Too clever by 31%

Canadian Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper won enactment of a bill moving Canada to a fixed term for Parliament, unless the Prime Minister loses a vote of confidence. This ostensibly limited the Prime Minister's ability to call an election just to grab a favorable moment on the political calendar.

Then he called an election for this fall, explaining that the restriction didn't apply to minority governments, which is what he has. (Explanation for Americans: Harper's party has a plurality but not a majority of seats in the House. This means that all of his proposals require at least the acquiescence if not the active support of at least one opposition party in order to become law.) He was widely thought to have timed this both to grab a moment of personal popularity and to come before the U.S. election, lest pro-Obama, pro-left, pro-"change" sentiment spread north of the border and doom him in two years' time. At the beginning of the abbreviated campaign, he seemed likely to finally get his wish and be re-elected with a parliamentary majority.

Now: Not so much. As Matt Yglesias has been discussing, an economic crisis has a funny tendency to sweep all the bums (of whatever political complexion) out of office, and perhaps to entrench a prejudice in favor of the other party just because it's there when things return to normal. Yglesias quotes Larry Bartels:

Considering America’s Depression-era politics in comparative perspective reinforces the impression that there may have been a good deal less real policy content to “throwing the bums out” than meets the eye. In the U.S., voters replaced Republicans with Democrats and the economy improved. In Britain and Australia, voters replaced Labor governments with conservatives and the economy improved. In Britain and Australia, voters replaced Labor governments with conservatives and the economy improved. In Sweden, voters replaced Conservatives with Liberals, then with Social Democrats, and the economy improved. In the Canadian agricultural province of Saskatchewan, voters replaced Conservatives with Socialists and the economy improved. In the adjacent agricultural province of Alberta, voters replaced a socialist party with a right-leaning funny-money party created from scratch by a charismatic radio preacher, and the economy improved. In Weimar Germany, where economic distress was deeper and longer-lasting, voters rejected all of the mainstream parties, the Nazis seized power, and the economy improved. In every case, the party that happened to be in power when the Depression eased dominated politics for a decade or more thereafter.

On one hand, it's of course not Harper's fault that the financial systems of the world are in a tailspin-- and indeed Canada has yet to be hit hard by the results (notwithstanding a very rapid decline in the value of the loonie as currency traders indulge the perverse 'flight to safety' that means rushing into the US dollar even when it's the US that's leading the way off the cliff). On the other hand, it certainly is his fault that he's standing for re-election right now. If he'd waited until the election due date prescribed in his own legislation, he wouldn't be fighting to save even his minority government against the headwinds of [what we can only hope will turn out to be] a Schumpeterian "gale of creative destruction." Now, with less than a week before the election, he's at 31% in the polls and falling, with the Liberals at 27% and rising. So much for cleverly gaming the system...

The financial crisis and secession

Since 1990, the world has seen something of a proliferation of new independent states: 15 from the old Soviet Union, 2 from Czechoslovakia, 6 or so from Yugoslavia, plus Eritrea and East Timor. This has not ben caused by, but has certainly been aided by, a sense that the minimum size for state viability wasn't very large in an era of peace and free trade. The Baltics couldn't militarily survive the late 30s/ early 40s, but that's not our world anymore; the Czech and Slovak Republics had no economic need to stay unwillingly joined if they could trade across an international boundary almost as easily as within a common one. Regional defense organizations and regional trade unions-- prominently NATO and the EU-- made a huge difference here.

The Russia-Georgia war perhaps marks the end of the "peace" described above. Being in line for NATO membership someday is nice and all, but it's not remotely the same as being part of a great power that protects you as part of its own territory.

And the financial crisis may-- may-- mean that minimum viable state size ratchets back up on the economic side as well. Being Singapore or Switzerland or Luxembourg or a banking haven in the Caribbean has been a pretty good deal in an age of easy trade in goods and easy capital mobility. But now: Iceland gets caught in the financial crisis having to bail out a bank with assets many times its GDP, and without the deep capital or foreign currency reserves that a place like the US or Germany or Japan or Britain has.

This suggests great trouble for Quebec nationalism as a project, maybe somewhat less for Scottish or Catalan-- Iceland has a separate currency that's taking a beating; Scotland and Catalonia would be in the EU and probably in the euro zone. But the lack of capital depth would have hit Iceland now even if it were inside the EU and the euro zone.

