Poli sci on SSRN

There's now a political science research network for working papers on SSRN, with lots of distinct subfield subject-matter lists. You can browse through them here.

The truth comes out

A commentator who calls him or herself simply UofCer reveals:

After we took a couple classes with Jacob Levy, a friend of mine made a facebook group: 18 million milligrams of caffeine with Jacob Levy. Every day he would walk in, set two cans of Diet Coke on the table and promptly begin lecturing without notes. If there were more than two cans, you could be certain you'd be late for whatever you had next.

Someone-- I suspect it was one of the architects of this group-- once asked me why it was Diet Coke rather than coffee, given my known proclivities.

The answer: On my way to class, I need my hands free to carry books. And it's dangerous to walk around with a cup of coffee in each of your sports jacket pockets. Two cans of soda will roughly get me through an hour and twenty minutes of talking-- after which time I can go get a proper cup of coffee.

Update: Phoebe Maltz enjoys the black ambrosia, too. In response to people who criticize the money spent, she observes, "If you consider the accused lattes to be a replacement for the three martinis our generation is not having at lunch, and the two packs of cigarettes our generation is not having throughout the day, it looks a bit different."

Pateman elected to British Academy

Carole Pateman has been elected to the British Academy. (She was elected as a regular fellow not an overseas "corresponding" fellow, thanks to her position at Cardiff.)

Neutrality 2008 : Call For Papers

Neutrality 2008: Call For Papers. Submission Deadline: 10/20/2007
CALL FOR PAPERS

The Centre for Research in Ethics at the University of Montreal (CRÉUM) is sponsoring an international conference on the ideal of neutrality which will take place in Montreal in May 2008 and will be followed by a workshop. Participants in the conference include: Arash Abizadeh (McGill University) ; Anthony Appiah (Princeton University) ; Richard Arneson (University of California, San Diego) ; George Crowder (Flinders University) ; Peter de Marneffe (Arizona State University) ; Charles Larmore (Brown University) ; Jacob Levy (McGill University) ; Stephen Macedo (Princeton University ); Ruwen Ogien (CNRS-Paris) ; Alan Patten (Princeton University) ; João Cardoso Rosas (Minho University) ; George Sher (Rice University) ; Christine Sypnowich (Queen’s University) ; Steven Wall (Bowling Green State University) ; Daniel Weinstock (CRÉUM, Université de Montréal).

This call for papers is addressed to graduate students and junior researchers interested in presenting their work on neutrality in this workshop.

The idea that the state should be neutral towards conceptions of the good life has been a constant topic of debate for the last thirty years amongst political theorists concerned with the legitimacy of the state. Although some have claimed the debate is passé, many recent works have proved them wrong (Wall and Klosko, 2003 ; Appiah, 2005 ; de Marneffe, 2006 ; Weinstock, 2006 ; Ogien, 2007) as the dialogue between communitarians and liberals has now opened an intense discussion between liberals themselves about the attractiveness or the scope of the neutrality principle, calling at times for a new perfectionism (Sher, 1997 ; Wall, 1998). This colloquium aims to present a diagnosis of the ongoing debate and offer new perspectives. It will be organized around three main topics:

First, the definition of the neutrality principle is open to discussion: even if there’s a broad agreement on its characterization as a constraint on justifications given by the government (justificatory neutrality, (Kymlicka, 1989)), the nature of this constraint and the scope of the principle are highly controversial. Alternative definitions (as equal concern or as neutrality of effects) may not have received appropriate attention (Goodin and Reeve, 1989 ; Wall, 2001 ; Appiah, 2005).

A second important issue questions the relation between neutrality and perfectionism. Some liberals refuse to take neutrality as the only legitimate understanding of liberal principles (Raz, 1986 ; Chan, 2000) and argue for liberal perfectionism. Is this claim valid or attractive? Different versions of perfectionism should be presented and they should answer diverse concerns related to its paternalistic aspect. Neutrality proponents also have to answer serious objections. Although some have argued for a neutralist foundation of neutrality (Larmore, 1993), this path has been criticized in light of the difficulties in building up a case for the neutrality principle without using substantive values such as respect or democratic equality.

A third bundle of questions will focus on practical issues where neutrality is an attractive ideal or, on the contrary, an undesirable principle. Important areas of investigation include education and religion, and, also, language and work. The colloquium hopes to elicit reflection on the possible application of the neutrality ideal to new practical spheres.

