Strauss Prize winner: Alin Fumurescu

Alin Fumurescu, PhD Indiana University, has been awarded the 2012 APSA Leo Strauss Prize for the best dissertation in political theory, for “Compromise and Representation: A Split History of Early Modernity,” now adapted into a book from Cambridge University Press.

Values In Transition

Arrived in today's mail:

Galit Sarfaty, Values In Translation: Human Rights and the Culture of the World Bank (Stanford Studies in Human Rights)

The World Bank is the largest lender to developing countries, making loans worth over $20 billion per year to finance development projects around the globe. To guide its investments, the Bank has adopted a number of social and environmental policies, yet it has never instituted any overarching policy on human rights. Despite the potential human rights impact of Bank projects—the forced displacement of indigenous peoples resulting from a Bank-financed dam project, for example—the issue of human rights remains marginal in the Bank's operational practices.

Values in Translation analyzes the organizational culture of the World Bank and addresses the question of why it has not adopted a human rights framework. Academics and social advocates have typically focused on legal restrictions in the Bank's Articles of Agreement. This work's anthropological analysis sheds light on internal obstacles including the employee incentive system and a clash of expertise between lawyers and economists over how to define human rights and justify their relevance to the Bank's mission.

Book launch tomorrow

The Research Group in Constitutional Studies and the Department of Philosophy are pleased to invite you to a Joint Book Launch to celebrate the recent achievements of some of our colleagues.

In celebration of:

Hasana Sharp (Philosophy), Spinoza and the Politics of Renaturalization (University of Chicago Press), and

Robert Alan Sparling (SSHRC Postdoctoral fellow, Political Science), Johann Georg Hamann and the Enlightenment Project (University of Toronto Press).

Speakers: Jacob T. Levy, Natalie Stoljar, Matthias Fritsch, Rob Sparling, and Hasana Sharp.

Thursday, April 19
3 to 4:30 pm
Paragraph Books
2220 McGill College Avenue

There will be a wine and cheese reception.

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!

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.

Big news

Brian Leiter reports that Jeremy Waldron has accepted the Chichele Chair in Social and Political Theory at Oxford University on a half-time basis.

Waldron (the first non-Montrealer to hold the chair in more than thirty years!) was widely thought to be the correct and even obvious choice for the preeminent position in the field. Several years worth of puzzlement about how to proceed with a Plan B followed when (or so it is said; all my knowledge here is of the "everyone knows" variety) it seemed that he was not movable from New York. This compromise is an outcome to be welcomed all around-- good for political theory at Oxford, good for the field, and (I hope and trust) good for Waldron.

McGill Prof Wins Grawemeyer in Psychology
Inside Higher Ed reports:

"Ronald Melzack, psychology professor emeritus at McGill University, in Montreal, has been named winner of the 2010 University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award for Psychology. Melzack was honored for his work on how people experience pain. Grawemeyer awards, worth $200,000 each, are awarded each year in in the fields of music, political science, psychology, education and religion."

Perking lots

"The chancellor's job had come to be defined as providing parking for the faculty, sex for the students, and athletics for the alumni." --Then-President of the University of California Clark Kerr.

The University of California at Berkeley rewards Nobel prize-winners with free parking spots in desirable on-campus locations.

MacArthur

Looks like I can just repost this verbatim, with this year's link on top, and substituting in "one economist."

posted September 23 2008: Continuing a recent trend...

noted here and here, academic humanists and social scientists are in notably short supply among this year's MacArthur Fellows. One archaeologist-anthropologist and one retired historian, out of a group of 25. The awardees are mainly practicing artists (novelist, violinist, sculptor, etc) or academic scientists, biomedical researchers, and engineers.

North America's leading Proust scholar and all his spiritual kin are safe for another year.

McGill's Brenda Milner awarded Balzan Prize

From the Gazette:

A Montreal neuropsychologist is among four winners of the 2009 Balzan Prize that were announced Monday.

Brenda Milner, professor of psychology at the Montreal Neurological Institute and professor in the department of neurology and neurosurgery at McGill University, received the prize for cognitive neurosciences.

"Her pioneering work has greatly influenced the field of cognitive neurosciences for more than half a century," said a statement from Balzan judges. It added that the 2009 award was “for her pioneering studies of the role of the hippocampus in the formation of memory and her identification of different kinds of memory systems.”