Small-country wealth within free trade has been one of the virtues of the broadly liberal era we've been living through. When states are dominant economic actors, it's far more important what state (and how strong a state, and how big a state) you live in.

The new Times Higher Education Supplement world university rankings...

have been released. McGill at #20 is the highest ranked in Canada and the second-highest (behind Michigan) public university in North America.

Update:
McGill ranked 14th in the world in social sciences, as well as 13th in humanities.

Dynamic Amazon ads...

sometimes freak me out.

If I'm at Chris' Invincible Super-blog, it's just weird to see a sidebar ad trying to get me to buy:

Is Democracy Possible Here?
Ronald Dworkin

Roman Law: an Historical Introduction
Hans Julius Wolff

Roman Law in European History
Peter Stein

The Constitution of Equality
Thomas Christiano

I go there for a few minutes of escapism, not to be reminded of my to-do list-- but Amazon doesn't know that, it just reads the Amazon cookies in my cache and responds appropriately.

I'msurprised...
that the NYT adopts the dour attitude of the principals in this article about a possible split in the ANC. Democratic consolidation in South Africa requires the possibility of genuinely contested elections and viable bi- or multi-partyism-- and, a decade and a half after the end of apartheid, it remains clear that only the ANC itself can generate enough support to win elections, so for there to be two parties that could win, they'd both have to be ANC descendants. (I'll bet the smaller parties start merging with one or another ANC descendant very quickly.) The possible fissure is good news. It would have done Mbeki good to have a serious opposition watching over him, it's certainly desirable that Zuma have one, and it will be a sight worth seeing when a majority-elected government in South Africa peacefully surrenders power to a rival majority elected-government.

As a political scientist living under minority governments in both Quebec and Canada...

I feel like a physicist watching Wile E. Coyote running on air. Seems like someone should point out to them that our predictions say such things aren't possible, but also it's also kind of fascinating to watch the damn things stubbornly stay in the air anyway. Looks like we're headed for another one at the federal level, as the Tories have stalled out in Quebec, where they'd hoped to pick up seats.

(Duceppe rules out coalition, Montreal Gazette, today.)

Steven Pinker on the coming turn to regulation

here.

Many leftist commentators have gleefully interpreted the financial crisis as proof of the failure of free-market capitalism. Libertarianism and laissez-faire will be out; regulatory command-and-control will be in. Everyone agrees that targeted regulation is needed in the domains of finance that brought us to this disaster, where a mad incentive structure and poorly understood dynamics combined to produce a catastrophic outcome. It is less clear that a general philosophy that "regulation is good" will be helpful across the board. The past decade has shown us that unplanned, bottom-up, productive activity can lead to huge advances in social well-being, such as Linux, Wikipedia, YouTube, and the rest of Web 2.0. And many segments of the old-fashioned economy are still distorted by excessive regulation, like the artificial scarcity created by government-rationed taxi medallions. But the winds of change are clearly blowing in the direction of increased regulation, and I suspect that not all of the effects will be good.

If so, libertarians and economic conservatives will have themselves to blame. In recent decades they have turned the benefits of deregulation and tax-cutting into a religious dogma--less is always better--rather than a consideration that has to be weighed against other goods and submitted to evidence-based evaluation. Worse, they have allied themselves with (or at least failed to distance themselves from) the know-nothing conservatism represented by Dan Quayle, George W. Bush, and Sarah Palin. Libertarianism and moderate intellectual conservatism have discredited themselves with this disastrous alliance, and whatever contributions they have to offer the national conversation will be blown off. There's some rough justice in this, but it would be a shame if the result is a pro-regulation monoculture.

I'd say that the blame is less with turning "the benefits of deregulation and tax-cutting into a religious dogma" and more with a failure to distance those benefits firmly, at every turn, from corrupt and regressive corporatism. "Deregulation" and "letting the corporations write the regulations" are not synonyms. Neither are "cutting spending" and "increasing spending on wealthy special interests." There's been a thoroughly baleful and stupid path that went something like this:

The apparently morally- and intellectually-powerful cases for regulation or greater spending come from the left.
We wish to resist regulation and greater spending.
Therefore obviously-indefensible regulation and spending coming from the right is the lesser of two evils (even if greater in magnitude!), because it's unprincipled and so can be written off as a temporary aberration.