Guidelines for submission:
Proposals should address one of these issues and should be between 300 and 500 words in length. Submission deadline is October 20, 2007. Notification of acceptance will be provided by February 1, 2008. Preferred format for all submissions is RTF attachment submitted by electronic mail to Roberto Merrill (nrbmerrill@gmail.com ) and Geneviève Rousselière (groussel@princeton.edu) with “Neutrality 2008 Submission” in the subject line of the email.

The plural states of recognition

La reconnaissance dans tous ses états
The plural states of recognition

Atelier international / International Workshop of the Center for Research in Ethics at the University of Montreal. Registration required : You can now register forthe workshop by sending your name and institutional affiliation to info@creum.umontreal.ca .

Thursday September 27: Struggle for recognition

Recognition : the heritage of a concept
Chair : George Di Giovanni (McGill University)

9 h 15 Robert R.Williams (University of Illinois at Chicago)
Hegel and Aristotle on Recognition and Friendship

9 h45 Simon Thompson (University of the West of England)
Recognition and the rise of democracy

10 h 30 Arto Laitinen and Heikki Ikäheimo (Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies
Esteem as a type of recognition & University of Jyväskylä)

11 h Jean-Philippe Deranty (Macquarie University)
The social mediation of practical self-relation. Normative and critical implications
of current debates on Hegel and recognition


Recognition, conflicts and social movements
Chair: Estelle Ferrarese (Université Strasbourg II)

14 h 30 Christian Lazzeri (Université Paris X – Nanterre)
Le prix de la lutte pour la reconnaissance

15 h Christian Nadeau (Université de Montréal)
Crimes contre l’humanité et théories de la reconnaissance

15 h 45 Hervé Pourtois (Université catholique de Louvain)
Le « tournant délibératif» de la théorie de la reconnaissance : issue ou impasse ?

16 h 15 Emmanuel Renault (ENS LSH Lyon)
Lutte, domination et reconnaissance : qu’est-ce que le modèle hégélien
de la reconnaissance ?


Friday September 28: politics of recognition

recognition of national identities
Chair : Stéphane Courtois (Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières)

9 h Peter Leuprecht (Université du Québec à Montréal)
Droits humains - individuels et /ou collectifs ?

9 h30 Geneviève Nootens (Université du Québec à Chicoutimi)
Reconnaissance, légitimité et démocratie dans les sociétés plurinationales

10 h 15 Michel Seymour (Université de Montréal)
La nation comme sujet de reconnaissance

10h 45 Michel Wieviorka (École des Hautes Études en Sciences sociales)
Naissance et déclin du débat sur le multiculturalisme


The institutionalization of recognition
Chair: Daniel Weinstock (CRÉUM)

14 h 15 Anna Elisabetta Galeotti (University of Piemonte Orientale in Vercelli)
Recognition, Respect and Justice

14 h 45 Margaret Moore (Queen’s University)
Toleration, Recognition and Institutional Accommodation

15 h 30 Anne Phillips (London School of Economics)
The risks of recognition

16 h Nancy Fraser (New School for Social Research)
The Priority of Justice:A Critique of Agonistic Approaches to Recognition

Saturday September 29: ethics of recognition

applied ethics of recognition
Chair : Alain G. Gagnon (Université de Québec à Montréal)

9 h Martin Blanchard (Université de Montréal)
Éthique de la délibération et revendications autochtones au Canada

9 h30 Avigail Eisenberg (University of Victoria)
A normatively defensible approach to the recognition of Indigenous identity

10 h 15 Jocelyn Maclure (Université Laval)
La reconnaissance engage-t-elle à l’essentialisme?

10 h 45 Melissa Williams (University of Toronto)
Recognition Regress? The Ontario Sharia Decision
and the Problem of Democratic Will Formation


The moral dimensions of recognition
Chair:Will Kymlicka (Queen’s University)

14 h 15 Elizabeth A. Povinelli (University of Columbia)
Recognition, Espionage, Camouflage

14 h 45 Charles Blattberg (Université de Montréal)
Demanding Recognition? On Overly-Adversarial Politics

15 h 30 Rajeev Bhargava (Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi)
The Phenomenology of Broken Spirits: Hegel and Taylor on misrecognition
and humiliation

16 h Charles Taylor (McGill University,New School for Social Research and Fribourg)
New Developments in the Politics of Recognition

Now online

Federalism, Liberalism, and the Separation of Loyalties, 101 (3) APSR, August 2007, pp 459-477. PDF is here, APSA membership or institutional subscription required.

Political theory awards

From the Foundations of Political Theory organized section of APSA.

AWARD WINNERS

The David Easton Award is given for a book that broadens the horizons of contemporary political science by engaging issues of philosophical significance in political life through any of a variety of approaches in the social sciences and humanities. The award is limited to books published in the previous five years and carries a cash prize of $500.