The studies will further scientific understanding of Alzheimer’s disease.

This is just the latest award for Milner, who has been inducted into the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Royal Society of London and the Royal Society of Canada.

In 2005, she received the Gairdner Award for medical science, and the previous year was promoted to Companion of the Order of Canada.

Other Balzan winners this year are Briton Terence Cave in the field of literature, Italian Paolo Rossi for history of science, and Swiss-German Michael Gretzel for the science of new materials.

Balzan prizes are awarded annually in a rotating fields of research, with two in the humanities and two in the sciences.

Winners are awarded one million Swiss francs ($1,016,000), half of which must be dedicated to research.

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.

AAAS, &c.

Via Brian Leiter, the new elections to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences have been announced. (See earlier AAAS posts: 2008, 2007, 2006.

Two political theorists were elected, Philip Pettit and Danielle Allen. (Of interest to students of nationalism: Rogers Brubaker was also elected.) I suggested two years ago that "Philip Pettit is surely overdue."

Another year, another opportunity to ask: Where is Michael Walzer on this list?

In other news, Gerald Gaus has been awarded the Gregory Kavka Prize in Political Philosophy for his article "On Justifying the Moral Rights of the Moderns: A Case of Old Wine in New Bottles," Social Philosophy and Policy (2007), 24:1:84-119.

Update: Just noticed this. Go back to the list of new inductees and scroll down to the very final name on the last page.

I'm enjoying...

the tributes to new Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman from libertarian and libertarianish economists. Some sharply distinguish the pre-NYT real economics Krugman did from the post-NYT public commentary. Others count Krugman's ability to explain things to a lay audience as one of his virtues-- which is of course appropriate given that they remember it as one of Milton Friedman's virtues, too.

See: Arnold Kling, Bryan Caplan, Alex Tabarrok, and of course Tyler Cowen. Note that the plaudits for Krugman's new trade theory/ economic geography contributions themselves have to be based on a genuine admiration for their intellectual importance, since those contributions were traditionally taken as being unfriendly to free trade, insofar as they showed at least the theoretical possibility of productivity-enhancing protectionism. (Krugman understands the difference between that possibility result and any likelihood that actually-adopted protectionism would be of the right sort.)

Congratulations...

to Leigh Jenco, whose (absolutely first-rate) dissertation "Individuals, Institutions, and Political Change: The Political Theory of Zhang Shizhao" has been awarded APSA's 2008 Leo Strauss prize for the best dissertation in political theory. Jenco has recently taken up a post as Assistant Professor of Political Science at the National University of Singapore.

Taylor wins Kyoto Prize

Political theorist, McGill emeritus professor, and winner of last year's Templeton Prize, and lately co-chair of the Quebec commission on reasonable accommodation has won this year's Kyoto Prize.

The prize, which is often referred to as the "Japanese Nobel", consists of a gold medal and 50 million yen ($470,765) in cash.

"I'm very, very honoured and I still haven't quite gotten over it," Taylor said.

"I feel there must have been some mistake, but I'm honoured to think that I place on a par with those other people that have won this award," including German thinker Jürgen Habermas.

The award citation follows.

Construction of a social philosophy to pursue the coexistence of diverse cultures

Dr. Charles Taylor is an outstanding philosopher who advocates "communitarianism" and "multiculturalism" from the perspective of "holistic individualism." He has constructed and endeavored to put into practice a social philosophy that allows human beings with different historical, traditional, and cultural backgrounds to retain their multiple identities and to live in happiness with each other.

He has criticized the atomistic view of the self, the conception of the human being grounded in the human sciences of naturalistic tendency such as methodological individualism and behaviorism, and tried to establish a "philosophical anthropology" on a foundation of phenomenology, hermeneutics, and language-game theory. In his view, human beings are "self-interpreting animals" that act with a sense of value and purpose: human beings articulate everyday feelings and moral intuitions in language and act according to their own evaluation of goals and values. He criticizes modern utilitarianism for leaving value judgments to the feelings and preferences of the atomistic selves and argues against it that human beings are the "situated selves" that are embedded in the fabric of social relations. In other words, it is through webs of interlocution that human beings develop identities and acquire frameworks within which they determine for themselves what is good, what is valuable, what they should do, and what they are for or against.

