The first Montreal Political Theory Workshop of the year, and the formal launch of the new Groupe de recherche interuniversitaire en philosophie politique de Montréal (GRIPP), will be 19 September 2008, 13.00-15.00, in the Heritage Room of the Faculty Club at McGill University, 3450 McTavish Street.

The speaker will be Charles Taylor, McGill '52, Professor Emeritus at McGill University, former holder of the Chichele Chair in Social and Political Theory at All Souls College, Oxford; the author of works including Hegel and Modern Society, Sources of the Self, and A Secular Age; and winner of the Templeton Prize and the Kyoto Prize. He will speak on "Secularism in International Perspective/ Laicité: une
perspective comparative." The reading for the session is chapter 7 of the Bouchard-Taylor commission report; attendees are asked to read that before the session.

A reception will follow, at which the winners of this year's GRIPP graduate Fellowship will be announced and welcomed.

Posts at Shalem College

[Very interesting initiative! JTL]

The Shalem Center, a Jerusalem research and educational institute, is applying to open Israel’s first liberal arts college. Shalem College will be a small, competitive institution of higher learning aimed at preparing highly qualified Israeli and foreign students for a life of service. It will offer a 4-year B.A. based on a broad core curriculum including studies in philosophy, political theory, history, economics, Bible and Jewish tradition, Middle East studies, literature and science. Students will choose among several majors.

The Center invites applications for the position of:


• Chairman, Economics Department

• Chairman, Department of Philosophy, Political Theory
and Religion (PPR)

• Chairman, Department of Middle East Studies

The Department Chairman will be responsible for all educational and administrative aspects of operating the department.
A qualified candidate should have a record of academic achievement, a commitment to undergraduate education, experience in academic administration, and an ability to supervise and mentor a diverse faculty and exceptionally capable students.
Additional information is available at www.shalem.org.il.

Interested candidates should send a letter of application and curriculum vitae to Marion Jacobs, V.P. for Human Resources, at marionj@shalem.org.il. Mailing address: 13 Yehoshua Bin-Nun St., Jerusalem 93102, Israel.

Review of applications will begin immediately and continue until the positions are filled.

I never did get around...

to writing my long-planned essay on the question "how can a libertarian live in Canada?" which I was asked an astonishing number of times in 2006-07. And now it seems it's too late. Will Wilkinson reports that in the latest Cato Institute/ Fraser Institute study of economic liberalism in the world, Canada has "has leap-frogged the U.S. to take 7th place, completely humiliating the tied-for-8th place land of the ever-less-free, home of the brave."

And, one assumes, the study was completed before the U.S> started nationalizinfg the commanding heights of the financial sector.

As Will notes, if the US isn't even obviously more free-market than Canada, then once civil liberties and social freedoms are taken into account Canada is surely the freer society.

VON KANT BIS HEGEL: Naturalism and Naturphilosophie

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

Naturalism and Naturphilosophie

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

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

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

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


12 October 2008, Sunday

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

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

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

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

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

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

The slow-motion end-from-above of capitalism...

is making me want to back and reread Schumpeter. I'm pretty sure this isn't how it was supposed to happen-- I remember corporate-bureaucratic managerial sclerosis that crowded out entrepreneurial energy, and I don't think the exotic financial instruments market has been anything like that. But still...

Of possible interest...

to the students who, in last term's evaluations, criticized me for drinking my in-class coffee from environment-unfriendly disposable cups instead of reusable mugs.

What is the "greenest" way to drink coffee around the office?

If you use a disposable cup, it's going to linger a long while on this Earth—polystyrene isn't biodegradable at all, and for all practical purposes, you shouldn't expect a paper cup to degrade very fast in a landfill, either.[...]

Pound-for-pound, petroleum-based polystyrene is a pretty bad material—it takes twice as much energy to produce a gram of polystyrene as it does to produce the same quantity of ceramic. But you'll need at least 70 times as much energy to produce a ceramic mug as you will to manufacture a polystyrene cup, and probably even more to produce a stainless steel mug.

How could that be? Simply speaking, it's all about mass: A polystyrene cup is much lighter than a permanent mug. That means it requires far less material, so the fact that it's made from petroleum is more than made up for by the greater mass of the mugs. [...]