This year's award goes to Quentin Skinner, of Cambridge University

for Visions of Politics, 3 Volumes, (Cambridge University Press, 2002)

Committee:

Jennifer Pitts, Princeton University; Shannon Stimson, University of California-Berkeley; Stephen White (Chair of Committee), University of Virginia.

First Book Award

The First Book Award is given for a first book by a scholar in the "early stages of his or her career" in the area of political theory or political philosophy. "Early stages" is interpreted to mean that the recipient cannot have held his or her PhD for more than ten years. This award carries a cash prize of $200.00.


This year's award goes to Bryan Garsten, of Yale University, for Saving Persuasion: A Defense of Rhetoric and Judgment (Harvard University Press, 2006)



According to the Committee:

In this impressive and timely study, Bryan Garsten explores the early modern critique of rhetoric and persuasively argues on behalf of a classically-based alternative of responsible rhetoric and dialogically-based political judgment. Initially a response to the breakdown of authoritative political and religious sources, early modern liberal thinkers like Hobbes, Rousseau and Kant developed theories of "public reason" that valorized increasingly abstract, elite, and centralized forms of political decision-making. By contrast, thinkers like Aristotle and Cicero commended more public and open forms of political deliberation - now based upon a shared store of rhetorical conventions - yet were both sensitive to, and warned against the dangers of demagogic rhetorical manipulation. One ironic conclusion of Garsten's study is to suggest that ancient thinkers had greater confidence in public reasonableness than was explicitly the case for liberal philosophers. Garsten's sensitive and detailed exegeses are judicious, mature, and resonate deeply with contemporary debates over democratic deliberation and the role of reason and rhetoric in politics.


Best First Book Honorable Mention: Davide Panagia, The Poetics of Political Thinking (Duke 2006):

In The Poetics of Political Thinking , Davide Panagia provides a strikingly original perspective on aesthetics, ethics, and politics. Political theories, he argues, are composed of mutilayered, multivalent ideas and, hence, are best understood as "images" of thinking rather than philosophical arguments. By weaving together painting, poetry, and philosophy, Panagia reveals how unrepresentability haunts our thinking about politics. His new readings of Hobbes, Rawls, and Habermas place their ideas in productive conversation with Deleuze, Ranciere, and Hazlitt, among others. The images of political thinking that emerge mirror the "disjunctive encounters between dissimilars" characteristic of democratic negotiations of difference. Panagia's eloquently written and thought-provoking book challenges political theorists to think differently about how we read and what we do.

Committee:

Patrick Deneen (Chair of Committee), Georgetown University; Roxanne Euben,
Wellesley College; Nancy Love, Pennsylvania State University

Books to buy

APSA's now just around the corner, so no new academic book purchases for the next month. Especially now that the Canadian dollar is so high against the American dollar, it's much better to pick books up at 20-40% off American list prices than to get them at (already-higher) Canadian list prices. So time to start keeping a list of books-- mainly 2007 releases, but also some backlist items that I've recently noticed and don't own yet.

Anne Phillips, Multiculturalism Without Culture, was top of the list but I just got a review copy. Still, looking like a busy buying year. My shopping list so far:

Adrian Vermeuele, Mechanisms of Democracy (Oxford)
Harro Höpfl, Jesuit Political Thought (Cambridge)
Gerard Magliocca, Andrew Jackson and the Constitution (Kansas)
Stephen Buckle, Natural Law and the Theory of Property (Oxford)
Colin Farrelly, Justice, Democracy and Reasonable Agreement (Palgrave)
John Millar, An Historical View of English Government (Liberty Fund)
Hamilton and Madison, Pacificus–Helvidius Debates of 1793–1794 (Liberty Fund)
Jean Louis De Lolme, The Constitution of England (Liberty Fund) (This is a very exciting volume to have back in print)
Brian Tamanaha, Law as a Means to an End (Cambridge) (Shameful that I don't have this one yet, really, but it was sold out at APSA last year and then I forgot that I hadn't gotten it)
Andrew Mason, Leveling the Playing Field (Oxford)
Carles Boix and Susan Stokes, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Politics
Alan Cromartie, The Constitutionalist Revolution: An Essay on the History of England, 1450–1642 (Cambridge)
Sarah Song, Justice, Gender, and the Politics of Multiculturalism (Cambridge)
Suzanne Dovi, The Good Representative, Blackwell
Rhodes et al., eds., The Oxford Handbook of Political Institutions
Sotirios A. Barber and James E. Fleming, Constitutional Interpretation: The Basic Questions (Oxford)
Philip G. Roeder, Where Nation-States Come From: Institutional Change in the Age of Nationalism (Princeton)
Corey Brettschneider, Democratic Rights: The Substance of Self-Government
(Princeton)
Howard Schweber, The Language of Liberal Constitutionalism (Cambridge)
Urbinati and Zakaras, eds., J.S. Mill's Political Thought (Cambridge)
James Otteson, Actual Ethics (Cambridge)
Mark Francis, Herbert Spencer and the Invention of Modern Life (Cornell)
Seyla Benhabib, Ian Shapiro, and Danilo Petranovich, eds., Identities, Affiliations, and Allegiances

