Rationalism, Pluralism, and Freedom

Available in the US February 11 (in Canada and the UK, released December 2014). If you buy at that link, discount code ASFLYQ6 brings the price down to $35. For those who prefer Amazon: Canada, US

CSPT: "Political Thought and Historical Imagination"

Political Thought and Historical Imagination 

CSPT Annual Conference
March 1-2, 2013
Luce Auditorium, Yale University

The historical imagination – how we understand history and place ourselves in relation to it – cannot help but shape and be shaped by the theoretical imagination – how we understand politics and its problems. This conference explores the ways in which our imagination of history influences the theoretical questions we ask, and the ways in which our political theories lead us to retell stories about the past.

Panels:

Roman History and 18^th Century Political Thought, Interpreting the French Revolution, Haiti: Theoretical Implications of Slavery and Emancipation, Historiography as Political Theory: Foundings, Inheritance and Critique, Narrative and Genre in Political Theory, Beyond World History: Political Trajectories Outside the West

Participants:

Danielle Allen, Keith Baker, Robin Blackburn, Richard Bourke, James Ceaser, John Dunn, Sibylle Fischer, Jason Frank, Patrice Gueniffey, Wang Hui, Kirstie McClure, Iain McDaniel, Pratap Bhanu Mehta, Michael Mosher, J. G. A. Pocock, Andrew Sabl, Rogers Smith, Steven Smith, Brandon Terry, Shatema Threadcraft, Richard Tuck, and Elizabeth Wingrove.

Organizers:

Bryan Garsten and Karuna Mantena, Yale University

Registration

[NB: see too this introductory note from, I take it, Garsten and Mantena on the occasion of their succeeding to the CSPT leadership.  Congratulations both to them and to the society on the transition.  CSPT has been an important organization in our field, and I'm happy to see it in such good hands.  JTL]

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

Special issue of the CLR James Review: "Creolizing Rousseau"

The C.L.R. James Journal is pleased to announce the publication of its Spring 2009 special issue, Creolizing Rousseau, guest co-edited by Jane Anna Gordon and Neil Roberts.

The CLR James Journal: A Review of Caribbean Ideas
Special Issue: Creolizing Rousseau
Volume 15, Number 1, Spring 2009

Table of Contents

EDITORS’ NOTE

Introduction: The Project of Creolizing Rousseau
Jane Anna Gordon and Neil Roberts


DEBATING CREOLIZATION: AN INTRODUCTION

Of Legitimation and the General Will: Creolizing Rousseau through Frantz Fanon
Jane Anna Gordon

From Mestiçagem to Cosmopolitanism
Alexis Nouss

Beyond Négritude and Créolité: The Ongoing Creolization of Identities
Mickaella Perina

CREOLIZING ROUSSEAU

Rousseau, the Master’s Tools, and Anti-Contractarian Contractarianism
Charles W. Mills

Rousseau and Fanon on Inequality and the Human Sciences
Nelson Maldonado-Torres

From Rousseau’s Theory of Natural Equality to Firmin's Resistance to the Historical Inequality of Races
Tommy J. Curry

Rousseau and the Problem of Democratic Transition in Postcolonial Africa
George Carew

C.L.R. James and the Creolizing of Rousseau and Marx
Paget Henry

Virtuous Bacchanalia: Creolizing Rousseau’s Festival
Chiji Akoma and Sally Scholz

REVIEW ESSAYS

Rousseau, Social Alienation, and the Possibility of Generative Critique: A Review Essay
Emily C. Nacol

On Pateman and Mills’s Contract and Domination
Lewis R. Gordon

Space, Power, Consciousness and Women's Resistance: A Review Essay
Gertrude Gonzáles de Allen

ACCEPTANCE LETTER OF WILSON HARRIS, FIRST RECIPIENT OF THE CPA NICOLÁS GUILLÉN PRIZE FOR PHILOSOPHICAL LITERATURE

BOOK DISCUSSION

Sylvia Marcos’s Taken from the Lips as a Post-secular Transmodern, and Decolonial Methodology
Nelson Maldonado-Torres

