CFP: British Society for Ethical Theory

Via Professor Solum, a call for papers for the British Society for Ethical Theory.

Call for Papers
THE BRITISH SOCIETY FOR ETHICAL THEORY
2008 CONFERENCE
University of Edinburgh, UK
14-16th July 2008

Invited Speakers: Barbara Herman (UCLA), Wlodek Rabinowicz (Lund)

Papers are invited for the annual conference of the British Society for Ethical
Theory, to be held at the University of Edinburgh. The subject area is open
within metaethics and normative ethics. Papers on topics in applied ethics or
the history of ethics may also be considered provided they are also of wider
theoretical interest.

Papers, which should be unpublished at the time of submission, should be in
English, no longer than 6500 words, readable in at most 45 minutes and in a
form suitable for blind review. Please send your submission electronically, and
include an abstract, as well as your full name, address and academic
affiliation. Those who submitted papers for our previous conferences
-successfully or otherwise - are welcome to submit again (though not of course
the same papers!).

Please tell us if you are a postgraduate student: submissions from postgraduates
are encouraged as our aim is that some such should be represented at the
conference. Selected conference papers will be published in the journal Ethical
Theory and Moral Practice. Please make clear in any covering letter whether you
wish your paper to be considered for publication here as well as for the
conference programme.

The deadline for submissions is 7th December, 2007.

Papers and accompanying particulars should be emailed to Dr. Elinor Mason:
Elinor.Mason@ed.ac.uk

Note that ONLY electronic submissions will be accepted.

The BSET conference is a major ethics conference held annually in or near the
UK. Our programme normally comprises around 11 papers, 2 invited, the rest
submitted. Submitted papers are blind refereed. All those we select for the
programme are assigned a generous time allocation (around 75 minutes, 45
minutes reading time, 30 for discussion) and all papers are given to plenary
sessions. We are a "British" society only as regards the geography of where we
hold our meetings and such trivia as the way we spell "programme"; we seek to
attract submissions from an international field. Submitted papers read to
previous conferences have included work by Robert Audi, Margaret Gilbert, Dan
Jacobson, Maggie Little, Rahul Kumar, Mathias Risse, Henry Richardson, Michelle
Mason, David Sobel, Valerie Tiberius, Jeanette Kennett, David Owens, Melissa
Barry and Garrett Cullity among many others.

Supreme downsizing

Adrian Vermeule is profiled and his work discussed in this article, from the Boston Globe's terrific Ideas section.

David Currie, 1936-2007

I only met Professor Currie on a few occasions, but I am a great admirer and beneficiary of his books in constitutional history (and learned conflicts of laws from his casebook). He was a major and multifaceted scholar, and an institution-builder at Chicago Law and of the Green Bag journal.

Chicago Law has a full obituary.

Final ASPLP Schedule

The schedule for the Annual Meeting of the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy, held in conjunction with the APA East, is now final.

American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy: Loyalty
Baltimore Marriott Waterfront

Friday, December 28, 2007

2:45 - 4:10pm: "Lawyerly Fidelity"
Location: Falkland (Fourth Floor)
Paper: Daniel Markovits
Commentators: Lynn M. Mather; Martin S. Lederman
Chair: Sanford V. Levinson

4:20-5:45pm: " For the Sake of Comrades"
Location: Falkland (Fourth Floor)
Paper: Nancy Sherman
Commentators: Ryan K. Balot; Phillip Carter
Chair: Jacob T. Levy

6-8pm: ASPLP Reception
Location: Kent A (Fourth Floor)


Saturday, December 29, 2007

8-9am: ASPLP Breakfast
Location: Dover B (Third Floor)

9-11am: "Partisan Loyalties"
Location: Dover B (Third Floor)
Paper: Russell Muirhead
Commentators: Richard H. Pildes; David Estlund
Chair: Nancy L. Rosenblum

Welcome to the blogosphere...

to Public Reason, a group blog on political theory and political philosophy with quite a list of potential contributors. The mission statement:

Public Reason is a new group blog for political philosophers and theorists. The purpose of the blog is to create an informal but professional online venue where members of the academic political philosophy and theory community can discuss their work. Academic blogging has undergone a remarkable growth lately. A number of group blogs have been created by philosophers and political scientists, but none is specifically dedicated to political philosophy or theory. Public Reason aims to remedy that deficit. Contributors to the blog will have the ability to post a number of items:

* Literature discussions. If you have something to say about a recent article in journals such as Ethics or the Journal of Political Philosophy, you can link to the article and post a discussion of it on the blog.
* Reading groups. Work through a book chapter by chapter with colleagues.
* Working papers. Upload or link to working papers you would like to receive feedback on.
* Conference announcements. Post information about forthcoming conferences or calls for papers.
* Teaching discussions. Unsure about how to best explain sovereign authority in Hobbes’s Leviathan or the constraints of deliberative democracy to students? Post ideas about conveying theoretical concepts in the classroom.
* Podcasts. If you are giving a talk or just want to read a paper for colleagues to listen to on their iPods over lunch, record an mp3 file, upload it here, and subscribe to Public Reason podcasts via iTunes.
* General issues. Raise an issue of academic interest not sufficiently addressed in any literature you can find.

Why should an academic blog? For the same reason you attend conferences, give talks, ask questions, chat with colleagues, read books, and publish papers. An academic group blog is merely an online tool used to continue the conversations begun on the journal pages and in the conference halls. In that respect, Public Reason is not intended as a vehicle for purely personal reflections, social observations, or “Friday night cat blogging.”

Whuh-huh-yeahbuhwha?

Via Brad DeLong, Bruce Bartlett said:

Under the best of circumstances, getting a tenured position at an elite university is very hard. Because you can't get rid of someone with tenure and may be stuck with them as a colleague for decades, it stands to reason that the process of choosing someone for such a position is going to be very intense. For the same reason, the choice is not entirely meritocratic--elite universities don't choose the best scholars as professors any more than they choose the best applicants as students. There are a lot of factors that go into a hiring decision that don't favor conservatives and go beyond simple ideology.

Just to mention one area, conservatives have a tendency to choose sub-disciplines within academic fields that are not very fashionable. For example, in political science, conservatives tend to gravitate toward political theory--a field that has been out of fashion since at least the 1960s. In history, conservatives often excel at military and diplomatic history--again, fields that have been out of fashion for decades.

One of the basic elements of liberalism is a greater affinity for things that are new and trendy. For conservatives, it is the opposite--an affinity for the familiar, the tried and true. This means that conservatives are always going to be behind the curve in any field where changing fashion is a key to advancement.

err...

even setting aside the "out of fashion" part:

While there has been a steady flow of people who are in some sense conservative into political theory thanks to the existence of Straussianism, the subfield is no great magnet for conservatives. Impressionistically I'd say that, of the small number of (even-loosely-described) conservatives who enter political science, a large proportion end up in international relations, a somewhat smaller proportion in formal modelling/ institutions/ American politics.

Indeed, it's an often-discussed pedagogical problem that we have so little conservative political theory to match with liberal, libertarian, socialist, democratic, feminist, and multiculturalist theory on syllabi. One of the big themes of the ASPLP conference on "American Conservative Thought and Politics" in January was, "Why so little explicitly conservative political theory?"

Nor is it remotely the case that political theory, for all its affinity with great books programs, is immune to faddishness, fashion, or trendiness!

I can't imagine what Bartlett means by this.

Weekend reading

Off at the Association for Political Theory conference having a grand time. Your assigned reading while I'm away:

chez Solum, Jensen on Attire & a Comment on the "goes with" Relationship. (Trust me.)

Chez Yglesias, Why So Few Utilitarians?,which expresses a crucially important and underappreciated truth of academic life that's much more general than the case discussed.

Image of the day

Me: I'm in one home stretch... and can see the guy holding the starting pistol for the next race just past the finish line.

Wayne Norman: This sounds like an allegory of my life; all our lives. Except that that guy with the starting pistol usually positions himself long before the finish line of the preceding race.

Me: well, yeah. But I'm not going to acknowledge he's there until I'm past the preceding finish line.

Wayne: yeah, otherwise it's just too scary. It's like when police states get to host the olympics and there are guys with guns ringing the track.

The future is another country

Candidates for the Nobel Prize in literature as identified by betting markets and "in Stockholm literary circles," according to an article that went online an hour ago at this writing: Phillip Roth, Haruki Murakami, Amos Oz, Yves Bonnefoy, Mario Vargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes, Joyce Carol Oates, Ko Un, Antonio Tabucchi, Claudio Magris, Thomas Pynchon, Assia Djebar, Peter Nadas, Maryse Conde.

