On the Side of Angels symposium
1. Nancy Rosenblum: "Glorious Traditions of Anti-Partyism and Moments of Appreciation," Part I
In political theory today, political parties and their partisan supporters are disparaged if not actively despised. They always have been. The canonical history of political thought is a record of relentless opposition to parties as institutions and moral disdain for partisans. Parties do have one classic defender, Edmund Burke. Of whom William Goldsmith wrote in 1774 “Here lies our good Edmund. Who, born for the universe, narrowed his mind. And to party gave up what was meant for mankind.” On the Side of the Angels: An Appreciation of Parties and Partisanship is my analysis of antipartyism and attempt at rehabilitation.
To begin, I’ll introduce two high points on my map of the terrain, two “Glorious Traditions” of antipartyism. The character and purpose of political parties vary over time and political contexts, of course, but if “party” lacks institutional coherence, aversions to parties are surprisingly steady. The first glorious tradition of antipartyism insists that political society should be integral and that divisions are unwholesome. The formulations are familiar – an organic body politic, an indivisible nation or people, unitary royal or popular sovereignty, a general will that cannot err, one determinable common good. “Holism” can be hierarchical or communitarian and egalitarian. From a holist perspective, every partial group and association fosters particularist interests and opinions. No form of pluralism is benign. Parts just are partial, and every organized interest and opinion is an actual or latent political party. Because parties’ raison d’etre is partiality and conflict, they are particularly anathema -- parts against not of the whole. This aversion is with us still.
The second glorious tradition of antipartyism accepts pluralism and partiality, and incorporates social and political parts into the frame of government. It is one thing to accommodate divisions in a system of representation (as in the mixed constitution or corporatism), however, and another to organize party conflict within or among them. “In all civilized societies, distinctions are various and unavoidable”, Madison wrote to Jefferson, but the logic of pluralism does not extend to parties. What earns the accusatory label “party” is turning acceptable divisions into warring factions, or inventing needless, novel divisions as an excuse for contesting for power. Partisans are passionate zealots, extremists, begetters of “extraordinary ferment” and “violent animosities”. Partisans, Hume wrote, suffer “madness of heart”.
In this tradition of antipartyism, in contrast to holism, however, reconciliation to parties is conceivable. For here, parties are less symptoms of deeper intolerable division than causes and drivers of arrant divisiveness, disrupters of political equilibrium. They can conceivably be tempered and put to use. We see this in the half-way house status of the party of constitutional necessity that David Hume identified with the fortunate parties of the Glorious Revolution. Constitutional necessity was the judgment partisans passed on their own activity, of course, before parties became respectable. Partisan association was temporary, a dangerous instrument political men must occasionally employ for the public good. The halfway house party of necessity with its disclaimers of partisanship is still with us: a nonpartisan party uniting people of all views in defense of the neglected national interest; an honorable party of independents; a party to transcend parties.
A set of recurrent themes marks the long course of the antiparty tradition that sees parties as fatally divisive, among them grim explanations for the ubiquity and irrepressibility of parties. Finally, there were so many causes there seemed to be no cause and we can almost see Madison throwing up his hands when he wrote, “A difference of interests, real or supposed, is the most natural and fruitful source of them.” Another constant theme is party archetypes, as in Jefferson’s “the terms whig and tory belong to natural as well as to civil history.” Both themes had a critical thrust, but they could be inverted and recast as appreciative of parties. For example, it is not hard to see that with a half conceptual turn it would be possible to represent parties as antagonistic but necessary elements of a reasonable political order – party of order/party of progress, say, so that parties appear as philosophically defensible parts whose dynamic is mutually corrective, even progressive. Similarly, the charge that parties not only exploit deep divisions but also invent conflicts (“the smallest appearance of real difference suffices”) contains the insight that parties create rather than simply mirror social or ideological divisions. The creative role of parties drawing lines of political division and as Tocqueville recognized “introduce[ing] a new power into the political world” is foreshadowed, aversively, here.
Against the background of these glorious traditions of antipartyism, I retrieve early moments of appreciation that can serve as guides to the achievement of parties. Sartori commented that “great achievements are accomplished in the mental fog of practical experience”. My challenge is to rescue from futility the traces of positive in the long history of antipartyism, and underscore their significance.
One moment of appreciation belongs to Burke, who portrays party conflict as a form of regulated rivalry. “Every good political institution must have a preventive operation as well as a remedial”, he wrote. Revolution and impeachment are recognized remedies for tyranny, but party conflict is the previously unrecognized preventative that makes these remedies unnecessary. The spirit of party is a “vigilant watchman over those in power”. Parties expose one another’s crimes and failures. Regulated party rivalry entails enormous political self-restraint; that was a crucial insight. The discipline consists of conceding each party’s status as just a part in a permanently pluralist politics, and with it the provisional nature of being the governing party, and the charade of pretending to represent the whole.
By bringing opposition within the frame of government, parties do more than manage political conflict; they organize the business of government. Perhaps surprisingly, this moment of appreciation belongs to Hegel. He argued that the real issue vexing political representation is not the right of enfranchisement or who were to be the constituents but rather the result of representation: the creation of a legislative assembly. Political men must recruit responsible colleagues and form parties in order to govern, which requires more than temporary cooperation or a commanding personality. Hegel wrote of the opposition party: “What it is often charged with, as if with something bad, namely all it wants is to form a Ministry itself, is in fact its greatest justification.”
Both regulated rivalry and governing are forgiving when it comes to the character of parties; neither moment of appreciation appears to depend on “great parties” mirroring deep natural or social cleavages or on partisans’ shared philosophy. “Small” parties can do the work, and serve as templates for great transformative parties.