Washing your mug will add to its energy burden. Research from the early 1990s suggests that each time you clean a mug in the dishwasher, it takes about as much energy—and would probably produce as many emissions—as it takes simply to produce a new polystyrene cup[...] As the Lantern has pointed out before, washing the mug by hand may not absolve you, either— although you can help your case by using cold water.

And, NB: in an office without a useful dishwashing sink, the likely prospect is of washing the mug multiple times-- say, rinsing it once in hot water in the rest room, and then taking it home regularly to run through the dishwasher. In other words, it's highly tricky to figure out the math here.

Update: Chris Lawrence's and Nick Troester's reactions make me worry that the tone of this post came out wrong-- I was only amused by the commentary in evaluations, and it built on some running jokes in class. One anonymous benefactor gave me a stainless steel McGill coffee mug to try to reform my sinner's ways. It was all in good fun.

Time to completion statistics...

modeled and explained.

Hakkarainen on Hume

The MONTREAL INTERUNIVERSITY WORKSHOP IN THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY presents:

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

Tuesday, 23 September, 6-8 PM

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


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

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

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

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

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

The fate of Open University, continued

Jeremy Young offers a diagnosis of what happened.

I think he omits at least three (interrelated) factors:

1) We had nothing in common besides professorial appointments. Volokh Conspiracy: Mainly libertarianism mainly lawprofs. Crooked Timber: Mainly social democratish mainly social scientists and political philosophers. Liberty and Power: Hard-core libertarians, with a healthy dose of history profs. Cliopatra: history profs. Prawfsblog: law profs. Open University: umm... We didn't have anything in common by discipline, by generation, by ideological or methodological outlook, by attitude about public intellectualism or the relationship between public commentary and scholarship, etc., etc. Someone who goes to Marginal Revolution to read Tyler will still likely enjoy reading Alex if Tyler happens to be offline that day. I'm not sure that there were any two regular OU bloggers who served as complements in that way.

2) Moreover, we were stylistically very different; I venture to guess that the readers of Richard Stern's diarist-style entries didn't overlap with, say, the readers of Alan Wolfe's commentaries on contemporary politics. And there wasn't much indication that the practitioners of one style were much enthused by the practitioners of another.

3) There was very close to no conversation among the bloggers, and what there was, was as likely to be contentious as anything else.

And, of course, the obvious:

4) It was someone else's blogspace (TNR's) but the "someone else" wasn't a person who would do a lot of blogging him- or herself to set the tone. Some of us refrained from the blog with our various different kinds of posts, because it seemed rude to monopolize the space-- but then no one ever got into the habit of constantly blogging there.

Hither and yon

"Liberals and Libertarians: Common Ground or Separate Agendas?", Thursday, October 23, 2008, 4:30 p.m., Dodds Auditorium, Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University.

Panel discussion with:

Eric Alterman, Professor of English, Brooklyn College of CUNY, columnist, The Nation

Jacob T. Levy *99, Tomlinson Professor of Political Theory, McGill University

Brink Lindsey '84, Vice President for Research, Cato Institute

Stephen Macedo, Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Politics and the University Center for Human Values. Director, University Center for Human Values

Douglas S. Massey, Henry G. Bryant Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs

Paul E. Starr, Stuart Professor of Communications and Public Affairs in the Woodrow Wilson School. Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs

Will Wilkinson, Research Fellow and Managing Editor, Cato Unbound.

Libertarians for Obama, continued

Megan McArdle edition.

Here's the thing: I dislike McCain on an intense, visceral level. I don't trust him with power. I find his personality brutish and unkind, his jokes about various women grotesque, and his political philosophy hopelessly addled. The ad he let his campaign run about Obama's sex-ed program was, as one journalistic acquaintance puts it, "beyond tawdry". I find National Greatness conservatism deeply troubling, and the idea that society would be better if it were more like the military alarming. I honor the military virtues--in the military. I do not think that America would be a better or nobler place if we were a leetle more like Sparta.

And while I am deeply grateful, and impressed, by McCain's suffering as a POW, I do not think that this makes me obligated to like him, or to vote for him. There's no admissions process to be a POW, and it stands to reason that some of them must have been people who weren't particularly admirable. The more I learn about McCain, the more I think that he's one of them. Or rather, I think of him like that kind of jerkily sexist 22-year-old of whom one thinks, "he's going to be a really good guy when he grows up". And I wish he would. But when he turned 70, I sort of lost hope.