The prize was awarded 40 minutes ago to... Doris Lessing.

One-way

I haven't had time to blog about the extraordinarily depressing results of the La Presse poll on the accommodation of religious minorities (linked story and poll results are both in French). Still don't, but I will at some point. It's not good. Every accommodation of or basic freedom for a non-Christian religion-- prayer spaces, individuals wearing hijabs or turbans or kirpans in public schools or public employment, cafeterias serving kosher or halaal food-- is opposed by a Quebecois majority, and typically by 65-90%. Meanwhile, 68% want to leave the Catholic crucifix in the National Assembly (NB to non-locals: Quebec's provincial parliament).

The perils of generational commentary

I'm currently reading a book by a very distinguished academic-- with 'distinguished' used in both the sincere and the euphemistic sense. And I've been struck by the author's repeated disgruntlement with "recent" developments in this or that academic literature-- where "recent" typically means the mid-to-late 80s and never means anything later than the mid-90s.

I thought of that again in light of this David Brooks column (hat tip Phoebe Maltz). In discussing the recent development of the unattached decade or so between college and marriage, referred to as the "odyssey" years, he observes:

And as the new generational structure solidifies, social and economic entrepreneurs will create new rites and institutions. Someday people will look back and wonder at the vast social changes wrought by the emerging social group that saw their situations first captured by “Friends” and later by “Knocked Up.”

NB: "Friends" debuted in 1994. At its outset, Ross had a Ph.D. and an ex-wife of several years, making him, at bare minimum, 26 or 27 years old. It has been off the air for more than three years, and by the time it ended almost every lead character was married, had children, or both. Ross would be 40 by now.

A current 25-year old was 12 when Friends debuted. Even a current 30-year old was 17. They did not see their situations captured by Friends then. They were 22 or 27 when it went off the air, and also didn't see their situations captured by the old folks struggling with biological clocks and the legacies of three divorces.

By contrast, "Knocked Up" was released in 2007. Old people my age who might have been twenty-something slackers in the mid-90s are not now 23-year olds, and do not see our situations reflected in the experience of people accidentally cutting their "odyssey years" short. Indeed, people who identified with "Friends" when it was on are more likely to be entering fertility-treatment time than accidental-pregnancy-in-post-college-hookup time.

In short: No one can meet Brooks' description. Much as I might like to believe that there's no great difference between a current 40-year old and a current 23-year old, my wishing it doesn't make it so. It's an occupational hazard of talking about generations younger than oneself to run them all together, and boomers are especially prone to it, but that means you probably don't want to use conspicuously dated and dateable markers for your discussion, even if you think it makes you seem contemorary and with-it.

Politics in the academy, part MLCCCXVII of a continuing series

From the Chronicle.

Conservatives are a small minority within the American professoriate, according to a major study whose results were released on Saturday. The study -- which is arguably the best-designed survey of American faculty beliefs since the early 1970s -- found that only 9.2 percent of college instructors are conservatives, and that only 20.4 percent voted for George W. Bush in 2004.

But at a symposium on Saturday at Harvard University, the study's authors cast doubt on certain claims made by conservative critics of academe. They emphasized that American faculty members are not uniformly left-wing. On most issues, they said, college instructors' views are better characterized as "centrist" or "center-left." And there is evidence of a convergence toward moderation: Faculty members who are 35 or younger are less likely than their elders to be left-wing (and also less likely to be conservative).

"The claim of extreme leftism is not well supported," said Solon J. Simmons, an assistant professor of sociology at George Mason University's Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution. "But the number of conservatives -- 9.2 percent -- is lower than what one might have found in the past. If there is any change in the data over time, conservatives seem to be falling away from the academy and being replaced by, perhaps, moderates." Mr. Simmons conducted the study with Neil Gross, an assistant professor of sociology at Harvard.
[...]

Among the study's findings:

* Faculty members lean sharply to the left on issues of gender, sexuality, and foreign policy. [...]
* On issues of race and economic policy, the leftward tilt is much less pronounced. [...]

* Liberal-arts colleges have the highest concentrations of left-of-center faculty members. Only 3.9 percent of instructors at liberal-arts colleges are conservatives. Community colleges have the smallest proportion of liberals (37.1 percent) and the highest proportion of conservatives (19 percent). "Elite, Ph.D.-granting institutions" fall in the middle, with 10.2 percent of faculty members identifying themselves as conservative. That pattern contrasts with the well-known studies conducted in the early 1970s by Everett Carll Ladd Jr. and Seymour Martin Lipset, who found that conservatives were rarest at the most elite institutions.

