For no particular reason that I'm aware of, Amazon has put The Multiculturalism of Fear on a 15%-off sale, in case any readers have been eagerly waiting for a chance to snag a copy below cover price.

These are a few of my favorite things.

Caffeine addiction and They Might Be Giants, in the same commercials. Disappointed not to have seen them yet.

Political theory, political science, and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences

Borrowing one of Brian Leiter's annual blog-posts for philosophy and law, a quick look at political theory and political science in the 2006 class of the AAAS.

Not many political scientists this year:

Nathaniel Beck, NYU
Michael Dawson, Chicago
Lee Epstein, Wash U
David Lake, UCSD
Keith Poole, UCSD
John Roemer, Yale

of whom only Roemer is a theorist.

(No political philosophers were among the philosophy inductees.) Last year there were nine inducted in political science, plus political philosopher Charles Larmore.

Looking through the overall list, it certainly includes most of the people it ought to among political theorists: among others, Barry, Josh Cohen, Dahl, Elshtain, Elster, Gutmann, Hardin, Holmes, Kateb, Mansbridge, Pateman, Pitkin, Rosenblum, Wolin. Dunn, Dworkin, MacIntyre, Nussbaum, Pocock, Skinner, Tuck, and Waldron are all on the list in various places (foreign members, history, philosophy, law.) But there are a few conspicuous absences among political theorists, along with one shocking one.

Conspicuous: Harvey Mansfield has never been inducted, nor Seyla Benhabib. Seniority matters a lot for the AAAS, so I won't start listing deserving people with PhDs from the 80s or 90s. But at the right level of seniority, Peter Euben is conspicuously missing, as is Michael Zuckert. (Hm. Other than the kind-of case of Galston, is Saxonhouse the only Straussian on the list? There's surely something strange there.) Philip Pettit is surely overdue, though his absence so far is understandable since little of his career has been spent in the U.S.

The shocking absence is Michael Walzer. That's truly an embarrassment for the selection process.

I don't know how that process works, but assume that current members nominate new ones. If it's commonplace (or even allowed) for people to nominate their departmental colleagues, maybe that has disadvantaged Walzer because he's spent so long at the Institute for Advanced Study? One way or another, I would hope that the oversight won't last much longer.

Update: It's been pointed out to me that William Connolly is missing, another serious omission; which reminded me to check for his colleague Richard Flathman, also inexplicably missing. I'd be interested in hearing further thoughts about oversights-- including in the other political science subfields.

Why I love Gilmore Girls even when I hate it:

Yet again, Gilmore Girls has reached a stage wherein almost all of the major characters are acting stupidly and annoyingly in one way or another, and I find myself in sympathy with none of them. What's worse, last night Jess reappeared, and we were all supposed to swoon for how mature he's gotten-- even to feel sorry for him for his mistreatment at Rory's hands. One of those stretches where I realize that both the main plotlines irk me.

And yet...

And yet, when Luke accompanies his geeky newfound daughter on a field trip, and the show wants to make clear how out-of-place Luke is with her and her geeky friends, it has a busful of them sing Tom Lehrer's "The Elements." They started about halfway through, but then kept going much longer than I thought they would in an uninterrupted scene. I kept expecting them to cut away; instead, they went all the way through to "haven't been discah-vered." The scene's very, very funny-- and so is Luke's "What the hell was that?" afterward. Like Cheers and Frasier, Gilmore Girls is terrific at entertainingly playing both sides of various highbrow/ lowbrow, literary cultural references/ puncturing pretentiousness fences.

Thoughts on "The Israel Lobby"

I've had some brief things to say elsewhere about the paper "The Israel Lobby," by Steve Walt and my soon-to-be-former colleague John Measheimer (henceforth M&W). Herewith a few more considered judgments.

1. As the Larry Summers affair should have taught us all:
a) Some pernicious stereotypes might be empirically correct.
b) Scholars must be free-- really free-- to reach empirical conclusions that bear out pernicious stereotypes.
c) But it's a tricky and delicate business; it requires not only serious consideration of rival explanations but also genuine scholarly expertise in the subject at hand.

Academic freedom does and should protect scholars who reach controversial conclusions. But scholars who know that they're going to further pernicious stereotypes, and know that they're going to take refuge in an academic freedom that op-ed columnists and full-time pundits don't enjoy, should really think three times about whether or not they're presenting scholarly conclusions and writing as experts.

Mearsheimer and Walt are among the country's leading scholars of security and of international power relations. That's pretty far afield from being specialists in Middle East policy. More importantly, it's very far afield from being specialists in interest group politics, or in the nexus between interest group politics and policy formation, or in the domestic political sources of foreign policy. (Indeed, they're committed to not being specialists in that last, which is part of the problem.) There are serious political scientists who specialize in all these things. There are political scientists who specialize, for example, in the study of the nexus between ethnic interest-group lobbying and foreign policy outcomes. Some of these think that AIPAC has very significant power, that it lives up to its reputation as one of the two or three most influential lobbies in Washington and the most influential foreign policy lobby. There's nothing anti-Semitic about reaching that conclusion. Some of them don't; they reach the conclusion that AIPAC "succeeds partly because it is pushing on an open door- it advocates policies that most Americans favor on the merits" (James Lindsay, "Getting Uncle Sam's Ear: Will Ethnic Lobbies Cramp America's Foreign Policy Style," The Brookings Review Winter 2002 Vol. 20 No.1 pp. 37-40). The most substantial study of the question found that

"U.S. governments, especially since 1973, have viewed assistance to Israel as being in the interests of American foreign policy in toto and in the Middle East [and so supported such assistance for their own reasons...] although AIPAC is a capable organization, its requests have merely tended to parallel the preferences of U.S. presidents, not determined them. When a president strongly wishes to go against the AIPAC's desired policy, he is readily able to do this and succeed." (Joseph Scolnick, review of Goldberg, Foreign Policy and Ethnic Interest Groups, and Organski, The $36 Billion Bargain, APSR 86(2):585-586)

I'm not competent to evaluate the dispute between those scholars of ethnic interest group effects on foreign policy who do and those who don't think that AIPAC can drive foreign policy. This may be a dispute between scholars who generally emphasize interest-group pluralism and those who generally stress state autonomy or presidential action; I don't know. And I'm certainly none the wiser for reading "The Israel Lobby," which doesn't come to terms with the dispute or even do much more than nod in the direction of this literature.