(Continued in Part II here.)
Nancy Rosenblum
Monday, January 26, 2009
On the Side of Angels symposium: Introduction
This week in this space we'll be having a look at Nancy Rosenblum's important new book, On the Side of Angels: An Appreciation of Parties and Partisanship.
Those who read this blog from time to time will know that one recurring issue is the intellectual relationship between political theory and political science, and that I'm constantly urging a view of political theory as within and tied to the social sciences, not only within or tied to philosophy. On the Side of Angels sets a high new standard for what political-theory-with-political science can look like and do. A number of our commentators also do exemplary work at that intersection; and all are terrific and thoughtful scholars whom I'm honored to have on this site for a week!
Our participants are:
Nancy L. Rosenblum, Senator Joseph Clark Professor of Ethics in Politics and Government and chair of the Department of Government at Harvard University, and Vice-President of the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy. She is the author of Membership and Morals: The Personal Uses of Pluralism in America , Another Liberalism: Romanticism and the Reconstruction of Liberal Thought, and editor of, among other volumes, the very influential collection Liberalism and the Moral Life. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Patrick Deneen, Markos and Eleni Tsakopoulos-Kounalakis Chair in Hellenic Studies and Associate Professor of Government at Georgetown University. He is the author of The Odyssey of Political Theory (2000) and Democratic Faith (2005), and coeditor of Democracy's Literature. He blogs regularly at What I Saw In America.
Henry Farrell, well-known in the blogosphere from his frequent contributions to Crooked Timber (which pioneered this kind of book event) and The Monkey Cage, is Assistant Professor of Political Science at George Washington University; the author of The Political Economy of Trust: Institutions, Interests and Inter-Firm Cooperation in Italy and Germany, forthcoming from Cambridge University Press; and co-editor (with Dan Drezner of The Political Promise of Blogging, forthcoming from the University of Michigan Press.
Jacob T. Levy, That's me. Just for the sake of completeness within one post, I'll say: I am Tomlinson Professor of Political Theory at McGill University, and the author of The Multiculturalism of Fear.
Mara Marin is Collegiate Assistant Professor of Social Sciences and a member of the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts at the University of Chicago. Her research centers on the status of commitments in politics and political theory.
Andrew Rehfeld is Associate Professor of Political Science and the Director of the Political Theory Workshop at Washington University in St. Louis. He is the author of The Concept of Constituency: Political Representation, Democratic Legitimacy and Institutional Design and is currently writing a book entitled A General Theory of Political Representation . He made an important and controversial contribution to the political theory/ political science debates with his paper Offensive Political Theory.
Melissa Schwartzberg is Associate Professor of Political Science at Columbia University. Her research centers on the historical origins and normative consequences of rules governing democratic decision-making. Her first book, Democracy and Legal Change (Cambridge, 2007), retrieves and defends the historically salient view that democracies regularly change their laws, while exploring the circumstances under which democracies have enacted immutable rules. She is writing a second book, Counting the Many, on the historical development and justifications of supermajority rules. Democracy and Legal Change was featured, along with Corey Brettschenider's Democratic Rights, in a mutual-critical-exchange in Perspectives on Politics 6(2), June 2008.
Nadia Urbinati is Nell and Herbert M. Singer Professor of Contemporary Civilization in the department of Political Science at Columbia University. She is co-editor of Constellations, and author of Representative Democracy: Principles and Genealogy (University of Chicago Press 2006), and Mill on Democracy: from the Athenian Polis to Representative Government (University of Chicago Press, 2002; Italian translation by Laterza 2006), which received the David and Elaine Spitz Prize as the best book in liberal and democratic theory published in 2002.)
Welcome to all of you!
The symposium will begin with posts by Rosenblum summarizing a few of the central arguments of On the Side of Angels, so that blog-readers not familiar with the book can take part in the conversation. Several of the commentators will focus on the arguments in those posts, though reference is made to the book as well. I'll be posting the contributions to the symposium between now and Thursday, so that each cluster of posts spends some time as a possible locus of conversation.
This week in this space we'll be having a look at Nancy Rosenblum's important new book, On the Side of Angels: An Appreciation of Parties and Partisanship.
Political parties are the defining institutions of representative democracy and the darlings of political science. Their governing and electoral functions are among the chief concerns of the field. Yet most political theorists--including democratic theorists--ignore or disparage parties as grubby arenas of ambition, obstacles to meaningful political participation and deliberation. On the Side of the Angels is a vigorous defense of the virtues of parties and partisanship, and their worth as a subject for political theory.
Nancy Rosenblum's account moves between political theory and political science, and she uses resources from both fields to outline an appreciation of parties and the moral distinctiveness of partisanship. She draws from the history of political thought and identifies the main lines of opposition to parties, as well as the rare but significant moments of appreciation. Rosenblum then sets forth her own theoretical appreciation of parties and partisanship. She discusses the achievement of parties in regulating rivalries, channeling political energies, and creating the lines of division that make pluralist politics meaningful. She defends "partisan" as a political identity over the much-vaunted status of "independent," and she considers where contemporary democracies should draw the line in banning parties.
On the Side of the Angels offers an ethics of partisanship that speaks to questions of centrism, extremism, and polarization in American party politics. By rescuing parties from their status as orphans of political philosophy, Rosenblum fills a significant void in political and democratic theory.