Conservatives are rarest in the humanities (3.6 percent) and social sciences (4.9 percent), and most common in the health sciences (20.5 percent) and business (24.5 percent). Only 7.8 percent of instructors in the physical and biological sciences are conservatives, which is a sharp decline from the level found by Mr. Ladd and Mr. Lipset in the 1970s.

* Faculty members broadly support the idea of political openness on campus. When asked whether "the goal of diversity should include fostering diversity of political views among faculty members," 68.8 percent agreed. (That figure struck one participant in the symposium as disturbingly low. "Where are the other 31 percent?" asked Jonathan L. Zimmerman, a professor of the history of education at New York University. "What are they thinking?") When asked whether "professors are as curious and open-minded today as they have ever been," 79.9 percent of the total sample said yes -- but 46.3 percent of the conservative respondents disagreed.

The scholars at Saturday's meeting offered a wide variety of arguments about what those numbers might mean, and whether they are a problem for academe. Harvard's former president, Lawrence H. Summers, praised the sophistication of Mr. Gross and Mr. Simmons's study but said that he views the results more pessimistically than they do.

"The data in this paper surprised me in the opposite direction that it surprised the authors," said Mr. Summers, who is now a university professor at Harvard. "It made me think that there is even less ideological diversity in the American university than I had imagined."

In his remarks, Mr. Summers concentrated on a subset of the data concerning elite, Ph.D.-granting universities. In humanities and social-science departments at those institutions, Mr. Summers pointed out, not a single instructor reported voting for President Bush in 2004.

Regardless of the salience of that last metric, I think Summers is right that the headline numbers mask some very important variation. If that whopping 9.2% conservative figure is that high because of community colleges and business departments; if those figures of 3.6% humanities and 4.9% social sciences are right, then in the areas where the charge of political bias in the academy are most prevalent and most important, things are more uniform than I would have thought.

I've been reading stories about this kind of thing for years, and I was still startled by those figures.

Inside Higher Ed has a non-gated story along with a more detailed breakdown of figures.

You know...

It would have been nice if the Red Sox had been playing like this for the past two months. But all things considered, I'll take the current arrangement and not complain; better a great postseason than a great end to the season.

Update: And, of course, if those were the last three innings of Roger Clemens' career, that's just icing on the cake. I can't really say that I'm rooting for Joe Torre to lose his job, but my admiration for Torre doesn't extend to the Rocket.

Reasonable accommodation hearings fact of the day

From the Gazette:

"When I face a Catholic priest or a Muslim mullah, I have the same fear as a gay man," he said in English - the first time anyone has addressed the commission in English. (Ten per cent of Gaspe residents have English as a mother tongue.)

I know that the hearings haven't reached Montreal yet, but I was still surprised by that. It's politic of anglophones to tread lightly in these debates about Quebec identity, but still.

Relatedly, it was pointed out to me yesterday that (mid-grant-application) I'd missed a big story last week: PQ leader Pauline Marois has declared that the solution to the difficulties exposed by the reasonable accommodation debate is... sovereignty!

Marois says the closely watched Bouchard-Taylor commission hearings on reasonable accomodation show that Quebecers are asking questions about their own identity and history.

"Quebecers need to make peace with themselves and get past the uncertainty surrounding their identity by creating their own country," Marois said.

Yes, I know what happens when your only policy is a hammer, but, c'mon. If you're in that position and you're confronted with a glass object that needs repair, you could at least maintain a decent silence instead of volunteering to give it a good whack. I'm sure it's a very nice hammer, and maybe it's the most important tool in the toolbox, but the world's a complex place and some things really aren't nails.

If Quebec were either thoroughly laique or thoroughly Catholic, then sovereignty would just expose religious minorities to a hostile, homogenous local majority. Sovereignty would solve the problem in the same way that it would solve the problem of the First Nations; the minority would have no chance, and the majority wouldn't have to be bothered listening anymore. Since Quebec continues to have a real identity divide-- laique/ Catholic, urban/ rural, etc., just like any healthy democratic society-- it might not turn out quite that way. Then again it might; after all, the great discovery of the past year is that the Catholic and laique voers can find common ground in excluding Muslims and Orthodox Jews. A sovereign Quebec would be dancing a delicate dance with its anglophone minority; a good round of bashing smaller and weaker minorities might be just the safe identity-building tonic that the nationalist doctor ordered.

