems of limited self-command and limited knowledge. As recent research has shown, a clear separation of different social spheres can help to reduce the risk of motivation crowding out and preserve a place for ‘higher virtue’ in commercial society. The conclusion reflects on the performative power of economics, arguing that the one-sided focus on models of ‘economic man’ should be embedded in a larger context.

My view about the cartoon itself, since Mike Munger misunderstood the punch line completely (hi, Mike!): The philosopher already knows the economist's arguments, having encountered them in week 2 of freshman intro moral philosophy under the names "Bentham" and "Sidgwick." That the economist is falsely assuming his ideas are new to the philosopher is made clear with the "fractions" joke.

The economist is violating lots of the official methodological pronouncements of economics, which is supposed to take preferences as exogenous and is not supposed to be a normative injunction to individual persons to maximize market value in all of their choices. It's supposed to be a way to model the decisions that are made among commensurable ends, whatever the decision process that goes into deciding what to value. So a good economist would have said, "ah, this is a question that comes before the questions I know how to answer; I need to put my toolkit away and see whether there's something interesting to learn here about how individuals do, or should, form priorities." And of course the economist is also violating the rule against engaging in interpersonal comparisons of utility; there's not even a pretense of showing Kaldor-Hicks efficiency (which itself is mighty dubious from the perspective of no-interpersonal-comparisons).

But the economist is talking like lots of people with some econ training talk, despite those methodological pronouncements. He's seeking aggregate welfare maximization, using only the welfare measures that are revealed in market prices. That this is a tail-swallowing rule for individuals to follow in making ethical choices was shown long ago by Bernard Williams. But it's also worth noting that it's Benthamite utilitarianism of just the sort that modern economics purports to have outgrown.

2011-09-30T09:46:00.001-05:00

Hasana Sharp, Spinoza and the Politics of Renaturalization

Now in print.

There have been many Spinozas over the centuries: atheist, romantic pantheist, great thinker of the multitude, advocate of the liberated individual, and rigorous rationalist. The common thread connecting all of these clashing perspectives is Spinoza’s naturalism, the idea that humanity is part of nature, not above it.

In this sophisticated new interpretation of Spinoza’s iconoclastic philosophy, Hasana Sharp draws on his uncompromising naturalism to rethink human agency, ethics, and political practice. Sharp uses Spinoza to outline a practical wisdom of “renaturalization,” showing how ideas, actions, and institutions are never merely products of human intention or design, but outcomes of the complex relationships among natural forces beyond our control. This lack of a metaphysical or moral division between humanity and the rest of nature, Sharp contends, can provide the basis for an ethical and political practice free from the tendency to view ourselves as either gods or beasts.

Sharp’s groundbreaking argument critically engages with important contemporary thinkers—including deep ecologists, feminists, and race and critical theorists—making Spinoza and the Politics of Renaturalization vital for a wide range of scholars.

2011-09-27T10:58:00.002-05:00

When last we looked in on biking at McGill

... just over a year ago, there was a big public forum at which sentiment was strongly (though not unanimously) against the environment-unfriendly categorical ban on bikes on McGill's downtown campus. Associate Vice-President Jim Nicell dismissed the forum as drawing an unbalanced crowd, though without saying what drove the selection process, and though for weeks beforehand the upcoming forum had been used to tell bikers that their concerns would get a public airing.

Further dialogue and consultation was promised.

Like I said: just over a year ago.

2011-09-21T19:48:00.003-05:00

Hither and yon: University of Ottawa

October 5, University of Ottawa, Faculty of Law, Fauteaux Hall room 147B, 4-5:30 with reception to follow.

John Hasnas (Georgetown University) - The depoliticization of law

Jacob T. Levy (McGill University) - Non-ideal constitutionalism

Scott Reid (Member of Parliament) - Examining of the roots of Canada's "Living Tree" doctrine

2011-09-20T15:20:00.001-05:00

Pearson Chair at McGill University

The Katherine A. Pearson Chair in Civil Society and Public Policy

Applications are currently invited for The Katharine A. Pearson Chair in Civil Society and Public Policy tenable jointly in the Faculty of Arts (www.mcgill.ca/arts) and in the Faculty of Law (www.mcgill.ca/law), McGill University. The appointment is expected to be at the rank of Full Professor. The Katharine A. Pearson Chair in Civil Society and Public Policy was created through a generous gift from the McConnell Foundation.

The Faculties of Arts and of Law seek applications from scholars of international renown with impeccable academic credentials in Arts and in Law, and demonstrated interdisciplinary expertise. The purpose of the Chair is to contribute to the teaching and supervision of undergraduate and graduate students in the two faculties. The holder of the Chair will also be expected to assume leadership within a new Civil Society Program at McGill University, develop new research directions in civil society and foster research grant applications to sustain the Program.

The Civil Society Program will rest on a broad meaning of civil society as an analytic term for the social sciences and humanities. Moving beyond the now-standard opposition of civil society to the State, the Program will explore both formal non-governmental structures and organizations (the “community sector”), and informal associations, practices, beliefs and values that mediate between the self and the State. The Program will study the role of individuals and non-governmental institutional forms, groups, communities and organizations in the development of legal and public policy. It will explore innovative, pluralistic and adaptive approaches to governance in meeting local and global challenges posed by health, environment, personal and economic well-being, social diversity and equity in a context of declining public resources.

The Civil Society Program will draw on McGill University’s identity as a socially important institution in public life in Canada and a respected voice internationally. McGill’s embrace of the advantages of study in Montreal – bilingualism, bicultural and bijural institutions, a cosmopolitan urban setting – are understood as central to the success of this venture. It will focus on Canada as a laboratory for study and public action, and recognize that Canada represents, at its best, a model setting for teaching, research and public outreach on matters relating to civil society in the international community.

Applicants shall provide a letter of intent, a summary of research interests (including proposed research program), complete curriculum vitae, copies of three representative publications, and the names of at least three references to the Staff Appointments Committee by October 15, 2011. However, applications will be accepted until an incumbent for the Chair is found. Email applications are preferred (linda.coughin@mcgill.ca) but hard copy applications can also be mailed to:

Staff Appointments Committee
c/o Dean’s Office
Faculty of Law
McGill University
3644 Peel Street
Montreal, Quebec, Canada, H3A 1W9

All qualified applicants are encouraged to apply; however, Canadians and permanent residents will be given priority. McGill University is committed to diversity and equity in employment. It welcomes applications from indigenous peoples, visible minorities, ethnic minorities, persons with disabilities, women, persons of minority sexual orientations and gender identities and others who may contribute to further diversification.

2011-09-15T09:19:00.003-05:00

GRIPP: Bonnie Honig

Friday September 16, 2011:

First workshop of the year for the Groupe de Recherche Interuniversitaire en Philosophie Politique [GRIPP]. Paper by Bonnie Honig, Sarah Rebecca Roland Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University and Research Professor at the American Bar Foundation.

“’Antigone versus Oedipus?’ Feminist Theory and the Turn to Antigone."

Ferrier 456, McGill, 2-4 pm. Attendees are expected to read the paper in advance.

Followed by beginning of the year Research Group on Constitutional Studies/ GRIPP reception, 4 pm, Ferrier reading room (428B).

2011-09-10T07:00:00.007-05:00

Sometime this week...

on the basis of the traffic I receive passively from google hits and blogrolls and old links and so on, this blog will get its 250,000th visit, very close to the ninth anniversary of my first substantive post. This post itself might trigger the 250,000th visitor just by RSS subscriptions. (In a meaningless coincidence of round numbers, I'm also nearing the 500 mark on followers on twitter. [Update: the 500 mark hasbeen hit.])

On the one hand, nine years is a pretty long time to hit the quarter-million mark; Mike Munger was crowing about his million after seven years this summer. On the other hand, this blog started out with an expression of ambivalence (within a day of the independently-written and now much more famous ambivalent first post from that other fellow down the hall), went more or less full-steam ahead for about four months, then went dormant when I migrated to the Volokh Conspiracy for most of three years, and then stayed almost-dormant for a long time while I blogged there and while I took a couple years off from blogging altogether except for occasional posts like my mostly-annual roundups of new books in political theory. Just when I was really getting going again, The New Republic launched Open University, which was a noble experiment with some interesting stuff (I greatly enjoyed reading Daniel Bell's, including this post about the launch of the Kindle. But in the end OU turned out kind of strange: academics engaged in parallel play, with Richard Stern writing as a diarist, Cass Sunstein promoting and defending Barack Obama's campaign, Sandy Levinson discussing the constitutional crisis of the Bush administration, and so on. My occasional attempts to engage in occasional intra-blog conversations were less than wholly successful. And OU petered out in 2008.

For a while now, what I've mostly blogged here have been political theory news (conference announcements, fellowship announcements, book lists, occasional book reviews), interspersed with bits of coffee-blogging and geek-culture blogging. My last real sustained use of the blog to develop and express my own views was during the Taylor-Bouchard commission hearings and report. I've had a few rounds of flamewars (e.g. with the odd law professor from Wisconsin who shall not be named lest she reappear) and have no appetite for them. And all those worries in that very first post still occur to me.

Overall, I think I've really blogged here intensively for the initial four months, and then in 2007-2009. I've never really committed to a view about this space. I try to do a lot of what Larry Solum does in terms of professional-service blogging. I worry about mixing that kind of space with a really active expression of views, as is done by the equivalent figure in philosophy; but then every so often I've got strong views about an obviously bloggable subject and go to it. When I have just a few substantive sentences to say about something these days, I put 'em on facebook.

The big spike in readership I get when I return to substantive blogging is nice-- but so are the expressions of appreciation I get from students and colleagues for the book recommendations and conference announcements and so on.

So: a quarter-million visitors in about three and a half years of real blogging spread over nine years, plus a few more years here and there of... whatever it is I do here most of the time. That's not bad. More importantly, I seem to mostly have the readers I want to have. I appreciate the readers who've stuck with me through my wanderings and ambivalences and passing fancies about what to do here, as well as those who happen by for one reason or another; and I appreciate most (though not quite all) of my various blogospheric interlocutors over that time. Thanks!

2011-09-05T15:34:00.001-05:00

Hither and yon, youtube edition

My talk at the Centre for Independent Studies in Sydney on "Rationalism, Pluralism, and Hayek's history of liberal thought" has been captured for the ages.

2011-09-02T18:20:00.003-05:00

What I bought at APSA

Oxford Handbook of the History of Political Philosophy, George Klosko ed., OUP

Flanagan, Alcantra, and Le Dressay, Beyond the Indian Act: Restoring Aboriginal Property Rights, MQUP

Jonathan Quong, Liberalism Without Perfection, OUP

Avigail Eisenberg, Reasons of Identity, OUP (new in paperback)

Margaret Kohn and Keally McBride, Political Theories of Decolonization:
Postcolonialism and the Problem of Foundations, OUP

Farah Godrej, Cosmopolitan Political Thought, OUP

Catherine Zuckert. Political Philosophy in the 20th Century, CUP

Gregory Claeys, Imperial Sceptics, CUP

Gerald Gaus, The Order of Public Reason CUP

Stedman-Jones ed, Cambridge History of 19th century political thought, CUP

Floyd and Stears, Political Philosophy vs History?, CUP

Andrei Marmor, Philosophy of Law, PUP

Annabel Brett, Changes of State: Nature and the Limits of the City in Early Modern Natural Law, PUP

Isaac Nakhimovsky, The Closed Commercial State: Perpetual Peace and Commercial Society from Rousseau to Fichte, PUP

Duncan Kelly, The Propriety of Liberty, PUP

Jeremy Jennings, Revolution and thre Republic, OUP

Chad Rector, Federations, Cornell UP

(OUP= Oxford, CUP=Cambridge, PUP=Princeton)

2011-08-29T07:26:00.002-05:00

ASPLP at APSA: Nomos: Federalism and Subsidiarity

2011 Annual Meeting of the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy
“Federalism and Subsidiarity”
American Political Science Association
Saturday-Sunday, September 3-4, 2011, Seattle

Saturday, September 3
pre-8:00 am: Coffee

8:00 – 9:45 AM Panel I: The City and Federalism
The Conference Center LL1

Principal Paper: “Cities, Subsidiarity, and Federalism”, Daniel
Weinstock, Philosophy, University of Montreal

Commentator: Loren King, Political Science, Wilfrid Laurier University
Commentator: Judith Resnik, Law, Yale University
Chair: Nancy Rosenblum, Political Science, Harvard University

1:45 PM: ASPLP Business Meeting
The Conference Center LL4

2:00-3:45 PM: Panel II: The Constitution and Federalism
The Conference Center LL4

Principal Paper: “Federalism and Subsidiarity, Perspectives from Law”,
Steven Calabresi, Law, Northwestern University

Commentator: Jenna Bednar, Political Science, University of Michigan
Commentator: Andreas Follesdal, Philosophy, University of Oslo
Chair: James E. Fleming, Law, Boston University

7:30-9:00 PM: Annual Reception
Washington State Convention Center 306

Sunday, September 4
pre-8:00 am: coffee

8:00-9:45 AM: Panel III: Against Dual Federalism.
Washington State Convention Center 618

Principal Paper: “Defending Dual Federalism: A self-defeating
enterprise”, Sotirios A. Barber, Political Science, Notre Dame.

Commentator: Ernest Young, Law, Duke University
Commentator: Michael Blake, Philosophy, University of Washington
Chair: Jacob T. Levy, Political Science, McGill University

2011-08-11T13:32:00.002-05:00

Hither and yon, down under

Rationalism, Pluralism, and Hayek's History of Liberal Thought, The Centre for Independent Studies, Level 4, 38 Oxley St, St Leonards, Sydney 2065, 17 August 2011, 6:00 pm - 7:15 pm

Conference, Between Indigenous and Settler Governance, University of Western Sydney, 18-20 August 2011. Paper: "Indigenous Rights, Modern Political Concepts, and the State."

2011-07-25T08:06:00.003-05:00

Visiting Fulbright Chair in the Theory and Practice of Constitutionalism and Federalism, McGill University, 2012-13

Application deadline: August 1
Stipend: $25,000 for one-semester or yearlong visitorship
Eligibility and how to apply
Call for applications

2011-06-03T17:45:00.002-05:00

Associational freedom

H/T Eugene Volokh: Apilado v. North American Gay Amateur Athletic Alliance holds that a gay softball league has the First Amendment right to limit the number of straight players per team.

2011-06-03T14:02:00.001-05:00

Summer 2011 APT Virtual Reading Group: Not for Profit by Martha Nussbaum

Posting this on behalf of APT:

This summer, the Association for Political Theory will host its first virtual reading group (VRG). The purpose of the virtual reading group is to create a space for a profession-wide discussion on topics of shared interest to political theorists and philosophers, a discussion that will culminate in a round-table discussion during the meeting itself. All members of APT are invited to participate, including those who will not be able to participate in the conference this year. Part of the purpose of the virtual reading group is to expand the reach of the high quality conversations among APT members beyond the physical space of the conference.

The 2011 APT Program Committee has selected Martha Nussbaum’s Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities as the subject of discussion. We believe that the themes of the book connect to the professional, pedagogical, and political concerns that are of interest to many members of the organization, and we hope that Not for Profit will serve as a launching pad for a broader discussion in the profession.

APT members can participate in the VRG at http://aptvrg2011.blogspot.com/ , by submitting comments to the blog (please note that comments cannot be anonymous). Each week, from June 6-August 5, 2011, participants will discuss a new chapter of the book. All members of APT are invited to participate in virtual discussion. The VRG will culminate in a round-table session at the annual conference in October featuring Fred Dallmayr (University of Notre Dame) and Arlene Saxonhouse (University of Michigan). Both the virtual reading group and the round-table session will be co-chaired by Lisa Ellis and Peyton Wofford of Texas A&M University.

Our conversations will get started each week by a guest commentator who will post some reflections and provocations about the chapter. Then, APT members are invited to participate in the reading group by reading the relevant chapters and posting on the blog.

[APT membership is free; to join, visit http://apt.coloradocollege.edu/3c_1_Membership_Application.asp].

June 6-10: Chapter One, “The Silent Crisis”
Invited commentator: John Seery, Pomona College

June 13-17: Chapter Two, “Education for Profit, Education for Democracy”
Invited commentator: Eric MacGilvray, The Ohio State University

June 20-24: Chapter Three, “Educating Citizens: The Moral (and Anti-Moral) Emotions”
Invited commentator: Lawrie Balfour, University of Virginia

June 27-July 1: Chapter Four, “Socratic Pedagogy: The Importance of Argument”
Invited commentator: Ryan Balot, University of Toronto

July 11-15: Chapter Five, “Citizens of the World”
Invited commentator: Roxanne Euben, Wellesley College

July 18-22: Chapter Six, “Cultivating Imagination: Literature and the Arts”
Invited commentator: Ed Wingenbach, University of Redlands

July 25-29: Chapter Seven, “Democratic Education on the Ropes”
Invited commentator: Bruce Douglass, Georgetown University

August 1-5: Wrap-up and conclusion

Please contact Lisa Ellis (ellis@politics.tamu.edu ) or Peyton Wofford (peytonwofford@politics.tamu.edu ) of Texas A&M University if you have questions.

We look forward to a great discussion this summer!

2011-05-24T06:51:00.001-05:00

Hither and yon: Paris

May 31, "Rationalism, Pluralism, and Freedom, "Analyses Normatives contemporaines" series, Centre de Recherche Sens, Ethique, Société (CERSES).

2011-05-24T06:29:00.003-05:00

Lost revisited

Apparently today is the one-year anniversary of the series finale of Lost, an event I've spent the last twelve months trying to purge from my memory. Here's why.

2011-05-20T11:40:00.002-05:00

Toldja so.

The Canadian Philosophical Association is proud to announce the winners of its 2011 biennial Book Prize

Winners:
Avery Kolers, Land, Conflict, and Justice: A Political Theory of Territory (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press) 2009.

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 evaluates existing political theories and develops an attractive alternative. He presents a novel link between political legitimacy and environmental stewardship, and applies these 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.

Arthur Ripstein, Force and Freedom: Kant's Legal and Political Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press) 2009.

In this masterful work, both an illumination of Kant's thought and an important contribution to contemporary legal and political theory, Arthur Ripstein gives a comprehensive yet accessible account of Kant's political philosophy. Ripstein shows that Kant's thought is organized around two central claims: first, that legal institutions are not simply responses to human limitations or circumstances; indeed the requirements of justice can be articulated without recourse to views about human inclinations and vulnerabilities. Second, Kant argues for a distinctive moral principle, which restricts the legitimate use of force to the creation of a system of equal freedom. Ripstein's description of the unity and philosophical plausibility of this dimension of Kant's thought will be a revelation to political and legal scholars. In addition to providing a clear and coherent statement of the most misunderstood of Kant's ideas, Ripstein also shows that Kant's views remain conceptually powerful and morally appealing today. Ripstein defends the idea of equal freedom by examining several substantive areas of law—private rights, constitutional law, police powers, and punishment—and by demonstrating the compelling advantages of the Kantian framework over competing approaches.

Of course, readers of some political theory blogs were told that Kolers' book is excellent some seven months ago.

Congratulations are in order!

2011-05-17T21:20:00.002-05:00

Going to live forever.

I especially appreciate how many of these studies find that the health benefits occur primarily among drinkers of 5-6 or more cups a day.

2011-05-13T15:01:00.004-05:00

Political theory at CPSA

Here's this year's lineup of theory panels at CPSA, as organized by Colin Farrelly and Loren King. Of special interest: Carole Pateman's plenary address, and the workshop on "Global justice and global governance":

This workshop explores the themes of global justice and global governance. What obligations and duties do we have to non–nationals? Which principles and (existing or possible) global institutions are best suited to address the diverse concerns that arise in the world today? And which historical figures in the canon of political theory (e.g. Aristotle, Hobbes, Kant, etc.) offer ideas and concepts that can help us address the challenges of today’s interdependent and complex world?

Over the course of the workshop we will examine these themes, and related issues, from all areas of political theory: normative analysis, history of political thought, applied theory. From cosmopolitanism and nationalism, to concerns of global health, immigration and international institutions, we aim to bring theory to bear on practical concerns that arise in an era of globalization.