On Sylvia Marcos’s Taken from the Lips
Karen Torjesen

On Sylvia Marcos’s Journey along the Spiral of Nahuatl Gender and Eros
Madina Tlostanova

Cosmology and Gender in Sylvia Marcos’s Taken From the Lips: Gender and Eros in Mesoamerican Religions
María Lugones

Unapologetically to Introduce New Goals and Methods: A Reply
Sylvia Marcos

In addition, the complete introduction that articulates the project of creolizing Rousseau and summarizes the essay of each author can be found at:


http://www.williams.edu/africana-studies/NeilRoberts/CreolizingRousseauIntroduction/EditorsNotes.htm


If you wish to obtain a copy of the issue, please direct your requests to Paget Henry (Paget_Henry@brown.edu), Executive Editor of The C.L.R. James Journal.

Fleischacker wins Gittler Award

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

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

Biblio-summertime

Recent acquisitions now added to the reading list:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Elisabeth Ellis, Provisional Politics: Kantian Arguments in Policy Context

Alan Houston, Benjamin Franklin and the Politics of Improvement

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

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

Julian Franklin, Jean Bodin and the Rise of Absolutist Theory

I Can't Quite Believe My Eyes

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

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

[...]

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

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

Emphasis added.

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

Alan Houston discovers new Benjamin Franklin letters

This is very cool (gated Chronicle article):

It sounds like a scene out of Possession: In the waning hours of a research trip to the British Library, an American scholar stumbles on a cache of letters overlooked for 250 years. It's the stuff of scholarly romance, and it happened to Alan Houston, a professor of political science at the University of California at San Diego, who made what he describes as the find of a lifetime—47 letters written by, to, and about Benjamin Franklin, and never before seen by scholars.

Mr. Houston had traveled to England to round up material for his book Benjamin Franklin and the Politics of Improvement (Yale University Press, 2008). On the last day of his visit, he was in the library's Manuscripts Reading Room looking at material on the French and Indian War.

He asked to see a volume of papers that had belonged to Thomas Birch, secretary of the Royal Society from 1752 to 1765. The volume was described simply as "Copies of Letters Relating to the March of General Braddock," referring to the ill-starred venture of a British general dispatched in 1755 to capture Fort Duquesne, in present-day Pittsburgh, from the French.

"The first thing in it was a letter from Benjamin Franklin to the secretary of the governor of Maryland," Mr. Houston said this week. "I looked at the first sentence and said, 'This doesn't sound familiar.' Then I got kind of nervous and bouncy in my chair." [...]

For two years, Mr. Houston has kept his find a secret from almost everyone else, except for a handful of Franklin experts whom he consulted to help him verify the documents.[...]

The letters will finally see the light of day this month in an issue of The William and Mary Quarterly, along with an essay by the discoverer on what Mr. Houston calls "the wagon affair of 1755."

Houston's new Franklin book is high on my summer reading list.

2008 books in political theory, continued

See this post for part 1.

Ten interesting and important books, by my lights, in political theory in 2008 by young and mid-career scholars. This will be a much more idiosyncratic list built around my own interests than the first one was-- not that the first one represented Objective Truth or anything, but, e.g., I'm pretty confident that there will be APSA panels or conferences or workshops or review symposia about most of the books I named there. Some of the books below are ones I suspect not many people have heard of yet; I want to encourage more people to have a look at them. In any case, well-known or not, consensus choices or not, these are interesting-to-me books published last year. Further contributions welcome in comments!

Sharon Krause, Civil Passions

Must we put passions aside when we deliberate about justice? Can we do so? The dominant views of deliberation rightly emphasize the importance of impartiality as a cornerstone of fair decision making, but they wrongly assume that impartiality means being disengaged and passionless. In Civil Passions, Sharon Krause argues that moral and political deliberation must incorporate passions, even as she insists on the value of impartiality. Drawing on resources ranging from Hume's theory of moral sentiment to recent findings in neuroscience, Civil Passions breaks new ground by providing a systematic account of how passions can generate an impartial standpoint that yields binding and compelling conclusions in politics. Krause shows that the path to genuinely impartial justice in the public sphere--and ultimately to social change and political reform--runs through moral sentiment properly construed. This new account of affective but impartial judgment calls for a politics of liberal rights and democratic contestation, and it requires us to reconceive the meaning of public reason, the nature of sound deliberation, and the authority of law. By illuminating how impartiality feels, Civil Passions offers not only a truer account of how we deliberate about justice, but one that promises to engage citizens more effectively in acting for justice.