The fact that *any* libertarians or market-oriented conservatives supported George W. Bush for re-election, after his first term had made clear what his governance was like, is an embarrassment. And now it's not just a personal embarrassment; it's a damaging embarrassment to market-liberal ideas.

Does the free market corrode moral character?

Amon those writing essays for a Templeton Foundation "Big Questions" symposium on this topic: Michael Walzer, Jagdish Bhagwati, Tyler Cowen, Garry Kasparov, BHL, Michael Novak, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, John Gray. The responses are just two pages each, which means that they don't allow for the kind of depth and seriousness some of these writers are known for, but still: worth a look.

McGill political science finding of the day

Ethnic conflict stoked by government economic intervention, not globalization: McGill researchers

Economic globalization and liberalization have been blamed for numerous social ills over the last two decades, including a sharp rise in interethnic violence in countries all over the world. Not so, say the results of a study conducted by researchers from McGill University and published in the current issue of the journal International Studies Quarterly.

In fact, according to Dr. Stephen Saideman and his former McGill Master’s student David Steinberg – now pursuing his doctorate at Northwestern University – the more government intervention there is in the local economy, the more likely interethnic violence and rebellion becomes. Conversely, the more economically open a society is, the less likely such violence becomes.

“Our study counters the idea that a liberalized economy is worse for ethnic groups. Minorities are more likely to be on the outside of the political system,” explained Saideman, associate professor and associate director of graduate studies in the Department of Political Science, and Canada Research Chair in International Security and Ethnic Conflict. “So, if the government is involved in the economy, minorities are more likely to be affected by the whims of the state than by the whims of the market.”

Utilizing their own original research, along with the Minorities at Risk dataset compiled by their colleagues at the University of Maryland, Steinberg and Saideman’s results show that government intervention in the economy leads to a spiral of political competition among groups to gain control of the state and the economic spoils it distributes.

“Thus groups on the outs feel threatened because they have no control, which can lead to open rebellion,” Saideman said, “while those who are in power become terrified of losing control, as occurred in Serbia. Before the war the Serbs controlled a large hunk of the Yugoslav political system and it was their fear of losing it that led to war.”

Moreover, the researchers said, their results were reasonably consistent in virtually every society they studied, regardless of political system.

“We’re not just talking about command economies like the old Soviet Union or Yugoslavia,” he said. “We control for regime type, so whether a country is a democracy or not, statistically and probabilistically, the more government involvement there is in the economy, the more likely ethnic conflict is.”

Though interethnic violence is somewhat more likely to occur in less-developed economies, Saideman said, similar interventions even in the industrialized world have the potential to sow serious intergroup tensions.

“Ironically, look at how the government of the United States is now in the process of buying up a large hunk of the economy to bail out Wall Street,” he said. “In the future this will give people who are denied loans or who have other economic grievances an incentive to blame the government. They won’t consider factors like oil shocks and housing bubbles, it will all be laid on the government’s doorstep.”

Title of the day

"But Mom, Crop-Tops Are Cute!": Social Knowledge, Social Structure and Ideology Critique

(by Sally Haslanger, Philosophical Issues, Volume 17 Issue 1

Fellowship Announcement: Post-Docs at Stanford

Stanford University: 2009-10 Post-Doctoral Fellowships

The McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society and the Program in Global Justice at Stanford University seek five post-doctoral fellows for 2009-10. We welcome candidates with substantial normative research interests from diverse backgrounds including philosophy, the social sciences, environmental studies, and professional schools. One of the fellowships will be housed entirely in the Program in Global Justice, and one will be jointly sponsored by the Center and Program: candidates for these positions should additionally have research interests in international topics. Three fellowships will be housed entirely within the Center for Ethics in Society. Fellows will teach one class (typically a seminar), participate in the Political Theory and/or Global Justice Workshops, and help in developing an interdisciplinary ethics community across the campus. Salary is competitive. Appointment is for one year, but may be renewed for an additional year.

Applications will be accepted between November 15, 2008 and January 10, 2009.