Monday May 16, 10:30am- 12 noon
G2(b): Workshop/Atelier: Global Justice and Global Governance/Justice internationale et gouvernance mondiale: Arendt, Hegel and International Hierarchy
Chair/Président: Colin Farrelly (Queen’s) Room/Salle BA-209

Jacob Schiff (Toronto), From Global Justice and Global Governance to Global Judgment and Global Action: Rereading Hannah Arendt for International Relations

Alexander Lanoszka (Princeton), Beyond Simple Benevolence and Malevolence: Sharpening the Theoretical Differences between Various International Hierarchical Relations

Christopher David LaRoche (Toronto), Why Liberal Peace Theorists Should Stop Reading Kant (And Start Reading Hegel)

Monday May 16, 1:30 pm - 3:00 pm
G3(b): Workshop/Atelier: Global Justice and Global Governance/Justice internationale et gouvernance mondiale : Cosmopolitanism I
Chair/Président: Loren King (WLU) Room/Salle BA-209

David Wiens (Michigan), The Statist Implications of Cosmopolitan Commitments

Leah Bradshaw (Brock), Cosmopolitanism and Citizenship

Kathryn Walker (Montréal), The Problem with Transnational Approaches to Global Justice

Tuesday May 17 8:45 am - 10:15 am
G5(b): Workshop/Atelier: Global Justice and Global Governance/Justice internationale et gouvernance mondiale: Property and Territory

Chair/Président: Charles Jones (UWO) Room/Salle BA-209

John Boye Ejobowah (WLU), On Ownership Rights to Natural Resources

Rhoda Howard–Hassman (WLU), Reconsidering Property Rights: A Safeguard Against State–induced Famine

Nicholas Troester (Princeton), Putting the 'Jus' in Jus Post Bellum: Humanitarian Crises and their Aftermath

Tuesday May 17, 10:30 am - 12 noon
G6(b): Workshop/Atelier – Global Justice and Global Governance/Justice internationale et gouvernance mondiale: Health and Human Rights

Chair/Président: John Boye Ejobowah (WLU) Room/Salle BA-209

Lesley Jacobs (York), The Globalization of Human Rights to Health: Domestic Public Health Policy Dialogue With International Law and International Institutions

Kathryn Walker (Montréal), Is Rooted Cosmopolitanism Bad for Women?

Lynda Lange (Toronto), Can T. Pogge be Defended Against Feminist Criticism of His Philosophy of Human Rights?

Wednesday 10:30 am- 12 noon
G10(b): Workshop/Atelier: Global Justice and Global Governance/Justice internationale et
gouvernance mondiale: Cosmopolitanism II – Author Meets Critics for Richard Vernon’s
Cosmopolitan Regard (Cambridge University Press, 2010)

Chair/Président: Simon Caney (Oxford) Room/Salle BA-209

Charles Jones (UWO), Motivation and Jurisdiction

Neil Hibbert (Saskatchewan), Particularizing Obligation

Steven Lecce (Manitoba), Iterative Contractualism? Global Justice and the Social Contract
Discussant/Commentateur: Richard Vernon (UWO)

Wednesday 1:30 pm - 3:00 pm
G11(b): Workshop/Atelier – Global Justice and Global Governance/Justice internationale et gouvernance mondiale: Federalism and Terrority

Chair/Président: Neil Hibbert (Saskatchewan) Room/Salle BA-209

Thomas Hueglin (WLU), Federalism and Democratic Governance

Burke Hendrix (Franklin & Marshall College), What Are the Outer Boundaries of Aboriginal Sovereignty?

Margaret Moore (Queen’s), Global Justice and Territorial Rights

Helder De Schutter (K.U. Leuven), European Federalism

Wednesday May 18, 3:15pm- 4:45 pm
G12: Workshop/Atelier: Global Justice and Global Governance/Justice internationale et
gouvernance mondiale: Plenary Session on Global Justice and Global Governance
Chairs/Présidents: Colin Farrelly (Queen’s) / Loren King (WLU)
Room/Salle BA-209

Simon Caney (Oxford), What is a Fair Distribution of Greenhouse Gas Emissions?

Virginia Held (CUNY), Care, Justice, and International Law

2011-05-05T22:12:00.003-05:00

Hither and yon: Theorizing the Commonwealth

Volkswagen Fellowship Symposium: "Theorizing the Commonwealth"
Wednesday, May 18, 2011 - 9:00am
Room 133, Barker Center
Harvard University

9:00 am
Welcome

9:10 am
Hans Beck
McGill University
Federalism in Ancient Greece: Theories of the Unthinkable

9:55 am
Emma Dench
Harvard University
The Roman Empire: Theory and Practice

Coffee Break

11:00 am
Theo Christov
Northwestern University
The Republican Idea of Europe in the 18th Century

11:45 am
Detlef von Daniels
Universität Witten/Herdecke
Rudiments of Federalism in Kant

12:30 pm
Pierpaolo Polzonetti
University of Notre Dame
Omnes viae ‘Romam’ ducunt: The American Revolution in Mozart’s Vienna

1:15 pm
Lunch Break

2:30 pm
Jacob T. Levy
McGill University
The Accidental Innovation: From Ancient Constitutionalism to Modern Federalism

3:15 pm
James Tully
University of Victoria
On the Idea of a Commonwealth Today

Coffee Break

4:20 pm
Glyn Morgan
Syracuse University
The Failure of the European Alternative

5:05 pm
Alexander Somek
University of Iowa
The Cosmopolitan Constitution

Pre-registration: Detlef von Daniels, detlef.vondaniels@uni-wh.de

2011-05-03T21:39:00.002-05:00

Hither and yon

Spatiality and Justice
Interdisciplinary Investigations on a Political Philosophy of the City
Montréal, 5 – 7 May 2011
Le Meridien Versailles
1808 Sherbrooke West
Metro Guy-Concordia

Thursday May 5th

8:45 Introductory remarks
Daniel Weinstock, CRÉUM,
Canada Research Chair in Political Philosophy

Justice, Cities and Spatiality I
Chair: Daniel Weinstock, CRÉUM,
Canada Research Chair in Political Philosophy

9:00 Patrick Turmel, Université Laval
Urban Justice and Equality

9:45 Nik Luka, McGill University
Justice, Public Space and Public Life

10:30 Cofee break

11:00 Larissa Smith & Tara Mrejen, McGill University
Autonomous Cities?

11:45 Martin Blanchard, CRÉUM
Housing, Justice and Philosophy: First Steps

Justice, Cities and Spatiality II
Chair : Victor Muñiz-Fraticelli, McGill University

14:00 Frank Cunningham, University of Toronto
Urban Citizenship

14:45 Avner de-Shalit, Hebrew University Jerusalem
Justice Within the City

15:30 Cofee break

16:00 Loren A. King, Wilfrid Laurier University
Claiming Lefebvre's Right: Urban Civilization and the Moral Salience of Everyday Life

16:45 Marie-Claude Prémont, ENAP
Les litiges post-fusion

Friday May 6th
Cities, Justice and Diversity
Chair: Hoi Kong, McGill University

9:00 Margaret Kohn, University of Toronto
What is Wrong With Gentriication?

9:45 Daniel Weinstock, CRÉUM, Canada Research Chair in Political Philosophy
The Ethics and Politics of Commemorative Space

10:30 Cofee break

11:00 Victor Muñiz-Fraticelli, McGill University
Big-City Values: The Normative Autonomy of Cities

11:45 Thad Williamson, University of Richmond
The City's Right to Capital: Property, Justice, and the Climate Crisis

12:30 Lunch

Power and Democracy in Urban Politics
Chair: Patrick Turmel, Université Laval

14:00 John Forester, Cornell University
Participatory Urban Planning, Mediated Negotiations, and the Construction of (Im)possibility

14:45 Clarissa Rile Hayward, Washington Univ. in Saint Louis
What's Wrong with the Mall? Power and Publicity in Democratic Politics

15:30 Cofee break

16:00 Hoi Kong, McGill University
Deliberative Municipalities

16:45 Roger Keil, York University
The Rise of the Suburbs and the Challenge of Metropolitan Governance

Saturday May 7th
Cities and Nation-States
Chair: Pierre-Yves Néron, CRÉUM

9:00 Richard Schragger, University of Virginia School of Law
Reviving the Regulatory City

9:45 Margeaux Ruellan, Université Paris IV-Sorbonne
L’espace public, un espace de démocratie ?

10:30 Cofee break

11:00 Laury Bacro, Université de Montréal
La banlieue française et l'émergence de la culture rap: comment un territoire urbain délimité inlue-t-il dans le processus de formation de l'identité et d'une pensée de la contestation ?

11:45 Jacob T. Levy, McGill University
Cities: The Birth of Intermediacy and the Problem of Territory

12:30 Group discussion: What Have We Learned?

2011-05-03T06:04:00.001-05:00

Congratulations...

to graduating senior political theorist and RGCS student fellow Mylène Freeman, newly elected NDP MP for the Quebec riding of Argenteuil--Papineau--Mirabel!

2011-04-18T11:03:00.004-05:00

The Tory-PQ Alliance

The Parti Quebecois is riding high in the polls at the moment, though a provincial election is a long way off. And it seems to be filled with enthusiasm and vigor at the moment, coming off its convention this weekend-- though I can't say that I find the 93% vote in support of Pauline Marois to be quite so impressive as it's being made out to be. It sends the signal "in the face of a possible victory in the medium-term future, we are capable of acting as a basically unified and functional organization and not undermining our leader for no good reason." That's better than the PQ has sometimes done in the past, but it's not a dazzling accomplishment.

I fear that the real boost to the PQ's fortunes right now is coming from elsewhere: the Harper campaign.

To a first approximation, the median Quebec voter wants recognition as a distinct society, an advantageous fiscal relationship with Ottawa, and *not* to secede, have a vote on secession, or back into secession by a forced confrontation. That translates into a preference for voting for the Bloc as a substitute for voting for the PQ. The Bloc and the PQ are allies, of course-- but they are also rivals, in that the Bloc's success in extracting concessions at the center undermines the PQ's claim of urgency within the province. Voting for the Bloc thus becomes the safety valve, releasing nationalist-secessionist pressure and dampening fervor for the PQ and for secession.

As far as I'm concerned, this is a healthy dynamic. I don't like the Bloc; but I view them as a desirable feature of the Canadian political system, keeping pressure on the center to accommodate Quebec, and thereby keeping federation tolerable for Quebec.

But that dynamic only works if the Bloc is perceived to carry some weight in Ottawa. A Harper majority, and especially a Harper majority won on the basis of a nationwide attack on Quebec secessionist sentiment as manifested in support for the Bloc, will leave the average francophone Quebec voter with a sense of not having a voice, of having the desire to be maitres chez nous delegitimized in Canadian politics. Even if Harper doesn't win his majority, he's contributed to that delegitimation by making the thought of a de facto coalition with the Bloc anathema.

That can only be good for the PQ, two years out.

2011-03-17T09:40:00.002-05:00

Hither and yon, Montreal edition: today at ISA

1:45 PM (TC61)

Cosmopolitanism, Institutions, and Non-Ideal Theory

Room: Parlor Suite 2020, Fairmont

Chair: Catherine Lu (McGill University)

Discussant: Daniele Archibugi (National Research Council)

Luis Cabrera. "Is There a Duty to Support Unjust Institutions above the State?"

Ryoa Chung. "Soft Law, Soft Power and Smart Politics in the NonIdeal World: A Pragmatic Approach to Cosmopolitanism."

Jacob Levy. "Contra Politanism: Against the Moral Teleology of Political Forms"

Laura Valentini. "On the Duty to Create Just Global Institutions: Dilemmas of Non-Compliance"

2011-03-14T08:01:00.002-05:00

March 18: Federalism, Security, Democracy, and the European Alternative

Federalism, Security, Democracy, and the European Alternative
Friday March 18
McGill, Ferrier 456, 840 Dr Penfield

Cosponsored by the Research Group on Constitutional Studies, McGill University
and
The Maxwell European Union Center, Syracuse University

1. 9:00-10:15: Federalism and Its Levels

Jacob T. Levy, "Federalism contra Subsidiarity"
Frank Pasquale, "Federalism in an Age of Fusion Centers"
Jason Sorens, “The New Economics of Ethnofederalism”

Break 15 Minutes

2. 10:30-11-45: Has Europe failed?

Daniele Archibugi, “Cosmopolitanism at Europe's Borders”
Cassiano Hacker-Cordon, “Europe’s Struggles and Global Justice”
John Hall,”Europe: "Banalities of Success"
Glyn Morgan, “The Failure of Europe’s Constitutional Alternative”

Break 15 minutes

3. 12:00-2:00: Security, Justice, and Democracy (Lunchtime Session)

Glen Newey, “Security’s Sake”
Laura Valentini, “Justice and democracy"
Patti Lenard, "Security, Justice and Democracy"

2011-03-10T10:08:00.001-06:00

It's the apocalypse

Time to panic, hoard, and acquire shotguns.

2011-03-10T06:06:00.006-06:00

Political theory in Montreal

A busy couple of weeks.

Tonight:

Michael Zuckert (Notre Dame), public lecture, Concordia, Hall Building, Room H-767, ƒ455 de Maisonneuve W: "Slavery and the Constitutional Convention."

Tomorrow and Saturday:
Conference on Aristotle's Politics

Friday:Thomson House, room 406:

9:00 
Opening  remarks

9:30‐11:00
Andrés  Rosler,  University  of  Buenos  Aires
“Political  Virtue:   Citizenship,  Democracy,  and  War”

11:00‐12:30
Fred  D.  Miller,  Jr.,  Bowling  Green  State  University
“The  Rule  of  Reason”

2:00‐3:30
Karen  Margrethe  Nielsen,  University  of  Western  Ontario
“On  Economy  and  Private  Property”

3:30‐5:00
Donald  Morrison,  Rice  University
“The  Common  Good”

Saturday, Leacock 927

9:30‐11:00
Marguerite  Deslauriers,  McGill  University
“Unity  and  Inequality”

11:00‐12:30
Richard  Kraut,  Northwestern  University
“Aristotle  and  Rawls  on  the  Common  Good"

Tomorrow:
GRIPP: Catherine Zuckert, Notre Dame: 'Plato’s Philosophers: The Political Payoff.' New CHancellor Day Hall, 3644 Peel, room 200-- please read the paper in advance.

Tuesday March 15

Global Justice and Health Inequalities
Ferrier 456

Introduction and welcome (coffee served): 8:45-9:15am
Patti Tamara Lenard, Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, University of Ottawa
Jacob Levy, Department of Political Science, McGill University
Christine Straehle, Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, University of Ottawa

9:15-10:45 am: Responsibility and health inequalities
Who is responsible for health inequalities? Who should bear the responsibility for remedying inequalities? Is health inequality distinct from other forms of inequality, or it is it derivative of wealth inequality more generally?
Garrett Wallace Brown, University of Sheffield, Global Health Inequality and the Demands of Cosmopolitan Global Justice
Mira Johri, Ryoa Chung and Ted Schrecker, Department of Health, University of
Montreal, Department of Philosophy, University of Montreal, Globalization and Health Equity Unit, Institute of Population Health, University of Ottawa, Global health and national borders

Angela Kaida, Simon Fraser University, Women and HIV: Our collective moral obligation to improve the health of HIV-affected women and children in developing countries
Disc: Pierre-Yves Néron, Centre de Recherche en Éthique de l'Université de Montréal

10:45-11:15 – coffee break

11:15-12:30: Boundaries and health inequalities
What is the moral status of boundaries that include some and exclude others from adequate health care? Do boundaries matter for delineating who carries the obligation to remedy health inequalities?
Yukiko Asado, Dalhousie University, Population boundaries for health inequalities
Phillip Cole, University of Wales, Westport, ‘Illegal’ Immigrants and Access to Health Care
Disc: Anna Drake, Queen’s University

12:30-2pm – lunch

2-3:15 pm: Globalization and health inequalities
How does an emphasis on our shared humanity, or the shared global space of justice, affect our sense of what we owe to others from the perspective of health
Lisa Eckenwiler, George Mason University, An ecological conception of global health equity
Ted Schrecker, University of Ottawa, Cartographies of obligation: the global marketplace and global health ethics
Disc: Sarah Weibe, University of Ottawa

3:15-3:45pm – coffee break

3:45-5:15 pm: Vulnerability, humanitarianism and health inequalities
How does an understanding of vulnerability add to our sense of our responsibilities to remedy global health inequalities? How should we think about health inequalities in times of humanitarian disaster? Do health inequalities and the vulnerabilities they induce warrant being termed a “humanitarian disaster” in and of themselves?
Christine Straehle, University of Ottawa, Health Care Migration, Vulnerability and Individual Agency
Patti Tamara Lenard, University of Ottawa, Treating inequality in health care access as a humanitarian disaster
Ryoa Chung and Matthew R. Hunt, University of Montreal, University of Montreal/McMaster University, Health inequalities, vulnerability and humanitarian crises

Disc: Adina Preda, Centre de Recherche en Éthique de l'Université de Montréal

5:15-5:45pm: Wrap-up

Graduate Student “Rapporteurs”:
Cathy Nguyen, University of Ottawa
Kate Wood, University of Ottawa

Wednesday March 16 - Saturday March 19

Annual meeting of the International Studies Association. See schedule for the International Ethics section here.

Friday March 18
Federalism, Security, Democracy, and the European Alternative
Ferrier 456

1. 9:00-10:15: Federalism and Its Levels

Jacob T. Levy, "Federalism contra Subsidiarity"
Frank Pasquale, "Federalism in an Age of Fusion Centers"
Jason Sorens, “The New Economics of Ethnofederalism”

Break 15 Minutes

2. 10:30-11-45: Has Europe failed?

Daniele Archibugi, “Cosmopolitanism at Europe's Borders”
Cassiano Hacker-Cordon, “Europe’s Struggles and Global Justice”
John Hall,”Europe: "Banalities of Success"
Glyn Morgan, “The Failure of Europe’s Constitutional Alternative”

Break 15 minutes

3. 12:00-2:00: Security, Justice, and Democracy (Lunchtime Session)

Glen Newey, “Security’s Sake”
Laura Valentini, “Justice and democracy"
Patti Lenard, "Security, Justice and Democracy"

March 21-25
Jon Elster

Traité critique de l’homme économique - le désintéressement
Lundi 21 mars, 18 h
UQAM - Bibliothèque centrale
400, rue Sainte-Catherine Est, local A-M204 (niveau métro)

La théorie du choix rationnel et ses critiques
Mercredi 23 mars, 18 h
UQAM - Pavillon Thérèse-Casgrain
455, boulevard René-Lévesque Est, local W-5215

Justice, Truth and Peace
Jeudi 24 mars, 17 h
McGill - Moot Court, New Chancellor Day Hall
3644, rue Peel (entrée par le 3660, rue Peel)

Le rôle des émotions dans l’explication de l’action
Vendredi 25 mars, 10 h
UQAM - Pavillon Thérèse-Casgrain
455, boulevard René-Lévesque Est, local W-5215

2011-03-04T20:47:00.002-06:00

Elsewhere

I haven't written anything there yet, but I've joined with a great team of simpatico philosophers over at the new blog Bleeding Hearts Libertarians. More to come.

2011-02-26T14:53:00.003-06:00

Hey, look at that

Now that the earmark bans are in place, it's evident to everyone that earmarks affect spending levels.

When House Republicans were searching for cuts to offer Senate Democrats as part of a temporary spending plan to avert a government shutdown, they were able to reach into accounts set aside for earmarks and find nearly $2.8 billion that would have previously gone to water projects, transit programs and construction programs. No earmarks, no need for that money, and the threat of an imminent shutdown was eased.

Lawmakers said the absence of earmarks also allowed for a more freewheeling debate on the House floor during consideration of the Republican plan to slash $61 billion from this year’s budget since Democrats and Republicans were not caught up in protecting the special provisions they had worked so hard to tuck into the spending bill.

“This is a completely new experience, and a good one,” said Representative Jeff Flake, an Arizona Republican who had lost scores of attempts on the House floor to strip earmarks from spending bills.

While spending on earmarks is a tiny portion of the budget, critics like Mr. Flake and Mr. Boehner said they played an insidious role in pushing up federal spending through what is known in legislative terms as logrolling.

Top members of the Appropriations Committee might, for instance, grant a lawmaker’s request for a few million dollars for an important project back home. That lawmaker would then be obligated to support the entire multibillion-dollar bill despite possible reservations. Woe to the person who gets an earmark and then opposes the bill; chances for a future earmark would be somewhere between zero and none.

“You get millions for an earmark and end up voting for billions of dollars that you may oppose,” said Steve Ellis, a vice president at Taxpayers for Common Sense, a government watchdog group.

(For previous discussion, see here.)

2011-02-25T11:45:00.002-06:00

On Liberty

Matt Yglesias:

[quoting] The Georgia dissidents rallied behind the revealing slogan “Liberty and Property without restrictions”—which explicitly linked the liberty of white men to their right to hold blacks as property. Until they could own slaves, the white Georgians considered themselves unfree. [/quoting] It’s a very interesting quirk of rhetoric. Freedom-talk tends, in practice, to have very little to do with any respectable notion of freedom.

Provides an occasion for two of my favorite quotes.

Samuel Johnson, on Americans: "How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?"

Orlando Patterson, on the general phenomenon:

The basic argument of this work is that freedom was generated from the experience of slavery. People came to value freedom, to construct it as a powerful shared vision of life, as a result of their experience of, and response to, slavery or its recombinant form, serfdom, in their roles as masters, slaves, and nonslaves.

2011-02-22T09:31:00.002-06:00

Clever or pretentious?

My admiration for this idea, a riff on the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue by Tyler Green of Modern Art Notes (and see the contributions of art museums to the idea here) was almost-- but not quite-- entirely undone by this: "Green confesses that he hasn't seen the Sports Illustrated version: 'The newsstand near me carries Cooks Illustrated, The Nation, Bookforum, The Chronicle of Philanthropy and The New York Review of Books. It seems not to carry Sports Illustrated.'"

You're already tweaking SI and propagating great works of art. Do you really need to further prove your high-culture bona fides with this kind of "I don't even own a television" tedium?