Note that this doesn't mean sovereignty mightn't be justified all things considered (though I don't happen to think so). But we know enough about post-secession nation-building and the behavior of newly-more-ethnically-homogenous states to know that the majority's sudden mastery in its own house doesn't make it confident and therefore tolerant toward minorities. Quite the contrary. Now, to be fair, Marois didn't say that it would do so; she offered no guarantees about how the Quebecois identity struggle would be resolved. But either she's openly embracing the "there will be no problem, because there are more of us than of you" exclusionary path, or (more likely) she's wrongly (maybe sincerely, but still wrongly) suggesting that a sovereign people could get over its identity crisis and stop being so threatened by minorities. That's not how these things work...

'Never ever talk to reporters without a script' watch

via the Chronicle:

The dean of admissions at the University of Chicago recently told The Wall Street Journal that he would give Barack Obama’s two daughters “a break” in the admissions process, even though the presidential candidate has said that his girls “should probably be treated by any admissions officer as folks who are pretty advantaged.”

Mr. Obama, who generally supports the use of race in college admissions decisions, made the remark earlier this year in response to a question from ABC’s George Stephanopoulos about whether his daughters should be able to benefit from affirmative action when the time comes for them to go to college.

In the Journal story, Theodore A. O’Neill, the admissions dean at Chicago, touted improvements in the racial and gender diversity of the student body at his institution, where Mr. Obama was once a lecturer. (The university, the article said, used to be about two-thirds male and overwhelmingly white. Now the gender ratio is about even, and 7 percent of the student body is black, 9 percent is Hispanic, and 1 percent is American Indian.)

Mr. O’Neill was quoted as saying that he disagreed with Mr. Obama, a U.S. senator from Illinois, on the issue of his daughters and whether they should get a break in admissions decisions: “Those children, for all their privileges, will have interesting things to say about American society based on what I’m assuming their experiences are.” [emphasis added]

The legal need to justify affirmative action in terms of "diversity" and the educational benefits students outside the preferred groups leads to all sorts of rhetorical contortions, and that's far from the worst. But, geez. And it gets worse when you realize that the assumption would not be tested by seeing whether, say, an applicant had anything interesting to say about American society in an application essay, or asking about actual experiences. The assumption is both triggered and rendered unfalsifiable by the 'race' box checked off on the application form.

The clean-shaven life is not...

This is most entertaining.

We have a report of this exchange from antiquity, involving the Stoic Epictetus:

“Come now, Epictetus, take off your beard.”
– If I am a philosopher, I answer, I will not take it off.
“Then I will take off your head.”
– If that will do you any good, take it.

And John Sellars tells this story in his book on The Art of Living (2003, p.15):

“In AD 176 the Roman Emperor and Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius created four chairs of philosophy in Athens, one for each of the major schools. When, a few years later, the holder of the Peripatetic Chair died, two equally well qualified candidates applied for the post. One of the candidates, Diocles, was already very old so it seemed that his rival, Bagoas, would be sure to get the job. However, one of the selection committee objected to Bagoas on the grounds that he did not have [a] beard saying that, above all else, a philosopher should always have a long beard in order to inspire confidence in his students. Bagoas responded by saying that if philosophers are to be judged only by the length of their beards then perhaps the chair of Peripatetic philosophy should be given to a billy-goat. The matter was considered to be of such grave importance that it was referred to the highest authorities in Rome, presumably to the Emperor himself…”

Over the page, Sellars suggests that it was the mission of the three philosophers to Rome in 155 BCE which created the popular link between philosophers and beards. That was the famous occasion (which haunts Grotius scholarship down to the present day) when the Sceptic Carneades made a speech in favour of justice one day, and a speech against it the next, very much annoying Cato the Censor in the process. But these were bearded Greeks in clean-shaven Rome, and the Romans remembered the beards.

Y'know, that's actually believable. And funny.

There's more; read the whole thing.

Great moments in multiculturalism, continued

Women's group targets hijab, yarmulke

If the Quebec Council on the Status of Women has its way, teachers, doctors and anyone working in a public institution in this province would not be permitted to wear hijabs or yarmulkes.