Hmm. I'm sure there was another list that I wrote down somewhere, but this'll probably do for a start...

Hm.

Not sure how I hadn't known about the blog of Waterloo political theorist Colin Farrelly, In search of enlightenment. Onto the blogroll it goes. A sample from a recent post on some of my favorite methodological themes in political theory, titled "What Justice Demands, 'Many-Things Considered.'" See also his post on Political "Philosophy."

Our attention to the demands of justice can be developed at many different levels of abstraction. Here is a simplistic typology of the different levels of analysis one could be concerned with:

(1) what the demands of justice are, “all-things-considered”
(2) what the demands of justice are, “many-things-considered”
(3) what the demands of justice are, “some-things-considered”
(4) what the demands of justice are ,“when only abstract concepts (e.g. equality) are considered” (or, what justice requires when justice is construed purely as an abstract ideal or Platonic form).

I believe that something like this typology is very useful and can help political philosophers and theorists explain a lot of what is going on between proponents of different theoretical traditions. Egalitarians believe that others (like libertarians) ignore the harmful effects of the free market (e.g. the vulnerability of the worst off, inequality, etc.). Libertarians believe that egalitarians ignore the importance of side constraints or the inefficiency of the planned economy, etc. Feminists believe liberals ignore the realities of patriarchy. Multiculturalists believe that liberals ignore the fact of cultural inequality. And finally deliberative democrats believe justice-theorists ignore the limitations of their own armchair theorizing and the importance of democratic practices and institutions, disagreement, etc. One could go on and on, revealing how some theories are attuned to different kinds of concerns and ignore (or bracket) others.

These various considerations have lead me to be much more a pluralist than I once was. Certain values have an important role to play in certain contexts but not others, and figuring out when they have a role to play is the real important challenge. So for me the real action takes place in (2) (with (1) being a kind of ideal that we strive for but never reach), rather than in (3) or (4).

The most influential example of (3) is John Rawls’s theory of “justice as fairness”. Rawls takes some important considerations (e.g. moderate scarcity, pluralism, impartiality, etc.) seriously but he also invokes a number of idealizing assumptions that impoverish his theory (e.g. full compliance, society is closed and full of normal functioning people). And these idealized assumptions really skew and impair the prescriptions of Rawlsian justice.

Those partial to (4) might argue that I am confusing two different things- principles of justice and principles of regulation. This of course raises important questions concerning what kind of principles the principles of justice are (e.g. do they serve as a guide for human action). And this adds a further layer of debate to these issues. For me, there is no substantive difference between principles of justice and principles of regulation (though not every principle of justice need be a principle to regulate an institution). The principles of justice are those principles that dictate how a just society is to be regulated. That is why I think the important action takes place closer to (1) and (2) rather than (3) or (4).

The ideal/non-ideal theory debate, which is beginning to gain real momentum, will hopefully lead to a more serious debate about which kinds of considerations should be incorporated into (2). Which considerations- of the many, many considerations that arise- should a normative theorist take seriously? (and which should we ignore, etc.) Asking, and attempting to answer, that question will result (hopefully!) in us taking a “big picture” perspective on these issues. And that could really transform our moral sensibilities in important ways. It could open our eyes to new concerns we tended to ignore (e.g. the limitations of government, dangers of group polarization, etc.) or it could help us realize that certain convictions or beliefs are no longer tenable, etc.

I believe the best consequence that will likely result of our taking this big picture perspective is that it is more likely to lead us to taking a *proportionate* response to the different demands of justice that arise in real, non-ideal societies. To ensure our response to any particular demand of justice (X) is fair and proportionate we must appreciate not only the moral stakes at risk in pursuing X (e.g. equality, liberty, sufficiency, etc.), but also the costs, risks and tradeoffs involved with aggressively pursuing X rather than other laudable aims (e.g. Y and Z).