Beyond that, I think the Republican Party is moribund. Its long tenure has made it corrupt, and depleted its stock of ideas. It has gotten too cosy with the bureaucracy and the lobbyists, and lost touch with its first principles. I do not think that this is some feature of conservatism--indeed, it reminds me quite a bit of the House under Tip O'Neil. But I think the party needs a time out to think about things.

CFP: "Environmental Philosophy and Political Philosohy" and "Anarchism and Philosophy".

via Will Roberts:

SSPP Calls for Papers
THE SOCIETY FOR SOCIAL AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY (SSPP)

1. . For the Society's meeting in conjunction with the Eastern APA (American Philosophical Association) in 2009 the SSPP invites papers for two conference panels. We are seeking papers that address issues pertaining to: Environmental Philosophy as Political Philosophy

Given our current global situation, the rising importance of environmental philosophy is increasingly beyond question, but insofar as philosophy has turned its attention to matters of the environment it has typically done so from the perspective of ethics. This panel invites papers that address the broad range of environmental concerns from a somewhat different perspective, namely, from the perspective of political philosophy. How, for instance, might matters of environmental sustainability transform our understanding of political solidarity and/or state sovereignty? How do increasing concerns about the ecological resources alter our conception of property rights as well as the relationship between capital and labor? What would it mean to extend rights to nonhuman animals, or to ecosystems? How does the imperative to be “sustainable” influence the way we conceptualize employment, citizenship and community? And how does an expanded view of ecology challenge traditional, humanistic notions of identity and the politics that have traditionally followed from them?

2. For the Society's meeting in conjunction with SPEP (Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy) in 2009, the SSPP invites papers for two conference panels. We are seeking papers that address issues pertaining to: Anarchism and Philosophy

Anarchism remains underrepresented in academic debates and discussions, a trend that continues despite its increasing importance in the anti-globalization movements. As a political philosophy, anarchism maintains a tense relation with the academy. Unlike Marxism, anarchism was not founded by a philosopher, and its major thinkers—Goldman, Kropotkin, and Bakunin—were by and large self-educated. Likewise, its areas of focus have been anti-authoritarianism, cooperation, and self-organization, rather than foundational texts or figures, thus making it a difficult fit with the dominant academic practices of interpretation and exegesis. Despite this, however, philosophers such as Todd May, Peter Lamborn Wilson, and Lewis Call have suggested that there is a fundamental link between the ideals of anarchism and philosophers such as Nietzsche, Baudrillard, Foucault and Rancière. Moreover, within anarchist circles there has been a longstanding interest in the work of situationists such as Debord and Autonomists such as Negri, which is not to suggest that these thinkers be identified as anarchist, but that their analyses of power and desire, and an ideal of equality, reflect certain anarchist commitments. We are looking for papers that address possible relations between anarchism and philosophy, from examinations of “canonical” anarchist thinkers to explorations of what philosophers offer to anarchism. Most importantly we are looking for papers that recognize the challenge that anarchism poses to the conventional notions of authority and hierarchy that dominate the university; that the conjunction "anarchism and philosophy" must interrogate and question the latter, as much as it supplements and defines the former.

Complete papers of 3000-5000 words (that can be summarized and presented in 20-30 minutes) should be submitted for consideration for the 2009 meeting (deadline: March 1, 2009). The APA Conference is scheduled for December 27-30, 2009, New York City, NY. The SPEP Conference is scheduled for October 28-30, 2009 Arlington, VA.

Authors should include their name(s) and contact information on the cover page ONLY. Papers should be emailed as attachments in Word or RTF format to papers@sspp.us

Uncooperative federalism

Onto the reading list, via Larry Solum: Uncooperative federalism.

Uncooperative Federalism

Jessica Bulman-Pozen
affiliation not provided to SSRN

Heather Gerken
Yale University - Law School



Yale Law Journal, Vol. 118, 2009

Abstract:
This essay addresses a gap in the federalism literature. Scholars have offered two distinct visions of federal-state relations. The first depicts states as rivals and challengers to the federal government, a role they play by virtue of being autonomous policymakers outside the federal system. A second vision is offered by scholars of cooperative federalism, who argue that in most areas states serve not as autonomous outsiders, but supportive insiders, servants and allies carrying out federal policy. The puzzle is that we rarely try to connect these competing visions and imagine how the state's status as servant, insider, and ally might enable it to be a sometime dissenter, rival, and challenger. Legal scholars have thus neglected the possibilities associated with what we call "uncooperative federalism." We see examples of uncooperative federalism scattered throughout "our federalism," instances where states use regulatory power conferred by the federal government to resist federal policy.