2. Social scientists seek to explain variation. U.S. support for Israel-- diplomatic, military, and financial-- had a point of inflection roughly 1970-73. It's not clear that the Jewish population of the U.S., or that population's level of commitment to Israel, or anything else having to do with "the Lobby" that is M&W's only explanatory variable changed much at that time. Jews, as Ongaski points out, had been in the U.S. all along, and had supported Israel all along, and you can't explain variation with a constant.

Even at the new, high, level of support, there has been variation that corresponds very well to particular U.S. presidencies and very poorly to any change in "the Lobby."

3. The core of the paper's difficulty has little to do with Israel or Jews and a great deal to do with its core purpose. M&W are committed to the neorealist view that powerful states act in their security interest. They're also, independently, committed to opposition to the Iraq War and to what they see as U.S. overreach in the Middle East; they think that the U.S. does not effectively pursue its security interests in the region. So there's a puzzle, an anomaly-- of their own making. If you are both committed to a predictive theory and committed to an interpretation of a particular case by which it falsifies your theory, then there's a puzzle for your views, but not yet a puzzle about the world.

They proceed to address this puzzle with a slippery-- I do not say sloppy-- ambiguity between explanatory and evaluative claims.

The mere existence of the Lobby suggests that unconditional support for Israel is not in the American national interest. If it was, one would not need an organized special interest to bring it about.

This is, I think, the worst paragraph of political science I've read in many years. The best, most-justified policies don't automatically spring into being at the end of the policy-making process. An all-things-considered judgment that X is the best policy is essentially irrelevant to one's ability to predict whether or not X will be adopted. Political and policy-making actors aren't, indeed couldn't possibly be, such purely disinterested promoters of the public good that they could promote it all the time without any organized support-- even assuming that they all agreed with each other, and with M&W, about what the public good consisted of. They often need organizational and material support from interest groups even to do [what they take to be] the right thing. Free-trading Representatives still know how vulnerable they are to the organized power of protectionist lobbies, and feel safer when the pro-trade lobbies are able to rally effectively and protect them; without that protection, some of them choose keeping their seat over their principles. (And the electoral process selects for those who will make that choice.) From the fact that a policy needed a lobby to support it, one can infer nothing about the policy's justifiability.

Moreover, from the facts that a lobby exists and that its preferred policies have been adopted, one can infer very close to nothing about whether the lobby was needed. Lobbies have a professional interest in convincing donors and would-be donors that "But for us, all would be lost"-- even if it's untrue. No one has any particular interest in debunking the claim. While individual donors of huge sums may be pretty sophisticated about the political process and about the claim's truth, and pretty straightforwardly instrumental rather than symbolic in their approach to contributions, the millions of small contributors to direct-mail campaigns are pretty certainly not. A lobby could be entirely superfluous, or entirely ineffective, and still survive off the contributions of highly-motivated but relatively uninformed small donors indefinitely. Unlike the view that the best security policy magically springs into being, the view that lobbies only exist when they're needed isn't even a necessary thought for M&W's neorealism.

Something very similar holds true for the paper's treatment of moral considerations. In short: from the authors' view that support for Israel is not, in the final accounting, morally demanded, they infer that moral considerations or beliefs are irrelevant to understanding why the United States support Israel. The structure of the paper is:

Why does the United States provide [so much] support to Israel?
1. Such support is not [in our view] genuinely strategically warranted.
2. Such support is not [in our view] genuinely morally demanded.
Therefore:
3. Such support must be explained by the presence of actors who place the interests of Israel ahead of the interests of the United States.

The mistake is astonishingly elementary, but it pervades the whole paper. The snarky way to put it is: M&W treat their say-so about strategic and moral considerations as if it was naturally entitled to such overwhelming political deference that the fact that the polity hasn't accepted their say-so is deeply anomalous. The probably-fairer way to put it is: M&W proceed as if the political system has some very strong natural tendency to reach true beliefs and justified policies about strategy and morality-- such a strong tendency that, if it fails in some case, there must be an unusual explanation, such as an unusually intense and effective Lobby that includes people willing to deliberately place the interests of a foreign power over that of their own country, and that includes powerful politicians, media figures, and so on who can make their preferred policies come about.

M&W profess to treat strategic considerations, moral considerations, and The Lobby as alternative explanations of U.S. support. For those to really be comparable itsmes, they'd have to be something like "relevant actors' beliefs about strategic considerations," "relevant actors' beliefs about moral considerations," and "lobbying/ interest group influence." But beliefs don't show up. M&W's discussion of whether Israel is a morally nice place or not is neither here nor there in understanding what brings U.S. support about. "Israel discriminates against its Arab citizens" and "The Lobby" are answers to questions of completely different sorts-- one evaluative, one explanatory.

M&W's rejoinder could be: "Well, since we're right about strategic and moral considerations, if other people's beliefs about those considerations lead them to support Israel, then their beliefs are wrong. Such widespread belief in false propositions is itself anomalous and must be explained by the activities of The Lobby." Now, however, I think the implausibility of the account becomes more apparent. Politics is often marked by good-faith disagreement about hard questions. And it's often marked by people getting things wrong. One doesn't need a Lobby to explain political actors believing and acting on false propositions about morality or prudence.