I think further benefits will be reaped by taking “justice-many-things-considered” (rather than (3) or (4)) seriously. It should make normative theorists realize how limited their armchair theorizing is. Defensible normative theories must take empirical considerations seriously and strive for something more meaningful than winning an abstract “first-best conceptualism” debate. A serious debate about which constraints or considerations we should take seriously will necessitate interdisciplinary dialogue and research, and this should help philosophers become more aware of the contentious assumptions they make (but do not have to defend) when they only engage in debate and dialogue amongst themselves. Furthermore, taking these various constraints seriously will make us realize that the demands of justice are provisional (both morally and politically provisional).

APSA notes

How is it that every other panel slot at APSA has no panels I want to go to-- but the other half of the slots have three or more panels apiece I want to go to?

It adds up to an unusually high number of panels I want to attend-- but with an unusually unfortunate distribution of them. Four I want to go to in the awful Thursday 8 am timeslot, when there are always fewer people in the audience than on the panel...

As of today, suddenly it's time to start getting ye olde APSA schedule nailed down. Funny how that happens sometimes; all at once people start scheduling stuff.

Post of the day

With the punchline "you know, all this openness to data and willingness to recheck your assumptions and basic generosity --- are you sure you're really cut out to be a blogger?"

I know...

that it's silly to keep putting up posts that say "Go read Piled Higher and Deeper," but, well, Go read Piled Higher and Deeper. This sequence should be mandatory reading for advisors...

A proviso

This is the G'Nort Proviso to Matthew Yglesais' celebrated Green Lantern theory of geopolitics:

Even if it were the case that sheer American willpower was almost infinitely powerful, the distinction between minimal competence and massive incompetence would be more powerful still. Or in general form: at any given level of power generated by sheer will and determination, the distinction between minimal competence and massive competence in the use of that power is more powerful still.

Tomorrow's OU post today!

Because TNR keeps business hours and we don't post directly onto Open University, this won't appear there until morning.

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

Rawls continued

A few days ago, Linda Hirshman (I apologize for having misspelled her name a few times below) wrote:

Perversely, Rawlsian liberalism also produced a slippery slope into its opposite, complete selfishness. After all, unless you could achieve the degree of selflessness he required, there was no other place to stop. [...] The game that Rawls set in motion, designed to eliminate common preexisting political values, could also produce the result that everybody simply advocated for himself.

It is not a coincidence that the only successful two-term Democratic presidency of the Age of Rawls was engineered in part for Bill Clinton by Bill Galston, a political theorist with a background in classical thought. Although Galston pays due homage to Rawls, his crucial work is ends-driven, not justified on the blindness of the procedure (his foundational political work is tellingly titled Liberal Purposes). Rawls's work--the best effort to take a tradition grounded in the bourgeois revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries--and make it relevant to a modern, industrial state simply left the country to the conservatives.

I bow to no one in my admiration for Bill Galston, and I do think that Galston was a real contributor to the intllectual shape of Clinton's first campaign and first term, even if he was not strictly necessary for the election to turn out the way it did. But the fact that there has been only one two-term Democratic presidency since 1971 really is, quite thoroughly, a coincidence, not at all causally related to the publication of A Theory of Justice. in that year. George McGovern's defeat came too soon after publication for the book to have had much impact outside academic philosophy yet, and in any event was by a large enough margin that it seems to have been rather overdetermined. A Democrat won in 1976; he lost in 1980, but he was a hectoring moralistic vocal born-again Christian ; whatever the faults of Rawlsianism, they are not the same as Jimmy Carter's.


After Clinton's presidency, only the election of 2000 could yet have generated a two-term Democratic president. So we're down to the elections of 1984, 1988, and (barely) 2000 lost by Democrats, and those of 1992 and 1996 won by Democrats. This is not the sort of electoral imbalance that calls out for any very extraordinary explanation. This is not a Democratic Party that went through some intellectual implosion like the Federalists or the Whigs did. It's a party that loses some and wins some, with the outcomes substantially predictable by the economy in the year and a half preceding each election.

Moreover, over those thirty-five years, the Democrats have controlled the House of Representatives for twenty-five, and the Senate for twenty. The so-called age of Rawls simply has not been a time of mysterious Democratic impotence and Republican dominance; it's been a time of rough parity.

As to selfishness, while I wasn't around before 1971 to witness it myself, I have it on good authority that it was an attribute of political action and human action even way back in 1970, and that a great many elections in American history had been decided on the basis of something other than tens of millions of voters engaged in a disinterested inquiry about the common good.