In addition to being absurdly and unnecessarily pretentious (look at that list! Surely you local newsagent carries something else; the only purpose of that list is culture-status grabbing), I just don't believe it. The kind of bookstore newsstands that carry The Chronicle of Philanthropy (not many!) carry pretty nearly everything. They might sell out of the swimsuit issue; they don't not carry it. And the places that can support such highbrow newsstands (big cities and some college towns) also support more than one newsstand. In that kind of place, one's eyes are eventually sullied by passing over the cover of a magazine that is less highbrow than one's own tastes. One grits one's teeth and endures; one need not fib about the experience.

2011-02-22T08:06:00.004-06:00

Freedom of associations/ freedom in associations watch

Arizona is considering requiring universities to allow concealed-carry permit holders to wear their guns on campus, and Texas seems to be close to doing so.

One view: This fails to recognize the autonomy of universities as self-governing institutions. Merits aside, it is rightly a matter for universities to decide. Universities are much more likely than state legislatures to correctly understand the dynamics of classroom life, dormitory life, Greek systems and drinking, and much more that should go into making a decision about permitting firearms on campus. Public universities should be free (as private universities are) to decide that for themselves.

Another view: students and professors do not leave their freedom at the campus gates. The First Amendment directly applies to public universities: their self-government does not extend to passing hate-speech regulations, or discriminating against religious student newspapers, or judging candidates for employment based on their political views, or establishing a religion. In the many American states where the voters and/or legislatures have decided that individual freedom encompasses wide latitude to carry firearms in public places, the public universities don't have any authority to trump that judgment. Public universities, unlike private universities, must respect the freedom of their members as individuals. Their associational freedom to make their own internal rules is a lesser matter, and even somewhat suspect, since they are state agencies.

2011-02-17T15:09:00.001-06:00

It is probably not an accident

that the U.S. and Canada have the relative positions that they do on this chart, since it is based on data from after I moved north.

2011-02-15T15:26:00.003-06:00

Oh, good.

Because the problem with purebred dogs is that they're not inbred enough, let's start thinking in terms of "endangered" breeds that should be rescued by breeding lots and lots of dogs from just four ancestors.

I'm a serious dog people, as those who know me will attest. But breed-fetishization holds no appeal for me. We've been mixing dogs' genes for thousands, possibly tens of thousands, of years, to meet our needs and desires at the time. There's nothing sacred about the sub-speciation that happened to be in effect when the Kennel Clubs came into existence. The otterhounds are cute, sure. But if we've inbred the otterhound to the point of epilepsy, and we no longer need dogs to hunt otters, why on earth should we go on inbreeding them and trying to create demand for them where none exists, instead of reshuffling the genetic cards and getting some healthier mutts and, eventually, new breeds? The need to have dogs available as props for historical reenactors and cosplayers doesn't really strike me as compelling. If there are enough of the cosplayers to sustain demand, that's fine, but if there aren't, I don't think the extinction of the breed would be an object of great concern. (The life of each individual dog is an object of concern, but not the fate of the breed.) Dogs' genetic differentiation and specialization is a human creation for human needs; the otterhound- polar bear analogy doesn't hold. And we will, happily, go on having, and making, lots of different kinds of dogs for the foreseeable future.

2011-02-15T12:51:00.003-06:00

Sasha's asteroid

Sasha Volokh suggests, in accordance with orthodox libertarian rights theory, that

"taxing people to protect the Earth from an asteroid, while within Congress’s powers, is an illegitimate function of government from a moral perspective. I think it’s O.K. to violate people’s rights (e.g. through taxation) if the result is that you protect people’s rights to some greater extent (e.g. through police, courts, the military). But it’s not obvious to me that the Earth being hit by an asteroid (or, say, someone being hit by lightning or a falling tree) violates anyone’s rights; if that’s so, then I’m not sure I can justify preventing it through taxation.

This is met with a sensible rejoinder from Matt Yglesias and that blank look of incredulity that Brad DeLong sometimes affects in lieu of argument. But I can sympathize even with Brad here. The conclusion is absurd, and as Matt says, that means that something has gone badly wrong somewhere along the way.

I'll again quote from my argument about this kind of thing.

I propose to treat the state as a morally contingent form of social organization that is nonetheless pervasive in the world we inhabit and in any world we can reasonably imagine in the medium-term future.

If we do so, one consequence is that we should view state officials as wielding a great deal of power in our social world that is probably not justified all the way down. States did not come about by individualist contractualist consent; they are not the institutional form of morally foundational nations; religious, hereditary, and customary forms of legitimation may remain sociologically credible in some places but are surely not morally well-grounded accounts of the justifications for the organized use of violence. Yet states are such well-entrenched features of the political landscape that, if can constrains ought at all, we are probably not morally obligated to abolish the state form in favor of some other form of political organization or in favor of anarchy of any description. We must morally make the best of them, making do with what we have.

In a world filled with states, officeholders and officials should view themselves as having political responsibility as analyzed by Weber, which is much like [David] Miller’s remedial responsibility. They wield power that is not morally legitimated by its origins; the power exists because of morally neutral historical and social accidents. What remains is moral responsibility for what is done with the power.

State officials then confront a world in which their authority gives them unusual power over outcomes. In a world full of drowning children, they are unusually likely to have access to life preservers. As Miller stresses, it is important not to view the world as always only made up of drowning children; we must also be able to see ourselves as partly responsible for the creation of our circumstances, our social worlds, and our outcomes. But even with that caveat in mind, there are drowning children enough to go around. Miller draws on Virginia Held’s (1970) famous argument that a random collection of individuals can be held morally responsible, to suggest that if they can, surely more substantial collectives like nations can be. But Held’s “random collection” shouldn’t be passed by so quickly; it is a serviceable shorthand for the reality of fellow-citizenship in a modern state, who make up a random collection of individuals who happen to be socially organized in a particular, contingent but powerful, way.

The state’s first duty, the prevention of interpersonal violence, follows more or less straightforwardly from the kind of social organization that the state is: the agency that is able to claim and enforce a local monopoly on the legitimate initiation of force. Not all forms of political organization have been like that, and the responsibilities of officeholders under them differed accordingly. But the ability to prevent private violence is constitutive of the modern state, which just for that reason acquires a responsibility to do so in accordance with the background moral rights of persons to be free from violence. Similarly, it acquires a responsibility to protect against theft and against aggression from outside its boundaries. It has displaced all other possible protectors; it has both the greatest ability and (due to its own actions) the only ability to defend against force; and so it bears the responsibility to do so.

Orthodox libertarianism would hold that this first responsibility (understood to include the prevention of private theft, not only personal violence) also more or less exhausts the state’s responsibilities. But the creation of the social technology that can protect against internal and external violence—for example, the creation of a professional body of armed men trained for coordinated action and a financial apparatus that can support that body—means that there is a significant concentration of physical and fiscal power on hand. And there may well be an overprovision of that power, since an underprovision is irresponsible and generates political pressure for state actors to fulfill their duties, and “just right” provision at the level that would keep police and armed forces working at precisely their whole capacity would be an astronomically unlikely coincidence. Then, unavoidably, the slack in the system provides the state and state actors with situations in which they have a unique capacity to prevent or mitigate harms and suffering. The police force created to prevent crimes also has the ability to respond to car crashes. The public fisc created to fund an army also has the ability to feed the starving. I am sure that there is no morally decent way to insist that the police officer refuse in principle to aid people in danger even if the danger wasn’t caused by crime, even though that means that the taxpayers will be involuntarily funding some use of the officer’s time that is not connected to rights-protection, even if the resulting situation is a violation of the best understanding of taxpayers’ property rights. Nor will it just be a matter of the personal benevolence of the police officer who wants to be free to prevent non-criminal harms while on the clock. If capacity and proximity can generate outcome-responsibility, then it can be the officer’s responsibility to act—and, accordingly, the responsibility of the state of which the officer is an agent.
Once the public fisc can prevent non-criminal harms indirectly, by paying its personnel to do so, it is a difficult distinction to maintain that it may not prevent them directly, by, e.g., feeding the hungry. Indeed, the distinction is probably an impossible one, and so all non-autocracies will end by being in the business of distribution (Dahl 1993). Once states are distributing benefits—and even physical protection is a benefit about which distributive decisions are made, as is perfectly evident when looking at the geographic unevenness of police protection in all countries—they face moral constraints about how and to whom they should be distributed. That is, there are problems of political redistributive justice, even if redistribution is not in itself demanded by justice.

I do not suppose that these brief remarks will persuade my fellow libertarians that they ought to abandon their views on redistributive spending. But perhaps they will agree that the police officer on duty has a responsibility (and not just the responsibility borne by any natural person) to aid the drowning child, even though doing so is a drain on taxpayer resources that is not for the sake of the prevention of interpersonal rights-violations, even though doing so provides a kind of subsidized in-kind insurance against misfortunes that are not injustices. The subsidy is not itself a demand of libertarian justice but of public responsibility conditional on the fact of public power; but once the subsidy exists, it is constrained by concerns about justice. A state could not justifiably intentionally deploy police differentially according to the race of the children likely to be at risk of drowning.

(From Levy, "National and Statist Responsibility," Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, Volume 11, Issue 4 December 2008 , pages 485 - 499.)

In other words: it is obviously morally false that no steps may legitimately be taken to prevent the earth from an asteroid collision. It may be that in some alternate world without coercive states, alternate forms of social organization would have arisen that would have the organizational capacity to build the space cannon (or whatever). But we live in a world in which states have, for centuries, aggregated to themselves the function of the rapid large-scale organization of the means of applying great quantities of destructive kinetic energy. For good or for ill, they have displaced the social actors from that alternate world. If states may not act, then there is no one who both may and can, and that violates the premise at the beginning of this paragraph.

Say that I hold bad but effective land title-- if the property right to my land morally appropriately vests in an Indian tribe that may actually regain it someday, but hasn't yet. Indeed, I've been aggressively contesting their land claim; it is due in part to my own actions that they haven't reclaimed it. And then fire breaks out on a neighboring piece of land; my property is the appropriate place for a firebreak to protect much more area behind mine. (This could be a house in a city or a plot of forest.) But it is only likely, not guaranteed, that the fire will spread. So if I allow the firebreak on my land, I am knowingly and certainly destroying property value that might otherwise survive intact, on land that is not genuinely mine to destroy.

Or: I have stolen your car for a joy ride, and suddenly (god help me) see a trolley experiment unfolding in front of me. Instead of the fat man of some versions of the thought experiment, what I can put between the trolley and the people in peril is your car, probably totaling it.

In both cases, even if we concede that it was wrongful conduct that put me into the position of being the one able to prevent the catastrophic consequences, and even if the prevention will cause some moral harm, I have a clear duty to prevent the bad consequences. And-- for reasons familiar from Weber and Walzer, and fully articulated by Goodin in Utilitarianism as a Public Philosophy-- state actors have an exceptionally strong duty to prevent bad consequences that they're in a position to effect.

Sasha's rights theory is the one I object to with the policeman and the drowning child: the child's rights are not being violated, so the policeman may not spend taxpayer-supported time rescuing her. Still less may he commit some new act of expropriation-- grabbing your expensive suede jacket off a nearby park bench to wrap around the cold and wet child. But the asteroid case is even worse: it's as though the city has declared a curfew in the park, so no one but the policeman legally could be in a position to help the child at all. Given that state of affairs, the world that at that moment exists, the policeman not only may but must act.

The strict believer in property rights could still say: I'd be responsible for the value of your car if I totaled it in that way, even to save lives, since my being in that position was a consequence of my own actions. And that's right-- though it is fully compatible with the view that I have a moral duty to act. So maybe, in the science fiction future world in which state officials are all called on to pay damages for the harms their coercive actions caused over the centuries, they might be liable for the taxation in support of the building of the space cannon, even though they had a moral duty to build it. (The state has the right to create a firebreak without the owner's consent, under its duty to provide for public safety, but it owes damages afterwards.)

But now suppose that you were one of the people standing on the track whose life was saved. And try to calculate the who owes damages to whom, in the event that a handful of state officials coercively extracted some billions of dollars from hundreds of millions of people, with the consequence that all life on earth was saved.

What all of this means is: Sasha's theory of what rights we have is not the only premise needed to make his argument go. Not even fiat justitia ruat coelum will do the work. He also needs an implausible theory in which moral duties in a non-ideal world are absolutely identical to moral duties in an ideal world. To defeat it, we only need introduce a moral equivalent of the lawyerly concept of estoppel. If you believe in the libertarian alternate world of statelessness, and you believe that states have wickedly prevented us from reaching that world, you should think that states are estopped from suddenly pleading "let justice be done" come the moment when the heavens are literally about to fall.

2011-02-09T12:04:00.004-06:00

Political bias in academia, revisited yet again

Lots of people who should know better seem to be excited about this silly John Tierney article on this Jonathan Haidt presentation about political bias in the academy.

Haidt has taken things that surely by now everyone knows about politics and the academy-- e.g. that the professoriate leans left compared to the American populace as a whole-- and dressed them up in various bits of metaphor and jargon. Some of the metaphors are good ones; I like the magnet image. But they're metaphors, not evidence. Throw in what on usenet we once would have called ObLarrysummers, and the cute fact that it's social psychologists in the audience-- people who think of thesmelves as good at analyzing patterns of bias!-- and we're done. We have a just-so story about the evolution of taboos around topics having to do with race and gender straight out of the political correctness wars circa 1992, retold in a way that emphasizes what's supposed to be clear as soon as one says "taboo"-- that there's something magical and superstitious rather than rational about it.

But here's what we don't have:
1) Any meaningful new evidence about the political imbalance in the academy.
2) Any meaningful evidence at all of bias.
3) Any attempt whatsoever to sort out the competing explanations for the political imbalance that are the heart of any serious conversation on the topic.

Stipulating that the academy skews left compared with a random population sample (which is what Haidt's facially meaningless phrase "statistically impossible lack of diversity" actually means), we are always faced with the question of why. Random population samples are, after all, not something one usually comes across in daily life; even professional opinion pollsters trying to get such samples have real trouble doing so, because, e.g., the people who own landline phones, as opposed to no phones or only cell phones, aren't a random population draw, and if you survey using the phone book you'll get a skewed sample.

The common explanations:

1) Initial self-selection. Different careers reflect different mindsets and values, and the sorting into those careers early in means that there's no reason to expect them to look like random population draws. No one is surprised when the military skews right or the Peace Corps skews left. There's probably some sorting as between, say, those who go into business or finance of various kinds out of college and those who pursue PhDs. This point can be put in a value-neutral way, or said with whatever sanctimonious inflection one likes. "Conservatives are practical, and practical people go into business, while head-in-the-cloud unrealistic people want to go into an ivory tower." "Liberals believe in critical thought and reasoning, so they are naturally attracted to careers that value it; conservatives don't like having their assumptions questioned, so they naturally turn away from intellectual careers." Note that one has to go through another round of this in order to think about why any one discipline is politically skewed: economists, engineers, philosophers, and literary theorists are plausibly different groups of people to begin with, and they sort themselves out accordingly.

2) Selection and screening mechanisms. The favorite sanctimonious left-wing explanation for why there aren't conservatives in the academy is that the academy's various hurdles, from grad school admission onward, screen for intelligence, and conservatives are less intelligent people.

3) Change over time. The second-favorite sanctimonious left-wing explanation is that academics, who might start out with no real political views at all, are influenced by evidence and argument, and these favor movement toward the left, or at least toward a point farther left than the American median. Sometimes this is distinctively about the post-2001 years, but sometimes not. Common symptoms of this argument are the mindless repetition of John Stuart Mill's comments about conservatives being stupid or Lionel Trilling's "irritable mental gestures." Equally uninteresting is something like this: university professors, with their tenure and their taxpayer-funded salaries become left-wing because they resent their dependence on hard-working productive people who have real jobs; they spend their whole lives cut off from and failing to learn about markets, competition, and business, so what do you expect?

4) Bias-- whether unintended (the hostile environment "locker room talk" Haidt discusses) or intended ("don't tenure him, he's a Republican."). These are meaningfully different from each other, but both are problematic.

Sorting these out requires hard longitudinal work. When, in the decades from freshman year of college to tenure, does the political skew get introduced? Are conservatives disinclined to enter a given discipline at all, maybe just because they're disproportionately more interested in other things? Trying to enter the discipline but failing because they're not smart enough? Entering the discipline but becoming more left-wing over time? Trying to enter but dropping out because they're discouraged by groupthink? Or trying to enter but being kept out by overt bias? The answer may be "some of each," of course, and the dynamics may feed on each other-- but that's a hypothesis in its own right.

A slice-of-time show of hands at an academic conference in response to the question "who here is a conservative?" does absolutely nothing to sort any of this out. Neither does a google search on the phrases "liberal social psychologist" and "conservative social psychologist." Those two data only show what we already knew: the professoriate skews left. The two solicited anonymous e-mails complaining about uncomfortable environments provide anecdotal support for "unintended bias," but, well, not very much. And the cute fact that the presentation is being offered to social psychologists who study the emergence of bias in groups has some nice rhetorical effect in the room, but still doesn't add any insight.

I freely admit that sorting these questions of causation out is extremely hard. But anyone who claims to be talking about this subject and doesn't even acknowledge them, to say nothing of trying to solve them, hasn't added to our knowledge, and certainly hasn't provided any reason for supporters of the bias hypotheses to run around claiming vindication. The fact that the presentation (note: not an article, not a paper, a power point presentation at a conference) got a NYT write-up from a sympathetic columnist doesn't make it any more of a contribution to our knowledge.

2011-02-01T19:54:00.002-06:00

Conference on federalism and its future

Federalism and Its Future
The University of Texas School of Law
February 10 – February 12, 2011

Thursday, February 10, 2011

4:30—6:00 p.m.
Eidman Courtroom (2.306)
Keynote Address

Vicki Jackson, Georgetown University: "Understanding U.S. Federalism: The Warren Court and Post World War II Models of Constitutional Legitimacy"

Friday, February 11, 2011
9:15—10:30 a.m.
Jeffers Courtroom (3.140)

Author: Michael Greve, Constitutional Disorder: The Promise and Pathology of American Federalism

Discussant: Jacob T. Levy
Moderator: Justin Driver

10:45 a.m.—12:00 p.m.

Jeffers Courtroom (3.140)

Authors: Malcolm Feely and Edward Rubin, Federalism: Political Identity and Tragic Compromise

Discussant: Andy Karch
Moderator: Lynn Baker

1:00—2:15 p.m.
Jeffers Courtroom (3.140)

Authors: Alison LaCroix, The Ideological Origins of American Federalism

Ed Purcell, Originalism, Federalism, and the American Constitutional Enterprise: A Historical Inquiry

Discussants: Alison LaCroix, Ed Purcell

2:30—3:45 p.m.
Jeffers Courtroom (3.140)

Author: John Nugent, Safeguarding Federalism: How States Protect their Interests in National Policymaking

Discussant: Rob Mikos
Moderator: Abbe Gluck
Moderator: Willy Forbath

4:00—5:15 p.m.
Jeffers Courtroom (3.140)

Authors: Sujit Choudhry, Federalism, Secession and Devolution: From classical to Post-Conflict

Heather Gerken, The Supreme Court 2009 Term - Forward: Federalism All the Way Down

Discussants: Dan Halberstam, Vicki Jackson (Choudhry), Dan Rodriguez (Gerken)
Moderator: Zack Elkins

Saturday, February 12, 2011
9:15—10:30 a.m.
Jeffers Courtroom (3.140)

Author: Jenna Bednar, The Robust Federation

Discussant: Ann Bowman
Moderator: Frank Cross

10:45 a.m.—12:00 p.m.
Jeffers Courtroom (3.140)

Author: Erin Ryan, Federalism and the Tug of War Within

Discussant: Wendy Wagner
Moderator: Jim Rossi

1:00—2:15 p.m.
Jeffers Courtroom (3.140)

Author: Robert Schapiro, Polyphonic Federalism: Toward the Protection of Fundamental Rights

Discussant: Louise Weinberg
Moderator: Ernie Young

2:30—3:45 p.m.
Jeffers Courtroom (3.140)

Authors: Dan Rubinfeld and Robert Inman, Federal Institutions and the Democratic Transition: Learning from South Africa

Discussant: Rick Hills
Moderator: Dan Rodriguez

3:45 p.m.
Wrap-up

2011-01-27T12:01:00.002-06:00

Earmarks revisited

Harry Reid is trying the "earmarks don't increase spending" line. I commented on that idea here.

2011-01-24T22:52:00.003-06:00

Note toward a future blog post

Bradford Plumer, like Matt Yglesias, is a fan of the Chinese idea (I'm taking it for granted that they're right about this, I don't know it myself) of having good mayors promoted up through the mayorly ranks.

If the mayor of a small city—say, out in China's provinces—does a good job, then when his term is up he may get appointed as mayor of an even bigger city. Being able to govern a city is a useful skill, after all, so why not people who have shown some talent at it move up and try their hand at governing bigger cities, rather than restricting the job to whatever local dogcatcher can prove residency? Maybe voters don't want meddling outsiders. But they can make that choice themselves, no?

Sounds good. But I'll go with "no." In the American party system I'm thinking that turns mayorships into almost purely patronage positions. Every medium-sized city mayor in America decides to try to succeed Daley. Who will win? Well, there will be a Democratic primary to decide it. But with dozens of potential candidates who are poorly known to the local voters, someone is going to do some serious vetting: the incumbent's machine, or the governor if of the same party, or US Senators if of the same party... or the President if of the same party.