Those who read this blog from time to time will know that one recurring issue is the intellectual relationship between political theory and political science, and that I'm constantly urging a view of political theory as within and tied to the social sciences, not only within or tied to philosophy. On the Side of Angels sets a high new standard for what political-theory-with-political science can look like and do. A number of our commentators also do exemplary work at that intersection; and all are terrific and thoughtful scholars whom I'm honored to have on this site for a week!
Our participants are:
Nancy L. Rosenblum, Senator Joseph Clark Professor of Ethics in Politics and Government and chair of the Department of Government at Harvard University, and Vice-President of the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy. She is the author of Membership and Morals: The Personal Uses of Pluralism in America , Another Liberalism: Romanticism and the Reconstruction of Liberal Thought, and editor of, among other volumes, the very influential collection Liberalism and the Moral Life. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Patrick Deneen, Markos and Eleni Tsakopoulos-Kounalakis Chair in Hellenic Studies and Associate Professor of Government at Georgetown University. He is the author of The Odyssey of Political Theory (2000) and Democratic Faith (2005), and coeditor of Democracy's Literature. He blogs regularly at What I Saw In America.
Henry Farrell, well-known in the blogosphere from his frequent contributions to Crooked Timber (which pioneered this kind of book event) and The Monkey Cage, is Assistant Professor of Political Science at George Washington University; the author of The Political Economy of Trust: Institutions, Interests and Inter-Firm Cooperation in Italy and Germany, forthcoming from Cambridge University Press; and co-editor (with Dan Drezner of The Political Promise of Blogging, forthcoming from the University of Michigan Press.
Jacob T. Levy, That's me. Just for the sake of completeness within one post, I'll say: I am Tomlinson Professor of Political Theory at McGill University, and the author of The Multiculturalism of Fear.
Mara Marin is Collegiate Assistant Professor of Social Sciences and a member of the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts at the University of Chicago. Her research centers on the status of commitments in politics and political theory.
Andrew Rehfeld is Associate Professor of Political Science and the Director of the Political Theory Workshop at Washington University in St. Louis. He is the author of The Concept of Constituency: Political Representation, Democratic Legitimacy and Institutional Design and is currently writing a book entitled A General Theory of Political Representation . He made an important and controversial contribution to the political theory/ political science debates with his paper Offensive Political Theory.
Melissa Schwartzberg is Associate Professor of Political Science at Columbia University. Her research centers on the historical origins and normative consequences of rules governing democratic decision-making. Her first book, Democracy and Legal Change (Cambridge, 2007), retrieves and defends the historically salient view that democracies regularly change their laws, while exploring the circumstances under which democracies have enacted immutable rules. She is writing a second book, Counting the Many, on the historical development and justifications of supermajority rules. Democracy and Legal Change was featured, along with Corey Brettschenider's Democratic Rights, in a mutual-critical-exchange in Perspectives on Politics 6(2), June 2008.
Nadia Urbinati is Nell and Herbert M. Singer Professor of Contemporary Civilization in the department of Political Science at Columbia University. She is co-editor of Constellations, and author of Representative Democracy: Principles and Genealogy (University of Chicago Press 2006), and Mill on Democracy: from the Athenian Polis to Representative Government (University of Chicago Press, 2002; Italian translation by Laterza 2006), which received the David and Elaine Spitz Prize as the best book in liberal and democratic theory published in 2002.)
Welcome to all of you!
The symposium will begin with posts by Rosenblum summarizing a few of the central arguments of On the Side of Angels, so that blog-readers not familiar with the book can take part in the conversation. Several of the commentators will focus on the arguments in those posts, though reference is made to the book as well. I'll be posting the contributions to the symposium between now and Thursday, so that each cluster of posts spends some time as a possible locus of conversation.
Sunday, January 25, 2009
I'm going to live, and keep my wits about me, forever, part of a continuing series
Coffee Linked to Lower Dementia Risk : "A team of Swedish and Danish researchers tracked coffee consumption in a group of 1,409 middle-age men and women for an average of 21 years. During that time, 61 participants developed dementia, 48 with Alzheimer’s disease.
After controlling for numerous socioeconomic and health factors, including high cholesterol and high blood pressure, the scientists found that the subjects who had reported drinking three to five cups of coffee daily were 65 percent less likely to have developed dementia, compared with those who drank two cups or less. People who drank more than five cups a day also were at reduced risk of dementia, the researchers said, but there were not enough people in this group to draw statistically significant conclusions."
Coffee Linked to Lower Dementia Risk : "A team of Swedish and Danish researchers tracked coffee consumption in a group of 1,409 middle-age men and women for an average of 21 years. During that time, 61 participants developed dementia, 48 with Alzheimer’s disease.
After controlling for numerous socioeconomic and health factors, including high cholesterol and high blood pressure, the scientists found that the subjects who had reported drinking three to five cups of coffee daily were 65 percent less likely to have developed dementia, compared with those who drank two cups or less. People who drank more than five cups a day also were at reduced risk of dementia, the researchers said, but there were not enough people in this group to draw statistically significant conclusions."
Saturday, January 24, 2009
On The Side of Angels symposium: prologue
In Barack Obama’s inaugural address last week,Americans encountered their quadrennial moment of post-partisanship. Since Thomas Jefferson’s “We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists,” almost nothing has been so common in an inaugural address as a call to move past old partisan divides. (See recent examples below.) In many respects this is politeness and graciousness in victory: no one thought that Jefferson really was a capital-F Federalist, and no one is at risk of forgetting that Obama is a Democrat. An inauguration marks the transition from candidate to president, from campaign to governing, and from voice of a party to head of a government. There’s something appropriate in the new president’s acknowledgement that, while remaining a partisan, he is now responsible to and for an entire citizenry.