Most legal scholars are likely to be aware of this type of resistance, or at least unsurprised by its existence. That makes the scholarly neglect of this topic all the more surprising. While uncooperative federalism occurs often in our federal system, we don't have a vocabulary for describing it, let alone a fully developed account of why it happens, what it means, and what implications it holds for the doctrinal debates in which federalism scholars routinely engage. This essay provides an initial account of this undertheorized aspect of our federalism. It compares the distinct powers that the state wields as sovereign and servant. It sketches a normative argument for why uncooperative federalism might be useful in a well-functioning federal system. And it explores what a strong commitment to uncooperative federalism would mean for the doctrine on commandeering and preemption, offering some counterintuitive conclusions about the ways in which weakening the protections for state autonomy might push states to engage in harder forms of dissent.

You know...

I'm officially committed to the view that the Bloc Quebecois and Parti Quebecois have jointly been an inadvertently useful force for Canadian federalism-- it has helped to keep the Canadian federation decentralized enough to keep Quebec on the inside, and decentralization to Quebec has been one of the engines for decentralization and stabilization throughout the system.

That doesn't make Gilles Duceppe any less obnoxious.

Duceppe said he is not prepared to sign the Canadian constitution, even if Prime Minister Stephen Harper grants his demand for the recognition of the Québécois as a nation to be enshrined in the constitution.

"There are a lot of other things that have to be part of changes to the constitution, it isn't limited to that," Duceppe replied. "At the end of the line, I think we can never obtain what we want within Canada. That's why we need sovereignty."

However, if there were a pan-Canadian referendum on enshrining the recognition in the constitution, Duceppe said he would be prepared to campaign in favour of it.

Duceppe dismissed suggestions he has gone from being a sovereignist to trying to improve the Canadian constitution.

"Every gain for Quebec is a gain for the future of Quebec, another step toward sovereignty."

If Harper is serious about recognizing the Québécois as a nation, he will put it in the constitution and give it real legal weight, he said.

Recognizing the Québécois as a nation in the constitution could also be instrumental in Quebec getting international recognition should Quebecers one day vote for sovereignty, he said.

"The first country to have recognized us as a nation in its constitution (will be) Canada. We have inaliable rights as a nation to determine our own future and it's not up to another country to impose its rules on us. We will use that."

Heads I win, tails you lose. I can understand why every time he opens his mouth Anglo-Canadians become less sympathetic to Quebec. The fact that the tension ends up being constructive doesn't maqke it any more pleasant. (Of course, when I read Anglo-Canadians in the rest of Canada commenting about Quebec, I can also understand the resentments that Duceppe and is ilk thrive on.)

New NEH grant opportunity of likely interest to political theorists/ philosophers

Enduring Questions: Pilot Course Grants

The purpose of the Enduring Questions grant program is to encourage faculty and students at the undergraduate level to grapple with the most fundamental concerns of the humanities, and to join together in deep, sustained programs of reading in order to encounter influential thinkers over the centuries and into the present day.

Enduring questions are, to an overarching degree, pre-disciplinary. They are questions to which no discipline or field or profession can lay an exclusive claim. Enduring questions can be tackled by reflective individuals regardless of their chosen vocations, areas of expertise, or personal backgrounds. They are questions that have more than one plausible or interesting answer. They have long held interest for young people, and they allow for a special, intense dialogue across generations. The Enduring Questions grant program will help promote such dialogue in today’s undergraduate environment.

What are these enduring questions? The following list is neither prescriptive nor exhaustive but serves to illustrate.

* What is the good life?
* What is justice? Mercy?
* What is freedom? Happiness?
* What is friendship?
* What is dignity?
* Is there a human nature, and, if so, what is it?
* What are the limits of scientific understanding?
* What is the relationship between humans and the natural world?
* Is there such a thing as right and wrong? Good and evil?
* What is good government?
* What are the origins of the modern world?
* What is liberal education?

The Enduring Questions grant program will support new humanities courses at the undergraduate level: their design and preparation, teaching, and assessment, as well as ancillary activities that enhance faculty-student intellectual community. Courses may be taught by faculty from any department or discipline in the humanities or by faculty outside the humanities (e.g., astronomy, biology, economics, law, mathematics, medicine, psychology), provided humanities sources are central to the course.