The U.S. has some 50,000 municipalities. The coordination problem of hundreds or thousands of mayors trying to move around the country and up the totem pole, when the voters "hiring" them in this odd labor market can't possibly have information about most of them, are huge. So, formally or informally, we'd end up with the Chinese model: the party hierarchy would provide the coordination.

American urban government is often nothing to write home about. But I'm unpersuaded that it would be improved by concentrating selection in the national political parties; and I think that's what this would necessarily amount to.

2011-01-22T11:25:00.002-06:00

Added to the blogroll

Ethics for adversaries. Mission statement:

This blog is based on a hypothesis: that we made a slight mistake when we carved out the sub-fields of ethics and political philosophy. The blog will not, for the most part be trying to prove this hypothesis in a heavy-handed way, but hopes to make it a little more compelling by way of examples.

What was the mistake? At some point “we” assigned some scholars to work on the foundations of moral theory, and others to work on the foundations of political philosophy, and then several other mutually exclusive bands of scholars to look into the peculiar ethical challenges facing professionals working within particular kinds of institutions and professions, like business, law, politics, international relations, journalism, accounting, international relations and, say, sports.

So what’s the hypothesis? That there just may be something similar about the challenges faced in design of all the aforementioned institutions, and also in the ethical dilemmas faced by people working within these settings. And further, that the challenges of designing and justifying these institutions may strain any more foundational theories of justice that have not adequately accounted for how different these competitive institutions are from other “merely administrative” institutions. (And we suspect this includes almost all famous theories of justice — not least John Rawls’s.)

The institutions, professions, and practices that we will be exploring throughout this blog are what we might call “deliberately adversarial.” They set up highly — but never completely — regulated competitions in order (ideally, in principle, as if by an invisible hand) to benefits those outside the competitions. We do not need to use free(ish) markets to produce and distribute goods and services, but if we do so in the right way, consumers should get better value for their money. We have not always had an adversarial legal system, or democratic elections, but when we do, citizens should be less likely to face injustice. We could have events where athletes show off their individual physical talents, but we tend to find competitive sports, where they do this in an attempt to win, a more satisfying spectator experience.

When does it make sense to try to get results from competitions rather than merely by attempting to achieve them directly? Why aren’t cooperation, mutual deliberation, and professionalism more efficient and just ways to deliver services? And if we do need to structure competitive environments, how do we ensure that the system won’t be “gamed” by the players so that they benefit more than the intended beneficiaries (like consumers, criminal suspects, or the general public)?

These will be the sorts of questions we will have in mind in this blog as we search for examples of effective or flawed “deliberately adversarial institutions” all around us.

2011-01-18T17:54:00.000-06:00

CFP: APT

CALL FOR PAPERS

Association for Political Theory 2011 Annual Conference
University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, Indiana

Proposals due: February 15, 2011

The Association for Political Theory (APT) invites proposals for its ninth annual conference, October 13-15, 2011, at the University of Notre Dame. To learn more about the Association and its annual conference, please visit the APT website at: http://apt.coloradocollege.edu. The Association for Political Theory welcomes proposals from all approaches and on all topics in political theory, political philosophy, and the history of political thought. Faculty, advanced PhD candidates, and independent scholars are eligible to participate. We also encourage faculty to volunteer to serve as chairs and/or discussants.

How to Apply: To apply online, click on the following link . Proposals are due by midnight on Tuesday, February 15, 2011 (PST). Please review the proposal guidelines described below before completing a proposal form. Each participant may submit one paper and one co-authored paper proposal. To propose a paper, each participant must submit an abstract of 300-400 words and a recent copy of his/her vita. If a copy of the CV can be found online, the applicant can provide the web address in the relevant box on the proposal form. Otherwise, the applicant must email a copy of the CV to aptproposals@gmail.com with his or her name as the subject line. Each participant is required to submit a proposal form, even if the proposal is part of a co-authored paper. Please note: you must both submit the proposal form and email your CV in order for your proposal to be considered by the Program Committee.

PLEASE NOTE THAT IN A CHANGE FROM PREVIOUS YEARS, WE WILL NOT BE ACCEPTING PANEL OR ROUNDTABLE PROPOSALS FOR THE 2011 CONFERENCE.

Chairs/Discussants: If you wish to participate as a chair and/or discussant, please note your areas of expertise and interest in the relevant box on the proposal form. You may offer to serve in both of these roles, but the Program Committee prefers to limit volunteers to one role to ensure broad participation in the conference. Presenting a paper does not preclude one from serving as a chair or a discussant in another panel.

Pre-circulation requirement: All papers accepted for the conference must be submitted electronically to an archive on the APT website no later than October 1, 2011. Please note that you should limit the length of your paper to 30 double-spaced pages of text so that discussants may provide suitable feedback. The archive will be password-protected so that access is limited to members of APT. Participants who fail to submit their paper to the archive by October 1, 2011 will be removed from the program.

Membership : Participation in the conference requires membership in the Association. Membership is free. Papers are available to APT members only, so conference participants will need to join APT in order to receive access to the archive. Click here to submit a membership application.

Questions and assistance: For questions about the program or proposal guidelines, or if you have any difficulty submitting a proposal form, please contact the Program Committee Co-Chairs, Alisa Kessel (akessel@pugetsound.edu) and Amit Ron (amit.ron@asu.edu).

***NEW APT INITIATIVE FOR 2011: Working Group Panel
“Power, Democracy, and the City”

This group is part of APT’s new Working Group initiative. Participants will engage in pre-conference dialogue as they prepare their papers, and the panel will serve as one moment in a longer collaboration. The format will enable scholars working on similar questions to learn from each other, develop their ideas over time, and create professional networks. The group will be chaired by Clarissa Hayward of Washington University in St. Louis. The intention is to submit the papers from this panel as a proposed special issue in the Journal of Power. Participants must have a first draft completed by August 15, 2011, and be ready at that time to share their work-in-progress and to comment on the work of the other participants. Just as for any APT paper, a polished version must be completed in time for presentation at the fall conference. For more information on this year’s working group theme, visit the APT Gateway website.

Potential participants should submit proposals via the proposal form and must indicate that they want their proposal to be considered for the working group panel. (You can submit the same proposal for both the working group panel and the general APT program, if you wish.) Papers will be selected by the working group panel chair and the APT program committee based on fit and strength. Generally, participants in APT working groups are expected to be at a post-dissertation stage of their career and to have begun publishing scholarly work. Once participants are notified of their acceptance and confirm their willingness to participate, members will develop a work-plan and schedule that include an initial re-reading and discussion of Robert Dahl's Who Governs? followed by the sharing of work in progress.

2011-01-18T11:12:00.009-06:00

Cass Sunstein in the news

As part of its effort to mend fences with business, the Obama administration has ordered of a review of regulations to seek "the proper balance," trying to "ensure that regulations protect our safety, health and environment while promoting economic growth" and to remove "outdated regulations that stifle job creation and make our economy less competitive." "Per a senior administration official, OMB Director Jack Lew is overseeing this effort, and it will be run out of Cass Sunstein’s office at OMB."

Left-leaning groups are predictably worried, and respond as if the mere notion that a regulation could be economically harmful is some kind of vile Republican lie.

Note that Obama's op-ed named just one example of overregulation, already repealed: the classification of saccharine as hazardous waste by the EPA. And it foresees new or stiffer "safety rules for infant formula; procedures to stop preventable infections in hospitals; efforts to target chronic violators of workplace safety laws." The emphasis of the piece is hardly on any claim that in fact there is too much regulation in any area. The tone is generally one that says "we've been doing things basically right and now we will confirm that with a self-audit."

I predict that almost no regulations will actually be repealed as a result of this, except in cases of conflict or redundancy with other regulations. I'm sure that compliance requirements can be simplified in many cases, and that we'll hear triumphant accounts of that: "Small businesses used to need to fill out 13 forms to do this; that has been reduced to 3." Almost any complex bureaucracy accumulates surplus paperwork requirements, and there are always reductions that can be made there just by deciding to look for them. But don't expect any sweeping round of deregulation here. Something more like Gore's "reinventing government" is the most to expect: basically worthy housecleaning, important to do every so often, but not at all fundamentally transformative of the regulatory balance. This is an effort to "change the tone," not to change the state.

Indeed, the Executive Order itself explicitly says "This order is supplemental to and reaffirms the principles, structures, and definitions governing contemporary regulatory review that were established in Executive Order 12866 of September 30, 1993"-- that is, the original order establishing the Reinventing Government initiative. It's a reaffirmation and refinement of existing practice. The greatest novelty is the order that each agency develop a plan for the periodic review of past regulations; but it seems that the reviews will be conducted by the agencies themselves, which already could have proposed changing their past rules had they wanted to.

One question, though: doesn't the new order mandate what Sunstein's office was supposed to be doing all along? He's a very energetic guy who likes to work long hours, and he was confirmed a year and a half ago. The Federal Register only grows by a couple of hundred pages per day, which is about his writing pace. Hasn't he already completed this review?

Update: See als these comments from Eric Posner.

2011-01-13T11:26:00.003-06:00

Poli sci rankings

Last week Kieran Healey made use of a clever online setup to solicit pairwise comparisons of sociology departments to yield a set of rankings. He then set one up for philosophy, too. The latter now has more than 100,000 votes and yields these rankings . Soc has more than 65,000 and yields these rankings.

He kindly went and set up a political science rankings widget. Go vote. here are the results. Let's test out the Condorcetian wisdom of crowds-- and, as noted in the other two cases, see whether we can't improve on the NRC rankings. Added advantage: not restricted to the U.S.

Update: The PSJR trolls managed to deliberately wreck this, just to show that they could.

2010-12-13T19:03:00.000-06:00

Princeton Graduate Conference in Political Theory

Graduate Conference in Political Theory
Princeton University
April 8-9, 2011

The Committee for the Graduate Conference in Political Theory at Princeton University welcomes papers concerning any period, methodological approach or topic in political theory, political philosophy, or the history of political thought. Approximately eight papers will be accepted.

Each session, led by a discussant from Princeton, will be focused exclusively on one paper and will feature an extensive question and answer period with Princeton faculty and students. Papers will be pre-circulated among conference participants.

The keynote address will be given by Professor Patchen Markell of the University of Chicago.

Submissions are due via email to polthry@princeton.edu by Monday, January 10th, 2011. Please limit your paper submission to 7500 words and format it for blind review (the text should include your paper's title but be free of other personal and institutional information). Only graduate students who will be enrolled in a Ph.D. program at the time of the conference may submit papers; papers from post-doctoral students will not be accepted. Papers will be refereed by current graduate students in the Department of Politics at Princeton. Acceptance notices will be sent in February.

Assistance for invited participants' transportation, lodging, and meal expenses will be provided by the committee, which acknowledges the generous support of the Department of Politics, the University Center for Human Values, and the Graduate School of Princeton University.

More information is available at politicaltheory.princeton.edu. Questions and comments can be directed to: polthry@princeton.edu.

2010-12-01T20:48:00.002-06:00

Department of unintended consequences

Bicycle locks endangering health of McGill’s most vulnerable trees

The tree in question, a 10-year-old magnolia acuminata, stands in front of the Macdonald-Harrington Building. It’s not much to look at, standing barely 10 feet tall, with a few spindly branches at its uppermost reaches – branches that carry fewer and fewer leaves in the summer months.
The tree, a protected species in North America and the only one of its kind on McGill’s lower campus, is dying. And it’s not dying of disease or as a result of an infestation of some exotic bug. Ironically, it’s being killed by cyclists.
With the greening of lower campus, more people are riding their bikes to McGill and the extra two-wheel traffic means crowded bike racks. The University is in the process of doubling the number of bike racks on lower campus from 1,200 to 2,4000. Nevertheless, some cyclists insist on chaining their rides to anything that doesn’t move, including fences, signposts, wheelchair access ramps – and small trees.
The problem with the latter is twofold. First, the constant rubbing and banging of locks, chains, pedals and pointy derailleurs cut into the protective bark, leaving the tree susceptible to disease, fungi and insects. It also impairs the flow of sap, which usually runs just below he surface of the bark.
Second, the relentless traffic of people and bikes at the base of the tree tamps down the soil, compacting it and making it more difficult for the roots to absorb water – another hindrance to the healthy flow of sap.
With its vital supply line of sap in an increasingly compromised state, the magnolia tree is literally withering to the point where its trunk at bike level is significantly thinner than it is higher up the tree (see photo). It is slowly strangling to death.
“This tree has almost stopped growing,” said Champagne. “It should be twice as large as it is now. And it’s a shame because in Canada this is a fairly rare tree.”
The situation is compounded because cyclists are locking their bikes to smaller trees all around campus, including just inside the Milton Gates. As a result, a generation of smaller, less robust trees is increasingly at risk of developing serious problems.

Gee, I wonder why bicycles are being inappropriately and excessively crowded just inside the Milton Gates?

2010-11-30T14:42:00.003-06:00

Compare and contrast

Does Canada lack global ambition?

"We don’t have enough time on task, we don’t have enough days in the year, we don’t have enough hours in the day. We don’t have enough emphasis on science and math. We don’t have a high enough standard for literacy, an encouragement for people to be literate and numerate when they graduate. The people [teachers] who perform the most precious job in our society and economy are not rewarded for success nor punished for failure.

So mediocrity is protected and excellence is not rewarded. At the university level, I think we have high quality institutions but again I would say that we tend to be very constrained by collective agreements. Fewer and fewer days in the year are actually spent teaching."

University considers cutting semesters from 13 weeks to 12
SSMU VP Abaki pushes for the change, arguing that McGill students work harder than their peers

The McGill administration is currently considering a number of changes to the university's academic calendar, including a proposal to shorten the lengths of the fall and winter semesters by reducing the number of hours students are in contact with their professors.

Standard McGill classes currently give students three hours of contact with instructors per week for 13 weeks, for a total of 39 hours per semester. The proposal, which is being considered by the Working Group on Calendars and Dates, a subgroup of McGill Senate's Committee on Enrolment and Student Affairs, would reduce the required number of contact hours to 36 per semester.

Students' Society Vice-President University Affairs Joshua Abaki has pushed for the changes, arguing that McGill students must work harder than their peers at other universities. According to Abaki, McGill is the only member of the G-13—a group of research-focused universities in Canada—that requires 39 hours.

-------

It may be of interest here to note that McGill's faculties are not unionized.

Concerning the astonishing student complaint that they are getting too much teaching for their dollar, it is perhaps also worth noting that in-province tuition for Quebec universities is far lower than equivalent tuition is at other G13 universities.

"What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly; it is dearness only that gives everything its value." Thomas Paine.

2010-11-18T07:09:00.005-06:00

Earmarks

The idea is rapidly spreading that a ban on earmarks doesn't affect spending, since earmarks are a way of distributing what's already been appropriated.

This is just true enough to be clever, and marks the speaker as being more sophisticated than those Tea Party rubes. But it's basically false, for three reasons.

First, it is more expensive to do things inefficiently than to do things efficiently. Building the Ted Stevens Bridge To Nowhere or the Robert Byrd Gold-Plated NORAD Auxiliary High Command Of West Virginia means that money has simply been wasted, and that all the needs that weren't met this year will arise again next year. If the real needs exert at least some pull on appropriations levels, then wasting money rather than spending it wisely at time 1 does affect appropriations at time 2. The U.S. gets very bad value per dollar of federal infrastructure spending, in part because earmarks screw up the ability to prioritize projects. That doesn't increase the appropriations at time 1; but it does tend to drive them up in every later year. Similarly, when earmarks keep alive weapons systems that the Pentagon wants to cancel, because the defense appropriators in Congress view the defense budget as a jobs program, the Pentagon shrugs its shoulders and increase its request the following year; it's not going to let the wasteful jobs-program part of the budget displace its own military priorities.

Second, bills often emerge out of House-Senate committees with higher appropriations levels that have the express aim of smoothing passage with earmarks.

But third, and most important: the earmarking members of Congress are the same people who set the appropriations level. And by this I don't only mean that they're members of the House and Senate; I mean that they're powerful members of the relevant committees. Ted Stevens and Robert Byrd took turns chairing the Senate Appropriations Committee. The knowledge that they were going to have a chance to start shoveling pork a little bit later in the process affected how much they appropriated at the beginning.

The idea that earmarks don't affect spending levels rests on a crazy image of how appropriations levels are set. We don't have one set of legislators who are dispassionate, disinterested judges of how much money needs to be allocated, who are then later on replaced by a bunch of grubby politicos deciding how to divvy up the spoils. Neither do we have legislators who, during their initial appropriations deliberations, somehow forget that earmarking comes later. Instead, we have normal human legislators throughout, responding to their incentives and environment. It would take a kind of saintly self-denial for them not to increase the initial size of the pool knowing that they were going to get a chance to give themselves a share later on.

Republican earmark supporters have been saying that abolishing earmarks transfers allocation authority to the dreaded Obama Administration. Well, yes. And if you tell a bunch of Republican legislators to decide how much money to give to the Obama administration to allocate, they'll come up with a smaller number than if you tell them to come up with an amount for them to divide up among themselves to allocate. Indeed the same holds true for members of the President's own party.

Earmarks aren't themselves a lot of money in the grand scheme of things, and abolishing them entirely would only make a tiny dent in the deficit. But they do indeed affect appropriations-- and my hunch is that they affect appropriations for more than their actual cash value, because they create a system that attracts appropriators like Byrd and Stevens, who err on the side of spending too much to make sure there's enough to go around.

2010-11-09T14:06:00.004-06:00

Not an Onion study

"Many Faculty-Senate Leaders at Doctoral Institutions Lack Clout, Survey Finds"

Once again, higher education has managed to be the study of something that sounds like it should be, but is not, from
the Onion's indispensible series of "study finds" articles, such as Study finds working at work improves productivity, New Study Finds College Binge Drinking To Be A Blast, Study Finds Link Between Red Wine, Letting Mother Know What You Really Think, and Teen Sex Linked To Drugs And Alcohol, Reports Center For Figuring Out Really Obvious Things.

2010-11-05T22:17:00.002-05:00

Remember, remember!

2010-10-20T09:08:00.003-05:00

SPEP Meeting, Montreal, November 4-6

The Society for Phenomenology and Existential PhilosophyANnual Meeting will be held in Montreal, November 4-6. The meeting is supported by SSHRC, McGill's Dean of Arts Development Fund, the Department of Philosophy of McGill University, and by the Université de Montréal.

The program is here.

2010-10-17T07:25:00.003-05:00

Responding to Sandy Levinson

Levinson asks:

PBS reports that the cost of rescuing the 33 trapped Chilean miners was $10-20 million. A third apparently came from private donations, with the rest from a mix of the state-owned copper company in charge of the effort and the government of Chile itself. Every American law student is told that there is, in the United States, no "duty to rescue." It is, of course, just such a notion of "good Samaritanism" that is the foundation of the welfare state, in which haves see their funds redistributed to have-nots lest the latter end up starving or freezing on the streets or watching their houses burn down because they can't afford to pay the user fee to the local fire department....

I've done a quick check of recent entries to the Volokh Conspiracy, which I take it is the leading collection of libertarians in the legal academy, and I notice that none of them saw the rescue as worthy of comment. Might it be too threatening for, say, David Bernstein, who announced his forthcoming talk to the Federalist Society (with a comment to follow by Jack Balkin) on his new book that attempts to rehabilitate Lochner, to admit that at least sometimes there is a role for the "rescuing state," which, almost by definition, must take from those who have in order to provide for those who don't? Or is there an ostensible "public purpose" in rescuing miners that doesn't cover, say, supplying medical care to children or food or shelter, among other things, to hungry infants or persons at the other end of the life cycle who, say, saw their savings wiped out by an economic collapse?

I answer:

I propose to treat the state as a morally contingent form of social organization that is nonetheless pervasive in the world we inhabit and in any world we can reasonably imagine in the medium-term future.

If we do so, one consequence is that we should view state officials as wielding a great deal of power in our social world that is probably not justified all the way down. States did not come about by individualist contractualist consent; they are not the institutional form of morally foundational nations; religious, hereditary, and customary forms of legitimation may remain sociologically credible in some places but are surely not morally well-grounded accounts of the justifications for the organized use of violence. Yet states are such well-entrenched features of the political landscape that, if can constrains ought at all, we are probably not morally obligated to abolish the state form in favor of some other form of political organization or in favor of anarchy of any description. We must morally make the best of them, making do with what we have.

In a world filled with states, officeholders and officials should view themselves as having political responsibility as analyzed by Weber, which is much like [David] Miller’s remedial responsibility. They wield power that is not morally legitimated by its origins; the power exists because of morally neutral historical and social accidents. What remains is moral responsibility for what is done with the power.

State officials then confront a world in which their authority gives them unusual power over outcomes. In a world full of drowning children, they are unusually likely to have access to life preservers. As Miller stresses, it is important not to view the world as always only made up of drowning children; we must also be able to see ourselves as partly responsible for the creation of our circumstances, our social worlds, and our outcomes. But even with that caveat in mind, there are drowning children enough to go around. Miller draws on Virginia Held’s (1970) famous argument that a random collection of individuals can be held morally responsible, to suggest that if they can, surely more substantial collectives like nations can be. But Held’s “random collection” shouldn’t be passed by so quickly; it is a serviceable shorthand for the reality of fellow-citizenship in a modern state, who make up a random collection of individuals who happen to be socially organized in a particular, contingent but powerful, way.