But there is still something odd about the trope. There is always a hint that, prior to the great man’s arrival, the parties disputed over petty and silly things, whereas now they shall unify behind his vision of greatness. It’s partly a result of presidentialism; where the head of state is separate from the head of government, the head of government doesn’t feel the same need to pretend to be above party, and doesn’t have the same presumptuousness that his or her program is now the whole nation’s program. But it’s also partly a legacy of a reflexive distrust of parties and partisanship—a disposition we’ll be considering here next week.
Reagan, 1985:
Our two-party system has served us well over the years, but never better than in those times of great challenge when we came together not as Democrats or Republicans, but as Americans united in a common cause.
Bush, 1989:
For Congress, too, has changed in our time. There has grown a certain divisiveness. We have seen the hard looks and heard the statements in which not each other's ideas are challenged, but each other's motives. And our great parties have too often been far apart and untrusting of each other. It has been this way since Vietnam. That war cleaves us still. But, friends, that war began in earnest a quarter of a century ago; and surely the statute of limitations has been reached. This is a fact: The final lesson of Vietnam is that no great nation can long afford to be sundered by a memory. A new breeze is blowing, and the old bipartisanship must be made new again. To my friends—and yes, I do mean friends—in the loyal opposition—and yes, I mean loyal: I put out my hand. I am putting out my hand to you, Mr. Speaker. I am putting out my hand to you, Mr. Majority Leader. For this is the thing: This is the age of the offered hand. We can't turn back clocks, and I don't want to. But when our fathers were young, Mr. Speaker, our differences ended at the water's edge. And we don't wish to turn back time, but when our mothers were young, Mr. Majority Leader, the Congress and the Executive were capable of working together to produce a budget on which this nation could live. Let us negotiate soon and hard. But in the end, let us produce. The American people await action. They didn't send us here to bicker. They ask us to rise above the merely partisan. "In crucial things, unity"—and this, my friends, is crucial.
Clinton, 1997:
To that effort I pledge all my strength and every power of my office. I ask the members of Congress here to join in that pledge. The American people returned to office a President of one party and a Congress of another. Surely, they did not do this to advance the politics of petty bickering and extreme partisanship they plainly deplore. No, they call on us instead to be repairers of the breach, and to move on with America’s mission.
Bush, 2005:
These questions that judge us also unite us, because Americans of every party and background, Americans by choice and by birth, are bound to one another in the cause of freedom. We have known divisions, which must be healed to move forward in great purposes—and I will strive in good faith to heal them. Yet those divisions do not define America. We felt the unity and fellowship of our nation when freedom came under attack, and our response came like a single hand over a single heart. And we can feel that same unity and pride whenever America acts for good, and the victims of disaster are given hope, and the unjust encounter justice, and the captives are set free.
In Barack Obama’s inaugural address last week,Americans encountered their quadrennial moment of post-partisanship. Since Thomas Jefferson’s “We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists,” almost nothing has been so common in an inaugural address as a call to move past old partisan divides. (See recent examples below.) In many respects this is politeness and graciousness in victory: no one thought that Jefferson really was a capital-F Federalist, and no one is at risk of forgetting that Obama is a Democrat. An inauguration marks the transition from candidate to president, from campaign to governing, and from voice of a party to head of a government. There’s something appropriate in the new president’s acknowledgement that, while remaining a partisan, he is now responsible to and for an entire citizenry.
But there is still something odd about the trope. There is always a hint that, prior to the great man’s arrival, the parties disputed over petty and silly things, whereas now they shall unify behind his vision of greatness. It’s partly a result of presidentialism; where the head of state is separate from the head of government, the head of government doesn’t feel the same need to pretend to be above party, and doesn’t have the same presumptuousness that his or her program is now the whole nation’s program. But it’s also partly a legacy of a reflexive distrust of parties and partisanship—a disposition we’ll be considering here next week.
Reagan, 1985:
Our two-party system has served us well over the years, but never better than in those times of great challenge when we came together not as Democrats or Republicans, but as Americans united in a common cause.
Bush, 1989:
For Congress, too, has changed in our time. There has grown a certain divisiveness. We have seen the hard looks and heard the statements in which not each other's ideas are challenged, but each other's motives. And our great parties have too often been far apart and untrusting of each other. It has been this way since Vietnam. That war cleaves us still. But, friends, that war began in earnest a quarter of a century ago; and surely the statute of limitations has been reached. This is a fact: The final lesson of Vietnam is that no great nation can long afford to be sundered by a memory. A new breeze is blowing, and the old bipartisanship must be made new again. To my friends—and yes, I do mean friends—in the loyal opposition—and yes, I mean loyal: I put out my hand. I am putting out my hand to you, Mr. Speaker. I am putting out my hand to you, Mr. Majority Leader. For this is the thing: This is the age of the offered hand. We can't turn back clocks, and I don't want to. But when our fathers were young, Mr. Speaker, our differences ended at the water's edge. And we don't wish to turn back time, but when our mothers were young, Mr. Majority Leader, the Congress and the Executive were capable of working together to produce a budget on which this nation could live. Let us negotiate soon and hard. But in the end, let us produce. The American people await action. They didn't send us here to bicker. They ask us to rise above the merely partisan. "In crucial things, unity"—and this, my friends, is crucial.
Clinton, 1997:
To that effort I pledge all my strength and every power of my office. I ask the members of Congress here to join in that pledge. The American people returned to office a President of one party and a Congress of another. Surely, they did not do this to advance the politics of petty bickering and extreme partisanship they plainly deplore. No, they call on us instead to be repairers of the breach, and to move on with America’s mission.