Notice that I haven't been engaging M&W's substantive views about American Jews or Israel; indeed, I've been accepting them arguendo. That is, the charge I make against them can't be conflated with a charge of anti-Semitism-- and isn't refuted by the claim by Mersheimer's former student Robert Pape that M&W are "philo-Semites of the first order," whatever that might mean. M&W have been getting unearned mileage out of the predictable rhetorical move that any criticism of their paper constitutes an attempt to paint them as anti-Semites and shut down debtae, thereby proving their argument, which is why it's important to establish that my critique of their paper doesn't turn on the substance of their evaluation of Israel.

My point is that their substantive evaluation of the US' Middle East policy can't do the work that the paper demands of it, namely the creation of an empirical and explanatory question to which The Lobby is the only answer left standing. Indeed this is related to the problem of non-engagement with the ethnic-interest-group literature. If AIPAC suceeds only when its preferences parallel those of Presidents, then it's Presidents' beliefs about moral and strategic consideration, not M&W's beliefs, that is the appropriate alternative explanation of policy.

"The truth of a proposition has little or nothing to do with its psychodynamics. 'The truth will prevail' is merely a pious wish; history doesn't show it.'" So quoth Ralph Schultz in Heinlein's Methuselah's Children, summarizing the point nicely. That a given set of political processes fails to generate policies that track M&W's understanding of the truth about difficult strategic and moral questions is not anomalous and does not raise the kind of question to which The Lobby is a necessary answer, even if M&W are correct about the truth about those difficult strategic and moral questions. Moral truth isn't a part of social scientific explanation; relevant actors' beliefs about moral truth are such a part, but are absent from the paper. The same is true for strategic truths and beliefs about strategy.

Now, it happens that I also disagree with much-- not all-- what what M&W have to say about those strategic and moral questions; and I think they argue for their views pretty badly even when I agree with them. But others have made the relevant criticisms of those arguments already. (Update: See, e.g., this devastating response to M&W's strange history of the conflict from Benny Morris, a historian cited by M&W, and on his account distorted by them.) What I want to stress is: the paper faces a puzzle only of the authors' own creation, an anomaly only of the disjuncture between the neorealist article of faith that the best strategic policies will be adopted regardless of domestic politics and M&W's substantive views of (especially) the Iraq War. If strategically optimal or morally correct policies don't just happen, then the puzzle disappears, and we're left with a conceptual mess of a paper that purports to knock down justifications for a set of policy outcomes in order to bolster an allegedly-rival explanation for them. But justifications and explanations are not, in fact, rivals.

Update:

Compare Anne-Marie Slaughter, who knows much more about the relevant debates than I do.

At the same time, their analysis is strongly, and in my view wrongly, colored by two assumptions. First is their deep opposition to the war in Iraq; they came out in favor of continued deterrence of Saddam early, and with the luxury of hindsight, probably rightly. But because they passionately opposed the war from the beginning, they find it hard to imagine any reasons to support the war other than the Israel Lobby. Yet George Packer, whose superb book The Assassins' Gate is a must read, notes that Douglas Feith, Richard Perle, and David Wurmser, all strong "pro-Likud Americans," ended up in high positions in the Bush administration and pushed for war in Iraq. He writes:

"Does this mean that a pro-Likud cabal insinuated its way into the high councils of the U.S. government and took hold of the apparatus of American foreign policy to serve Israeli interests? . . . For Feith and Wurmser, the security of Israel was probably the prime mover. But for others, such as Wolfowitz, Iraq stood for different things -- an unfinished war, Arab tyranny, weapons proliferation, a strategic threat to oil, American weakness, Democratic fecklessness -- and regime change there became the foreign policy jackpot." Just because Walt and Mearsheimer discount each one of these factors does not mean that they were equally discounted in Washington, leaving only Israel's security as an argument for war.

Second, Walt and Mearsheimer are realists, which means that they assess the strategic value of states solely in terms of their relative power, regardless of regime type. In English, that means that Israel's status as the only stable, mature democracy in the Middle East is irrelevant in assessing America's strategic interest. We liberals, on the other hand, essentially think that regime type trumps virtually every other measure of power. That does not mean that we should support Israel automatically or uncritically, but it does provide a powerful reason for why supporting Israel -- and above all Israel's continued existince as a liberal democracy, which may often require taking a tougher line with the Israeli government that we have been prepared to do in recent years -- is very much in America's strategic interest.

New news:

As of today, I've accepted an appointment as Tomlinson Professor of Political Theory in the Department of Political Science at McGill University, effective July 1.

That's all...

Noting recent events, I link to this old post defending the mocking and satire of religious beliefs, and this one on the Islamist fatwa of death against the playwright Terence McNally for portraying Jeses (an honored prophet in Islam) as gay. Note that McNally is not and has neverbeen a Muslim. The structure of some Islamists' understanding of blasphemy rules allows them to pass potentially-violent judgment on how Christians depict Jesus; what's at stake isn't only deference on the question of how Mohammed may be portrayed.

Newly posted at The New Republic:
"Power Grab: The Alito hearings and Congressional Power."

2005 was a kind of curious year in book publishing in political theory and philosophy. The market was mainly filled with huge Companions or Very Short Introductions or anything else besides actual monographs. It doesn't seem to me that there was any book that captured everyone's attention. There was no new book in the prestigious Oxford Political Theory series. People have been talking for the past few years about the absence of any set of questions so exciting and energizing as to draw everyone out of their niches and into a common conversation. This year seemed to me the year in which that absence filtered through to the lagging-indicator of newly-published monographs.