NEH Enduring Questions courses:

* must give evidence of “pre-disciplinary” character, encouraging reflection on human experience and avoiding extensive specialization;
* must focus on an explicitly stated question or questions, pursued in a disciplined and deliberate manner;
* must draw on significant readings from prior to the twentieth century and may draw on later works, with a preference for reading books in their entirety or near entirety;
* may draw on artworks (e.g., music, plays, sculpture);
* must reflect intellectual pluralism, anticipating more than one plausible or interesting answer to the question(s) at hand;
* must be open to all students regardless of major or concentration;
* may not be offered for graduate credit; and
* require a letter of institutional support from the president, provost, dean, program chair, or department chair, attesting to the course being new and committing to offering the course at least twice.

See more, including application eligibility and procedures, at the link.

Nota bene

From The Chronicle:

The vice chancellor of the University of Cambridge courted controversy in a speech today by criticizing the British government for “meddling” and for pressuring top institutions like hers to admit more graduates of public high schools.

“As institutions charged with education, research, and training, our purpose is not to be construed as that of handmaidens of industry, implementers of the skills agenda, or indeed engines for promoting social justice,” Alison Richard told her fellow vice chancellors, who are meeting this week in Cambridge for the annual conference of their representative organization, Universities UK.

Ms. Richard, a former Yale provost, went on to tell her colleagues that “we need the independence and autonomy to chart our individual institutional courses, and to experiment.”

Elsewhere

At MR: Alex Tabarrok, "Why Libertarians Should Vote For Obama.

Claims that have to make Americans living in Canada giggle:

Bloc Quebecois Leader Gilles Duceppe, battling his party's sliding popularity in Quebec against both the Conservatives and the Liberals, sought to rally Quebecers around one idea. He said they must vote Bloc to deprive Harper of the majority he so dearly wants to prevent him imposing his "right-wing, American-style ideology" on Quebecers.

McGill/ GRIPP postdoctoral fellowship

The Departments of Political Science and Philosophy at McGill University and the Groupe de recherche interuniversitaire en philosophie politique de Montréal (GRIPP) will offer one postdoctoral fellowship at McGill in 2009-10. Area of specialization is open within political theory and political philosophy, but we are especially interested in applicants whose research is relevant to one or more of these GRIPP research themes:

1) The history of liberal and democratic thought, especially early modern thought;
2) Moral psychology and political agency, or politics and affect or emotions or rhetoric;
3) Democracy, diversity and pluralism.
4) Democracy, justice, and transnational institutions

Ph.D. must be in hand by 1 September 2009; preference may be given to candidates whose Ph.D.s will be in hand by 15 April 2009. Preference may also be extended to those with a knowledge of French, and to Canadian citizens or permanent residents.

The fellow will be expected to be in residence at McGill for the academic year and to take part in the intellectual life of political theory at McGill and in GRIPP, including regular workshops and conferences. The successful applicant will be assisted in applications for the McGill Tomlinson Postdoctoral Fellowship and for a SSHRC postdoctoral fellowship (if eligible) to increase the available stipend.

Please submit CV, writing sample, research statement, graduate transcript, and three letters of recommendation to: GRIPP postdoctoral fellowship, Political Science, McGill University, 855 Sherbrooke St W, Montreal QC H3A 2T7. Review of applications will begin September 15.

Being put on the couch

My friend Todd Seavey-- with whom I have a twenty-year morphing-but-running argument about the relationship between libertarianism and (variously) liberalism and conservatism as systems of ideas, liberalism and conservatism as organized political movements, the American Democratic and Republican parties-- offers an analysis of why I (among other libertarians he knows) certainly won't vote for McCain and will probably vote for Obama. It's odd to see oneself analyzed as a phenomenon, but I do think he's right about me and the Iraq War. I was basically in support of the war, I was wrong, and I give Obama credit for having been right and McCain discredit for seeking to double down on the wrongness. (I've never written a big mea culpa post about it, but Dan Drezner and Belle Waring have written posts that happen to do a very good job of speaking for me-- both in what I was thinking in 2002 and in what I came to think since.)

As far as the Chicago connection goes, there may well be some added comfort on my part with Obama, whom I've never met, because of all the people I know and respect who know and respect him. Sunstein is certainly on that list-- but so are a lot of other people at the University of Chicago Law School whose politics are much closer to Todd's and mine than they are to Cass'.