Bush, 2005:
These questions that judge us also unite us, because Americans of every party and background, Americans by choice and by birth, are bound to one another in the cause of freedom. We have known divisions, which must be healed to move forward in great purposes—and I will strive in good faith to heal them. Yet those divisions do not define America. We felt the unity and fellowship of our nation when freedom came under attack, and our response came like a single hand over a single heart. And we can feel that same unity and pride whenever America acts for good, and the victims of disaster are given hope, and the unjust encounter justice, and the captives are set free.
Friday, January 23, 2009
Of what is political theory a subset?
The newly-engaged Will Wilkinson is back from southeast Asia and has been blogging up a non-stop storm of terrific posts for a week now. I keep wanting to put up one-line posts that say "what he said!" with a link, but that way lies Instapunditry and is best kept to a minimum.
In response to this post (and as much as I like Will as a commentator on current politics, I like him still better when he engages in political philosophy), I posted the following in comments.
Will says he'll answer at some point; I eagerly await his views. In the meantime, on to my own independent interests in it, as the exchange has crystallized some old thoughts in a new way for me.
---------------------------------------
I have a longstanding interest (dating, in my published work, to the first few pages of The Multiculturalism of Fear) in the puzzle of which facts of the world should be taken as given and which susceptible to deliberate reform in normative theory. This is closely tied to a favorite topic around here (see e.g. this post and the comments thread): the relationship of political theory to both political science and political philosophy. And today I was rereading parts of D’Alembert’s Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedie with its tree of domains of knowledge.
These all get me to the following framing:
Of what is political theory a subset?
The answer we get from the Rawlsian revival is: political theory/philosophy is a subset of moral philosophy/ethics. (As between the latter two categories, it doesn’t matter for my purposes which is a subset and which is a superset, or whether they’re distinct.) “What is the right thing to do?” has as a special applied case “what is the right thing to legislate?” or “what is the right thing for a judge to do?” It has other special applied cases: “What is the right thing for a doctor, a corporation, a biologist to do?” We call these medical ethics or business ethics or bioethics or… We don’t call “what is the right thing to legislate?” “political ethics,” because the person of the legislator disappears from that question; “political ethics” is reserved for questions that can’t be rendered actorless. (Should the legislator accept a donation? Should a bureaucrat resign?)
Nonetheless, I trust that the idea that political philosophy is a kind of applied ethics or moral philosophy is familiar enough. We treat a journal called Ethics as perhaps the highest-prestige place in which to publish political philosophy; the network of institutional interdisciplinary homes of political philosophy are often characterized as ethics centers, and the ur-center is a center for ethics and the professions; and the methodology of the canonical Theory of Justice is laid out and legitimized in an article called “the autonomy of moral theory.”
But political theory has (increasingly-atrophied) sister disciplines in the other social sciences: economic theory and social theory, both practiced by Montesquieu, Smith, Marx, and Weber, and at least one of which was practiced by Tocqueville, Foucault, Polanyi, Durkheim, Hayek, and Habermas. These are, broadly, descriptive and explanatory theoretical disciplines, attempts to understand the phenomena of the social world. They often analyze phenomena that are too broad and sweeping to be easily tractable by fine-grained and localized data analysis: modernization, modernity, industrialization, market society, nationalism, and so on. Stereotypically, these disciplines study such huge phenomena as to look like the sweep and tide of history, things that seem especially un-suited to analysis in terms of what the right thing for a person to do is. (Business ethics and economic theory in this sense are wholly distinct enterprises.) They are the study of necessity and given phenomena, not normative choice and deliberate reform. I regret the unavailability of the word “phenomenology” for this kind of study; let’s call it social-science theory.
(It’s obviously a little too simple to describe sociological theory, which has as one of its central axes the “structure or agency?” question, as all being about structural necessity—but the “agency” side of those debates isn’t about the deliberate normative choices people informed by social theory should make, but a descriptive/ explanatory claim about the world, about the efficacy of individual choices and actions.)
Political theory might—mightn’t it?—be a subset of social science theory. The political theorist might seek to be to states and wars and elections as Hayek or Marx or Polanyi or Weber are to markets, or as Foucault or Durkheim is to modernity, or as Gellner is to nationalism. I try to make a start in my article on David Miller's book, which gradually turns into an article on what normative political theory can look like if we take a social-science theory view of the world of states.
(Interestingly, legal philosophy, analytic jurisprudence as that field has come to exist since Hart, is not construed as a subset of ethics or as the study of the right choice to make; Hart characterized his enterprise as one of “descriptive sociology,” and even non-positivist or partly non-positivist successors such as Fuller, Finnis and Dworkin, have had to work out a theory of what law is in a way that has not been much paralleled in political philosophy. Legal philosophy, in this sense, looks more like social-science-theory than like political philosophy.)
Now, there are understandable reasons, both simple and complicated, for emphasizing politics as the domain of choice. One complicated reason has to do with the influence of Arendt and the idea of freedom in human action, located quintesentially in the realm of the political. One simple reason is that what politicians like to tell us about themselves is that they're always in the business of Doing Something, and that every Something they Do will dissolve some unpleasant thing in human social life. The domains studied by economists and sociologists tend to lack actors claiming those magical powers.
But here it's worth remembering my exchange with Will. He's far from believing in the magical ability of political officials to alter just any thing they wish in the social world. But he, too, treats politics as a domain differently from other domains; economic facts just are, whereas political facts are unjust results of human decisions that presumably could and should be decided differently. The world of states (and of states' relationships to borders and economies and labor migration) is up for normative grabs.