Applicants should send a cover letter, CV, three letters of recommendation, and a short writing sample (about 25 pages) to:

Post-doctoral Fellowship Committee
Bowen H. McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society
482 Galvez Street
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305-6079

Stanford is an equal opportunity, affirmative action employer.

Best thing I've read today

Sha-na-na and the invention of the Fifties. (h/t)

Tocqueville the humorist, on the influence of Rousseau

If you're enough like me that that title catches your eye or makes you smile, go read this quick and fun Nick Troester post. Guaranteed 100% free of financial meltdown commentary or Sarah Palin jokes.

Now in the sidebar:

An ongoing google calendar of workshops, seminars, and conferences at McGill or around Montreal in political theory and related fields. A calendar-view can be found at http://profs-polisci.mcgill.ca/calendar.html.

Separately noted this morning:

" John McCain secures his own daughter’s endorsement" and "Sarah Palin gets crucial endorsement from... her parents.

Is it just me...

Or has the news over the past two weeks looked something like this?

Biggest bank failure in history

Biggest nationalization in history follows failure of world's largest insurer

Biggest non-defense budget authorization in history sought

Bailout talks explode in chaos and recriminations

North Korea reactivates atomic program

Russia lends Venezuala $1 billion to buy Russian armaments

Somali pirates seize ship carrying dozens of tanks

Presidential candidate 'suspends' campaign; hours before first scheduled
presidential debate, unclear whether it will actually take place

Largest one-day increase in the price of oil in history

Former Vice-President of the United States advocates civil disobedience in fight against global warming

Russia begins nuclear rearmament

Armed conflict breaks out between U.S. and Pakistan along the Afghan-Pakistani border

?

For some time now I've been joking that the world ended several years ago and we've all been living in post-apocalyptic times; it makes each little outbreak of philistinism or cultural depravity easier to face. (Sure, there's a 90210 sequel show on the air, but, hey, zombies didn't eat my brain today, so really, that's better than could reasonably have been expected.) But things are actually looking... quite poorly right now. I can't think of anytime quite like it; certainly, I never remember a presidential race so finely suspended between crisis and farce, catastrophe and clown show.

I've never really understood the "is the country on the right track/ wrong track" polling questions; they just seem to be ways of asking people "is your party in power or not?" But "wrong track" seems to be a pretty serious understatement just about now...

Canada continued

Will Wilkinson:

Wanna dodge the draft, get gay-married or smoke a joint without fear of life in the clink. Where do you go? Canada!

The frosty land of curling and Celine Dion has long been a destination for Americans fleeing the puritanical, war-mongering excesses of the States. And now, according to a new study, our hockey-loving, socialized-health-care-having neighbors to the north have surpassed the U.S. in its degree of economic freedom. Not only can Canadians more accurately pronounce laissez faire, they have more of it. And that was before the U.S. government nationalized half our mortgage industry and bought the world's largest insurance company.

In last year's Economic Freedom of the World Index, published by an international consortium of think tanks (including my employer), Canada and the U.S., the so-called "land of the free," were running neck and neck. But in this year's study -- which tracks things like the size of government, burden of economic regulation and free trade -- Canada squeaked out a tiny advantage: it ranked seventh compared to eighth place for the U.S. Strictly speaking, it's a statistical tie. But if the U.S. doesn't have the freest economy in North America, much less the world, what do freedom-loving Americans have to keep us from running for the border?

Economic freedom isn't everything, right? The U.S. does more to protect free speech and the right to bear arms in self-defense. And Canadian medical socialism surely benefits from the fact that most Canadians are only a short drive from the slightly more market-based American system. But if the United States of warrantless wiretaps, secret courts, militarized drug busts and mass minority imprisonment is not clearly more economically free than Canada, then it probably has no claim to being a freer country overall.

And now the U.S. government is about to commit hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars to bail out financiers who made a series of terrible decisions, in effect socializing just the downside of financial risk. America's revolutionary founders pledged their lives fortunes, and sacred honor for this?

Vancouver's not that cold, you know.

Clearly Will's never heard a joual-speaker pronounce the vowel in "faire." But other than that, correct all around!

On the value of studying Indian law

A good article in the Chronicle about rising interest in law schools, and rising interest among those hiring lawyers, in the serious study of U.S. Indian law.