Now, there's nothing wrong with that. The exciting, unifying, common-conversation Big Ideas are only sometimes productive. There need to be signficant periods of time when people are working in their niches and making progress there. Frankly, I enjoy going to APSA more in the years when it's filled with scores of panels with interesting new papers, each following its own logic of argument and discovery, than in the years when everyone feels compelled to give a paper about, e.g., deliberative democracy.

But in those fragmentary moments, excellent books can get published that don't get noticed because they're in other people's niches. I like to see good work get read and recognized, and like to discourage the occasional bout of "nothing good is being done these days" despair. So, as a partial corrective, a list of ten excellent, interesting, important, or potentially transformative books in political theory [however I happen to understand the boundaries of that discipline-- including political philosophy, parts of legal theory, parts of intellectual history, etc.] published in 2005. I restrict myself to formal publication dates in 2005, so omit, e.g., William Galston, The Practice of Liberal Pluralism, Steven Smith's Law's Quandary, and Seyla Benhabib, The Rights of Others which all came out at the very end of '04-- but now I've just mentioned them, so I guess they're not wholly excluded after all.

The list is heavy on the 18th century, which is certainly in part because that's where my attention's been directed lately. But I think Hont's and Robertson's books, along with the Pocock series of which the book below is volume 4, do add up to a sense that there's renewed energy and argument about enlightenment political thought. Hont, Robertson, and Pocock are often in direct argument with one another, in ways that help the reader to see what's controversial and exciting and at stake. I don't know of another part of the field that saw such a cluster of important and contending works published this year.

I find some of these books more persuasive or interesting than others, of course. Some I suspect point down dead ends. But none am I willing to lightly assume points down a dead end; in each case I'm at least eager to see what other ideas are generated by people going in the directions these books suggest. And some aren't meant to be agenda-setting books but make real contributions on their own.

I exclude all books that are first monographs published by young scholars, though that means leaving off some of the year's finest work. That's because I'm chair of the APSA/Foundations of Political Theory Best First Book committee for 2005. Once that committee has deliberated and awarded the prize, I'll make an effort to plug the awardee[s] as well as other books from that pool.

Disclosure: The discipline is so small that any list like this is riddled with various intersections of interest; many of these people are friends and/or colleagues in one way or another.

In no particular order:

Jealousy of Trade : International Competition and the Nation-State in Historical Perspective, by Istvan Hont.

Publisher's description:
This collection explores eighteenth-century theories of international market competition that continue to be relevant for the twenty-first century. "Jealousy of trade" refers to a particular conjunction between politics and the economy that emerged when success in international trade became a matter of the military and political survival of nations. Today, it would be called "economic nationalism," and in this book Hont connects the commercial politics of nationalism and globalization in the eighteenth century to theories of commercial society and Enlightenment ideas of the economic limits of politics.

Barbarism and Religion, Vol. 4: Barbarians, Savages and Empires, by J.G.A. Pocock

Publisher's description:
This fourth volume in John Pocock's great sequence on Barbarism and Religion focuses on the idea of barbarism. Barbarism was central to the history of western historiography, to the history of the enlightenment, and to Edward Gibbon himself. As a concept it was deeply problematic to enlightened historians seeking to understand their own civil societies in the light of exposure to newly-discovered civilizations hitherto beyond the reach of history. The troubled relationship between philosophy and history is addressed directly in this fourth volume.

The Persistence of Subjectivity : On the Kantian Aftermath, by Robert Pippin

Publisher's description:
What might it mean to take seriously Hegel's claim that philosophical reflection is always reflection on the historical "actuality" of its own age? Discussing Heidegger, Gadamer, Adorno, Leo Strauss, Manfred Frank, and John McDowell, Robert Pippin attempts to understand how subjectivity arises in contemporary institutional practices such as medicine, as well as in other contexts such as modernism in the visual arts and in the novels of Marcel Proust.


Politics and Passion : Toward a More Egalitarian Liberalism and Arguing About War, by Michael Walzer.

Note: Treated as one book; each is a slender collection of Walzer's already-published writings, one on domestic politics and political theory, one on international questions. There was good reason to separate them for publishing purposes but I recommend buying and reading them together.

Publisher's descriptions:
1. Liberalism is egalitarian in principle, but why doesn’t it do more to promote equality in practice? In this book, the distinguished political philosopher Michael Walzer offers a critique of liberal theory and demonstrates that crucial realities have been submerged in the evolution of contemporary liberal thought.

In the standard versions of liberal theory, autonomous individuals deliberate about what ought to be done—but in the real world, citizens also organize, mobilize, bargain, and lobby. The real world is more contentious than deliberative. Ranging over hotly contested issues including multiculturalism, pluralism, difference, civil society, and racial and gender justice, Walzer suggests ways in which liberal theory might be revised to make it more hospitable to the claims of equality.

Combining profound learning with practical wisdom, Michael Walzer offers a provocative reappraisal of the core tenets of liberal thought. Politics and Passion will be required reading for anyone interested in social justice—and the means by which we seek to achieve it.

2. Michael Walzer is one of the world's most eminent philosophers on the subject of war and ethics. Now, for the first time since his classic Just and Unjust Wars was published almost three decades ago, this volume brings together his most provocative arguments about contemporary military conflicts and the ethical issues they raise. The essays in the book are divided into three sections. The first deals with issues such as nuclear deterrence, humanitarian intervention, and terrorism. The second consists of Walzer's responses to particular wars, including the first Gulf War, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq. And the third presents an essay in which Walzer imagines a future in which war might play a less significant part in our lives. In his introduction, Walzer reveals how his thinking has changed over time. Written during a period of intense debate over the proper use of armed force, this book gets to the heart of difficult problems and argues persuasively for a moral perspective on war.