POLI 232 announcement

This is an almost-useless place to post this message, but faculty don't have access to the wait list, so I can't do any of the things that would actually make sense like send it to the appropriate students.

As the waitlist is currently configured, when someone drops the course, the top person on the waitlist gets an e-mail inviting him or her to register-- and a window of time in which to do it. If you receive such an e-mail but no longer plan to register for the course, please indicate that as directed. Just ignoring it and taking no action means that the next person on the waitlist can't be invited for the duration of your timer.

Of course, by the same token, if you're enrolled but planning to drop, please drop sooner rather than later out of courtesy to those waiting.

Biblio-file-ilia

A faithful reader of good taste and sense writes to ask "some serious theoretical questions" about the organization of books on the shelf:

How much should the 16th century be grouped with the 17th century or the 15th? E.g. Hooker, Coke, and King James, who span both, could be on the same shelf as Machiavelli, or as Hobbes and Locke. “Modernity” would then start either with Machiavelli or with the Reformation(s).

Does the eighteenth century end in 1804, when Napoleon is crowned Emperor, or in 1814, when he is finally defeated? It affects the shelf where Bentham is placed, and perhaps others. Fichte I’ve decided is on the nineteenth century section.

I’ve decide that the nineteenth century ends on 1914. I have made no distinction (forgivemerawls!) between pre- and post-1971 twentieth century theory.

I am ambivalent between universalizing American Political Thought (shelving by date) and particularizing it (by giving it its own section. Normatively, I prefer the former, but practically it may be better to have it all in one place. Tocqueville, in any case, is a nineteenth century Frenchman, not an American.

This is exactly my kind of thing-- I'm being asked to elevate my aesthetic preferences-- about books, no less!-- to the level of moral and historical truth. No better appeal to an academic's vanity than that!

And yet my answer is: that way lies madness. There is no truth of the matter here. Filing your personal library is a matter of making predictions about the thought patterns of your future self-- or an attempt to leave clues to that future self about what you did in the past. I've heard of people who shelve books by color (and people have defended it to me, using books that they and I easily know the color of-- "you'll never forget to look for Theory of Justice under blue!"). Seems silly to me, but by that I only mean "I'd be utterly failing my future self by doing that, because I know perfectly well that he won't remember stuff that way."

As for chronology, there's just no winning that game. We have too many works with uncertain dates of composition or publication. We have too many "collected political writings of X" that span decades overlapping in part the "collected political writings of Y." You don't want to split up a given author's works, but do you go chronologically by birthdate, by date of the the author's most important work, or what?

Now if the question were: design an ideal update of Dewey Decimal or LC for other book browsers, and put things into order, then maybe I'd go with a kind of chronology of clusters rather than a chronology of authors or (worse) a chronology of works. My clusters might go, in relevant part:

Thinkers of the Renaissance and Humanism (mainly Italian); thinkers of the Reformation; thinkers of the Counter-Reformation; thinkers associated with the English constitutional struggles up through and including the Civil War; [skipping some unasked-about steps] the French Enlightenment; the Scottish Enlightenment; the American Enlightenment, Revolution, and Founding; the French Revolution up to and including the complete Constant; the Revolution Debates in 1790s England; Kant and early Idealism; Romanticism; classical utilitarianism and classical political economy up to and including the younger Mill; Hegel and the Hegelians up to and including Marx...

But even in the course of writing that list, I've noticed a dozen problematic cases and weird outcomes of doing things that way. So after all, even that can claim no more merit than an attempt to out-think my future self: "If I were me-- and I will be-- where would-will I look for that book?" For my part, my opinion about when the French Revolution ended wouldn't affect where-when I think about Bentham; I put him mainly in a different story. I think of American 18th-century political thought as a story by itself-- but not one that stands apart from an otherwise-unified Plato-to-Rawls canon. It's no more distinct than any of the others partial stories.

I don't use that succession of clusters either, though. The demands I make on my future self are limited to these:

"Is the book pure academic history; positive law; or something else?"
"Is the book a secondary commentary on a primary canonical author named in the title?"
"If so, look alphabetically under the canonical author; if not, look alphabetically under the book's author?"

"Something else" includes all manner of social science, social theory, political theory, and the history of political thought-- so Arendt and Aristotle and Aron, Benhabib and Bentham and Berlin, Habermas and Hampshire and Hardin and Hart and Hayek, Machiavelli and Macintyre and Madison.