I believe in the importance and value of normative questions about politics, and normative theories that try to answer them! The possibility of freely-chosen deliberate normative reform is real. I don't think that political theory is best done as only a subset of a social-science theory of necessity. (Indeed, I suspect the same is true of theorizing about economics or culture or social structures.) But I also don't think it's best done as only a subset of ethics or moral theory. Our aspiration should be to do both-- to theorize the social phenomena of politics, and to analyze the morality of choices within politics, as well as to think about how each of those shapes the other. To be grandiose: we should try to reunify some of what's been divided in the human sciences, and to understand normative reflection and explanatory explorations as linked and complementary.
And I suspect that, even as we approach 40 years on from Theory of Justice, it's the social-science theory part of our vocabulary and intellectual toolkit that's currently underdeveloped. (This is truer in some parts of the field than others; those for whom Foucault or the early Habermas is more significant than Rawls aren't as likely to fit the "subset of ethics" model, and some of those explicitly reject normative theory as an enterprise. But that's not what I want, either.) I also suspect that developing that part of our intellectual toolkits will require abandoning the ideal/ non-ideal theory distinction. Perhaps individual moral decisions can be analyzed in an idealized abstraction; but social and political decisions, not so.
In the current literature, G.A. Cohen’s Rescuing Justice and Equality (about which more in another post, or follow the beginnings of the symposium at Crooked Timber) seems especially strongly committed to the view I’m implicitly criticizing here. So too is David Estlund, a critic of what he calls "utopophobia." Any thing which is not naturally impossible (as Blackstone described Parliament’s legislative competence) is within the scope of what our normative political principles might legitimately demand. I haven't here offered any substantive argument against their views. I'm trying, however, to alter the terms of debate a bit. I think that there's a sense in which that substantive position is allowed to follow too quickly on an implicit sense of what our intellectual enterprise just is.
(NB: In an inchoate but real way this post is indebted to Jeremy Waldron's old essay "What Plato Would Allow," from Nomos: Theory and Practice, and to a related talk I heard him give at ANU sometime in the 1993-94 school year.)
The newly-engaged Will Wilkinson is back from southeast Asia and has been blogging up a non-stop storm of terrific posts for a week now. I keep wanting to put up one-line posts that say "what he said!" with a link, but that way lies Instapunditry and is best kept to a minimum.
In response to this post (and as much as I like Will as a commentator on current politics, I like him still better when he engages in political philosophy), I posted the following in comments.
Will, I wonder whether there are political facts which you think can be taken as given for purposes of moral inquiry in the same way that you take economic facts as given...?
Evidently you don't attribute to them just the same status. The gap between the Canadian and the Mexican dingus-tightener is to be the object of direct moral criticism in a way that the gap between the American dingus-tightener and the American widget-polisher is not. T
I know some of the moves that could be made here, but I don't want to provide too much of a prompt. So let me start with: Do political facts about the world occupy a categorically different status from economic facts about the world for purposes of moral inquiry? If so, why? If not, then why is the fact of the border-controlling 'nation-'state up for moral criticism in a way that market outcomes aren't?
(As always, I agree with your analysis of nearly everything! But I'm pulling on a loose thread to see what unravels, partly because it seems relevant to your argument and partly because I'm independently interested in it.)
Will says he'll answer at some point; I eagerly await his views. In the meantime, on to my own independent interests in it, as the exchange has crystallized some old thoughts in a new way for me.
---------------------------------------
I have a longstanding interest (dating, in my published work, to the first few pages of The Multiculturalism of Fear) in the puzzle of which facts of the world should be taken as given and which susceptible to deliberate reform in normative theory. This is closely tied to a favorite topic around here (see e.g. this post and the comments thread): the relationship of political theory to both political science and political philosophy. And today I was rereading parts of D’Alembert’s Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedie with its tree of domains of knowledge.
These all get me to the following framing:
Of what is political theory a subset?
The answer we get from the Rawlsian revival is: political theory/philosophy is a subset of moral philosophy/ethics. (As between the latter two categories, it doesn’t matter for my purposes which is a subset and which is a superset, or whether they’re distinct.) “What is the right thing to do?” has as a special applied case “what is the right thing to legislate?” or “what is the right thing for a judge to do?” It has other special applied cases: “What is the right thing for a doctor, a corporation, a biologist to do?” We call these medical ethics or business ethics or bioethics or… We don’t call “what is the right thing to legislate?” “political ethics,” because the person of the legislator disappears from that question; “political ethics” is reserved for questions that can’t be rendered actorless. (Should the legislator accept a donation? Should a bureaucrat resign?)
Nonetheless, I trust that the idea that political philosophy is a kind of applied ethics or moral philosophy is familiar enough. We treat a journal called Ethics as perhaps the highest-prestige place in which to publish political philosophy; the network of institutional interdisciplinary homes of political philosophy are often characterized as ethics centers, and the ur-center is a center for ethics and the professions; and the methodology of the canonical Theory of Justice is laid out and legitimized in an article called “the autonomy of moral theory.”
But political theory has (increasingly-atrophied) sister disciplines in the other social sciences: economic theory and social theory, both practiced by Montesquieu, Smith, Marx, and Weber, and at least one of which was practiced by Tocqueville, Foucault, Polanyi, Durkheim, Hayek, and Habermas. These are, broadly, descriptive and explanatory theoretical disciplines, attempts to understand the phenomena of the social world. They often analyze phenomena that are too broad and sweeping to be easily tractable by fine-grained and localized data analysis: modernization, modernity, industrialization, market society, nationalism, and so on. Stereotypically, these disciplines study such huge phenomena as to look like the sweep and tide of history, things that seem especially un-suited to analysis in terms of what the right thing for a person to do is. (Business ethics and economic theory in this sense are wholly distinct enterprises.) They are the study of necessity and given phenomena, not normative choice and deliberate reform. I regret the unavailability of the word “phenomenology” for this kind of study; let’s call it social-science theory.