Frontiers of Justice : Disability, Nationality, Species Membership (The Tanner Lectures on Human Values), by Martha C. Nussbaum


Publisher's description:
Theories of social justice are necessarily abstract, reaching beyond the particular and the immediate to the general and the timeless. Yet such theories, addressing the world and its problems, must respond to the real and changing dilemmas of the day. A brilliant work of practical philosophy, Frontiers of Justice is dedicated to this proposition. Taking up three urgent problems of social justice neglected by current theories and thus harder to tackle in practical terms and everyday life, Martha Nussbaum seeks a theory of social justice that can guide us to a richer, more responsive approach to social cooperation. The idea of the social contract—especially as developed in the work of John Rawls—is one of the most powerful approaches to social justice in the Western tradition. But as Nussbaum demonstrates, even Rawls's theory, suggesting a contract for mutual advantage among approximate equals, cannot address questions of social justice posed by unequal parties. How, for instance, can we extend the equal rights of citizenship—education, health care, political rights and liberties—to those with physical and mental disabilities? How can we extend justice and dignified life conditions to all citizens of the world? And how, finally, can we bring our treatment of nonhuman animals into our notions of social justice? Exploring the limitations of the social contract in these three areas, Nussbaum devises an alternative theory based on the idea of "capabilities." She helps us to think more clearly about the purposes of political cooperation and the nature of political principles—and to look to a future of greater justice for all.

Theories of social justice, addressing the world and its problems, must respond to the real and changing dilemmas of the day. A brilliant work of practical philosophy, Frontiers of Justice is dedicated to this proposition. Taking up three urgent problems of social justice--those with physical and mental disabilities, all citizens of the world, and nonhuman animals--neglected by current theories and thus harder to tackle in practical terms and everyday life, Martha Nussbaum seeks a theory of social justice that can guide us to a richer, more responsive approach to social cooperation.


The Case for The Enlightenment : Scotland and Naples 1680-1760, by John Robertson


Publisher's description:
Challenging the recent tendency to fragment the Enlightenment in eighteenth-century Europe into multiple Enlightenments, John Robertson demonstrates the extent to which thinkers in two societies at the opposite ends of Europe shared common intellectual preoccupations. Before 1700, Scotland and Naples faced a bleak future as backward, provincial kingdoms in a Europe of aggressive commercial states. Yet by 1760, Scottish and Neapolitan thinkers were in the van of those advocating the cause of Enlightenment by means of political economy. Robertson pays particular attention to the greatest thinkers in each country, David Hume and Giambattista Vico.


The Enlightenment's Fable : Bernard Mandeville and the Discovery of Society , by E. J. Hundert

Publisher's description:
The apprehension of society as an aggregation of self-interested individuals is a dominant modern concern, but one first systematically articulated during the Enlightenment. This book approaches this problem from the perspective of the challenge offered to inherited traditions of morality and social understanding by Bernard Mandeville, whose infamous paradoxical maxim "private vices, public benefits" profoundly disturbed his contemporaries, while his The Fable of the Bees had a decisive influence on David Hume, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Adam Smith and Immanuel Kant. Professor Hundert examines the sources and strategies of Mandeville's science of human nature and the role of his ideas in shaping eighteenth century economic, social and moral theories.

Political Obligations, by George Klosko

Publisher's description:
Political Obligations provides a full defense of a theory of political obligation based on the principle of fairness (or fair play), which is widely viewed as the strongest theory of obligation currently available. The work responds to the most important objections to the principle of fairness, and extends a theory based on fairness into a developed "multiple principle" theory of obligation. In order to establish the need for such a theory, Political Obligations criticizes alternative theories of obligation based on a natural duty of justice and "reformist" consent, and critically examines the non-state theories of libertarian and philosophical anarchists. The work breaks new ground by providing the first in-depth study of popular attitudes towards political obligations and how the state itself views them. The attitudes of ordinary citizens are explored through small focus groups, while the "self image of the state" in regard to the obligations of its citizens is studied through examination of judicial decisions in three different democratic countries.


The Idea of the State , by Peter J. Steinberger

Publisher's description:
Political theory has been characterized by a pronounced distrust of metaphysical or ontological speculation for more than a half-century. However, Peter J. Steinberger reaffirms the importance of systematic philosophical inquiry into the foundations of political life in view of changing trends. Steinberger demonstrates how such an approach can cast a new and instructive light on a variety of controversial, seemingly intractable problems of tolerance, civil disobedience, democracy and consent.

Democratic Faith, by Patrick Deneen

Publisher's description:
The American political reformer Herbert Croly wrote, "For better or worse, democracy cannot be disentangled from an aspiration toward human perfectibility." Democratic Faith is at once a trenchant analysis and a powerful critique of this underlying assumption that informs democratic theory. Patrick Deneen argues that among democracy's most ardent supporters there is an oft-expressed belief in the need to "transform" human beings in order to reconcile the sometimes disappointing reality of human self-interest with the democratic ideal of selfless commitment. This "transformative impulse" is frequently couched in religious language, such as the need for political "redemption." This is all the more striking given the frequent accompanying condemnation of traditional religious belief that informs the "democratic faith."

At the same time, because so often this democratic ideal fails to materialize, democratic faith is often subject to a particularly intense form of disappointment. A mutually reinforcing cycle of faith and disillusionment is frequently exhibited by those who profess a democratic faith--in effect imperiling democratic commitments due to the cynicism of its most fervent erstwhile supporters.