Burke Hendrix, Ownership, Authority, and Self-Determination: Moral Principles and Indigenous Rights Claims

Much controversy has existed over the claims that Native Americans and other indigenous peoples have a right—based on original occupancy of land, historical transfers of sovereignty, and principles of self-determination—to a political status separate from the states in which they now find themselves embedded. How valid are these claims on moral grounds?

Burke Hendrix tackles these thorny questions in this book. Rather than focusing on the legal and constitutional status of indigenous nations within the states now ruling them, he starts at a more basic level, interrogating fundamental justifications for political authority itself. He shows that historical claims of land ownership and prior sovereignty cannot provide a sufficient basis for challenging the authority of existing states, but that our natural moral duties to aid other persons in danger can justify rights to political separation from states that fail to protect their citizens as they should.

Actual attempts at political separation must be carefully managed through well-defined procedural mechanisms, however, to foster extensive democratic deliberation about the nature of the politic al changes at stake. Using such procedures, Hendrix argues, indigenous peoples should be able to withdraw politically from the states currently ruling them, even to the point of choosing full independence.

Dennis Rasmussen, The Problems and Promise of Commercial Society: Adam Smith's Response to Rousseau

Adam Smith is popularly regarded as the ideological forefather of laissez-faire capitalism, while Rousseau is seen as the passionate advocate of the life of virtue in small, harmonious communities and as a sharp critic of the ills of commercial society. But, in fact, Smith had many of the same worries about commercial society that Rousseau did and was strongly influenced by his critique.

In this first book-length comparative study of these leading eighteenth-century thinkers, Dennis Rasmussen highlights Smith's sympathy with Rousseau's concerns and analyzes in depth the ways in which Smith crafted his arguments to defend commercial society against these charges. These arguments, Rasmussen emphasizes, were pragmatic in nature, not ideological: it was Smith's view that, all things considered, commercial society offered more benefits than the alternatives.

Just because of this pragmatic orientation, Smith's approach can be useful to us in assessing the pros and cons of commercial society today and thus contributes to a debate that is too much dominated by both dogmatic critics and doctrinaire champions of our modern commercial society.

Annelien De Dijn, French Political Thought from Montesquieu to Tocqueville: Liberty in a Levelled Society

This study makes a major contribution to our understanding of one of the most important and enduring strands of modern political thought. Annelien de Dijn argues that Montesquieu’s aristocratic liberalism - his conviction that the preservation of freedom in a monarchy required the existence of an aristocratic ‘corps intermédiaire’ - had a continued impact on post-revolutionary France. Revisionist historians from Furet to Rosanvallon have emphasised the impact of revolutionary republicanism on post-revolutionary France, with its monist conception of politics and its focus on popular sovereignty. Dr de Dijn, however, highlights the persistence of a pluralist liberalism that was rooted in the Old Regime, and which saw democracy and equality as inherent threats to liberty. She thus provides a new context in which to read the work of Alexis de Tocqueville, who is revealed as the heir not just of Restoration liberals, but also of the Royalists and their hero, Montesquieu.

Elisabeth Ellis, Provisional Politics: Kantian Arguments in Policy Context

If we are to vindicate moral reasoning in politics, Elisabeth Ellis argues in this original and provocative work, we must focus on the conditions of political discourse rather than the contents of any particular ethical system. Written in an engaging, direct style, Provisional Politics builds on Ellis’s prize-winning interpretation of Kant’s theory of provisional right to construct a new theory of justice under conditions of agency and plurality. She develops this new perspective through a series of cases ranging from the treatment of AIDS widows in Kenya to the rights of non-citizens everywhere, as well as the clash between democratic decision-making and the politics of species conservation. The book concludes with a sobering discussion of the probable limits of political agency.