(It’s obviously a little too simple to describe sociological theory, which has as one of its central axes the “structure or agency?” question, as all being about structural necessity—but the “agency” side of those debates isn’t about the deliberate normative choices people informed by social theory should make, but a descriptive/ explanatory claim about the world, about the efficacy of individual choices and actions.)
Political theory might—mightn’t it?—be a subset of social science theory. The political theorist might seek to be to states and wars and elections as Hayek or Marx or Polanyi or Weber are to markets, or as Foucault or Durkheim is to modernity, or as Gellner is to nationalism. I try to make a start in my article on David Miller's book, which gradually turns into an article on what normative political theory can look like if we take a social-science theory view of the world of states.
(Interestingly, legal philosophy, analytic jurisprudence as that field has come to exist since Hart, is not construed as a subset of ethics or as the study of the right choice to make; Hart characterized his enterprise as one of “descriptive sociology,” and even non-positivist or partly non-positivist successors such as Fuller, Finnis and Dworkin, have had to work out a theory of what law is in a way that has not been much paralleled in political philosophy. Legal philosophy, in this sense, looks more like social-science-theory than like political philosophy.)
Now, there are understandable reasons, both simple and complicated, for emphasizing politics as the domain of choice. One complicated reason has to do with the influence of Arendt and the idea of freedom in human action, located quintesentially in the realm of the political. One simple reason is that what politicians like to tell us about themselves is that they're always in the business of Doing Something, and that every Something they Do will dissolve some unpleasant thing in human social life. The domains studied by economists and sociologists tend to lack actors claiming those magical powers.
But here it's worth remembering my exchange with Will. He's far from believing in the magical ability of political officials to alter just any thing they wish in the social world. But he, too, treats politics as a domain differently from other domains; economic facts just are, whereas political facts are unjust results of human decisions that presumably could and should be decided differently. The world of states (and of states' relationships to borders and economies and labor migration) is up for normative grabs.
I believe in the importance and value of normative questions about politics, and normative theories that try to answer them! The possibility of freely-chosen deliberate normative reform is real. I don't think that political theory is best done as only a subset of a social-science theory of necessity. (Indeed, I suspect the same is true of theorizing about economics or culture or social structures.) But I also don't think it's best done as only a subset of ethics or moral theory. Our aspiration should be to do both-- to theorize the social phenomena of politics, and to analyze the morality of choices within politics, as well as to think about how each of those shapes the other. To be grandiose: we should try to reunify some of what's been divided in the human sciences, and to understand normative reflection and explanatory explorations as linked and complementary.
And I suspect that, even as we approach 40 years on from Theory of Justice, it's the social-science theory part of our vocabulary and intellectual toolkit that's currently underdeveloped. (This is truer in some parts of the field than others; those for whom Foucault or the early Habermas is more significant than Rawls aren't as likely to fit the "subset of ethics" model, and some of those explicitly reject normative theory as an enterprise. But that's not what I want, either.) I also suspect that developing that part of our intellectual toolkits will require abandoning the ideal/ non-ideal theory distinction. Perhaps individual moral decisions can be analyzed in an idealized abstraction; but social and political decisions, not so.
In the current literature, G.A. Cohen’s Rescuing Justice and Equality (about which more in another post, or follow the beginnings of the symposium at Crooked Timber) seems especially strongly committed to the view I’m implicitly criticizing here. So too is David Estlund, a critic of what he calls "utopophobia." Any thing which is not naturally impossible (as Blackstone described Parliament’s legislative competence) is within the scope of what our normative political principles might legitimately demand. I haven't here offered any substantive argument against their views. I'm trying, however, to alter the terms of debate a bit. I think that there's a sense in which that substantive position is allowed to follow too quickly on an implicit sense of what our intellectual enterprise just is.
(NB: In an inchoate but real way this post is indebted to Jeremy Waldron's old essay "What Plato Would Allow," from Nomos: Theory and Practice, and to a related talk I heard him give at ANU sometime in the 1993-94 school year.)
Charming.
Noted without comment from the Gazette:
Noted without comment from the Gazette:
A Quebec billionaire at the centre of a messy and very public airing of his 10-year tumultuous relationship with a young Brazilian summed up yesterday why he never married her, despite having three children together.
“It’s not my cup of tea,” the man, who can’t be identified under Quebec family law, told a packed Quebec Superior Court room.
His ex has launched a constitutional challenge to Quebec’s unique family law in order to receive financial support – an issue he conceded he finds interesting.
“I just wish I wasn’t in the middle of it,” he said. “I’m disappointed that what was supposed to be a constitutional debate has evolved into an airing of our dirty laundry.”
As it stands now in Quebec, couples living common-law only have to pay child support but are under no obligation to provide support to the spouse, or to divide assets once the union ends.
The woman’s lawyers, who expect the case to go all the way to Canada’s highest court, want couples in de facto unions for three years without children or one year with children treated the same as people who are legally married, just as in other provinces.
The woman is asking for $56,000 a month plus $50 million – a figure she says reflects the kind of spending power she had when the two were together. But the man, who is now with a model with whom he is not married but has two children, says he gives the three children ample support.