Deneen argues that democracy is ill-served by such faith. Instead, he proposes a form of "democratic realism" that recognizes democracy not as a regime with aspirations to perfection, but that justifies democracy as the regime most appropriate for imperfect humans. If democratic faith aspires to transformation, democratic realism insists on the central importance of humility, hope, and charity.



What do you think I've left off? I've already thought of a few, but I'll hold off on mentioning them until I've heard from a few readers.

(After finishing up this topic, I expect to return to blogsilence for a long while.)

Update: OK, here are my two candidates-- twelve altogether, to make one book per month in 2005:

Ian Shapiro, The Flight from Reality in the Human Sciences
Iris Marion Young, On Female Body Experience.

And here's my top three to look forward to in 2006:
Adrian Vermeule, Judging Under Uncertainty : An Institutional Theory of Legal Interpretation
David Schmidtz, The Elements of Justice
Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers

Hey, that's kind of nice.

Just got my new Perspectives on Politics in the mail, and noticed that my work is cited in an article. Nice because I was also cited in the last two journals that showed up: the most recent American Political Science Review and the most recent Political Theory. (Some links may require subscriptions.) And in all three cases by people I don't know or barely know.

Not a big deal. But a nice little salve to wounded pride.

This post has been removed after a week-- not because anyone's asked me to do so (they haven't) but because I always conceived this as a temporary note rather than a permanent entry into google. Got the word out to people who'd be interested, and that was its purpose.

It's unpleasant, it was in my opinion badly done and done for bad reasons-- but it's done now.

This post has been removed after a week-- not because anyone's asked me to do so (they haven't) but because I always conceived this as a temporary note rather than a permanent entry into google. Got the word out to people who'd be interested, and that was its purpose.

It's unpleasant, it was in my opinion badly done and done for bad reasons-- but it's done now.

This post has been removed after a week-- not because anyone's asked me to do so (they haven't) but because I always conceived this as a temporary note rather than a permanent entry into google. Got the word out to people who'd be interested, and that was its purpose.

It's unpleasant, it was in my opinion badly done and done for bad reasons-- but it's done now.

The world just keeps getting better and better.

In which Crooked Timber proves itself to be the coolest blog, ever. I love these book seminars they do, and this is the best yet.

Just in case any interested students happen to look here for this kind of information:



PLSC 25710/35710, HIST 22703/32703. The Long 18th Century I.

Prerequisite for undergraduates: At least four quarters of political or social theory or philosophy (including core sequences); waived for students taking part in the French-language section (see below).


This course will examine political, legal, and economic thought in Western Europe from 1688 until the middle of the 18th century. It will focus on French and Scottish thought during the early years of the post-Glorious Revolution era and the Enlightenment, with particular attention given to Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Smith. Other authors read include Locke, Mandeville, Voltaire, Diderot, Hume, and Ferguson.

Students may take this course or its spring successor (on the American and French Revolutions, the American founding, and the English 1790s) without taking the other, but there will be considerable gains from taking them in sequence.

The winter quarter will include an optional French-language discussion section for students interested in reading selections from 18th-century French political thought in the original. Students who take part in this section and also write a paper in French may use this course toward a Romance Languages concentration or minor.

Newly-posted on SSRN: Contextualism, Constitutionalism, and Modus Vivendi Approaches

Newly-published: Community Matters: Challenges to Civic Engagement in the 21st Century, Verna Gehring ed., with contributors including William Galston, Meira Levinson, Robert Fullinwider, and me, among others.

Miers continued:

Something that's struck me in the past two days is the difficulty the administration has had in fighting one fire about the Miers nomination without adding fuel to the other. The first is the "Souter problem," the fact that a lot of the (especially social) conservative base cares deeply about judicial appointments, care for reasons that are almost entirely about outcomes (will Roe be reversed or not?-- see Jonah Goldberg), and care in ways that leave them deeply distrustful of "stealth candidates" appointed by Republican presidents.

The second is the "crony-too-far" problem-- the sense (expressed very well in both Randy Barnett's WSJ op-ed on cronyism and George Will's column) that Miers is unqualified for the post of Supreme Court justice and that she has been chosen primarily because of her closeness to President Bush.

The difficulty is that, in order to answer the first set of critics, the administration and its allies are resorting to saying: "Trust us; the President knows her really well, and she's a real right-winger not a potential Souter." But that only emphasizes the fact that she's an insider pick. The more they say "trust us," the more skeptics of the second sort will say, "We shouldn't have to take Supreme Court nominations on faith, and the fact that George W. Bush is the guy who has all this secret knowledge about her makes us more worried, not less."

And so Reginald Brown's defense of Miers quoted by Orin Kerr over at the Conspiracy, asks us to believe that Bush approached the appointment seriously, because "This is a man who almost lost the Presidency because of the liberal activism of the Florida Supreme Court"-- the very last issue that should be brought up to reassure those who are worried about cronyism threatening judicial independence. It goes on to say,

Judging takes work, but the folks who think "constitutional reasoning" is a talent requiring divination, intense effort and years of monastic study are the same folks who will inevitably give you "Lemon tests," balancing formulas, "penumbras" and concurrences that make your head spin. The President sees through that mumbo jumbo and recognizes that good Justices are the ones who focus on the Constitution’s text, structure and history and who call balls and strikes. Bush is in favor of demystifying the Court and the Miers choice is part of that effort.[...]She also happens to be a gun-toting evangelical who gives money to pro-life organizations and spends her free time taking care of her elderly mom. [...] Miers lives in the real world. She knows what the practical impact of a Kelo decision will be and that the laws of Nigeria and the European Union aren’t terribly relevant to U.S. constitutional analysis. And as important, the people that she hangs out with don’t give a hoot what Linda Greenhouse and the New York Times think.

The anti-liberal-judicial-elitism card is cute, but only aggravates the cronyism worries. John Cornyn's WSJ op-ed is much the same.