Jenet Kirkpatrick, Uncivil Disobedience:
Studies in Violence and Democratic Politics

Uncivil Disobedience examines the roles violence and terrorism have played in the exercise of democratic ideals in America. Jennet Kirkpatrick explores how crowds, rallying behind the principle of popular sovereignty and desiring to make law conform to justice, can disdain law and engage in violence. She exposes the hazards of democracy that arise when citizens seek to control government directly, and demonstrates the importance of laws and institutions as limitations on the will of the people.

Kirkpatrick looks at some of the most explosive instances of uncivil disobedience in American history: the contemporary militia movement, Southern lynch mobs, frontier vigilantism, and militant abolitionism. She argues that the groups behind these violent episodes are often motivated by admirable democratic ideas of popular power and autonomy. Kirkpatrick shows how, in this respect, they are not so unlike the much-admired adherents of nonviolent civil disobedience, yet she reveals how those who engage in violent disobedience use these admirable democratic principles as a justification for terrorism and killing. She uses a "bottom-up" analysis of events to explain how this transformation takes place, paying close attention to what members of these groups do and how they think about the relationship between citizens and the law.

Uncivil Disobedience calls for a new vision of liberal democracy where the rule of the people and the rule of law are recognized as fundamental ideals, and where neither is triumphant or transcendent.

Jason Maloy,The Colonial American Origins of Modern Democratic Thought

This first examination in almost 40 years of political ideas in the seventeenth-century American colonies reaches some surprising conclusions about the history of democratic theory more generally. The origins of a distinctively modern kind of thinking about democracy can be located, not in revolutionary America and France in the later eighteenth century, but in the tiny New England colonies in the middle seventeenth. The key feature of this democratic rebirth was honoring not only the principle of popular sovereignty through regular elections but also the principle of accountability through non-electoral procedures for the auditing and impeachment of elected officers. By staking its institutional identity entirely on elections, modern democratic thought has misplaced the sense of robust popular control that originally animated it.

Dana Villa, Public Freedom

The freedom to take part in civic life--whether in the exercise of one's right to vote or congregate and protest--has become increasingly less important to Americans than individual rights and liberties. In Public Freedom, renowned political theorist Dana Villa argues that political freedom is essential to both the preservation of constitutional government and the very substance of American democracy itself.

Through intense close readings of theorists such as Hegel, Tocqueville, Mill, Adorno, Arendt, and Foucault, Villa diagnoses the key causes of our democratic discontent and offers solutions to preserve at least some of our democratic hopes. He demonstrates how Americans' preoccupation with a market-based conception of freedom--that is, the personal freedom to choose among different material, moral, and vocational goods--has led to the gradual erosion of meaningful public participation in politics as well as diminished interest in the health of the public realm itself. Villa critically examines, among other topics, the promise and limits of civil society and associational life as sources of democratic renewal; the effects of mass media on the public arena; and the problematic but still necessary ideas of civic competence and democratic maturity.

Public Freedom is a passionate and insightful defense of political liberties at a moment in America's history when such freedoms are very much at risk.

Alan Houston, Benjamin Franklin and the Politics of Improvement

This fascinating book explores Benjamin Franklin’s social and political thought. Although Franklin is often considered “the first American,” his intellectual world was cosmopolitan. An active participant in eighteenth-century Atlantic debates over the modern commercial republic, Franklin combined abstract analyses with practical proposals. Houston treats Franklin as shrewd, creative, and engaged—a lively thinker who joined both learned controversies and political conflicts at home and abroad.

Drawing on meticulous archival research, Houston examines such tantalizing themes as trade and commerce, voluntary associations and civic militias, population growth and immigration policy, political union and electoral institutions, freedom and slavery. In each case, he shows how Franklin urged the improvement of self and society.