Unfortunately, playing the "what will I think then?" game doesn't do any good if what you will think then is "what's the truth of the matter about the era to which Bentham belongs?" But, just this once, I urge you to embrace subjectivism and relativism and reject realism-- if you reject realism forcefully enough now, perhaps you can reach across time and knock the unproductive "truth of the matter" thought right out of your future self's head.

They forgot "conference attendance."

Piled Higher and Deeper turns its attention to professorial uses of time.

ASPLP: Evolution and Morality

See you there! To join the ASPLP and subscribe to Nomos, see information here.

Annual Meeting of the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy
August 28-29, 2008

In conjunction with the American Political Science Association
Hynes Convention Center/ Boston Marriott Copley Place/ Sheraton Boston Hotel, Boston, MA

Evolution and Morality

Conference co-chairs: Sanford Levinson, W. St. John Garwood and W. St. John Garwood, Jr. Centennial Chair of Law and Professor of Government, University of Texas, and James Fleming, The Honorable Frank R. Kenison Distinguished Scholar in Law, Boston University

Thursday, August 28
4:15 PM: Panel 1. Hynes 105
Philip Kitcher, John Dewey Professor of Philosophy and James R. Barker Professor of Contemporary Civilization, Columbia University: "Naturalistic Ethics without Fallacies"
Commentators:
Jonathan Beckwith, American Cancer Society Professor of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics, Harvard Medical School
Robin B. Kar, Professor of Law, Loyola Law School
Chair: James Fleming

7:30 PM: Evening Reception, Sheraton Exeter

Friday, August 29
7:00 AM: Breakfast reception

7:50 AM: Annual business meeting, Sheraton Independence Ballroom West

8:00 AM: Panel 2. Sheraton Independence Ballroom West
Nita Farahany, Assistant Professor of Law and Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Vanderbilt University: "Law and Behavioral Morality"
Commentators:
Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Professor of Philosophy and Hardy Professor of Legal Studies, Dartmouth University
Jennifer Culbert, Assistant Professor of Political Science, Johns Hopkins University
Chair: Jacob T. Levy, Tomlinson Professor of Political Theory, McGill University


10:15 AM: Panel 3, Sheraton Independence Ballroom West
Larry Arnhart, Professor of Political Science, Northern Illinois University: "Deep History in Biopolitical Science"
Commentators:
Daniel Lord Smail, Professor of History, Harvard University
Richard Richards, Associate Professor of Philosophy, University of Alabama
Chair: Donald Horowitz, James B. Duke Professor of Law and Political Science, Duke University

Some conservatives in the APSA...

have decided to go for "cute and clever" instead of "principled." After this year's brawl over whether to change the location of the Annual Meeting scheduled to take place in New Orleans because of Lousiana's anti-gay mini-DOMA, some on the right are circulating a petition to keep the APSA from coming to Toronto nextyearbecause of the threat to freedom of speech posed by the Human Rights Act/ Human Rights Commissions. (On the merits of the academic freedom case, see Cliff Orwin. The HRCs are a blight, and free speech in Canada is on shakier ground than it is in the US< but there's even less evidence that any academics will be brought before the HRC for their APSA talks than there was that gay APSA members would be placed at dire legal-medical risk by setting foot in a state where their spouses weren't recognized.)

It's overtly payback, aimed to show that the right can politicize siting choice as much as the left.

The right answer remains, in this case as in the New Orleans case, the Weberian answer found in the APSA constitution:

2. The Association as such is nonpartisan. It will not support political parties or candidates. It will not commit its members on questions of public policy nor take positions not immediately concerned with its direct purpose as stated above. But the Association nonetheless actively encourages in its membership and its journals, research in and concern for significant contemporary political and social problems and policies, however controversial and subject to partisan discourse in the community at large these may be. The Association shall not be barred from adopting resolutions or taking such other action as it deems appropriate in support of academic freedom and of freedom of expression by and within the Association, the political science profession, and the university, when in its judgment such freedom has been clearly and seriously violated or is clearly and seriously threatened.

Yes, the Association is authorized to take action in support of academic freedom-- but the non-politiciziation norm is given great weight, and it's to be outweighted only when "such freedom has been clearly and seriously violated or is clearly and seriously threatened." The idea that scholarly freedom in Canada is in such a situation is absurd, false, and almost certainly being offered in bad faith just to score a cute point.