Linda also wrote:

Just close your eyes, Rawls said, and think of what kind of political society you would make if you didn't know who you were. Black, white, male, female, smart, dumb--you might be anyone who would then have to live in the society you imagined. Rawls said if you did this, you'd produce unlimited free speech and moderately redistributive capitalism. The wags had it that this white male Harvard professor closed his eyes and produced the government of Cambridge, Massachusetts. No matter. It didn't happen.

This is really extraordinary-- a weird cheap shot playing off the ambiguity of "you'd produce." Rawls never said that the thought experiment of the original position was some kind of substitute for political action. It was a way to organize thinking about justice prior to political action. It was a way to reinvigorate thinking about justice at all, in the face of the technocratic utilitarianism characteristic of the era of the best and the brightest, and the aggregative utilitarianism that had passed as thinking about the "common good" for some time before that.

But more generally: I can't understand the relationship between ideas and political life that Linda seems to be implying. Has any work of political philosophy ever caused the realization of its ideas in the society of its writer's birth, to say nothing of doing so within a generation of publication? About as long after the publication of Leviathan, the government of England broke even more decisively from Hobbes' recommendations than it had already done. Germany remained non-communist a generation after Marx; Victorian England remained Victorian in the decades after On Liberty, and Locke's Second Treatise was only published after the revolution its doctrines seemed to justify. America never became Rawls' "realistic utopia," but neither did it become Hayek's or Nozick's or MacIntyre's or Walzer's vision of a just social order. I can't see the relevance of any of that to our evaluation of the arguments within those works, or to whether the works were important, influential, or powerful.

In short: Theory of Justice, like most works of political philosophy, failed to be self-realizing; and American elections since 1971, like most political activity in most societies, went on their way without perceptible causal influences from works of political theory. This is unexceptional as regards either politics or political theory, and doesn't require any special failings of Theory of Justice.

In saying this I don't contradict Keynes' dictum that

The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.

I think this largely holds at the level of the public official, not at the level of the mass election. In the West Wing, Democratic staffers might invoke the difference principle; and for all I know White House staffers have occasionally done so in real life. But they have not done so very much, or in ways that would, or did, cost them elections.

Now: the fact that Rawls and Democratic electoral fortunes merely coincided without causation doesn't mean there's nothing to say about the co-incidence. Rawls was relatively appealing in a non-perfectionist intellectual climate that Aristotleans find objectionable, and that intellectual climate had its effects on the shape of liberal political practice. In the wake of the 1960s, appeals to some unitary set of virtues were going to be hard to sustain as foundations for public life, Rawls or no Rawls; the sexual revolution, women's and gay liberation, and the suspicion of courageous military service as a virtue after Vietnam all helped make virtue-language relatively unattractive for a while. And Warren Court liberalism, in pushing hard against some traditional state practices that had been justified in moralistic, paternalistic, or overtly Christian ways, made "neutrality" a kind of liberal watchword. Rawls' critique of perfectionism and embrace of state neutrality among conceptions of the good at the level of basic justice were a good fit with this intellectual climate. But Rawls didn't cause it. The underlying cultural shifts that made perfectionism unavailable to the left until it was married to pluralism by Galston were underway before 1971, and Rawls did no more than offer some inadvertent post-hoc justification for them.

Those cultural shifts are still with us, though the pendulum has swung a good ways back from the extremes of the 1970s. If Linda wants to revitalize Aristotelean virtue-talk for the left, she's right that Rawls offers a kind of obstacle to the project-- but those shifts offer a bigger one. And if she wants to overcome the Rawlsian obstacle, pointing to the electoral failure of Walter Mondale isn't an intellectually successful way to go about it.

A final note: I feel quite sure that Linda as a philosopher already knows everything I've said here, and so I'm embarrassed to have written in a way that must sound condescending. But the essay itself seemed committed to denying or ignoring all these commonplace objections, and so I've replied as best as I could to the essay itself.

Plug away

Via orgtheory, Professor Rojas says:

Interested in social movements and organizations? Need something for your course on race and social change? How about a snazzy account of black power politics in the 1960s? Perhaps I can help you fill out that sociology of education syllabus. Might I humbly suggest my new book on the rise of Black Studies in the university?

That’s right. From Black Power to Black Studies is done, the official publication date is this week, and you can order it from Amazon, which means you’ll get it in about a week or so. Read the blurbs at the Johns Hopkins University website, with instructions for desk copies. Did I mention the spiffy 70s style cover?

Gradual School

As far as I can tell, the data from the new report from the Ph.D. Completion Project shows only four disciplines with 10-year doctoral completion rates below about 45%. One of these, computer science, is undoubtedly depressed by graduate students getting attractive job offers and leaving voluntarily (especially since the data span the mid-to-late 1990s).

The other three are Communications, Sociology,...

and Political Science.