Engagingly written and richly illustrated, this book provides a compelling portrait of Franklin, a fresh perspective on American identity, and a vital account of what it means to be practical.

Adrian Vermeule, Law and the Limits of Reason

Human reason is limited. Given the scarcity of reason, how should the power to make constitutional law be allocated among legislatures, courts and the executive, and how should legal institutions be designed? In Law and the Limits of Reason, Adrian Vermeule denies the widespread view, stemming from Burke and Hayek, that the limits of reason counsel in favor of judges making "living" constitutional law in the style of the common law. Instead, he proposes and defends a "codified constitution" - a regime in which legislatures have the primary authority to develop constitutional law over time, through statutes and constitutional amendments.

Vermeule contends that precisely because of the limits of human reason, large modern legislatures, with their numerous and highly diverse memberships and their complex internal structures for processing information, are the most epistemically effective lawmaking institutions.

Now online: "Not so Novus an Ordo: Constitutions Without Social Contracts"

The preprint version is available at Political Theory (subscription required).

Abstract:

Social contract theory imagines political societies as resting on a fundamental agreement, adopted at a discrete moment in hypothetical time, that binds individual persons together into a polity and sets fundamental rules regarding that polity's structure and powers. Written constitutions, adopted at real moments in historical time, dictating governmental structures, bounding governmental powers, and entrenching individual rights, look temptingly like social contracts reified. Yet something essential is lost in this slippage between social contract theory and the practice of constitutionalism. Contractarian blinders lead us to look for greater individualism, social unity, and coherence of principles than should be expected. Real constitutional orders appropriate, incorporate, and channel the histories and divisions of the societies they govern. Treating them as social contracts flattens and distorts them, making those engagements with the past or with social plurality appear anomalous and encouraging their minimization. Accordingly this article redirects attention to non-contractarian strands within constitutionalism's intellectual inheritance and lived practice.

The Philosophy of Adam Smith: A conference to commemorate the 250th anniversary of The Theory of Moral Sentiments, January 6-8, 2009, Balliol College, Oxford

The program and schedule are now online, along with paper abstracts. It's a great lineup, and I'm excited that I'll be able to be there for part of it.

Organised by the International Adam Smith Society and The Adam Smith Review
Conference organisers: Vivienne Brown, Editor The Adam Smith Review (v.w.brown@open.ac.uk)
Samuel Fleischacker, President, International Adam Smith Society (fleischert@sbcglobal.net)

Although Adam Smith is better known now for his economics, in his own time it was his first book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), which established his reputation. Just as scholarly work on Smith has challenged the free market appropriation of Smith’s Wealth of Nations, so it has also come to appreciate the importance of Smith’s moral philosophy for his overall intellectual project. This conference, to be held at the college Smith himself attended from 1740-46, and at the beginning of the year marking the 250th anniversary of the publication of The Theory of Moral Sentiments, will provide an opportunity to re-evaluate the significance of Smith’s moral philosophy and moral psychology, the relationship between them and his other writings on economics, politics, jurisprudence, history, and rhetoric and belles lettres, and the relevance of his thought to current research in these areas.

Plenary speakers will include:

Stephen Darwall (Professor of Philosophy, University of Michigan), "Smith on Honor and Respect"

Charles Griswold (Professor of Philosophy, Boston University), "Tales of the Self: Adam Smith's Reply to Rousseau"

David Raphael (Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, Imperial College), "The Virtue of TMS 1759"

Emma Rothschild (Jeremy and Jane Knowles Professor of History, Harvard University, and Director of the Centre for History and Economics, King's College, Cambridge and Harvard University), "TMS and the Inner Life"

Geoffrey Sayre-McCord (Professor of Philosophy, University of North Carolina), "Is the Impartial Spectator's Vision 20/20?"