Having made extensive studies of the philosophy of Hegel, which are widely regarded as the best contemporary work on the philosopher written in English, Dr. Taylor delved back into the thought of Rousseau and Herder. He then adopted Gadamer's notions "fusion of horizons" and "history of effects" to situate his own thought in a historical context and has built a convincing social theory. Drawing on the concept of "recognition," which is a key to his philosophy, he contrasts the "dialogical self" with the "monological self" and offers "freedom in situation" in place of "absolute freedom." Human beings can flourish only if their identities are recognized by others and, accordingly, he stresses the importance of bonds with community and sense of community as a necessary condition for the realization of liberalism emphasizing individual autonomy.

The concept of recognition is at the base of Dr. Taylor's multiculturalism as well. Identity-formation in modern society is sometimes rooted in a distorted recognition, and this often results in self-repression and in a subsequent struggle aimed at a revision of "self-representations" projected upon by others. Dr. Taylor argues that "it's reasonable to suppose that cultures that have provided the horizon of meaning for large numbers of human beings, of diverse characters and temperaments, over a long period of time are almost certain to have something that deserves our admiration and respect, even if it goes along with much that we have to abhor and reject." In putting forth this principle, he has provided rational grounds for the dignity of human beings living a deep diversity and for their demands for recognition.

In his native Canada, Dr. Taylor is also involved in political activities campaigning for the recognition of collective rights of minority groups to preserve their cultural identities. He has been seeking a way to overcome Eurocentrism and to reach for genuinely global values, paying due attention to the specific conditions of non-Western societies. He has invariably aspired to a society resting on mutual recognition, where each member strives by mutual efforts through dialogue for a better understanding and for changing the narrow frameworks of understanding with the realization that the space occupied by him/her as a self within the whole "story" of mankind is quite limited and he/she is in no possession of an absolute standard for judging the relative merits of various cultures. Dr. Taylor is a prominent thinker who has pointed the future course for us through his own life, envisioning the future in which diverse, heterogeneous cultures peacefully coexist upon mutual recognition.

AAAS 2008

(2007 post here, 2006 post here.)

One political theorist elected to the AAAS this year, Charles Beitz of Princeton. Congratulations, and congratulations also to former colleagues Sue Stokes and Stathis Kalyvas. Political philosopher Elizabeth Anderson was inducted, as was McGill's incoming Macdonald Chair in Moral Philosophy, Calvin Normore, and Princeton political philosopher/ religious scholar Jeffrey Stout. Margaret Jane Radin, who has also made important contributions to political theory, was chosen under law.

A long way from American Political Thought 2004

Will Baude will be clerking for Chief Justice John Roberts. Congratulations!

Who's new

The McGill Reporter has a feature on new faculty this week, including profiles of political philosopher Iwao Hirose and political theorist Victor Muñiz-Fraticelli.

Tetlock wins Grawemeyer

From the Chronicle:

Berkeley Professor Wins Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order

Philip E. Tetlock, a professor of business administration and political science at the University of California at Berkeley, has won the 2008 Grawemeyer Award for “ideas improving world order,” the University of Louisville has announced. Mr. Tetlock will receive the $200,000 prize for his research on the accuracy of high-profile advisers on issues of public policy.

Predictions on political issues are frequently wrong, says Mr. Tetlock, which is unfortunate because lawmakers frequently rely on such analyses to shape policy. In a 20-year study of 27,000 predictions made by 284 “experts” cited in the news media, he found that, very often, the professionals were no more accurate in their crystal-ball gazing than ordinary people.

“In this age of academic hyperspecialization, there is no reason for supposing that contributors to top journals—distinguished political scientists, area-study specialists, economists, and so on—are any better than journalists or attentive readers of The New York Times in ‘reading’ emerging situations,” writes Mr. Tetlock in his 2005 book about the study, Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know? (Princeton).

Experts need to receive more training and be held publicly accountable for their advice, he argues in the book.

Dan Drezner blogged about Tetlock's findings here, here, and here. Tyler Cowen called Expert Political Judgment "one of the (few) must-read social science books of 2005." I worried about the propensity of public-intellectual academics to make pronouncements as if their expertise went far beyond its genuine boundaries my very first substantive post on this blog (scroll down, permalinks that old seem to have rusted away).

Now online

in the new APSR: Leigh Jenco, "'What Does Heaven Ever Say?'” A Methods-centered Approach to Cross-cultural Engagement."