(See Slide 7 in that power point presentation.)

Communications has the lowest rate of completion by year, through year 9. But the gap closes steadily over the years 7-9, and by year 10 Political Science seems to have the lowest rate of completion of the three.

This doesn't tell us what proportion of entering students complete sometime after year 10 (which is worrying in one way) and how many drop out or are failed (both worrying in another way). But notice that the completion rates are consistently lower than in econ, and econ grad students certainly have more attractive job opportunities that become available during their years of study. The completion rates are also lower than in the literary humanities, disciplines whose grad students face notoriously bad job prospects that presumably encourage many of them to drop out.

100% completion rates are implausible and undesirable. But completion rates this low suggest that departments and students are doing a bad job matching expectations at the beginning of programs. The departments can't judge who's likely to succeed in grad school, and students can't tell whether a program is a good one for them. Something seems badly wrong. Some discipline has to come in last in these sorts of measures, but we shouldn't take any solace from that. Either econ or English would have a good reason for a very low completion rate; I can't see that political science has any excuse to be behind both.

Prospective grad students, ask for hard data on time to completion and attrition rates!

See Chronicle coverage here, subscription required. See also Professor Rojas' latest round of advice to grad students-- finally reaching the all-important "The only good dissertation is a complete dissertation."

Elsewhere:

Linda Hirshman attributed thirty-five years of American political history to the moral thinness of John Rawls; I began a reply but wandered off into a side issue; Henry Farrell and commentators engaged in a very serious and thoughtful set of arguments about where I wandered to; Matt Yglesias responded to Hirshman more directly. I still intend to do so sometime soon.

Oh, look.

John Gray has written another book.

Gray, a professor at the LSE who is described on the front cover as "the most important living philosopher", has had a fit of Bush-hatred spectacular even by the standards of important living philosophers. But, rather than getting it out of his system over a macrobiotic soufflé in Hampstead, the silly man has gone and built an entire theory of history around it.[...]

Perhaps aware that he is running short of neocons to man his conspiracy, Gray presses Tony Blair into service. The former Prime Minister was not only a classic neocon, we learn, but one whose mendacity bore the stamp of Soviet disinformation: an American poodle and a red under the bed. Bush, though, is not so much a slippery neocon as an old-style fundamentalist Christian whose policies are designed to hasten global warming (sound of box being ticked) and therefore the end of the world. The CIA, meanwhile, has been taken over by shape-shifting lizards telepathically controlled by the ghost of Milton Friedman.

OK, so perhaps that last sentence misrepresents Gray's argument; but Black Mass could hardly be more bonkers if it really was crawling with lizards. Although Gray is by no stretch of the imagination our most important living philosopher, he does slightly remind me of Bertrand Russell in his dotage - a clever man playing to the gallery.

But it's getting late, professor: the main actors have either left the stage or are heading for the wings, and the only people left in the gallery are a few Independent readers. Go home and sleep it off.

Elsewhere

At Inside Higher Ed, and article about the report of the APSA Working Group on Collaboration," on questions of coauthorship and credit in the discipline. (Apropos ofSix Degrees of Cass Sunstein, kind of.)

Also at APSA, the theme for next year's conference is "Categories and the Politics of Global Inequalities," which sounds to me more like an MLA theme. But there it is; grad students, if you believe in that sort of superstition, start trying to figure out which of your dissertation chapters can accommodate the word "categories" in its title.

(Note to non-political scientists: APSA has a quirky system of adopting a theme for its Annual Meeting-- a theme to which maybe 5% of the conference's panels will be dedicated. The "theme panels" themselves can be quite interesting, and represent the real impact of the theme on the conference. There are some small marginal incentives for both paper-writers and paper-selecting section organizers to put up a pretense of shaping their papers/ sections to fit the theme, but these are generally not worth it and can end up looking kind of silly.)

Big news

From the Montreal Gazette:

Land claims agreement worth $1.4 billion
Jeff Heinrich, CanWest News Service

MONTREAL - First they made peace with Quebec, now they're making it with Ottawa - and becoming masters in their own house. Dropping lawsuits totalling $4.5 billion, leaders of the 16,500 Cree of northern Quebec announced a historic $1.4-billion deal with Ottawa on Monday.

If ratified in a referendum in October and approved by Parliament, it will see them take control of all policing, courts and social and economic development in their communities - and perhaps eventually form their own state within Canada.

It's the first time the Cree have reached a significant financial agreement with the federal government since 1983.

t ends three years of intense negotiations aimed at resolving differences over the landmark 1975 James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement, which compensated the Cree for lands flooded by Hydro-Quebec's mammoth James Bay hydroelectric projects.