The state’s first duty, the prevention of interpersonal violence, follows more or less straightforwardly from the kind of social organization that the state is: the agency that is able to claim and enforce a local monopoly on the legitimate initiation of force. Not all forms of political organization have been like that, and the responsibilities of officeholders under them differed accordingly. But the ability to prevent private violence is constitutive of the modern state, which just for that reason acquires a responsibility to do so in accordance with the background moral rights of persons to be free from violence. Similarly, it acquires a responsibility to protect against theft and against aggression from outside its boundaries. It has displaced all other possible protectors; it has both the greatest ability and (due to its own actions) the only ability to defend against force; and so it bears the responsibility to do so.

Orthodox libertarianism would hold that this first responsibility (understood to include the prevention of private theft, not only personal violence) also more or less exhausts the state’s responsibilities. But the creation of the social technology that can protect against internal and external violence—for example, the creation of a professional body of armed men trained for coordinated action and a financial apparatus that can support that body—means that there is a significant concentration of physical and fiscal power on hand. And there may well be an overprovision of that power, since an underprovision is irresponsible and generates political pressure for state actors to fulfill their duties, and “just right” provision at the level that would keep police and armed forces working at precisely their whole capacity would be an astronomically unlikely coincidence. Then, unavoidably, the slack in the system provides the state and state actors with situations in which they have a unique capacity to prevent or mitigate harms and suffering. The police force created to prevent crimes also has the ability to respond to car crashes. The public fisc created to fund an army also has the ability to feed the starving. I am sure that there is no morally decent way to insist that the police officer refuse in principle to aid people in danger even if the danger wasn’t caused by crime, even though that means that the taxpayers will be involuntarily funding some use of the officer’s time that is not connected to rights-protection, even if the resulting situation is a violation of the best understanding of taxpayers’ property rights. Nor will it just be a matter of the personal benevolence of the police officer who wants to be free to prevent non-criminal harms while on the clock. If capacity and proximity can generate outcome-responsibility, then it can be the officer’s responsibility to act—and, accordingly, the responsibility of the state of which the officer is an agent.
Once the public fisc can prevent non-criminal harms indirectly, by paying its personnel to do so, it is a difficult distinction to maintain that it may not prevent them directly, by, e.g., feeding the hungry. Indeed, the distinction is probably an impossible one, and so all non-autocracies will end by being in the business of distribution (Dahl 1993). Once states are distributing benefits—and even physical protection is a benefit about which distributive decisions are made, as is perfectly evident when looking at the geographic unevenness of police protection in all countries—they face moral constraints about how and to whom they should be distributed. That is, there are problems of political redistributive justice, even if redistribution is not in itself demanded by justice.

I do not suppose that these brief remarks will persuade my fellow libertarians that they ought to abandon their views on redistributive spending. But perhaps they will agree that the police officer on duty has a responsibility (and not just the responsibility borne by any natural person) to aid the drowning child, even though doing so is a drain on taxpayer resources that is not for the sake of the prevention of interpersonal rights-violations, even though doing so provides a kind of subsidized in-kind insurance against misfortunes that are not injustices. The subsidy is not itself a demand of libertarian justice but of public responsibility conditional on the fact of public power; but once the subsidy exists, it is constrained by concerns about justice. A state could not justifiably intentionally deploy police differentially according to the race of the children likely to be at risk of drowning.

(From Levy, "National and Statist Responsibility," Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, Volume 11, Issue 4 December 2008 , pages 485 - 499.)

2010-10-13T07:33:00.002-05:00

The pamphlet

I think this has the potential to be very big news in our little corner of the world, though it won't feel like it until the first uptake from a university press. From the press release:

Less than 10,000 words or more than 50,000: that is the choice writers have generally faced for more than a century--works either had to be short enough for a magazine article or long enough to deliver the "heft" required for book marketing and distribution. But in many cases, 10,000 to 30,000 words (roughly 30 to 90 pages) might be the perfect, natural length to lay out a single killer idea, well researched, well argued and well illustrated--whether it's a business lesson, a political point of view, a scientific argument, or a beautifully crafted essay on a current event.

Today, Amazon is announcing that it will launch "Kindle Singles"--Kindle books that are twice the length of a New Yorker feature or as much as a few chapters of a typical book. Kindle Singles will have their own section in the Kindle Store and be priced much less than a typical book. Today's announcement is a call to serious writers, thinkers, scientists, business leaders, historians, politicians and publishers to join Amazon in making such works available to readers around the world.

For academics in the liberal arts, the options have been more like "less than 10,000 or more than 70,000"-- monographs don't typically weigh in at 50,000 words. But everyone knows that what Henry Farrell says is true: many of those 80,000 word books would have been better as 25,000 word extra-sized articles.

Presumably, the reason we don't have physical pamphlets published is because they don't make economic sense, and presumably that will continue to be the case.

But imagine what happens the first time a university press says it will publish-- "direct to digital," as it were-- peer-reviewed contributions in that 10-30,000 word range.

Departments, disciplines, and universities that draw very sharp distinctions between articles and books ("one book for tenure, two for full")

2010-10-12T19:23:00.001-05:00

Research Assistance wanted

Ad here for McGill undergraduate RAs.

2010-10-04T14:35:00.004-05:00

What I've been reading: A promissory note

Once grant/fellowship/job application/recommendation season is over, I owe posts on three excellent books, one each from political theory, political philosophy, and political science:

Bryan Garsten, Saving Persuasion: A Defense of Rhetoric and Judgment
Avery Kolers, Land, Conflict, and Justice: A Political Theory of Territory
James Scott: The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia

Garsten's and Kolers' books are immediate additions to my list for graduate students: "You want to aspire to write a dissertation that could, after a few years of post-PhD work, turn into something like that." In addition to their many substantive merits, they're each in very different ways exemplary in size and scope. They show how much can be accomplished with a well-defined project. They're each big and ambitious projects, going after fundamental questions in novel ways; and they each articulate and defend a sufficiently clear and interesting position that they can make real progress on those big questions within a few hundred pages.

Scott's book is of a different order of magnitude. It will take further reflection to feel confident of this, but I think it's the most important political science book of the 2000s of which I'm aware. I think political theorists aren't rushing to it the way we did to his earlier Seeing Like A State, but I recommend it to all those who appreciated that book-- or, for that matter, to those who appreciated Rousseau's Second Discourse, or Smith's Lectures on Jurisprudence, or Ferguson's Civil Society.

There are others to whom I'll be recommending it in a more antagonistic spirit-- not, "here, you'll appreciate this!" but rather, "here, you really need to read and understand this because it will correct your errors!" But that will have to wait for the real post.

2010-09-27T11:27:00.002-05:00

On Scott and Hayek

Welcome, Marginal Revolution readers. The essay to which Tyler refers in his post is here, at Cato Unbound. But as long as you're here, I'd like to refer you to this article of mine (an ungated version is available here) which is about pluralism and rationalism in the liberal tradition-- and how the distinction between them crosscuts that between market and welfare liberalism, and thus there's a dimension along which we can think about Scott's and Hayek's similarity without denying their differences.

2010-09-20T11:03:00.003-05:00

A problematic entry in the continuing series

A loyal reader points me to this bizarre story in which a Kentucky man is claiming caffeine intoxication as a defense against murder. Apparently there is some (but slim) precedent for this.

Counterpoint: he's claiming that his caffeine sources were "sodas, energy drinks and diet pills." I've never endorsed energy drinks or diet pills, and distrust the thought that caffeine is the only relevant ingredient in them.

Counter-counterpoint: "Reports and case records say that during that time, he was drinking five or six soft drinks and energy drinks a day, along with taking diet pills; it all added up to more than 400 milligrams of caffeine daily. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders — the American Psychiatric Association's guidebook for the classification of mental disorders — defines a caffeine overdose as more than 300 mg."

If 400 mg of caffeine provides a legal defense against a murder charge, then I've been entitled to at least two, usually three kills a day for years now. I'm starting my list for this afternoon right now.

2010-09-20T09:58:00.002-05:00

Seeing Like A State, Seeing Like A Market

I add my two cents to the Cato Unbound forum on Seeing Like A State.

2010-09-07T10:01:00.006-05:00

Of McGill-only interest: Bicycles

Over the summer, bicycling was forbidden on McGill's central campus. I wrote a letter of objection, mainly reproduced below, and was assured that ongoing discussions about possible revisions were possible in the fall.

The decision to begin the school year with a lengthy article in the official McGill Reporter quoting at length from an administration official dismissing all objections annoys me and seems not to signal an interest in ongoing conversation. Significantly, there's no mention of the fact that McGill is built on the southern face of a mountain which has a real effect on how useful it is to tell people to bike around campus in an east-west direction rather than through it. So I hereby make my letter an open one.

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I am writing to urge that bicycle-riding be allowed on parts of the lower downtown campus. I recommend that one bicycle lane be opened between the University Ave. gate and tghe bicycle racks at Leacock; one between the University Ave. gate and the McTavish gate; and one up McTavish Ave.

The shift to a bike-free lower campus on May 28th unnecessarily discourages bicycling, and so is in direct tension with the aims of the Greening project. The east-west distance across campus (say, University to Peel) is considerably longer than the usual distance between bike parking and destination, and long enough to provide a real deterrent to biking to and from campus. Sherbrooke is an unsafe alternative for the east-west route; Dr. Penfield is one-way; and Dr. Penfield and Pine both involve such steep ascents at least one direction to also discourage biking.

There's an aesthetic problem that's already becoming apparent, too. Just as McGill has finished the renovations beautifying the University Ave. entrance to campus, it's become a bicycle parking lot. It's overcrowded even now, outside the school year. I understand that there are plans in the works for double-stacking racks that might alleviate the overcrowding (though probably not enough to solve the problem once the school year begins). But that will only make the aesthetic problem worse. What should be a signature view of campus is going to be significantly diminished, because the vast majority of bicycle parking for campus is being concentrated unnecessarily in that one spot.

The stated objective of the policy is pedestrian safety. I don't know how many bicyclist-pedestrian collisions there have been on lower campus in past years. But in past years, lower campus was also crowded with cars. Roads that are wide enough for a lane of traffic and two lanes of parking, with sidewalks alongside them, are now mainly empty of cars. It seems, at the very least, premature to assume that with all that space freed up, pedestrians and cyclists could not coexist-- at any time of day, at any time of year. I suspect that one bicycle lane could always be open, safely, on those roads. A bicycle lane could obviously be open, safely, during non-peak times: outside the academic year; weekends; outside business and class hours on weekdays.

There is a lingering worry about biking on lower campus that dates from non-McGill people using campus to fill in a gap on the city bike paths, as a shortcut between University Ave. and downtown. That worry might be now out-of-date, since the University Ave. bike path has been extended south. But in case not, I think it would be reasonable to require dismounting at the Sherbrooke entrance, and not allow biking on the road that extends McGill College Ave. into campus (the trunk of the Y, as it were).

There are many possible permutations of where and when. But that is part of my point; we proceeded immediately to the most draconian possibility at the same time that auto traffic was removed from lower campus and McTavish. It seems to me absurd not to at least experiment with safe coexistence on all this newly-auto-free real estate.

-------

One final update comment: there is an inconsistent account being given about changes to pedestrian behavior. "As the campus becomes more pedestrian friendly, incluyding the conversion of most of McTavish Street to a pedestrian zone, more and more people will feel increasingly free to walk all over the roadways, [Associate Vice-Principal Jim Nicell] said." So pedestrians are assumed to be highly responsive to one change: no cars. But it's assumed that their walking all over the roadways would be completely unresponsive to the existence of bicycles or a painted bicycle lane on those roadways-- and, of course, that bicyclists would also be unresponsive to lanes and rules less draconian than a ban. The following:

"Perhaps once people are accustomed to the new situation, it may be possible to explore some flexibility with specific hours when people might be permitted to cycle through the campus. It's too early to say when or even if that could happen."

is especially bizarre. To the degree that people get accustomed to the new situation, it will become harder to reintroduce bicycles, because new habits and norms will have developed around the status quo. The way that you let habits and norms of coexistence develop is by allowing coexistince, at least sometimes.

The official FAQ says:

McGill has had a number of pedestrian injuries reported in recent years due to collisions with cyclists. Once pedestrians become accustomed to the reduced amount of vehicular traffic on campus, we believe the risk of such injuries would increase, should cyclists be permitted to circulate as in the past.

This suggests a) that the "ongoing discussion" claim is a stall, and that in a matter of weeks or months we'll hear that the new status quo is irreversible because pedestrian behavior has changed so much, but b) that pedestrian behavior can change only once.

Oh, and one final annoyance: "the fairly minor inconvenience to cyclists of having to walk a few metres." The distance from, say, the Milton gates to Bronfman or the various centres on Peel is more than half a kilometer. That's not an epic forced march or anything. But the rhetorical dismissal of bikers' concerns with "a few metres" is false and rude.

Update: Open forum this Thursday, Shatner building, 3:30-5.

2010-09-07T09:35:00.001-05:00

THE ANNUAL MONTREAL POLITICAL THEORY MANUSCRIPT WORKSHOP AWARD

Call for applications: The Groupe de recherche interuniversitaire en philosophie politique de Montréal (GRIPP), spanning the departments of political science and philosophy at McGill University, l'Université de Montréal, Concordia University, and l'Université du Québec à Montréal, invites applications for its 2011 manuscript workshop award. The recipient of the award will be invited to Montreal for a day-long workshop in April 2011 dedicated to his or her book manuscript. This "author meets critics" workshop will comprise four to five sessions dedicated to critical discussion of the manuscript; each session will begin with a critical commentary on a section of the manuscript by a political theorist or philosopher who is part of Montreal's GRIPP community. The format is designed to maximize feedback for a book-in-progress. The award covers the costs of travel, accommodation, and meals.

Eligibility:

A. Topic: The manuscript topic is open within political theory and political philosophy, but we are especially interested in manuscripts related to at least one of these GRIPP research themes: 1) the history of liberal and democratic thought, especially early modern thought; 2) moral psychology and political agency, or politics and affect or emotions or rhetoric; 3) democracy, diversity, and pluralism. 4) democracy, justice, and transnational institutions.

B. Manuscript: Book manuscripts in English or French, not yet in a version accepted for publication, by applicants with PhD in hand by 1 August 2010, are eligible. Applicants must have a complete or nearly complete draft (at least 4/5 of final draft) ready to present at the workshop. In the case of co-authored manuscripts, only one of the co-authors is eligible to apply. (Only works in progress by the workshop date are eligible; authors with a preliminary book contract are eligible only if no version has been already accepted for publication).

C. Application: Please submit the following materials electronically, compiled as a single PDF file: 1) a curriculum vitae; 2) a table of contents; 3) a short abstract of the book project, up to 200 words; 4) a longer book abstract up to 2500 words; and, in the case of applicants with previous book publication(s), (5) three reviews, from established journals in the field, of the applicant's most recently published monograph. Candidates are not required to, but may if they wish, submit two letters of recommendation speaking to the merits of the book project. Please do not send writing samples. Send materials by email, with the subject heading “2011 GRIPP Manuscript Workshop Award” to Arash Abizadeh . Review of applications begins 10 January 2011. Contact Arash Abizadeh with questions.

Previous GRIPP Manuscript Workshops:
April 2010: Hélène Landemore (Yale), Democratic Reason: Politics, Collective Intelligence, and the Rule of the Many
April 2009: Alan Patten (Princeton), Equal Recognition: The Moral Foundations of Minority Cultural Rights
March 2009: Kinch Hoekstra (UC Berkeley), Thomas Hobbes and the Creation of Order

------------------------------------------------

LE PRIX ANNUEL DE L’ATELIER DE MANUSCRIT DE PHILOSOPHIE POLITIQUE DE MONTRÉAL

Appel à candidature: Le groupe de recherche interuniversitaire en philosophie politique de Montréal (GRIPP), qui réunit des chercheurs des départements de science politique et de philosophie de l’Université McGill, de l’Université de Montréal, de l’Université Concordia et de l’Université du Québec à Montréal, fait un appel à candidature pour son prix 2011 de l’atelier de manuscrit. Le lauréat sera invité à Montréal en avril 2011 pour un atelier d’une journée complète consacré au manuscrit de son livre. Cet atelier du type « l’auteur rencontre ses critiques » comprendra quatre ou cinq séances de discussions critiques sur le manuscrit ; pour chacune d’entre elles, un spécialiste de théorie politique ou un philosophe membre de la communauté montréalaise du GRIPP lancera la discussion par un commentaire critique d’une des sections du manuscrit. Ceci a pour but de faciliter les échanges sur un livre en chantier. Le prix couvre les dépenses de voyage, d’hébergement et de repas.

Éligibilité :

A- Sujet : De façon générale, le manuscrit doit traiter de théorie politique ou de philosophie politique, mais nous sommes tout particulièrement intéressés aux manuscrits qui correspondent à l’une des thématiques de recherche du GRIPP : 1) l’histoire de la pensée libérale et démocratique, et notamment du début de la pensée moderne; 2) la psychologie morale du sujet (ou encore de l’agent) politique, ainsi que la politique et les affects, les émotions ou la rhétorique; 3) la démocratie, la diversité et le pluralisme; 4) la démocratie, la justice et les institutions transnationales.

B- Manuscrit : Sont éligibles tous les manuscrits de livres en français ou en anglais, non encore publiés et non en version acceptée par une maison de presses, et dont l’auteur a reçu un doctorat avant le 1er août 2010. Les candidats devront avoir une version complète, ou presque (au moins 4/5e de la version finale), à présenter à l’atelier. Pour ce qui concerne les manuscrits coécrits, seul l’un des coauteurs est éligible.

C- Soumission : Vous voudrez bien fournir les documents suivants, en format électronique, dans un seul fichier PDF : 1) un curriculum vitae; 2) une table des matières; 3) un court résumé du projet du livre de moins de 200 mots; 4) un résumé plus long, de moins de 2 500 mots; et, dans le cas de candidats ayant déjà publié, 5) trois recensions parues dans des revues spécialisées et reconnues dans le domaine de la plus récente monographie publiée. Les candidats peuvent, s’ils le souhaitent, joindre deux lettres de recommandation présentant l’intérêt de leur projet de livre. Nous vous prions de ne pas envoyer d’extraits de manuscrit. Envoyez ces documents par courriel, avec le sujet « 2011 GRIPP Manuscript Workshop Award » à Arash Abizadeh . L’examen des candidatures commencera le 10 janvier 2011. Pour toute information supplémentaire, veuillez contacter Dominique Leydet

Derniers lauréats du prix :
Avril 2010: Hélène Landemore (Yale), Democratic Reason: Politics, Collective Intelligence, and the Rule of the Many
Avril 2009: Alan Patten (Princeton), Equal Recognition: The Moral Foundations of Minority Cultural Rights
Mars 2009: Kinch Hoekstra (UC Berkeley), Thomas Hobbes and the Creation of Order

2010-08-19T07:59:00.002-05:00

What I will be reading: APSA Shopping list

Starting up my annual book shopping list for APSA. Here's what I already know I'll be looking for. Suggestions in comments for other new or new-ish books I should be on the lookout for welcome. (Read: Plug away, or talk about what you're excited about, or correct and instruct my tastes even if it won't do any good!)

During APSA I'll be solidly mid-move-- my office should be partly packed up by then, but my new office won't yet have its bookcases. So don't expect to see me walking around APSA with my customary huge bags of books; I think the better part of valor will be to have them shipped so I can just leave them boxed up until I move!

Inevitably I won't get some of these. The publishers oddly insist on bringing political science books to the political science convention, instead of bringing precisely the combination of political science, philosophy, history, law, and economics that I want to buy...

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Sigal Ben-Porath, Tough Choices: Structured Paternalism and the Landscape of Choice

Bergin et. al., eds., The Eighteenth-Century Composite State: Representative Institutions in Ireland and Europe, 1689-1800 Palgrave

Condillac, Commerce and Government Considered in their Mutual Relationship, Liberty Fund

Joshua Cohen, Philosophy, Politics, Democracy: Selected Essays, HUP

Joshua Cohen, Rousseau, OUP

Ann Ferguson and Mechthild Nagel, eds., Dancing With Iris: The Philosophy of Iris Marion Young

Axel Honneth, The Pathologies of Individual Freedom: Hegel's Social Theory, PUP

Alan Houston, Benjamin Franklin and the Politics of Improvement, YUP

Jonathan Israel, A Revolution of the Mind: Radical Enlightenment and the Intellectual Origins of Modern Democracy, PUP

Kauna Mantena, Alibis of Empire: Henry Maine and the Ends of Liberal Imperialism, PUP

Avishai Margalit, On Compromise and Rottehn Compromises, PUP

John Marshall, John Locke, Toleration and Early Enlightenment Culture, CUP

Robert Molesworth, An Account of Denmark (with Francogallia and other writings), Liberty Fund

Eric Nelson, The Hebrew Republic: Jewish Sources and the Transformation of European Political Thought HUP

Douglass C. North, Understanding the Process of Economic Change, Princeton

Frederick Pollock and F.W. Maitland, The History of English Law Before the Time of Edward I, Liberty Fund

Arthur Ripstein, Force and Freedom: Kant's Legal and Political Philosophy, HUP

Filippo Sabetti, Civilization and Self-Government: The Political Thought of Carlo Cattaneo, Lexington

Debra Satz, Why Some Things Should Not Be For Sale: The Moral Limits of Markets

Samuel Scheffler, Equality and Tradition: Selected Essays, OUP

David Schmidtz, Person, Polis, Planet, OUP

Judith Shklar, Hegel [newly republished], CUP

Germaine de Stael, Considerations on the Principal Events of the French Revolution, Liberty Fund

Iris Marion Young, Responsibility for Justice, OUP

[NB: This is the shopping list of books for me. For the RGCS Ferrier library, I got my first big box of blue books from CUP yesterday; the shopping's already begun.]