The council is calling on the Quebec government to ban what it calls visible religious symbols.

While a crucifix or a Star of David on a necklace would be acceptable, council president Christiane Pelchat said, public employees should not be permitted to wear such overt symbols as the hijab, a head covering worn by Muslim women, or the yarmulke, a skullcap worn by Jewish men.

The council plans to argue for a ban on religious symbols before Quebec's roving commission on "reasonable accommodation" of immigrants and religious minorities.

The commission's hearings are to wrap up Nov. 30.

That would mean female Muslim teachers would not be allowed to wear a hijab in public schools, Pelchat said this week during a meeting with The Gazette's editorial board.

"Teachers are role models and they should be promoting equality between men and women," Pelchat said. "Because you prevent someone from wearing a hijab, it doesn't mean you are preventing them from believing."

Pelchat, a former Liberal MNA, said the council believes "a secular state promotes freedom of religion for all believers of various denominations."

The council also stated it believes the right to equality between men and women trumps the rights to freedom of religion.
[...]

The Quebec Council on the Status of Women is a 20-member body that advises the government on issues relating to women.

Announcing the Okin-Young Award in Feminist Political Theory

The Women and Politics and Foundations of Political Theory sections of the American Political Science Association and the Women’s Caucus for Political Science announce the Okin-Young Award in Feminist Political Theory. The award commemorates the scholarly, mentoring, and professional contributions of Susan Moller Okin and Iris Marion Young to the development of the field of feminist political theory. This annual award recognizes the best paper on feminist political theory published in an English language academic journal during the previous calendar year. Papers will be considered by self-nomination or nomination by other individuals. The award carries a cash award of $600. To be eligible, the article must have been published in 2007.

The deadline for submissions is February 15, 2008. To be considered for the award, one copy of the article should be sent to each member of the award committee by mail or electronically as a PDF attachment:

Award committee chair:

Professor Nancy J. Hirschmann
Department of Political Science
The University of Pennsylvania
Stiteler Hall
Philadelphia, PA 19104
njh@sas.upenn.edu


Professor Kathy Ferguson
Department of Political Science
University of Hawai'i
640 Saunders Hall
2424 Maile Way
Honolulu, HI 96822
kferguso@hawaii.edu

Professor Joanna Vecchiarelli Scott
Eastern Michigan University
1525 Harding Road
Ann Arbor, MI 48104
joanna.v.scott@gmail.com

Hither and yon

Beginning today: The Plural States of Recognition, Montreal

This Saturday: CSPT: "Intellectual Foundings: J.G.A. Pocock and the Cambridge School", at Columbia.

Two weekends hence: Association for Political Theory, London, Ontario. (Time to make my travel arrangements...)

Two weekends after that: Immigration, Minorities, and Multiculturalism in Democracies, back here in Montreal.

Scholar-blogging
Dani Rodrik:

Going into this, my expectation was that blog popularity and scholarship would have little (or perhaps even a negative) correlation. After all, the skills of a blogger (writing quickly and well, working for short-term results, spending a lot of time reading and digesting others' work) are not necessarily those that a scholar who wants long-term impact needs to have. Plus, there is the time spent on the blog--which does mean less time for research. Remember the Acemoglu response: I am too darn busy writing research papers... And one can certainly be an excellent and popular blogger--providing stimulating commentary on others' work--without having large scholarly output or high impact.

And yet the correlation between how well one does on bloggership and on scholarship turns out to be positive and statistically highly significant. The rank correlation between the two is 0.27, and it is significant at the 99% level of confidence.

Too funny.

At Sean Carroll's Cosmic Variance: Academics: Still Totally Lame, a commentary on the Chronicle symposium on guilty pleasures.

Arrrgh! Stuff like that sets back the cause of academic non-geekiness for centuries!

The reading list

Actually, scratch that: immediately read upon receipt of the journal, and highly recommended.

Lee Ward, "Montesquieu on Federalism and Anglo-Gothic Constitutionalism," 37(4) Publius 551-77, 2007.

It's hard to be novel, correct, and concise in writing about Montesquieu; indeed, it's hard to be any two of those at the same time. This article manages all three.

Taylor speaks out

The latest from the Taylor-Bouchard commission:

'Who's to judge?' commission asks
Jeff Heinrich, The Gazette


A loquacious Charles Taylor made his daytime debut today at the Quebec "reasonable accommodations" commission her co-chairs with Gérard Bouchard - and waded right into the controversial debate over veils and kirpans.