ession speakers

Richard van den Berg, "PL Roederer's Reading of Smith's System of Sympathy"
Lauren Brubaker, "Smith's moderate response to Rousseau"
Richard Boyd, "Adam Smith and Nationalism"
Emily Brady, "Nature, Aesthetic Judgment, and Sympathetic Imagination"
Toni Vogel Carey, "Accounting for Moral as for Natural Things"
Maria Alejandra Carrasco, "The forked meaning of self-command"
Sergio Cremaschi, "Adam Smith's post-scepticism and his unwritten doctrines"
Remy Debes, "The Value of Persons in Smith's Moral Philosophy"
Patricio Fernandez and Nicholas Teh, "Smith and McDowell on Moral Objectivity"
Tom Ford, "Reification and Adam Smith's 'as it were'"
Fonna Forman-Barzilai, "The 'humbler department': Smith's anti-cosmopolitanism"
Christel Fricke, "Moral Norms: Conventions or Universal Principles?"
Patrick Frierson, "Smithian Intrinsic Value"
Ryan Hanley, "Smith's Skepticism"
Maureen Harkin, "Smith on Literature,"
Eugene Heath, "Moral Evolution and the Invisible Hand"
Neven Leddy, "Smith's TMS in 1759, 1790 and 1976"
Thornton Lockwood, "Moral Education in Aristotle and Adam Smith"
John McHugh, "Hume and Smith: Sympathy, Utility and the Sociality of the Self"
Alice MacLachlan, "Injustice, Entitlement, and Smithean Resentment"
James McClellan and Karin Brown, "Sophie de Grouchy's Translation of TMS"
Robert Mankin, "Smith and the Art of Dying"
Angelica Nuzzo, "The Standpoint of Morality in Adam Smith and Hegel"
Paul Oslington, "Newton and Smith on Divine Action"
Jonathan Rick, "The Impartial Spectator's Amour-Propre"
Alvaro Santana-Alcuña, "Outside the Self"
Roberto Scazzieri, "Social Mirrors: Rationality under Relational Constraints""
Eric Schliesser, "Adam Smith's Engagement with Plato's Laws"
Arby Siraki, "Adam Smith's theory of tragedy"
Spiros Tegos, "The Problem of Authority in Adam Smith"
Andrew Terjesen, "Imagination or Correspondence in Smith's 'Sympathy'"
Robert Urquhart, "Adam Smith's Problems: Tensions within TMS and WN"
Carola Freilin von Villiez, ""Dimensions of Impartiality"
Gloria Vivenza, "Cicero and Seneca in TMS"
Christopher Williams, "Taste and Testimony in Adam Smith"
Jeffrey Young, "Justice, Property, and Markets"

Now available: Montesquieu and His Legacy


Rebecca Kingston, ed., Montesquieu and His Legacy, SUNY Press 2009. [Must have been sent back from the future-- woo!]

Montesquieu (1689-1755) is regarded as one of the most important thinkers of the Enlightenment. His Lettres persanes and L'Esprit des lois have been read by students and scholars throughout the last two centuries. While many have associated Montesquieu with the doctrine of the "separation of powers" in the history of ideas, Rebecca E. Kingston brings together leading international scholars who for the first time present a systematic treatment and discussion of the significance of his ideas more generally for the development of Western political theory and institutions. In particular, Montesquieu and His Legacy supplements the conventional focus on the institutional teachings of Montesquieu with attention to the theme of morals and manners. The contributors provide commentary on the broad legacy of Montesquieu's thought in past times as well as for the contemporary era.

1. What Montesquieu Taught:“Perfection Does Not Concern Men or Things Universally,” Michael Mosher

Part I. Morals and Manners in the Work of Montesquieu

2. Morals and Manners in Montesquieu’s Analysis of the British System of Liberty, Cecil Patrick Courtney

3. Honor, Interest, Virtue: The Affective Foundations of the Political in The Spirit of Laws, Céline Spector

4. On the Proper Use of the Stick: The Spirit of Laws and the Chinese Empire, Catherine Volpilhac-Auger

5. Montesquieu on Power: Beyond Checks and Balances, Brian C.J. Singer

Part II. Montesquieu’s Legacy in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Political Thought

6. Montesquieu’s Constitutional Legacies, Jacob T. Levy

7. Montesquieu’s Humanité and Rousseau’s Pitié, Clifford Orwin

8. Montesquieu and Tocqueville as Philosophical Historians: Liberty, Determinism, and the Prospects for Freedom, David W. Carrithers