CFP: Rousseau's Legacies

Sixteenth Biennial Colloquium of the Rousseau Association Seizième Colloque Bisannuel de l’Association Rousseau

Rousseau's Legacies/ Fortunes de Rousseau
Los Angeles, California
25-28 June, 2009

Call for Papers

In association with the University of California, Los Angeles
(Program Director: Byron Wells)

Rousseau's legacies are multiple and contested. In philosophy, he was
described as the Newton of the moral sciences by Kant, and yet
alongside those who champion an ethic of rights and duties, are
others, equally influenced by Rousseau who take forward his concerns
with virtue, community or moral psychology. In social anthropology,
Rousseau was hailed as precursor, by none other than Levi-Strauss.
Rousseau's concern with the natural world and the environment has
echoes both in the romantic movement and in the environmental politics
of our own day. Rousseau's autobiographical writings prefigure a
concern with subjectivity that finds later expression in Freud and the
psychoanalytic movement. His writing on education has been
rediscovered, championed or excoriated by successive generations of
advocates or opponents of "child centred education". His political
legacy has been bitterly contested between advocates of deliberative
democracy, liberals, nationalists of various stripes, and those who
see him as the harbinger of totalitarianism. We invite papers
reflecting critically on any aspect of Rousseau's various legacies in
philosophy, literature, political theory, theatre, music, biography
etc.

Proposals on the above topic (title and short summary), in English or
French, for papers of 20 minutes duration should be sent to the
President of the Rousseau Association, Christopher Bertram, by
electronic mail at C.Bertram@bristol.ac.uk or by ordinary mail at the
following address :
Department of Philosophy
University of Bristol
9 Woodland Road
Bristol
United Kingdom

If using ordinary mail, please also give if possible an electronic
address for acknowledgement.

The deadline for receipt of proposals is December 31st, 2008.
Proposals will be reviewed by the Scientific Committee (Professors
Christopher Bertram, Patrick Coleman, Ourida Mostefai) and a decision
communicated by January 31st 2009. A preliminary program for the
conference will be available in February 2009.

I've said this before...

about Bill Clinton, and I'll say it now about John McCain. The behavior you're seeing now isn't new; it's just that now he's directing it against Barack Obama instead of against targets on the right. There seem to have been a lot of people who had unlimited patience for McCain's fact-free, lying, bullying, moralistic swagger when it was, for example, channeled into his campaign finance crusade, and would lead him to baseless charges of corruption against those who disagreed with him on principled grounds. He was no more saintly a tobacco-control fighter or campaign-finance fighter than he is a fighter for the presidency; in all cases, his incredible self-regard has gone hand in hand with a view that all who opposed him were corrupt, illegitimate, unvirtuous, unpatriotic. And in all cases his certainty of his own rightness in all things has meant that mere facts or truth weren't much of an obstacle to him.

Jonathan Chait almost nails it:

McCain's deep investment in his own honor can drive him to do honorable things, but it can also allow him to believe that anything he does must be honorable. Thus the moralistic, crusading tone McCain brings to almost every cause he joins. In 2000 and afterward, McCain came to despise George W. Bush and Karl Rove. During his more recent primary campaign, McCain thought the same of front-runner Mitt Romney. Not surprisingly, Romney was the target of McCain's most unfair primary attack--an inaccurate claim that he favored a withdrawal timetable in Iraq.

In time, when Bush's support became necessary for his second presidential campaign, McCain reconciled himself to his former rival--and even to Rove, whom he has reportedly taken on as an outside adviser. More recently, he apparently changed his view of Romney. Now, Obama is the villain. "The contempt that many McCain aides hold for Barack Obama," The Atlantic's Marc Ambinder wrote this summer, "rivals the contempt that McCain held for Mitt Romney a year ago." As Time reported, "McCain and his aides now view Obama with the same level of contempt they once reserved for tobacco-company executives, corrupt lawmakers and George W. Bush. They have convinced themselves that Obama is not honorable, that he does not love his country as much as himself."

The pattern here is perfectly clear. McCain has contempt for anybody who stands between him and the presidency. McCain views himself as the ultimate patriot. He loves his country so much that he cannot let it fall into the hands of an unworthy rival. (They all turn out to be unworthy.) Viewed in this way, doing whatever it takes to win is not an act of selfishness but an act of patriotism. McCain tells lies every day and authorizes lying on his behalf, and he probably knows it. But I would guess--and, again, guessing is all we can do--that in his mind he is acting honorably. As he might put it, there is a bigger truth out there.