His first interjection took the safe form of a series of questions, preserving the neutrality the commission is trying to maintain as it hears from Quebecers across the province on the touchy issue of religion in society.

"It's a question I've wanted to ask of many (people who've presented) briefs," Taylor told Argenteuil resident John Saywell, one of 30 residents who addressed the commission, whose 17-city tour made a stop in the Laurentians today and last night.

"You talked about religious symbols and what they mean - but who decides?" asked Taylor, a Montreal philosopher and author.

"For example, some say the kirpan is a knife and is therefore an instrument of violence. Some people think the hijab reflects a situation of inequality between men and women. Some people think the crucifix reflects the violence we're now up against.

"But who's to judge?" Taylor asked.

Sociological studies in France and elsewhere have shown that young Muslim women wear the veil for myriad reasons, he said. Some do it out of faith, some do it out of opposition to their non-practicing parents, some do it out of reaction against the secular society around them.

"Is it really possible in a free society that someone can define for me under law what a symbol means for me?" Taylor asked. "I ask the question: Is there not something profoundly (wrong) about saying we'll decide in the National Assembly that what a symbol means is such-and-such and that if you don't like it, shut up?"

Added Bouchard, a sociologist and historian: "Isn't it the right of a group to live on the margins of society?"

The discussion got crustier when Taylor confronted Lise Bourgault, mayor of Brownsburg-Chatham who also was a Conservative MP from 1984 to 1993. In her presentation, Bourgault called for religious clothes to be banned entirely in public, because for her, veiled women "project an image of oppression" and makes her more and more xenophobic.

"I go to the Adonis supermarket (in north-end Montreal), I see women in veils behind their husbands who are pushing the shopping cart. It goes against so many battles we won for the equality for the sexes," Bourgault said.

"Why do people feel so threatened?" Bouchard asked her.

"We're threatened by terrorist movements," the mayor replied.

"There's reason to be afraid, but we should be afraid in an intelligent way," Taylor shot back.

"I throw into question your reasoning."

Bouchard also had a comment.

"If the burqa starts making in-roads in Quebec," he told Bourgault, "I don't think you'd be among the first victims."

The chairmen were more gentle with Ste-Sophie resident Lidia Quintana, a Chilean immigrant. Her sister, Carmen, was a household name in Quebec in 1986 when she came here for lengthy medical treatment after being severely burned by Chilean troops under the Pinochet regime.

Carmen has since returned to Santiago. had three children and and teaches psychology at university. Lidia married a French-Canadian, had children of her own, and settled in the Laurentians 16 years ago. Today she said immigrants should try harder to adapt to Quebec society, especially by learning French, as she did.

And she said accommodations of a small number of religious minorities go too far. Quebec should draw up a "Charter of Rights and Responsibilties of Immigrants" for everyone to sign, "before this problem degenerates," she said to applause, evoking an idea others have brought up during the hearings as well.

"You talk about a moral contract," Taylor replied. "You don't think that goes both ways?" he asked.

"We've heard that sometimes a lack of integration makes people fall back on their closed group and a feeling of alienation. It seems there's a reciprocal relationship going on that doesn't always work," he said.

"It's not just about accommodations."

Hear, hear, though I fear that he will not be heard.

There's also an update to my previous post on the hearings.

Great moments in multiculturalism

From the latest Bouchard-Taylor commission hearings:

"It's really a mentality that's separate," St. Hippolyte resident Lise Casavant said of the Hasidism, adding that immigrants should sign a new Quebec citizenship charter "or choose another province," a sentiment several other speakers also evoked.

John Saywell, of Argenteuil, said when he hears a Hasidic Jewish leader speaking only in English on the TV news, he thinks it's wrong. The community should make the effort to speak French, he said.

And Lise Provencher, of St. Jerome, said immigrants are "buying their way in" to Quebec and that Jews are the worst because they're "the most powerful. ... It's always been said that the Jews are the trampoline of money in the world." After she spoke, the crowd applauded.

At the last round:

The Roman Catholic religion has played an important role in Quebec history and its imagery should remain in public institutions, said Saguenay Mayor Jean Tremblay at hearings into immigrant accommodation.