9. Montesquieu and the Scottish Enlightenment, James Moore

Part III. Montesquieu and Comparative Constitutional Law

10. Montesquieu and the Renaissance of Comparative Public Law, Ran Hirschl

11. Free Speech and The Spirit of Laws in Canada and the United States: A Test of Montesquieu’s Approach to Comparative Law, Stephan L. Newman

12. Montesquieu’s Persian Letters: A Timely Classic, Fred Dallmayr

13. Montesquieu and Us, Jean Ehrard

14. Montesquieu and the Future of Liberalism, Ronald F. Thiemann

15. Montesquieu and Liberalism: The Question of Pluralism, Catherine Larriere

CFP: Rousseau's Legacies

Sixteenth Biennial Colloquium of the Rousseau Association Seizième Colloque Bisannuel de l’Association Rousseau

Rousseau's Legacies/ Fortunes de Rousseau
Los Angeles, California
25-28 June, 2009

Call for Papers

In association with the University of California, Los Angeles
(Program Director: Byron Wells)

Rousseau's legacies are multiple and contested. In philosophy, he was
described as the Newton of the moral sciences by Kant, and yet
alongside those who champion an ethic of rights and duties, are
others, equally influenced by Rousseau who take forward his concerns
with virtue, community or moral psychology. In social anthropology,
Rousseau was hailed as precursor, by none other than Levi-Strauss.
Rousseau's concern with the natural world and the environment has
echoes both in the romantic movement and in the environmental politics
of our own day. Rousseau's autobiographical writings prefigure a
concern with subjectivity that finds later expression in Freud and the
psychoanalytic movement. His writing on education has been
rediscovered, championed or excoriated by successive generations of
advocates or opponents of "child centred education". His political
legacy has been bitterly contested between advocates of deliberative
democracy, liberals, nationalists of various stripes, and those who
see him as the harbinger of totalitarianism. We invite papers
reflecting critically on any aspect of Rousseau's various legacies in
philosophy, literature, political theory, theatre, music, biography
etc.

Proposals on the above topic (title and short summary), in English or
French, for papers of 20 minutes duration should be sent to the
President of the Rousseau Association, Christopher Bertram, by
electronic mail at C.Bertram@bristol.ac.uk or by ordinary mail at the
following address :
Department of Philosophy
University of Bristol
9 Woodland Road
Bristol
United Kingdom

If using ordinary mail, please also give if possible an electronic
address for acknowledgement.

The deadline for receipt of proposals is December 31st, 2008.
Proposals will be reviewed by the Scientific Committee (Professors
Christopher Bertram, Patrick Coleman, Ourida Mostefai) and a decision
communicated by January 31st 2009. A preliminary program for the
conference will be available in February 2009.

John Adams,

my favorite 18th-century brilliant and unlovable loser, finally won a bunch of well-deserved victories.

VON KANT BIS HEGEL: Naturalism and Naturphilosophie

The fourth conference in the Von Kant Bis Hegel series (held in English, the name notwithstanding) will be held October 11-12. The conference, sponsored by Concordia and taking place a block off McGill's campus, features an extraordinary lineup; highly recommended.

Naturalism and Naturphilosophie

11 October 2008, Saturday
Centre Mont-Royal: Salon Cartier I

10:00: Mots de bienvenue
Speaker: Allen Wood (Stanford, Indiana): “Kant and the Intelligibility of Evil”
Moderator: Pablo Gilabert (Concordia)

13:30:
Speaker: Rolf-Peter Horstmann (Humboldt): “Kant and the Problem of Purposiveness”
Moderator: George di Giovanni (McGill)

15:30:
Speaker: Frederick Neuhouser (Barnard-Columbia): “Rousseau and the Normative Significance of Nature”
Moderator: Dario Perinetti (UQAM)