But still I'll say "almost." Chait's mini-bio here is all about the presidency, but this isn't a pattern that only emerges when McCain's running for that office. It's how he conducts himself in all political disputes. It's on display even now with his bizarre and almost-incoherent personalization of the financial crisis into charges of malfeasance against Republican FEC chairman Chris Cox. And his history of doing so in his fights with other Republicans has some relationship to the fact that they're not particularly rushing to his defense now, and to the fact that a figure like George Will has prose like this saved up:

Under the pressure of the financial crisis, one presidential candidate is behaving like a flustered rookie playing in a league too high. It is not Barack Obama.

Channeling his inner Queen of Hearts, John McCain furiously, and apparently without even looking around at facts, said Chris Cox, chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, should be decapitated. This childish reflex provoked the Wall Street Journal to editorialize that "McCain untethered" -- disconnected from knowledge and principle -- had made a "false and deeply unfair" attack on Cox that was "unpresidential" and demonstrated that McCain "doesn't understand what's happening on Wall Street any better than Barack Obama does."[...]

In any case, McCain's smear -- that Cox "betrayed the public's trust" -- is a harbinger of a McCain presidency. For McCain, politics is always operatic, pitting people who agree with him against those who are "corrupt" or "betray the public's trust," two categories that seem to be exhaustive -- there are no other people. McCain's Manichaean worldview drove him to his signature legislative achievement, the McCain-Feingold law's restrictions on campaigning. Today, his campaign is creatively finding interstices in laws intended to restrict campaign giving and spending.[...]

It is arguable that, because of his inexperience, Obama is not ready for the presidency. It is arguable that McCain, because of his boiling moralism and bottomless reservoir of certitudes, is not suited to the presidency. Unreadiness can be corrected, although perhaps at great cost, by experience. Can a dismaying temperament be fixed?

Res Publica prize for graduate student submission

from the philosophy CFP blog [NB: "Post-graduate" is British for "graduate student," not for "postdoc"]:

Post-graduate Essay Prize, 2008

Res Publica: A Journal of Moral, Legal and Social Philosophy
(http://www.springer.com/11158)

For the fourth year running, Res Publica will be awarding a prize for the best paper submitted by a current postgraduate student in 2008. This may be in any area of moral, legal or social philosophy, and should conform to the normal requirements for submissions - please see the website address above for details.
Papers must be submitted via the Editorial Manager system, accesible via the website above or directly at : http://www.editorialmanager.com/resp/default.asp
Please state when you submit a paper that you’d like it considered for the postgraduate prize, and also confirm that you have not yet been awarded a PhD. You can do this via a message to the editors on Editorial Manager.
All entries must be received by 1 October 2008, with the winner to be announced in December 2008. The winner will receive £100 and a year's subscription to the journal. The winning essay will be published in Volume 15 (2009).
Previous winners:

Alexandra Couto, 'Privacy and Justification' 12.3 (2006)
Alasdair Cochrane, 'Animal Rights and Animal Experiments: An Interest-Based Approach' 13.3 (2007)
Göran Duus-Otterström, 'Betting Against Hard Determinism' (forthcoming, 2008)

The prize will be judged by a panel of referees, along with the journal editors.

For more information please contact:

Gideon Calder gideon.calder@newport.ac.uk
or Jonathan Seglow j.seglow@rhul.ac.uk
Co-editors, Res Publica

Continuing a recent trend...

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

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

Montreal Political Theory Calendar

I've put up a webpage using google calendar that will include all the information I get about public seminars, workshops, and lectures in political theory and related fields in Montreal and especially at McGill. It's at http://profs-polisci.mcgill.ca/levy/calendar.html . There's been a proliferation of partially-distinct workshop series with partially-distinct e-mail lists, and I hope that a webpage will reduce some of the need to blast-email lots of lists simultaneously-- and it can be useful to have a non-e-mail place to look up rooms and times.

John Adams,

my favorite 18th-century brilliant and unlovable loser, finally won a bunch of well-deserved victories.

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.