2010-08-17T07:55:00.006-05:00

What I've been reading: Ernest Gellner, Conditions of Liberty: Civil Society and Its Rivals

What if Max Weber had written like Isaiah Berlin?

I thought I'd read this book in grad school, but having seriously read it this summer I now suspect that I just skimmed a few chapters. The alternative is that by second year in graduate school I just knew so little social theory and so little history that my brain didn't have receptors for the ideas in this idea-rich book to latch on to-- which is, I admit, possible.

The book is deceptive: published by Penguin and written in a light, breezy, sometimes chatty, and lucid style, it looks like it should be a popular book on the end of the Cold War and the resurgence of the idea of civil society. In fact, there are books packed into most paragraphs-- many books read and, usually, books to be written. Like Weber, Gellner tosses out three-sentence ideas that make you (or at least me) stop and say-- "wow, if that's right it's hugely important, and I can see how it might be right, but figuring out whether it actually is right would take years."

In one respect the book has dated badly; there's a bit too much immediate-post-Cold-War smugness in putting down Marxists and Marxisms of all stripes. Which is not to say I think he's wrong on the merits-- but it gives the book a certain ugliness, not mitigated by his swipes and jabs at what we would now call neoliberalism.

But in other respects just the opposite is true. Certainly, the idea that Islam represented a world-historical idea, a great and important set of rival ideas and social organizations to liberalism, Marxism, and traditionalism, would probably interest a lot more people now than it did in 1994. Gellner is not loved by scholars of the Islamic world (any more than he is by anthropologists or analytic philosophers), but compared with most large-scale social theorists, he took the Islamic world seriously, and treated it as importantly normal and central rather than exotic and inexplicable. Crucially, he also treats it as changing over time, and as participating in modernization.

I probably would have preferred a book that was more about civil society and less about its rivals (Marxism, Islam, and pre-modern systems). I found his history and theory of Europe through the 19th century much more interesting than his mini-book about Marxism, the Soviet Union, and the Cold War, useful though it is to try to offer a general account of the relationship between productive power and coercion that includes the Communist case.

But I think Gellner was in a mood to write something big and sweeping, and this certainly is that. It's more sweeping a theory of politics, economics, language, society, and religion than a 200-page book has any business being. And I wish that we were now 15 years into an era when people wrote books trying to understand whether the ideas in this book were right or not. Maybe we would be, if this book and Plough, Sword, and Book: The Structure of Human History had been combined into one book. In any case I find them fascinating and provocative big ideas. Now that I've properly read it, I expect to return to this book many times.

In the short term, I'll be doing follow-up writing. Gellner treats civil society as dependent on the linguistically-unified nation-state in the sense and for the reasons he laid out in Nations and Nationalism, and on the "modular man" also developed in that book. Modular man can not only switch from job to job, from one sector of the economy to another, he can also switch from one local, religious, cultural, or associational attachment to another, with only national identity not being malleable in this way. And civil society depends on the existence of a state that is Weberian in function (it expropriates private holders of coercive power and subsequently monopolizes that power) and yet limited enough to allow for private and decentralized market and associational life.

My own view is that keeping the state limited in that way depends in some part on there being associations and groups in the social order that are not filled with modular men. If the only real loyalty is to the nation-state and loyalties are not separated among other social groups, the equilibrium Gellner praises is likely to be unstable. I think he's [very] broadly right about the forces that tend undermine social loyalties and transfer them to the nation-state, but he's entirely too sanguine that the result will just happen to be, and to remain, a stable outcome. He's also only broadly right about those forces, and social (religious, cultural, associational, federal) ties, organizations, and institutions have always been somewhat stronger, man always somewhat less modular, than he allows-- and I think this has been important for the development and stability of (in his sense) civil society.

I wish that I had read this book six or seven years ago, whether that would have been a first-real-reading or a first-serious-rereading.

FN: I had started to re-read this before this Crooked Timber thread alerted me that my colleague John Hall has published a new intellectual biography of Gellner, and prompted reflection on why Gellner isn't better appreciated, but the thread (and Scott McLemee's review of the Hall book) may well have shaped the way I thought about the book as I went.

2010-08-05T07:27:00.003-05:00

Picking sides

David Boaz on Vaughn Walker, the judge who struck down Proposition 8

In other words, this “liberal San Francisco judge” was recommended by Ed Meese, appointed by Ronald Reagan, and opposed by Alan Cranston, Nancy Pelosi, Edward Kennedy, and the leading gay activist groups. It’s a good thing for for advocates of marriage equality that those forces were only able to block Walker twice.

H/tWill Wilkinson.

2010-08-03T13:26:00.005-05:00

What I've Been Reading: Helena Rosenblatt, Liberal Values: Benjamin Constant and the Politics of Religion

Shorter post than usual on this one, as I read it to help with what I'm writing now, and I should just keep writing. It's a marvelous book in at least three ways.

One, it's astonishingly efficient, moving the reader rapidly but thoroughly across multiple parties and intellectual movements and some four decades. I've read a lot about liberal politics in Restoration France in general, and Constant in particular, and was still learning a tremendous amount in each chapter. It's a book in the "Ideas in Context" series from CUP, and it fits that label as well as any book bearing it, indeed better than most.

Two, it's really very well-written. It's a scholars' history through and through, addressing interpretive questions and suitably thickly footnoted, but it reads as easily as good popular history does.

Three, the book wears its sympathy for Constant on its sleeve yet presents his various antagonists' views with almost as much care as it presents his.

The book covers Constant's turn to a kind of Protestantism, and shows of what kind that was-- Kantian, Germanic, and Romantic in inspiration, close to being Deist or "natural religion" in content but interestingly (to my eye bizarrely) progressive in its ecclesiology. Constant believed that religion changed with the times and was no less true for that; God allowed us to gain knowledge over time, and offers us new times, new revelations, to match our intellectual maturity. Religion is perfectible or at least progressive, becoming ever-more attuned to authentic religious sentiments and moral goodness, ever-less superstitious and stultifying. And so Protestantism was progress, and it also facilitated progress by opening free inquiry into religious matters and diminishing the importance of external church forms. But progress continued.

With that religious worldview explained, the book's core purpose is to treat it as part of Constant's political thought, and in turn to show the political importance of his religious thought and writings, through a marvelous exposition of post-Revolutionary religious politics in France.

Two thoughts prompted by the book, but less about this book than about the Constant literature in general. One, we're now decades into the Constant "revival." His reputation as both a liberal political actor and a great political theorist now seem to me rescued. Of the people who know who Benjamin Constant is, most are basically well-disposed toward him (at least in the English-speaking world; it might be different in France). At what point does "rehabilitate Constant's reputation" cease to be an imperative in every new book about the man and his thought? It was less of a distraction in this book than in many, because Rosenblatt had something new to say-- viz. that the venom with which Constant was attacked and his name denigrated for a generation after his death was directly connected to usually-overlooked religious disputes.

Two, the contemporary admiration for Constant often goes with an embarrassment over his economic views, which were openly laissez-faire. Rosenblatt, unlike some Constant authors, doesn't hide this or deny it. She argues, rightly, that Constant was no egoist or materialist, and that he thought commerce and wealth were less important than the development of the individual mind and soul (though she misses the importance of some of his change in thought, from static property to dynamic commerce, that's suggested by passages she refers to). But she still talks about it as though that means that he doesn't really count as a laissez-faire liberal, that he's not like the rest of them. That Constant had a gambling problem, was a womanizer, and probably visited prostitutes-- these are presented matter-of-factly. That he believed in free trade and an open market-- this must be apoloigized for, minimized, and mitigated, rather than being understood or explored. That's OK; this is a book about Constant and religion, not about Constant and commerce (though, again, there are interesting connections between the two that get left unanalyzed). But after you read enough about Constant, the pattern becomes a little bit tiresome.

The book is well-blurbed at Amazon (in what I think is an excerpt from a Perpsectives on Politics review, despite what Amazon says) by Art Goldhammer, whose excellent blog on French politics I don't link to as often as I should.

I believe that Yale political theorist Bryan Garsten is working on a book on the same subject, which I now await even more eagerly than I did before.

2010-07-31T13:36:00.003-05:00

A belated mea culpa

This is roundabout; bear with me.

Matt Yglesias highlights a story about the closure of Walter Reed hospital, and notes the existence of regulations on how the land may be used. In short, the land may be conveyed directly to government agencies or various kinds of non-profit entities that submit proposals for it. It cannot be auctioned or otherwise sold to the private market.

Matt notes-- rightly-- that this is weird.

What on earth is the purpose of rules of this sort? Why not sell the land and earmark the money for these worthy purposes? That would seem to make everyone better off. You don’t see that many examples of truly pareto optimal policy changes out there, but this is one. No nefarious interest I can think of benefits from this arrangement, it’s just wasteful for no reason. And it comes up in DC all the time because a similar rule applies to a bunch of long-vacant school buildings we have.

I didn't know about these rules, and probably would have thought no more about it if not for the fact that he quoted David Alpert's reference to the regulations as "federal base closure rules." (Walter Reed is, after all, a military installation.)

Uh-oh, thinks I.

A little reading later, I believe I owe the following apology:

In 1988, the Pease Air Force Base on the edge of my hometown had been slated for closure, and it was shuttered in 1991, at important savings to the federal government and important anti-stimulus for the local area during the early 90s recession. The land was transferred to a QUANGO, the Pease Development Authority, which spent its first few years trying and failing to attract high profile firms to come use large amounts of the land all at once. In the meantime, a huge chunk of real estate and infrastructure sat basically vacant.

In 1992 (at the ripe old age of 21) I ran for the New Hampshire House of Representatives, as a Libertarian. And my distinctive policy proposal was: break up the PDA, stop trying to land the One Big Firm that would come replace the Air Force as a dominant employer, and allow the base to be parceled and auctioned. Market-led base redevelopment rather than local-politico-led posturing.

It's now pretty clear to me that this would have been impossible under federal law, and that the PDA/ tradeport model was as close as any local authorities could come to letting commerce take hold there. (At least they didn't turn the base into a megaprison complex.) Doesn't mean it was a good model, and almost twenty years later I still think there's underutilized capital there. But it would have been wholly outside the New Hampshire legislature's authority to fix this.

Of course: 1) No one else seemed to know this, either; certainly, my opponents never slapped me down as an ignorant kid who didn't know the rules. 2) I was a 21-year old third-party candidate running against two Democratic incumbents in a solid Democratic (two-seat) district. I wasn't ever going to win. 3) Had I won, I would hardly have been the most ignorant member of New Hampshire's 400-person part-time lower legislative house, or the first to find that the thing they'd talked about on the campaign trail couldn't be done.

Nonetheless: I apologize to the voters of my then-district, and to my opponents in that race. I spent several months arguing something on the basis of insufficient information, and making claims that it turns out were false or impossible.

2010-07-31T12:05:00.004-05:00

A point that should be obvious

Opposing someone else's expression or activity on the grounds that it's "provocative"-- that it will provoke various observers and third parties to some negative reaction-- is usually a dishonest way of dodging agency. It means: "I've made the decision that my dislike for your expression is more important than your freedom, and I intend to aggress against you to shut you up, but I want to make it seem like you're the one who's made a decision to be aggressive." It's a decision posing as a passive reaction. It's then, perversely, often followed by the idea that the expression's primary purpose was to provoke, and so denying that the first person has any non-aggressive interest at all in the expression.

Some of this was worked out and widely endorsed during the controversy over the Danish cartoons.

But it applies just as forcefully to the way that defenders of laicite talk about the various forms of Islamic women's covering (from headscarves to the burka/ niqab).

And, boy oh boy, does it apply to the despicable demagoguery around building a mosque in lower Manhattan.

Sarah Palin, the 2008 Republican vice-presidential nominee, has urged “peace-seeking Muslims” to reject the center, branding it an “unnecessary provocation.” A Republican political action committee has produced a television commercial assailing the proposal. And former House Speaker Newt Gingrich has decried it in speeches.[...]

He added: “The average American just thinks this is a political statement. It’s not about religion, and is clearly an aggressive act that is offensive.”

Update: Isaac Chotiner had the same thought.

2010-07-31T11:01:00.007-05:00

What I've been reading: Steven Pincus,1688: The First Modern Revolution

I have enough to say about this book that I keep putting off the blog post, but eventually that makes the post an overdue assignment, and I don't need to add any of those to my life. So let's see what I can rush through:

----

This is an important book with a powerful, distinct argument pressed forward in lots of ways. It isn't, and shouldn't be mistaken for, a freestanding popular history of the Glorious Revolution, though given the conventions of history book publishing it physically looks like it could be. Instead, it's an argument in support of the following propositions:

Contrary to the traditional Whig understanding, the Glorious Revolution was not a consensual, peaceful restoration of a stable and traditional English political order.

Contrary to the modern revisionist understanding, the Glorious Revolution was not a conservative elite Anglican coup against a moderate James II as punishment for his support of religious toleration.

James II was an innovating modernizer, rapidly building up and centralizing an absolutist modern state on the close model of Louis XIV's state in France. This included an aggressive plan for Catholicizing England and English institutions (not merely allowing Catholics religious freedom), but the Catholicism James promoted was the Gallican Catholicism of France and the Jesuits, putting him on the other side of a profound split from the papacy and Catholic Spain and the Holy Roman Empire-- all of which ultimately aligned with William of Orange and the Netherlands against Louis and James. Gallicanism was as much a political project as a religious one, and the Glorious Revolution cannot be well understood as the last shot of the Wars of Religion. Instead, it was part of a long-term and Europe-wide fight against Louis' absolutist modernization and imperial ambition.

This means that the Revolution cannot be (as it often has been) read in a narrowly English or even British context; and it also means that it cannot be read in a narrow timeframe that ends in 1689. But neither was England just a field on which to fight out the European conflict; Pincus forcefully denies another revisionist thesis that sees the Revolution as essentially a Dutch invasion.

James had domestic modernizing opponents, those who sought to pursue a different modernizing and state-building project on non-absolutist, commercial rather than aristocratic, tolerant rather than Gallican grounds. They (along with more traditionalist Anglican Tories) rose against James in a genuine domestic violent insurrection-- one that would have failed without the invasion by William at the head of an armed force that included Dutch as well as Anglo-exile forces, but one without which William would not have made the crossing.

Pincus maintains that this fits a general pattern. Revolutions, he thinks, are made against modernizers. An initial state modernization project either reveals that traditional institutions are fragile, or makes them so, or both. And so at the moment that state capacity is being built up, the popular allegiance to it is shaken-- change no longer seems unthinkable, as change is already being pursued, indeed already seems inevitable. And revolutions are also made by modernizers. That is, they are the violent and (at least semi-)popular overthrow of a modernizing state by rival modernizers-- not, despite frequent rhetoric, by restorationists. He maintains that revolutions are events in early state modernization and consolidation-- and that the English Revolution was the first of them.

The book is sweeping and general-- which is to say that it pursues depth of evidence of a number of different kinds, aimed at making its interpretive claim irresistible. It offers quantitative and archival history; economic, theological, ideological, and diplomatic history; domestic and international history, all arranged to clear argumentative purpose. Again, this doesn't amount to a narration of events-- much is explained but much is not. (I know a lot about the era for a non-historian, but I read the book with wikipedia open next to me, and made a lot of use of it.)

The cumulative effect is sometimes devastating for the rival views, and I doubt that they can survive in unmodified form. That said, Pincus' own evidence sometimes points to openings that might be exploited by adherents of the rival views trying to rebuild and recover. The first major case of this I noticed was the frequency of anti-Catholic rhetoric in Whig claims he quotes in places besides where he's maintaining that the Revolution was not essentially anti-Catholic. The distinctions he draws between Gallicanism and Catholicism as such are well-taken (and for me were probably the most important revelations of the book), and they do provide a way to understand anti-Catholic language that's not narrowly confessional. But it's not always clear that the revolutionaries observed the distinction as cleanly as Pincus suggests, and he doesn't tell us how to evaluate or weigh the cases in which the distinction was not observed. I think he ultimately makes his case-- I was persuaded, anyway-- but I predict that there will be pushback here.

In the second case I'm less sure what to think. His narrative of rival imperial and economic visions, and of Whig-revolutionary triumph in the second half of the 1690s over a Tory restorationist mindset, seems to demand the destruction of the East India Company. But the Whig attempt to do so failed. Pincus leads us through the sequence of events, and then shows that Whigs triumphed on the related but distinct ground of banking (in the creation of the Bank of England and the destruction of the Tory Land Bank). But I was left dissatisfied; it seems as though the survival of the Company is more important disconfirmatory evidence of Pincus' thesis than he allows. I predict pushback here, and am eager to see how it turns out.

But it is to the book's (Pincus') credit that I end the book understanding that these are moments of possible weakness in his claim, on the basis of evidence he has supplied. More importantly, it is to the book's (Pincus') credit that it has such a clear and controversial thesis that we can talk about what would be disconfirmatory evidence; and that, despite its novelty, the thesis is supported so powerfully across so many areas that one can identify the discrete patches of ground left to defend by those whose views Pincus is critiquing.

I think the book is a major event in historical scholarship, but I also think it repays reading for political theorists. Some thoughts on why:

I learned a lot about a semi-minor figure I'm writing on (Robert Molesworth); and learned enough to seriously change how I'll teach Locke's Letter Concerning Toleration in the future. His exclusion of religions that demand allegiance to a foreign prince, I now think, was certainly not a euphemism for Catholicism as such. Instead, it emphasizes the political-not-confessional divides in the way that Pincus shows was common among (at least) Whig and revolutionary intellectuals and leaders. The upshot is that Locke was acknowledging that the Catholicism of Elizabethan times, the Catholicism that taught that heretical monarchs could be deposed and killed on order of the Pope, was intolerable in a regime of toleration-- but insisting that by-then-contemporary Catholicism was tolerable. This is largely my interpolation-- Locke qua philosopher rarely appears in 1688, and even Locke the important Whig exile intellectual often appears only passively-- I think much more is quoted from letters to Locke or accounts of things told to him than is quoted from Locke, and he begins to seem like a curiously blank center of Whig and exile networks. But it's a treat to be able to read a book in another field that supplements and contextualizes things I already know in a way that changes what they seem to mean.

Moreover, the reader of Pincus' book is left understanding what was radical and revolutionary in the Second Treatise, and what the chapter on property was about in a way that transcends the justification of expropriation in America. The idea that labor was the source of property was at the core of the Whig non-zero-sum political economy, opposed to the Tory account that treated the finite sum of land in the world as the core resource, and commerce as just a matter of moving things around. I look forward to my next re-reading of the Second Treatise; I think that having read this book will make it exciting again.

The Whig account of the Revolution as limited in aim, consensual, and mainly intended to undo the absolutist innovations of James receives one of its canonical statements in Burke. While everyone understands that Burke is no neutral narrator, I think his account still has a substantial influence on those of us who read more political theory than history. Here, again, theorists have something important to learn from the book. Pincus' Whig revolutionaries were tamed and staved off eventually; the Revolution was, in the French idiom, brought to an end by the 1720s, giving rise to the relative stability of the Hanoverian era. But the Revolutionary era itself here seems more like the Americans' long-distance memory of it in the 1770s than like Burke's account of it a little bit later.

Similarly, I think that political theorists, political scientists, and sociologists who worry about revolutions as a category really need to read this book-- the introductory treatment of their literatures and development of a rival claim about what revolutions are and why they happen, and then then enough of the rest of the book to understand why 1688 qualifies. Revolutions aren't a key idea for me-- but state-building and state-consolidation are, and here too I learned a lot and had my ideas sharpened considerably. The sharper ideas aren't always in agreement with Pincus', but they're indebted to his book.

Very, very highly recommended.

2010-07-20T06:04:00.003-05:00

What I've been reading: Don Herzog, Cunning

This is the funniest book of political theory I've ever read.

That sounds like a faint praise, and like a very low bar to clear. But I laughed-- actually laughed-- more often reading Cunning than reading Harry Frankfurt's On Bullshit, or Montesquieu's Persian Letters, or Mandeville's Fable of the Bees, or Hume's Essays, all of which I think are genuinely funny works. (And much much more often than when reading the last officially-meant-to-be-funny work of political theory published in my lifetime that I made my way through-- a disappointing book from an author who's both brilliant and funny but who produced a text that was neither.)

It's subversive (and admits to being self-subversive, too), sarcastic, and constantly surprising, which helps keep the laughs coming; it never settles into shtick.