Catholicism is still very important for a majority of Quebecers and that heritage should be reflected in the public realm, he told the Bouchard-Taylor commission on Thursday.

"The Catholic religion is one of the nicest values we have in Quebec," the mayor declared at the second day of hearings in the Lac-Saint-Jean region, north of Quebec City.

Tremblay is one of a few mayors left in Quebec who still start council meetings with a prayer. He defended that practice.

"We are a little easy-going," he said. "When someone who represents three per cent of the population wants to do something, everyone bends. But when the mayor wants to say his prayer, we tell him to respect secular principles."[...]

Marcien Bisson, a retired Saguenay resident, suggested Quebec introduce a law to eliminate kosher foods he said are ubiquitous despite the province's small Jewish population.

Bisson also asked Quebec declare God's supremacy in order to respect the Canadian Constitution.

Monsieur le Maire and Monsieur Bisson, meet Ms. Asselin-Vaillancourt.

Allowing women to wear a veil in public is a major impediment to assimilation because it is a personal and political act, said Marthe Asselin-Vaillancourt, a feminist activist who works with a local retired persons' association.

"Wearing a veil does not encourage integration. It produces negative effects. It irritates and bothers people," she said.

Asselin-Vaillancourt suggested future immigrants to Quebec be well-informed about the province's values of secularity [laicite] and gender equality before they come to Canada.

"We have to send a clear message that when they choose Quebec, they are choosing and accepting to live in a society that supports equality between the sexes," she said.

NB: this is an important part of the dynamic that's being revealed through the commission hearings. The Herouxville norms wanted it both ways (Quebec is a laique society that respects its heritage with giant public crucifixes), but that doesn't entirely seem to be the norm. Both sides in the 40-year-old Quiet Revolution fight know that they're at an impasse and are frustrated with the status quo. And both sides are willing to take it out on religious minorities. The secularists don't like 'em because they have, and are public about, religions. And the old-line Catholics don't like 'em because, well, they're not Catholic, and they [further] undermine the old Catholic identity of the province. We can hear sweeping declarations one right after the other, each stated as if it were obvious fact and not frustrated aspiration: Quebec is laique. Quebec is Catholic. Both are offered as reasons not to accommodate religious minorities; but the reasons can't both be valid ones, and no one seems to point out that the divide itself undermines any claim that social policy should be made on the basis of the homogenous shared Quebecois values.

Update:
The CBC coverage has some other choice moments.

On Monday, the commission heard from several Quebecers who are upset about kosher foods. Many mass-produced packaged foods available in supermarkets are kosher, which means a rabbi supervised their preparation to ensure the products meet Jewish dietary laws.

Laurentians resident Émile Dion said that makes him angry because he believes the cost of getting a rabbi's blessing raises food prices by as much as 10 per cent. "Why should I pay 10 per cent more for the Jews?" he asked during his comments, which went on for several minutes. "It forces us to eat kosher, and I don't want to," he said in French.

Midway through Monday's hearings, commission co-chair Bouchard interrupted the comments to remind the audience that only about two per cent of Quebec's population is made up of Muslim and Jews.

"Do you see a certain disproportion there, between your concerns and the cause?" he asked in French.

Ten percent! And I'm pretty sure no one's forcing the gentleman to eat food with Jew-cooties in it; sausage remains readily available, and he can always combine his kosher milk with some kosher meat to keep them the cooties at bay.

[A bit of economics: in the wildly implausible situation in which the rabbinic approval added that much to the price of food, and given that kosher-observant Jews make up a tiny share of Quebec's population, there would be a massive, obvious opening for a producer who didn't get the approval and provided food for 10% less to the rest of us. Conversely, if the market-clearing price for a box of corn flakes really is $3.30 rather than $3, what makes you think that abolishing rabbinic approval would lead the producer to cut the price?]

I wish I had any idea whether the coverage of the hearings was representative of what's said at them, and more importantly just how unrepresentative people who sign up to speak at them (guaranteed to be the people with axes to grind, bees in their bonnets, and time on their hands to concoct elaborate theories-- ahem...) are of their regions' populations.

Since I noted last year...

that there were no academic humanists or social scientists among the new MacArthur Fellows, I thought I should note that this year there is one. "Jay Rubenstein, an associate professor of history at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. He is a medieval historian who illuminates how violent events such as the First Crusade are recorded and remembered by future generations."

Otherwise: hard scientists, artists, curators, activists, etc.