The NYT has so far been presenting conservative worry about Miers as being mainly Type 1. But, in the blogosphere and the conservative legal academy and intelligentsia, it's much more Type 2. And the more defenses we see of Miers that say, "She don't go in for that fancy hifalutin law stuff," the worse the Type 2 worry will get, for at least two reasons. One is the slap-in-the-face aspect. Many brilliant conservative lawyers dedicated to moving the law in a conservative direction have spent a generation excelling in the legal academy and on the bench by making important, impressive arguments about constitutional law. The Miers pick, and this defense of the Miers pick, is an open insult to those scholars and judges: "We don't like your kind, with your fancy law degrees and all; you're just like the libruls, because you think constitutional law requires hard intellectual work." That's tactically stupid, a deeply demoralizing message to send to those whose intellectual work has done so much and holds the promise to do more.

But the Type 2 worry isn't just about amour propre. People who hold it ctually believe-- rightly-- that this appointment is wrong, that friendship with the president is not a qualification for the Supreme Court, that constitutional law does require hard intellectual work that requires practice and thought in advance, and that the absence of any of the convetnional qualifications is something to at least worry about. The more the administration defends against Type 1 by saying "Miers ain't one of them fancy elite types with their heads full of fancy law-larning," the more impossible it becomes to defend against Type 2.

OK, I shouldn't spend all day e-mailing bloggers on a topic and pretend I'm not blogging. So, briefly:

1) Lawrence Solum has the definitive Harriet Miers blog post.

2) My official slogan for what I think will happen at the hearings: this nomination is "A crony too far." All the slack people cut Bush, pre-Katrina and for non-lifetime appointments, when he appointed people purely because he'd seen into their heart, will be absent in a post-Brown, post-Katrina, Supreme Court context. Personal loyalty to the President may be a relevant qualification for White House counsel but simply is not for Supreme Court justice; and Senators know this. What's more, they actually care, both because they're afraid of going down with Bush's cronyism ship at this point, and because they care deeply and self-importantly about the Senate's vaunted prerogatives. If the Supreme Court is reduced to a Presidential patronage position, then Advise And Consent loses all its advertised majesty.

3) Fill in this sentence, with a straight face. "Harriet Miers is one of the nine [or even ninety] most ________ lawyers in America," or "is one of the best ________ in America." Now try to fill in the blanks with anything that does not involve the words "President Bush" (i.e. "trusted by President Bush," "personally close to President Bush," etc.) Attention GOP operatives: No fair just saying "qualified;" there has to be some operationalization of "qualified" that doesn't involve the words "President Bush." NB: someone cribbed this from me, after I went into his office and said it out loud...

Seen two very good movies in two days.

First of all, everyone should go see Proof, mixed reviews notwithstanding and even if (like me) you're fundamentally annoyed by Gwynneth Paltrow. It's quite well done, with great performances from Anthony Hopkins, Hope Davis and (grrr... pulling teeth) especially Paltrow, who does strung-out-by-grief-and-coffee-or-maybe-crazy quite convincingly. (Jake Gyllenhall is fine but nothing special.) The heroin chic body helps here, whereas I always find it weird when we're supposed to believe she's a great beauty. But mainly she actually acts it well. The writing is, well, the same as the writing of the play for all but two scenes, and the play was great.

And the movie is the most deeply University of Chicago I can imagine a movie being. Not the two-minute When Harry Met Sally opener, not the Indiana Jones fleeing from his office hours gag, but a complete movie both set in and filmed in the confines of the university and the neighborhood and capturing them both, visually and emotionally. They got it right. It's not a true story, but it's what that story would have been like.

Then last night we saw a special sneak preview of Serenity (with this guy).

Hot damn.

No spoilers ahead.

We went with one person who'd never seen the TV show Firefly, and he didn't have any problem following it at all and really enjoyed it. Exposition and character introduction are handled surprisingly smoothly and quickly, and the story manages to work really well as a stand-alone movie-sized story that just happens to have had 14 episodes of high-quality TV as setup, to get these characters to where they are at the beginning of the movie. It helps, in a way, that Firefly got cancelled so soon. It was still at the stage of mystery rather than mythology-- we were beginning to get a sense of what the questions were but didn't have elaborate continuinty-heavy answers yet. (The movie provides a lot of the crucial answers.)

For those who have seen the show: the movie is a little less frontier-inflected, a little less Chinese-inflected, a little more space adventure. But it's seamlessly continuous with the show-- in the social and political background, in the low-tech, patched-together atmosphere, in the subplots that get woven in, and in the characterization and character interaction.

This is not a genre-buster like Matrix or even a genre-redefiner like Blade Runner. It's more of an ante-raiser like Alien: "See? This thing that we've gotten used to seeing done badly can be done really, really well." For Alien, it was making a monster movie genuinely suspenseful, scary, and visually compelling. For Serenity, it's making space opera morally serious and centered on complete characters with convincing relationships and first-rate dialogue. I predict that it will make watching Star Wars or Star Trek movies harder to do without cringing.

And it's really, really good. There are a few tricks that will be familiar to fans of Buffy and Angel. And there are homages to Buffy as well as to Star Wars. But none of that is distracting or even noticeable for more than a second-- they'll make you chuckle if you get the connection and won't matter if you don't. There's a major trick that managed to take me completely off-guard, that's a terrific plotting idea.

There's Summer Blau, whose strikingly weird and creepy face manages to carry a lot of the atmosphere of the movie, and who turns professional ballet training into kick-ass movie martial arts very effectively. Nathan Fillian, Gina Torres, and Adam Baldwin prove themselves matches for the dialogue Joss Whedon gave them. (Harrison Ford famously complained to George Lucas, "You can write this shit, George, but you can't *say* it." Whedon's lines are meant to be said.) And the look of the movie proves that $40 million can go a long, long way in an age of good CGI.