Cunning is also the work of a word-crafter, precisely written and a delight to read on that count alone, even without the wit.

This book is a humanist essay, not a monograph bound within one or another disciplinary genre. (And Herzog has entertaining things to say about the monographs within the disciplinary genres.) It ranges from major works of literature to almost-unknown figures of history to contemporary social science and philosophy, and in so doing manages to feel genuinely new in its reflections on instrumental rationality.

That's terribly hard by this point. Everyone in social science and the cognate areas of philosophy is familiar with all the decades' worth of back-and-forth on rational actors who choose efficient means toward given ends that even hearing the words triggers a whole set of preprogrammed responses and counter-responses. So Herzog gives us a new word: cunning. He invites and provokes thought on the ways in which the word can be praise and the ways in which it implies wickedness. He plays with the figure of cunning Odysseus to great effect, and helps the reader to wonder what kind of character Odysseus can finally be. The book unsettles some of those very entrenched thoughtless patterns of thought about rationality-- and it doesn't propose new safe patterns into which one could settle. Any reader who feels smug seeing Herzog whack at the other side's idols and icons has missed the point, or has stopped reading at the moment of smugness and missed the turnabout on the following page.

The reflections on method and genre in the introduction and scattered throughout ["foundational justifications are philosophers' pet unicorns; their colorful folklore tells us what they look like, but we have yet to see one"], the bracing skepticism and useful modelling of how we can proceed despite skepticism, are all very useful. But it would be a mistake to read this book in the spirit of ends-means rationality, mining it for what is useful in it. Read this to enjoy it, and learn from it along the way.

2010-07-17T07:48:00.006-05:00

Robert Paul Wolff on writing a dissertation

Here. I endorse almost every part of this, and of course especially this:

In Philosophy, a dissertation is The Defense of a Thesis. [That is why a dissertation is referred to familiarly as a thesis.]

What is a thesis? It is a proposition, expressed in a declarative sentence. Here are some examples of theses:

Contrary to popular opinion, David Hume and Immanuel Kant have almost identical views on the role of the mind in empirical knowledge. [This is the thesis of my doctoral dissertation]

God is dead.

God is not dead; he has just been on vacation.

In all situations, I am morally obliged to choose the act that will produce the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people.

Here are some examples of things that are not theses:

Kant and Hume on the role of the mind in empirical knowledge

Nietzsche's view of religion

Act utilitarianism

Each of these is a topic, not a thesis. You cannot write a dissertation defending a topic.

I take exception to the boldfaced portion of this:

In order to write a dissertation, you must be prepared to defend a thesis. If you cannot state the thesis of your dissertation in a single declarative sentence, you are not ready to write. Do not make the mistake of thinking that if you begin writing, your thesis will become clear eventually. That way lies disaster. You ought to be able to begin your dissertation with the sentence, "In this dissertation, I shall defend the thesis that p." You should then be able to conclude your dissertation with this sentence: "Thus we see that p."

The beginning and end of that paragraph are certainly right. The middle is right only

"If you are like me, and work in your head,"

Some people can work through an article-length idea in their heads. It has become clear in reading Wolff's memoirs that he really can work through a book-length idea in his head. But most of us can't.

What is true is that until you know your thesis, you cannot write your introduction or conclusion. What is probably true is that if you do not know your thesis, much of what you are writing won't end up in your final dissertation. But the last thing graduate students need to think is "you are not ready to write," full stop. Write. Try an idea out. See where it goes. Maybe you have a thesis for one chapter that you're pretty sure about; write that. Or maybe you have an objection to a standard view in the literature that you're pretty sure about. Write that. (A literature review per se isn't writing, but it does get you in the habit of putting words onto paper, and it sometimes leaves you with a more useful resource than scattered notes.)

Wolff is absolutely right to emphasize the importance of slow-but-steady writing-- a page or two a day, every day, of new writing, not revising. But I doubt that any but a handful of students are well-served by telling them to : Start on Page 1, with the sentence, "In this dissertation, I shall defend the thesis that p." This is all of a piece with my concerns above. Almost every successful dissertation I've seen written was written from the inside out, not from the beginning to the end. If you're going to write from page 1, you have have to know your thesis cold before you start writing. If you wait until you know your thesis cold before you start writing, you'll wait far too long.

When you write from the inside out, you should make every effort to write a beginning and end that make it look as if you've written from beginning to end! And that will require some revision of the middle chapters. By the time you're writing your introduction, you know your story, and you'll want to adjust the middle portions to make them fit more cleanly together and more cleanly into the story.

Wolff's absolutel right on what a dissertation is, and in large part right about writing. But I fear that parts of his advice encourage too much delay. Start writing.

2010-07-15T09:20:00.003-05:00

Visiting Fulbright Chair in the Theory and Practice of Constitutionalism and Federalism, 2011-12; application deadline August 2

Visiting Fulbright Chair in the Theory and Practice of Constitutionalism and Federalism, 2011-12.

Open to US citizens (who are not also Canadian citizens or permanent residents). The Research Chair awards provide a fixed sum of US$25,000 for stays of 4 to 9 months (one semester or the full academic year). Click here to apply.

Specializations: Normative, jurisprudential, comparative, historical, or analytic/formal studies of constitutional theory and practice, with preference for studies that encompass some aspect of constitutional federalism. Methodologically open within political theory and political science, including intellectual and institutional history.

Additional Grant Activity: Candidates would be invited to take part in a faculty and graduate seminar, with respondents, focused on the chair’s work in progress.
Comments: The McGill University Department of Political Science is an internationally recognized Ph.D. granting department with 29 faculty members with interests spanning Canadian Politics, Comparative Politics, International Relations, and Political Theory. Normative, comparative, Canadian, and jurisprudential research programs on constitutionalism and federalism are all represented within the department. The Research Group on Constitutional Studies, of which the visiting scholar will be a member during his or her visit, encompasses researchers from the Departments of Political Science and Philosophy and the Faculty of Law studying constitutional theory and its antecedents, jurisprudential pluralism and federalism, legal theory, and empirical constitutional politics.

Contact: Olga Naiberguer, Associate Director, International Programs, olga.naiberguer@mcgill.ca or
Jacob Levy, Department of Political Science, jacob.levy@mcgill.ca
www.mcgill.ca/politicalscience

Note: French language ability commensurate with the requirements of the project and the host institution is required. Facility with French not required but an asset.

2010-07-10T15:52:00.007-05:00

What I've Been Reading: Geoffrey Brennan and Philip Pettit, The Economy of Esteem

I mean to start doing more book-blogging here, along the lines that Tyler Cowen does it-- my thoughts and reactions to what I read, rather than worked-out reviews. These'll sometimes be opaque to those who haven't read the books, but might at least stimulate interest in them. What follows is rather longer than I expect these posts will usually be.

-------------------

This is a superb book by two outstanding scholars, demonstrating a terrific fusion of rigorous philosophical argument and formal/ economic reasoning, in the service of an argument that modern economics is radically incomplete. Against the invisible hand of the marketplace that relies on interest, and the iron hand of regulation that relies on punishment, they set an intangible hand relying on the quest for esteem. In the heart of the book, they walk through one type of setting after another and one type of problem after another, showing in an abstract and powerful way what the tradeoffs and dynamics are within the pursuit of esteem, what social institutions and individual choices look like when thought of in esteem-seeking terms.

It’s also, to my mind, a sometimes strange and frustrating book. I may not be its target audience, for much of it seems designed to refute the null hypothesis that esteem-seeking is irrelevant or powerless, and that only interest-seeking matters. I suppose that it ought to be persuasive to anyone subscribing to that hypothesis. But then again someone holding it has disregarded a great deal of evidence and argument already, and won’t necessarily cease to do so just because the argument Is presented in terms he or she finds cognitively familiar.

As a result, Brennan and Pettit often—not always, but often—talk about the desire for esteem as an unusual feature of human life, something that has its primary effects in the domain of civil society set apart from the market and the state. But it is pervasive; it pervades and intertwines with the pursuits of wealth and power. It is indeed more pervasive than they are, no matter how powerfully they shape our macro-social institutions. The desire to avoid disesteem and humiliation , and the willingness to follow norms the breaking of which is shameful, surrounds us and shapes us, all the time.

Another oddity of emphasis, that is I think connected. The authors are conscientious about regularly noting perverse cases—“intangible backhand” problems in which the desire for esteem results in misaligned incentives or undesirable behaviors. But these are always treated as exceptional, as interestingly quirky—kind of the way that economists present Giffen goods. The language of “esteem” and “estimable” encourages this.

But there are plenty of other words and concepts that might be used, but that barely register in the book: Pride. Glory, vanity, or their traditional hybrid vainglory. Egotism (as distinct from the egoism of homo economus). Above all, as far as I’m concerned: status. Many of the dynamics that are presented in such successful abstraction seem likely to be beneficial so long as we think of them as esteem-seeking—and immediately take on a more baleful aspect when we think of them as status-seeking.

The book notes that sometimes the economy of esteem is blocked from its best operation by a systematic disesteem for whole groups of people, e.g. racial prejudice. And its treatment of what happens within the subordinated group as a result are very interesting. But the superordinate group isn't mentioned, and I kept thinking that some whiteness studies would have done some good here. The authors are interested in the disincentive to performance among the subordinate group who can't receive full-- or, sometimes, any-- esteem rewards for excellence. But the counterpart is the unearned status boost for even the least estimable members of the superordinate group. Jim Crow was economically destructive, but represented a categorical increase in status for lower-class whites; they gained a status floor beneath which they could not normally fall, just in virtue of not being black. And so they became dogged supporters and enforcers of Jim Crow, to protect and maintain their own otherwise-precarious status gains.

The often-positive-sum esteem settings the authors focus on are important and interesting. But they are not the whole of the economy of esteem, and are probably not the most important ways that esteem and status affect social institutions, the market, and politics.

A final complaint, minor in fact though it bothered me a great deal. Brennan and Pettit do make occasional reference to the historical importance of the view that esteem-seeking was a primary motivation. But their desire to contrast the intangible and invisible hands means that Adam Smith almost always appears as a synecdoche for the economistic worldview—and doesn’t appear often in any case. But Smith’s greatest work, the Theory of Moral Sentiments—mentioned here primarily as a source for the invisible hand metaphor!—is a work that’s centrally about the relationship between esteem-seeking and moral psychology, between the desire for praise and the desire for praiseworthiness, between human motivation and the good opinion of others; in short, about the core material of this book. And the book omits altogether the great critic of esteem-seeking behavior, Smith’s contemporary Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

The book in fact contains many good answers to traditional critiques of esteem-seeking, draws credible connections between the pursuit of esteem and the attainment of excellence, and greatly adds to our understanding. And I want to emphasize again how admirable its combination of economic and philosophical reasoning is. This may be the finest manifestation I know of the intellectual atmosphere that existed at the Australian National University’s Research School of the Social Sciences (where the authors were longtime colleagues) for many years, and that’s high praise. But the book by its own admission is meant to be research-agenda-opening, not primarily question-answering. Much work remains to be done in thinking about status, power, and interest-based motivations alongside each other, sometimes rivalrous, sometimes reinforcing, always interacting—and about what follows for the methodologies of the social sciences.

With respect to institutional reforms, the authors are very concerned to make the point that professionals should be treated like professionals, and rewarded with esteem for excellence, rather that either micromanaged in a punitive regulatory fashion or "incentivized" (as the ugly word goes) with constant payments for performance. This is persuasive and important-- and indeed helps to make sense of how and why many professions are organized the way that they are. But it's a lesson that operates within boundaries, too. Professions as sectors, and firms of professionals like law firms, face market discipline, even when professionals as individual workers are not paid by commission. I think the authors are concerned to show that, e.g., civil servants and public school teachers also ought to be treated as professionals, with their time use regulated by the intangible hand and not the invisible or the iron hand. No doubt there's something to that; but it needs to be paired with an understanding of what will take the place of the market boundaries faced by private-sector professions. And there's something slightly underwhelming about "treat schoolteachers better" as the institutional takeaway from a book that, on its face, is attempting a major overhaul in how social science is done.

(At least, a major overhaul in how economics is done. Sociology, it must be said, has never been blind to the importance of status. But economists-- even, apparently, very fine and professionally-interdisciplinary economists-- sometimes have trouble acknowledging that sociology has gone somewhere before they have.)

The best part of the book by far is Part II, "Within the Economics of Esteem," that formalizes and analyzes many features of esteem-seeking behavior, and casts light on lots of situations. (Not accidentally, many of these are set in universities and among academics; I've maintained several times on this blog that academic life is more usefully modeled as status-seeking than as interest-seeking.) Readers of these chapters need to be brave enough not to be frightened away by the mere appearance of a diagram or an equation, but these are no more difficult than what appears in an introductory microeconomics class and in any case their ideas and intuitions are clearly explained in the accompanying prose. But pause to appreciate the models if you can. They're pitched at a very well-chosen level. They simplify and abstract, as models do... but they don't simplify into straight lines or monotonic curves. Brennan and Pettit have thought carefully about discontinuities, asymmetries, sharp angles, and indeterminate zones, and they simplify just enough to highlight them, rather than simplifying them away-- and many of the best ideas of the book are found in the discussions and justifications of those discontinuities, asymmetries, and so on.

2010-06-22T16:59:00.004-05:00

I'm going to live forever, part 4,872 in a continuing series

Good news:

Drinking several cups of tea or coffee a day appears to protect against heart disease, a 13-year-long study [of 40,000 people] from the Netherlands has found.

Less good news:

Consuming between two to four coffees a day was also linked to a reduced risk... the protective effect ceased with more than four cups of coffee a day,

But at least:

even those who drank this much were no more likely to die of any cause, including stroke and cancer, than those who abstained.

2010-06-17T11:07:00.004-05:00

Liberty and civil society

[Note: originally written as a contribution to the Cato Unbound symposium on Philip Blond's Redy Toryism. Russell Arben Fox's reply to the symposium, and I guess mainly to me, is here, and it's of course a much better and more interesting defense of an idea like Red Toryism than was the piece of Blond's to which we had to reply.]

My old friend Patrick Deneen writes:

"The contemporary conspiracy between State and Market -- apparently locked in battle, but more fundamentally consonant in their hostility toward, and evisceration of, the institutions of civil society -- mutually reinforce each other, strengthening simultaneously commercial and State concentrations of power that recent events reveal to have been deeply intertwined. Both are based upon the radically individuated anthropology of classical liberalism, an anthropology that both necessarily precedes and ultimately succors the progressivist liberalism that it purports to oppose. ... The only true locus of human liberty is to be found in the institutions of civil society, yet our dominant philosophies both regard its requirements for stability, self-sacrifice and generational continuity as an obstacle to individual liberty."

I can't imagine the time horizons over which the purported changes have happened. The civil society that is a semi-distinct sphere of human society, the order of intermediate and sometimes-voluntary associations that mostly lack either coercive power over outsiders or expressly commercial purposes, isn't any older than the state and the market as distinct spheres. Like them, it arises in the world of modern social differentiation. The medieval church was, to our eye, quite state-like; the medieval guild looked a great deal like a participant in the market. From the time that civil society in this sense is really identifiable as a sphere-- the time when The Church became churches which were required to peacefully coexist, when one of the guilds evolved into the Freemasons and others were replaced by fraternal societies that did not regulate the labor market, when the intergenerational corporate form became democratized and demonopolized and made accessible to voluntary associations, and so on, in other words from the 18th or early 19th century onward-- there has always been augmentation of material wealth on the market and there has always been an increase in the coercive power of the state. And yet the grand narrative of the decline of civil society is, according to its leading empirical scholar Robert Putnam, the story of a civic-minded Greatest Generation inadvertently raising baby boomers who watched too much television. The pessimistic take on civil society is that it flourished and its forms proliferated until the 1950s, 60s, or 70s. (The optimistic take is that it flourishes still, and that its forms continue to proliferate, even if fewer hours are being volunteered for the Rotary.) The timing matches neither an unusucal increase in state power (certainly not compared with the 1910s or the 1930s and 40s!) nor an unusual increase in market power.

The life of religious institutions in particular is somewhat more complicated. One of the great institutional accomplishments of American civil society, the Catholic school system, has indeed fallen victim to the market. The system rested on the service of men and, especially, women who opted to forego market rewards for lifelong religious-education vocations. The opportunity costs of that decision have risen dramatically, especially for women who had been excluded from the labor market altogether. It is unclear whether the system is sustainable on current trends. If it is not, there will be a loss to the social world. But it will not be because of, nor will it engender, a loss of liberty.

Liberty is productive of civil society. The tremendous creativity of nineteenth-century Americans in creating churches, voluntary associations, universities, and fraternal societies is a testament to this. And the existence of a rich and vibrant civil society is a sign of freedom. I do not believe that a society that lacked such a civil society would be a free one-- but the lack would be more symptom than cause. Free persons do create and inhabit and maintain and perpetuate organizations and institutions. They do so partly under the umbrella of a coercive state that allows the institutions to be intermediate, rather than rival armed camps enforcing the rights of the members. And they do so partly with the wealth and leisure that the market makes possible. There are, of course, countervailing effects and complex relationships. But there is nothing like a simple inverse relationship between civil society and a reifiied sum of "state plus market."

The phrase "civil society" is a complicated one. It suggests the self-governing city or city-state, free of feudal power or coercive religious jurisdiction. In early modernity, this sense of a complete political society with rough equality before the law and excluding religious violence becamse generalized to the entities we now think of as nation-states-- the Hobbesian, Weberian, Westphalian states that overpowered coercive church jurisdiction and suppressed the possibility of religious civil war. And so, in the writings of someone like John Locke, civil society is political society, theself-contained and unified political society that can apply a general law and that excludes external (e.g. church) claims of political power. There was an important sense in which that society offered freedom-- freedom from the inquisitors and their Protestant equivalents. That is, civil society-as-state suppressed the power of intermediate institutions. In the 18th century, thinkers such as Adam Ferguson and Adam Smith came to imagine social spheres distinct from political society-- a society, and an economy, that could persist over time and survive changes in political regime. (Scottish society and the Scottish economy changed, but did not disappear, when the Scottish state disappeared into the British.) That, too, was an advance in our understanding of freedom-- our social lives are not wholly constituted by our political lives. Hegel was later to use the phrase to refer almost entirely to the market, under an appropriate legal regime-- the legal regime that recognizes free bourgeois citizens, legally autonomous and interacting with each other as equals. That is the social world of liberal agents creating new voluntary associations as easily, and with the same rules, as they create economic firms or political parties.

To say that liberty is only possible in civil society is an interesting thought when it admits of this complexity. But when it treats the non-political non-economic domain as the whole meaning of the phrase, it is misleading at best.

2010-05-28T09:23:00.000-05:00

The Queen's Speech

"My government will invest in new high-speed broadband internet connection," spoken by an 84-year old woman wearing an actual ginormous crown in imperial purple sitting on an actual throne.

I'm sure that to Commonwealthers the theater (theatre) of the Queen's Speech (or its viceregal equivalents) is old hat, but this is the first one I've ever actually watched. It strikes me as wonderfully odd. It seems undignified for the Queen to have to read a first-person speech written by some newly-elected politico and simultaneously undignified for the elected leader of a great power not to be able to deliver his own agenda to Parliament, and just wildly incongruous to have the longest-serving head of state in the world (is that right?) wading through a detailed list of bills to be introduced ("alcohol-related violence!") and through boringly jargony catchphrases. And yet it all works-- I enjoyed it more than I've enjoyed a State of the Union, like, ever.

I especially liked that the official statement of the government's agenda doubles as the Queen's Christmas card/ annual letter ("The Duke of Edinburgh and I look forward to our visit to Canada in June").

2010-05-26T20:23:00.002-05:00

Two political theory doctoral students win major fellowships

Two pieces of good news for theory students I've noticed recently from very competitive fellowship competitions:

Kiran Banerjee Wins Canada’s Most Prestigious PhD Award

[University of Toronto] PhD student, Kiran Banerjee, has won the Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship, Canada’s most prestigious scholarship for doctoral students. The award recognizes students in the social sciences and humanities, natural sciences and engineering, and health sciences who have demonstrated leadership skills and high standards of scholarly achievement in their graduate studies. The award is worth $50,000 annually for up to three years. Kiran, one of 174 students to receive the award this year, is writing a doctoral dissertation on `Statelessness and the limits of contemporary citizenship: a theory of transnational political inclusion and open membership’.

James Ethan Bourke awarded ACLS fellowship

James Ethan Bourke
Doctoral Candidate
Duke University
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation/ACLS Early Career Fellowship Program Dissertation Completion Fellowships 2010

The Politics of Incommensurability: A Value Pluralist Approach to Liberalism and Democracy

This dissertation explores the meaning and political implications of Isaiah Berlin’s theory of value pluralism. Value pluralism is the idea that goods or values are often conflicting and incommensurable to one another; that is, they cannot be measured by a common rubric or systematically ranked against one another. The argument has four main parts: 1) an analysis of what Berlin and others have meant by “value pluralism;” 2) a critique of current attempts to link value pluralism to one or another political view; 3) a new interpretation of the core claim of incommensurability and an analysis of how it affects practical reasoning; and 4) a constructive argument about the liberal-democratic institutions and practices that value pluralism supports.