A little over five years ago, the Cree signed a similar deal with the Quebec government. Under the so-called Paix des Braves, the Cree got $4.5 billion to settle decades of lawsuits against the province that, like the Ottawa ones, stemmed from the 1975 James Bay treaty.

At a packed news conference Monday, current and former Cree leaders and negotiators joined federal officials, negotiators and politicians to announce what they described as a 50-year deal, covering the 30 years since the original James Bay accord was signed and 20 more years after the new deal is eventually ratified.

"We've come a very long way since 1975," said Matthew Mukash, grand chief of the Grand Council of the Crees.

[...]

Under the agreement, the Crees will take over programs now under Ottawa's jurisdiction: the administration of justice, including rehab centres, workhouses and refuges for women; training and manpower; construction of community centres, sewage systems and firefighting services; and economic development programs.

A second stage of negotiation would then begin on Cree self-government, including eventual status as a fully fledged Cree state within Canada.

This is one of the biggest and longest-standing indigenous rights disputes in the world. The Cree are the largest First Nations group in Canada. I'm not sure why the article uses the language of a "Cree state;" I presume that what's envisioned is an autonomous territory like Nunavut, or conceivably (though this is unlikely) a province. "State" is a word without constitutional meaning in the Canadian federation.

I can't find any online discussion of what territory the "state" might occupy; the question of Cree territory in Quebec, and whether the Cree could be forced to accompany a seceding Quebec out of Canada, is a critical one in Quebec secession debates. Carving a self-determining territory even partly out of Quebec's current landmass would be politically explosive; but it would be very strange for a settlement of the James Bay case to lead to the creation of a territory that didn't include the huge, overwhelmingly Cree, Quebec side of the James Bay watershed.

I don't have one

Via the Chronicle: Six Degrees of Cass Sunstein: Collaboration Networks in Legal Scholarship, by Paul Edelman and Tracey George.

Degrees of separation is a concept that is intuitive and appealing in popular culture as well as academic discourse: It tells us something about the connectedness of a particular field. It also reveals paths of influence and access. Paul Erdős was the Kevin Bacon of his field - math - coauthoring with a large number of scholars from many institutions and across subfields. Moreover, his work was highly cited and important. Mathematicians talk about their Erdős number (i.e., numbers of degrees of separation) as a sign of their connection to the hub of mathematics: An Erdős number of 2 means a scholar did not co-author with Erdős but did collaborate with someone who did (i.e., an Erdős 1). In this study, we examine collaboration networks in law, searching for the Legal Erdős. We crown Sunstein as the Legal Erdős and name a complete (as possible) list of Sunstein 1s and 2s.

Never having co-authored a publication, I don't have a Sunstein number, though several of my friends are Sunstein 1s.

Elsewhere...

Worth reading:

Brad DeLong with an unusually concise and clear ("unusually" in the usual run of things, not "unusually for Brad DeLong") analytic narrative distinguishing political and economic constraints on policy-- in this case-- Chinese economic reform under Deng.

Margaret Soltan on the online amplification effect-- on-campus news can now be worldwide news in a matter of minutes, and college administrators often aren't prepared for it.

That weird story Dan linked to the other day about the Washington burglar invited to join the dinner party for a glass of wine moves from "news of the bizarrre file" to "interesting limit case of social and psychological phenomena" thanks to a sharp post from Julian Sanchez.

Peter Suderman at The American Scene, "Critics and the Masses."

Phoebe Maltz on a discussion of "on the left" as an identity, featuring Charles Taylor and Paul Berman, at a Dissent function.

A relatively good neighbor

NYT:

Columbia University announced yesterday that it would not ask the state to use eminent domain to evict residents of 132 apartments in the 17-acre area of Harlem that it wants to move into.

The announcement, covering all the remaining residents in the area, suggests that the university, which is seeking the city’s support for a major northward expansion of its Morningside Heights campus, is trying to be conciliatory.

And yet:

In a statement, Columbia said its executive vice president, Robert Kasdin, did not eliminate the possibility that the university might ask the state to invoke eminent domain to acquire the few commercial properties that remain in the proposed expansion area.

Fifth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States: "nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation."

More on New York's particularly bad eminent domain system.

True north, high and free

Marijuana use is higher in Canada than in either Jamaica or the Netherlands; indeed than anywhere else in the industrialized world. Quebec leads the way.

Not totally shocking news to anyone who's walked around the Plateau on a Saturday night.

Disturbing search of the day that brought someone to this blog

Lesbian with hijab pics. Not here; sorry.