Go see it. Make Universal Studios lots and lots of money, so that they will give it to Whedon and let him make more.

(See also this New York magazine review, which is a touch less spoiler-free than mine. And also: this fun, funny, offbeat joint interview with Joss Whedon and Neil Gaiman. I'll be moving on to Gaiman's new novel, Anansi Boys, as soon as it arrives from Amazon.)

Department of free publicity:

Go see Serenity!

"Joss Whedon, the Oscar® - and Emmy - nominated writer/director responsible for the worldwide television phenomena of BUFFY THE VAMPIRE, ANGEL and FIREFLY, now applies his trademark compassion and wit to a small band of galactic outcasts 500 years in the future in his feature film directorial debut, Serenity. The film centers around Captain Malcolm Reynolds, a hardened veteran (on the losing side) of a galactic civil war, who now ekes out a living pulling off small crimes and transport-for-hire aboard his ship, Serenity. He leads a small, eclectic crew who are the closest thing he has left to family –squabbling, insubordinate and undyingly loyal."

Expectations are high; more will be blogged soon...

Yalta:

I came off the bench just this once to write the following:

Applause Lines, at TNR.

I should note that a few bloggers got there before I did, notably Matt Welch, Pejman, and Stephen Bainbridge. See also Anne Applebaum.

Shhh.

I'm really not here.

But for the handful of people whose political, intellectual, and cultural tastes or at least knowledge overlap so neatly with mine that they'll get this, I thought I'd put it up. (Julian, John, Jon, and Russell, I'm looking your way.) For everyone else, well, it'll live on when people Google the right combination of words. And I find it too amusing to let it sit in the back of my head for months until I restart blogging.

Last night was the annual play-reading for the members of the University of Chicago's Law and Philosophy workshop, a fun tradition.

Tonight is Neil Gaiman's (yes, that Neil Gaiman)talk at the University-- indeed at the Court Theater, three short blocks from my front door.

One of the regulars of the play-reading, and there in a lead role last night, was one Richard Posner, Senior Lecturer in Law at the University of Chicago. He also holds down a side job, as you might have heard; he's a judge on the Seventh Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals.

Now, as the four of you reading this post probably already know, Posner's side job brought him into indirect contact with Gaiman, when Posner upheld the forces of light and goodness by ruling in Gaiman's favor in Gaiman v McFarlane, the case that was proximately about the ownership of the three characters Gaiman created or co-created for Todd McFarlane's comic Spawn, but at a more fundamental level was about the IP rights to Marvelman/ Miracleman, which MacFarlane was supposed to trade to Gaiman in exchange for the rights to the Spawn characters. Posner's opinion has become something of a cult classic, for its careful and earnest explication of Spawn's origin.

So. Anyways. I got a kick out of being able to tell Posner that one of the parties in one of his cases was speaking on campus, and out of seeing him be genuinely impressed ("Really? Gaiman's coming here? I'd have thought he was too big a deal for college campus talks") and then seeing him turn to the person sitting next to us and explain who Gaiman was, the backstory of Spawn, and the backstory of Gaiman v McFarlane.

Then the dinner break was over, and we went back to our play reading. Which was, for the record: The Tempest, itself a work of some (Eisner-award-winning) significance in Gaiman's corpus. Judge Posner played Alonso. And I sat back and grinned at how much fun Hyde Park can be, and how neatly things sometimes connect.

PS: (Will, if you happen upon this, do me a favor and don't Levywatch it. It amuses me to think that it's going to sit hidden here.)

During my leave of absence from blogging, magazine-writing, and so on, this page exists primarily as a blogroll. I recommend that you browse around through the blogs linked to over there to the left. If you desperately miss my writing, you might sample some of my academic work.

My sabbatical will end no earlier than June 2005, and may last until September 2005 or later.

Apropos of absolutely nothing...

but according to google, no one's really put this together before.

There was something grimly appropriate in the mid-career stall of former Lois Lane Teri Hatcher in those embarrassingly awful Radio Shack commercials with Howie Long (c. 1999, pre-Desperate Housewives.

Because Superman himself had an embarrassingly awful mid-career stall as a Radio Shack celebrity endorser.

Probably about twenty other people remember this, but in 1980-- in the doldrums when the only writer who could really handle the Bronze Age Superman, Elliot S! Maggin, was on hiatus writing novels instead of comics-- there was a Superman one-shot comic that was one big product-placement ad for the TRS-80, paid for by Radio Shack, and starring "the TRS-80 whiz kids!"

The comic centers on the ability of a couple of elementary-school kids sitting in their computer lab at school to do the fancy arithmetic that, apparently, Superman always did in his head before using his powers but was temporarily unable to do because he'd breathed in some special kryptonite dust courtesy of Major Disaster. He still had precise control over his powers, and could still calibrate them mathematically, so that when he was told to fly at a 44.28 degree angle to the ground at 6432.9 mph he could do just that. He could moreover measure things just by looking at them, so he could tell the TRS-80 Whiz Kids via walkie-talkie (or something) that a plane was crashing from a distance of 16,985.3 meters. The step that he couldn't perform was the super-calculation of his intercept path, in-between the super-measurement and the super-calibration of response.

No, it makes no sense whatsoever-- it's as ridiculous as any Silver Age "Jimmy Olson the gorilla-headed boy" plot, but with all the earnestness that came from combining late-70s enthusiasm for kids programming in BASIC with sheer commercial opportunism.

I'm deeply embarrassed by how much I liked this bizarre Cary Bates-written monstrosity when I was 9.