2010-05-25T14:11:00.012-05:00

And they all died happily ever after

First draft thoughts on the Lost finale, to be updated as time permits:

I'm pleased to see that the critics are nearly unanimous in their correct view that the finale was terrible-- though one of the highest-profile Lostologists, EW's Doc Jensen, inexplicably sticks to the incorrect view that it was not terrible.

------
http://io9.com/5545911/lost-was-the-ultimate-long-con?skyline=true&s=i
"Lost, arguably the most important genre show of the past decade, ended with a fizzle. People will tell you it was fine until the last 15 minutes, but they're wrong."

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/25/arts/television/25lost.html?ref=television

"Desmond and Jack walked into a cave for the final showdown with evil, and Desmond said, “This doesn’t matter, him destroying the island, you destroying him.” Jack, serious to the end, replied, “All of this matters.” It was the sort of thesis-antithesis, drama-of-ideas moment that the show had always specialized in. The problem was that several hours later, after the show’s mystical, walk-into-the-white-light ending, it was Desmond who would be proved more right."

http://www.slate.com/id/2242745/entry/2255005/
"I can only hope that some pissed-off, enterprising Lost fan will do for the final season what other irate fanboys have done for the Star Wars prequels: re-edit the whole sloppy mess into something better."

http://www.slate.com/id/2242745/entry/2254926/
"Well, shit."

http://www.slate.com/id/2242745/entry/2254865/
"That spooky island that so much blood and treasure were spilled over—the one that holds the key to life and transfixed 20 million viewers each week at its peak? Oh, it's still out there. Don't trouble yourself about it. Just join us in this cheesily nondenominational church and let the good times roll. In lieu of a truly clever conclusion, please enjoy watching a minute of slow-motion hugging between the characters."

http://www.slate.com/id/2242745/entry/2254778/
"After six seasons, you call a prom of the dead in a chapel of love where everybody is farting rainbows, where all the primary Oceanic 815 survivors are redeemed, where a loving "Dad" opens a Spielbergian door of light to the greater beyond ("Where are we going?" "Let's go find out.")—a finale?"

http://www.salon.com/entertainment/tv/review/2010/05/24/lost_season_finale_recap
"A series like "Lost" doesn't need to solve all of its riddles, but it does need to address the right ones. (The first season of "Twin Peaks" is an object lesson in how to provide enough resolution while preserving the delicious mysteries of a fictional universe.) From statements the producers of "Lost" have made over the past five years, they developed a dynamic with die-hard fans (and disillusioned fans and skeptical non-fans) that was infinitely more complex than any of the personal relationships among the series' characters. Could it be that in resisting the geekiest, nitpickingest, most Aspergerian demands of their audience they swung too far in the opposite direction, dismissing as trivial everything but the cosmic (the tedious and largely unnecessary Jacob-Smokey background) and the sentimental (making sure that every character receives his or her designated soul mate or therapeutic closure of the most banal Dr. Phil variety)?"

http://defamer.gawker.com/5545877/the-lost-finale-was-incredibly-dumb
"Once upon a time, there was a television show about a bunch of people on an island. For six years it was one of the most fascinating things on TV. And then it ended, in the worst way possible. Lost ended tonight, and with it the hopes and dreams of millions of people who thought it might finally get good again. SPOILER ALERT: It didn't. "
--------------

I'll begin positive. Absolutely loved the Jack-Fake Locke conversation about the real Locke, and the final exchange between Ben and Locke (although I can't entirely disagree with this critique of that moment, either). Got a kick out of the Star Trek II visual reference. Happily endorse Hugo's ascension and mostly endorse Ben's resolution-- though the latter desperately needed for him to do something, when instead he was utterly passive at just the wrong moment, neither Gollum at the Crack of Doom nor Vader helping to strike down the Emperor. Yay, Frank's alive and awesome. Yay, Miles and duct tape. Yay, Enos jokes. Yay, Juliet-Sawyer. (A lot of the episode consisted of trying to get the audience to just say 'yay'-- 'Yay, it's Vincent/ Rose & Bernard/ Juliet/ Frank/ Penny/ pianist Daniel/ Charlotte!' That's OK, in this kind of thing, and they got a few 'yay's out of me. But a 'yay' moment is narrative popcorn, not protein.) The cliffside fight was pretty great.

And after that... I'm kind of out of positive things to say.

The idea is emerging that the finale emphasized Character over Plot or Mythology, and therefore that we who disliked it failed to appreciate that Lost was a character-driven show. This idea is also incorrect.

No episode in which Christ symbolism was slathered on like cake frosting can be accused of being light on myth. And the finale laid it on even thicker than the season premiere. The island plotline was all about the Rules and the glowy soul-magic electromagnetism. The widely-reviled final Jack-Christian scene and church scene were mythology. But a) they were new mythology, unconnected with anything we've seen before, and b) they were bad mythology. We'll return to why.

And conversely: 'shipper fanfic is not the same as characterization. The only moments of real character resolution were on the island. Jack accepted both that he can be wrong and that he can be right, accepted that his responsibility to help others is compatible with a limit on his ability to do so and that he needs to be willing to pass responsibility to others. Kate ran to instead of running away, and in so doing saved the day; and came to terms with her connection to Jack. And Hurley grew up-- understanding that he can help others without being subordinate to them.

But nothing in the Sideways-verse offered any character resolution-- and indeed it undermined the resolutions those three characters reached on the island. The Jack-Christian touchy-feely was entirely unearned, and untrue to Jack's complicated relationship to his father. Sayid's One True Love being declared to be fricking Shannon was wildly untrue to his character as it's developed through the show. Sun and Jin's beatific bliss at discovering that they were already dead (which means, for Jin, that he has never seen and will never see his daughter) doesn't make a lick of sense. And the same problem repeats. Indeed, much of the problem is the sameness. The lovey flashbacks could have substituted any couple for any other couple. Everyone had precisely the same reaction to their remembrance of the island and of their death-- regardless of what they'd lost in either the real world or in their Sideways hallucination. Those of you who think you're "character" fans-- do you approve of Jack showing not an instant of a flicker of regret at discovering that he didn't really have a son, and never would?

And what about Locke, who in an instant goes from a world in which he's with the woman he loves, has come to terms with his father's accident, and in which he's just regained his legs, to a world in which he has just a moment ago died a lonely and pathetic failure, murdered after an abandoned suicide attempt, having re-lost his legs and been exiled from the Island where he'd found purpose, meaning, respect, and faith? Shouldn't there be some slightly complex emotion registering on Terry O'Quinn's talented face, instead of that dude-do-you-want-a-hit-of-this? nirvana?

And the fact that everyone ends up dying happily ever after in a big group hug really seems to cheapen the arcs that the characters did have. It turns out not to matter who lived and who died, who faced what struggles or-- crucially-- what issues with non-Oceanic-815 people. The characterization of these characters, such as it was, always involved the interaction of their off-island and on-island lives. The failure to give Locke in particular any real resolution bothers me.

The awakenings were neither moments of emotional resolution in Sidewaysland-- it's not as though Sideways-Sayid or Sideways-Sawyer had emotional issues that centered on the absence of a hot blonde from their lives-- nor moments of resolution of issues from the real world. They were just magical moments, overwriting any given character's story with the blissed-out realization of having found twue wuv and being dead.

The only awakening that tugged at my heartstrings at the time was Sawyer-Juliet. But even that's a little creepy in retrospect, once you know that Juliet has just found out her son was a hallucination. (Even in retrospect that bothers me less than Jack's lack of reaction-- because father-son issues were central to Jack's whole story, and because his son was central to his Sideways arc.)

All of that said about the characterization issue, I'm still a mytharc kind of geek. And I'm as dissatisfied with the answers we got as with those we didn't.

It turns out that every mystery about the island comes down to three things:

1) The glowy soul-magic electromagnetism has various funky effects.

2) Jacob made up lots of (as far as we know) entirely arbitrary rules for his arbitrary game with Smokey, a game that had the aims of protecting the glowy soul-magic electromagnetism, protecting the world from Smokey, and (Trading Places-like) winning an argument with his brother about human nature by experimenting on people.

3) The various peoples brought to the Island each left stuff behind.

Category 1 never got any further explanation. In the final few episodes we saw the glowiness of the source of the soul-magic-electromagnetism, but we already knew that there was magical life-and-health-connected electromagnetism. What we didn't know was why or what it meant. We still don't.

And categories 2 and 3 are boring. Polar bear? Just a Dharma leftover. The Numbers? Just the arbitrary stipulative system Jacob used to list out the candidates to replace himself. The complexities of coming to and leaving the island? Jacob's made-up rules. The need for the Oceanic Six to return (without apparently needing Aaron or Walt to return)? Well, Jacob wanted some of them to show up for a job interview.

But much remains unexplained-- and in need of explanation. In particular, the history between 1977 and 2004 of Ben, Widmore, Eloise, Richard, and Jacob that led to the Purge, Widmore's exile, the Others becoming sociopathic by the time of Oceanic 815, and Widmore's, Ben's, and Eloise's off-island activities-- in other words, the plot of seasons 3-5-- doesn't make sense.

Allegedly Jacob was talking to Richard, and not to Ben, throughout these years. What was Richard saying to Ben? Did Jacob approve of the Others' new moral code? How did Widmore, Eloise, and Ben gain the mysterious knowledge that they lorded over the survivors, especially off-island in Seasons 4-5? Did Jacob tell them?

For an example of what this kind of thing looks like done right, look at the Locke-Richard-Smokey interactions as Locke timejumps. Eventually we understand who knew what when, and how they knew it, and why they said what they said, and how neatly it all fits together. I suspect that there's no such coherent storyline for the Ben-Eloise-Widmore plots; if there is, we certainly haven't been told about it.

"But those are secondary characters!" you say. Well, maybe, expect for Ben. But their conflicts and agendas were primary-- they were central for more than half of the show's length. And they were left a chaotic and unresolved mess. I'm not looking for an in-depth character study of Widmore's psychology. I just want to know that the basic moving parts of the plot were.

It's tempting to try a variant on the following:

"Smokey was manipulating Ben, either directly or indirectly through Richard, by pretending to be Jacob. Ben got corrupted by Smokey early on, leading him to think he was connected to the island's fundamental purpose when really he was working for its destruction. He was led into some conflict with Widmore and Eloise in which he was wrong and they were right, but he won. Eloise and Widmore, knowing that Jacob's will was being thwarted, spent all the intervening years trying to get back and fight for good, albeit becoming corrupted by their ruthless dedication to that cause. In the meantime, Ben led the Others into paranoia and malice, under Smokey's direction. By the time Ben met Smokey Locke, Smokey already knew Ben from years of manipulation and only had a little more work to do to finish the job." That could get us a lot of the way there.

Except...

Except that Ben never talked to anyone who he thought was Jacob before the Season 5 finale; Richard knows what Jacob looks like; and Smokey couldn't appear to Richard using Jacob's face, because Jacob wasn't dead. So we're left with the thought that Ben acted autonomously. That's a lot more interesting in terms of Ben's character; but it leaves us without a solution as to what the heck was going on.

To be continued...

2010-05-17T10:51:00.004-05:00

Yer doin' it wrong

Inside Higher Ed reports:

A plan to eliminate 15 faculty positions regardless of tenure status might hit some speed bumps if Albion College’s faculty handbook were followed, but the college’s trustees have decided to ignore that minor inconvenience.

When Albion faculty said the dismissals might violate the handbook, the board promptly passed a resolution washing their hands of the guidelines. Indeed, the board didn’t even bother to say which parts of the book they would change; the trustees simply declared that anything standing in their way was "amended effective immediately."

And the resolution does indeed say, simply,

RESOLVED that exercising the authority of the Board of Trustees under the Charter of 1857, the Faculty Handbook is amended effective immediately in all ways necessary to
permit the reduction of 15 full time equivalent (FTE) existing faculty positions, which may include tenured faculty positions, by the beginning of the 2010-2011
academic year.

Some of the faculty have advanced various interpretations of the Faculty Handbook which are incompatible with the trustees’ fiduciary obligation to govern the College.
The Board of Trustees reaffirms its fundamental commitment to academic freedom, which tenure protects.

This amendment is made effective immediately because the Board considers it an emergency that the Board’s authority in this area be clarified.

Now, final resolution of the relationship between faculty governance and trustee authority is hard to come by, and one usually wants to avoid pushing things to the point where a resolution is needed. But let's say that the trustees are right that they have the responsibility and authority to act unilaterally if they need to. Suppose that they have the authority to unilaterally amend the Faculty hHandbook-- which is likely to be legally correct.

They still haven't acted.

"the Faculty Handbook is amended effective immediately in all ways necessary to
permit the reduction of 15 full time equivalent (FTE) existing faculty positions, which may include tenured faculty positions, by the beginning of the 2010-2011
academic year."

has no actual amendments contained within its language. The thing about written legal documents is that they contain actual words-- and amending them requires substituting other actual words, or else specifying which original words are being deleted. You can't simply declare a policy goal.

If the Faculty Handbook posed an ex ante obstacle to the firings, then I can't see that that obstacle has been removed.

Update: Paul Gowder thinks I'm wrong about this. As you'll see in the comments over there, I think he's wrong in thinking me wrong.

2010-05-06T13:40:00.005-05:00

Problems in ethnofederalism and quasi-federalism

There are a few possible outcomes for today's election in Britain that would be of especially great interest for students of ethnofederalism and quasifederalism.

1) If the Tories gain a plurality but not a majority-- and could get over the top with the help of a Celtic party. It's improbable that they would get such help-- except for the UUP, whose candidates are standing as part of the Tory caucus this year, the gulf between the Tories and the non-English parties is substantial.

But this would also mean that Lib-Lab plus one or two Celtic parties would add up to a majority.

Imagine a hung Parliament in which the Tories have two more seats than Lib-Lab-- but Tories + SNP would be a majority, or Lib-Lab + SNP + Plaid Cyrmu would be a majority.

SNP and PC, like the Bloc Quebecois, are generally committed to not being in the business of deciding who runs the whole state. But at that point (like in the aftermath of the last Canadian election) the pressure on them to pick a side could be ratcheted up. So could the inducements offered to them to do so.

If you're David Cameron under these circumstances, do you open negotiations with the SNP? Or do you rely on the pious hope that they can be left out of the calculations, because Lib-Lab won't do a deal with them either?

Now imagine if Tory seats = Lib-Lab seats precisely. If you're the SNP, can you really resist the chance to play kingmaker, to start a bidding war, to name your price?

2) If the Tories gain a plurality, but Lib-Lab together gains a very slim majority, a different set of problems arise that has nothing to do with the Celtic partiesand everything to do with the West Lothian question. This outcome would mean that the Tories had won a majority of seats in England, given party distributions elsewhere. But the government would be Lib-Lab.

Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland-- but not England-- have and regional self-government of varying degrees. England is still ruled directly from Westminster. There has been contention over whether Scottish MPs should be able to vote on individual pieces of legislation that affects England (or England and Wales) but not Scotland. But I think this election result would put the problem in a new, sharper, light. A government that has authority over English-- but not Scottish-- domestic policy would have been decisively chosen by Scottish votes, in the face of an English majority in the other direction.

I could imagine that result being inflammatory; it might finally succeed in igniting widespread English interest in the West Lothian question. That would, I think, pose more dangers for the Tories than it would offer advantages-- as a generation of conflict over Europe showed, identity questions can fracture the Conservative Party, and its leadership has little skill in finessing them. But this outcome would offer a very powerful incentive to the Tories to start playing the Little England card.

See also Chris Lawrence.

Update

We're right in the thick of condition (1)-- and it's amazing how invisible the SNP and PC are. The Bloc Quebecois doesn't enter into governments in Canada-- but it's willing to negotiate its price for tacitly supporting minority governments.

In Britain, the only choices are:

Tory-LibDem coalition, or at least arrangement to keep LibDem from voting down a Queen's Speech;

Tory-Labour grand coalition, which is never going to happen;

a minority government that could be brought down with a sneeze or a stiff breeze, whether Conservative or Labour or Lib-Lab;

or that somebody talks to the SNP and Plaid Cymru and gets their agreement not to vote down a minority government (the SNP, at least, will not take part in government.)

Thisarticle says that the SNP has begun talks with Labour. But that fact isn't being reported anywhere else, and it has the potential to be decisive.

2010-05-04T14:50:00.004-05:00

Boring facts

Matt Yglesias chases Brad DeLong chasing David Brooks chasing his own tail as usual, on culture and policy as explanations of social outcomes.

Brooks says

If you combine the influence of ethnicity and region, you get astounding lifestyle gaps. The average Asian-American in New Jersey lives an amazing 26 years longer and is 11 times more likely to have a graduate degree than the average American Indian in South Dakota.

and follows up with

Therefore, the first rule of policy-making should be, don’t promulgate a policy that will destroy social bonds. If you take tribes of people, exile them from their homelands and ship them to strange, arid lands, you’re going to produce bad outcomes for generations.

Now, "first do no harm" to functioning social worlds is a valuable rule for policymakers to follow. And Matt's right to see the second passage as completing the meaning of the first.

But, well, here's the thing. South Dakota, arid though it might be, is not Oklahoma. South Dakota's Indians are mostly Sioux-- the members of the Lakota/ Nakota/ Dakota nations from which the state takes its name. They have been progressively crowded onto smaller and smaller portions of their ancestors' homelands as a result of gold rushes, wars, thefts, and allotments and partitions. But they have not been "exiled" from their homeland, and strange, arid South Dakota is not strange to them.

There's been plenty of bad policy directed at Indians-- but it's not the same bad policy everywhere.

2010-04-24T17:58:00.004-05:00

Superseding reparations

This slightly mad Henry Louis Gates op-ed (apparent thesis: the history of slavery has responsibility that's widely distributed and hard to disentangle across North America, Europe, and west Africa, so thank goodness we now have a President whose half-east African, half-white ancestry gives him magical historical-responsibility-apportioning powers) made me, possibly, realize something.

Gates hints that, if reparations are owed to the descendants of slaves, they might be owed in part by [some] west Africans whose ancestors were involved in the slave trade.

I think this is finally a case that lets my moral intuition click into the patterns set by Jeremy Waldron's famously controversial article Superseding Historic Injustice. Waldron argues that forward-looking demands of distributive justice and the welfare of the poor trump backward-looking rectification. There's much more to it, but that's one of the key moral ideas. As applied to the indigenous land rights cases that he talks about, I've never found this even slightly compelling. But: I can't imagine the fact pattern or historical evidence that would make me think taxing west Africans in 2010 to make payments to African-Americans in 2010, when the latter have a standard of living between 20 and 50 times higher than the former. Liberia has a per-capita income of just over a dollar a day. Extracting even millions, to say nothing of tens or hundreds of millions, of dollars (and in dollars, that is, exhausting-and-then-some the foreign exchange reserve capacity of west African states) from people many of whom are among the poorest in the world just can't be what justice demands.

I could just fall back on the following, which is part of how I think about reparation cases anyways: the United States government and the government of the several states within it are historically and institutionally continuous with those that perpetrated slavery. There's been no repudiation of the national debt in the US since that time. So those governments are corporate actors that could still be liable for "their" misdeeds of a century and a half ago (and more recent misdeeds as well, since I think much of the case for reparations rests on the Jim Crow era). No west African state and probably no west African collectivity or corporation has that same demonstrable intergenerational continuity. The relevant actors have ceased to exist. So there's no one who could be held responsible today in west Africa, although there is in the US.

That seems plausible to me. But it also seems unnecessary to reach the conclusion. Forward-looking distributive and welfarist considerations alone would, it seems to me, trump any backward-looking evidence of continuity one could find. That's not a comfortable view for me, and maybe my intuition is still entangled with other facts about the case. But at least I can now see Waldron's point on a basic level that I've never managed before, even though I can follow the argument just fine.

(Hat tip Melissa Harris-Lacewell on twitter.)

2010-04-24T14:02:00.003-05:00

Guy Fawkes revisited

Steve Benen and Josh Marshall are surprised that the Republican Governor's Association has decided to issue a call to Remember November in a way that seems to evoke remembering the Fifth of November. I have to say it's not obviously true that there's any Guy Fawkes reference in the video. It could be exclusively a reference to Election Day falling in November. And Benen calls back to a Michelle Bachman rally on Capitol Hill that took place last November 5-- but as far as I can tell Benen was the only one linking that to Guy Fawkes Day. The basic presumption has to be that Americans don't know the date, don't know the rhyme, and don't know the significance of either.

But here, my guess is that the Ron Paul influence on the Tea Parties has meant that rallies have signs and chants to remember November in a way that is directly descended from the Paul campaign's inadvertent association with Guy Fawkes Day.

And-- tell me if I'm imagining this-- in the "Remember November logo, the V is stylized to look both like the checkmark on a ballot and like the V from "V for Vendetta."

SO I think Benen, Marshall, and Scherer are right to see a Guy Fawkes influence here-- but it certainly doesn't amount to a wholesale appropriation of the imagery. This is a lot more tenuous than, say, the usual Republican appropriation of and code language about the American Confederacy.

In case the connection is real, I'll take the occasion to refer you to my post three years ago about the strange twists and turns and misunderstandings that ended with Guy Fawkes being a symbol to the American anti-statist right.