12 October 2008, Sunday

Centre Mont-Royal: Salon Cartier I
9:00:
Speaker: Ludwig Siep (Münster): “Hegel and Modern Bioethics”
Moderator: Matthias Fritsch (Concordia)

11:00:
Speaker: Paul Redding (Sydney): “Platonism and Organicism in the Thought of Kant and Hegel”
Moderator: Klaus Corcilius (Humboldt)

14:00:
Speaker: Sally Sedgwick (U-Illinois Chicago): “On the Conditions of Critique: Kant versus Hegel”
Moderator: David Morris (Concordia)

16:00:
Speaker: Paul Guyer (Pennsylvania): “The Promise of Natural Beauty: From Kant to Adorno”
Moderator: Andrew Chignell (Cornell)

All talks will take place at Centre Mont-Royal: 2200, rue Mansfield/at Sherbrooke.

Metro: Peel or McGill www.centremontroyal.com No registration necessary

Hakkarainen on Hume

The MONTREAL INTERUNIVERSITY WORKSHOP IN THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY presents:

Jani Hakkarainen
University of Tampere (Finland) and Yale University
"Hume's Skepticism and Realism"

Tuesday, 23 September, 6-8 PM

The meeting will take place in the Thomson House of McGill University
3650 McTavish Street, just north of Doctor Penfield Ave.


Le SÉMINAIRE INTERUNIVERSITAIRE DE MONTRÉAL EN HISTOIRE DE LA
PHILOSOPHIE présente:

Jani Hakkarainen
Université de Tampere (Finlande) et Yale University
"Hume's Skepticism and Realism"

mardi, le 23 septembre, 16:00-18:00

La séance se tiendra dans la Thomson House de l'université McGill
3650 rue McTavish, au nord de l'avenue Docteur-Penfield

For information contact/ Pour tout renseignement, veuillez contacter
Justin Smith (justismi@alcor.concordia.ca), Sara Magrin (magrin.sara@uqam.ca)

Liberal Beginnings

Onto the purchase list and then onto the reading list with this one:

Liberal Beginnings: Making a Republic For the Moderns. by Ira Katznelson and Andreas Kalyvas; 2008, Cambridge University Press.

The book examines the origins and development of the modern liberal tradition and explores the relationship between republicanism and liberalism between 1750 and 1830. The authors consider the diverse settings of Scotland, the American colonies, the new United States, and France and examine the writings of six leading thinkers of this period: Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, James Madison, Thomas Paine, Germaine de Staël, and Benjamin Constant. The book traces the process by which these thinkers transformed and advanced the republican project, both from within and by introducing new elements from without. Without compromising civic principles or abandoning republican language, they came to see that unrevised, the republican tradition could not grapple successfully with the political problems of their time. By investing new meanings, arguments, and justifications into existing republican ideas and political forms, these innovators fashioned a doctrine for a modern republic, the core of which was surprisingly liberal.

To buy, tout de suite

French Political Thought from Montesquieu to Tocqueville: Liberty in a Levelled Society?

Cambridge University Press, Ideas in Context

Annelien de Dijn

This study makes a major contribution to our understanding of one of the most important and enduring strands of modern political thought. Annelien de Dijn argues that Montesquieu’s aristocratic liberalism - his conviction that the preservation of freedom in a monarchy required the existence of an aristocratic ‘corps intermédiaire’ - had a continued impact on post-revolutionary France. Revisionist historians from Furet to Rosanvallon have emphasised the impact of revolutionary republicanism on post-revolutionary France, with its monist conception of politics and its focus on popular sovereignty. Dr de Dijn, however, highlights the persistence of a pluralist liberalism that was rooted in the Old Regime, and which saw democracy and equality as inherent threats to liberty. She thus provides a new context in which to read the work of Alexis de Tocqueville, who is revealed as the heir not just of Restoration liberals, but also of the Royalists and their hero, Montesquieu.

Declaration of Independence quotes of the day

The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

[...]

He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.

[...]

He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.

[...]

He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:[...] For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world[...]

Now online

at my SSRN page: "Not so Novus an Ordo: Constitutions without Social Contracts," forthcoming in Political Theory.