They and their mother are in the process of moving out of their Westmount home, which has a mould problem, into a $2.4-million Outremont home which is in the man’s name. He pays for the nannies, chauffeur, cleaning lady and cook, as well as all the children’s school fees. He gives the woman $35,000 a month child support.
Yesterday, his testimony sounded like a script from a soap opera, as he recounted details of their on-again off-again relationship. It was peppered with details of jetting off to Europe, Brazil, Fiji, Japan and Dubai, house parties with 2,500 guests and denials of drug overdoses.
“We were incredibly in love and our three children were made with love,” he said. “But on the other hand, I was constantly criticized for my lifestyle, that I worked too hard and for the people I hung out with.
“And I had problems with her behaviour, too.”
He met the girl, then 17 and 15 years younger than him, on a beach in Brazil in 1992. She didn’t speak English or French, and he couldn’t speak Spanish or Portuguese, so for the first few years of their relationship, he said, they used a lot of sign language.
Thursday, January 22, 2009
For what it's worth...
I think both Battlestar Galactica and Lost are back in good form.
The two bits of my pre-premiere talk on "Lost" last night that I'll now cherry-pcik to make myself look smart:
1) Hume's philosophy includes a funny combination of apparent determinism with skepticism about [what we can know about] causation. Desmond [David Hume's] unique status with respect to the timeslip parts of the story-- he was the first character to get knocked loose from the timestream, the first whose consciousness went time-traveling, the first to experience the impossibility of changing history, and the first to nonetheless make use of timeslips in non-paradox-inducing ways-- and his unique status off the island [he's not one of the Oceanic Six and so far there haven't been any indications that he's included in the mandate to return, but he's still an island escapee and therefore tied to it-- in a way that seems more important than, say, Walt]-- will be centrally important as the story becomes more and more about time.
2) One of the three possibilities I laid out for why Locke becomes Bentham is that, in between then and now, he learned that he had to sacrifice his life to maximize the well-being of the greatest number of Islanders for whom he now had responsibility. Locke (philosopher) not only supports individual rights but also insists on the moral priority of life and condemns suicide. An act of utility-maximizing self-sacrifice is commemorated by his ceasing to be Locke at all and becoming Bentham. (But I admit that this was not my *preferred* possibility.)
A thought about Lost that doesn't have anything to do with political theory: Hurley always seems like he's in a slightly different show, and somehow the actor and the writers make that work very effectively. It's not just that he's comic relief, or that he's the one to stand in (very obviously) for the viewers ("I was never too clear on that part"). More generally he seems like his world only occasionally intersects with the dark, grim, meaningful, trumpet-heavy world of the rest of the characters, and that he's only intermittently interested in that world.
This has always been true of him, though he didn't always seem quite so on his own. The grimmest characters from the first season have tended to have the highest survival rate into later seasons; Rose and Bernard excepted, the major surviving Survivors are people with pretty heavy baggage and major Issues. Charlie, Boone, and Shannon had all of that too-- but they often featured in lighter scenes and exchanges. Now: well, everyone else's world has Alan Dale as a glowering presence in it, whereas Hurley's has Cheech. And Linus seemed not to understand this; he showed up in Hurley's kitchen making the kind of grim, opaque, meaningful speech that works on someone like Locke, Jack, or Sayiid. And Hurley responded appropriately-- which meant that he responded like a character from a different show. I got a kick out of it.
I think both Battlestar Galactica and Lost are back in good form.
The two bits of my pre-premiere talk on "Lost" last night that I'll now cherry-pcik to make myself look smart:
1) Hume's philosophy includes a funny combination of apparent determinism with skepticism about [what we can know about] causation. Desmond [David Hume's] unique status with respect to the timeslip parts of the story-- he was the first character to get knocked loose from the timestream, the first whose consciousness went time-traveling, the first to experience the impossibility of changing history, and the first to nonetheless make use of timeslips in non-paradox-inducing ways-- and his unique status off the island [he's not one of the Oceanic Six and so far there haven't been any indications that he's included in the mandate to return, but he's still an island escapee and therefore tied to it-- in a way that seems more important than, say, Walt]-- will be centrally important as the story becomes more and more about time.
2) One of the three possibilities I laid out for why Locke becomes Bentham is that, in between then and now, he learned that he had to sacrifice his life to maximize the well-being of the greatest number of Islanders for whom he now had responsibility. Locke (philosopher) not only supports individual rights but also insists on the moral priority of life and condemns suicide. An act of utility-maximizing self-sacrifice is commemorated by his ceasing to be Locke at all and becoming Bentham. (But I admit that this was not my *preferred* possibility.)
A thought about Lost that doesn't have anything to do with political theory: Hurley always seems like he's in a slightly different show, and somehow the actor and the writers make that work very effectively. It's not just that he's comic relief, or that he's the one to stand in (very obviously) for the viewers ("I was never too clear on that part"). More generally he seems like his world only occasionally intersects with the dark, grim, meaningful, trumpet-heavy world of the rest of the characters, and that he's only intermittently interested in that world.
This has always been true of him, though he didn't always seem quite so on his own. The grimmest characters from the first season have tended to have the highest survival rate into later seasons; Rose and Bernard excepted, the major surviving Survivors are people with pretty heavy baggage and major Issues. Charlie, Boone, and Shannon had all of that too-- but they often featured in lighter scenes and exchanges. Now: well, everyone else's world has Alan Dale as a glowering presence in it, whereas Hurley's has Cheech. And Linus seemed not to understand this; he showed up in Hurley's kitchen making the kind of grim, opaque, meaningful speech that works on someone like Locke, Jack, or Sayiid. And Hurley responded appropriately-- which meant that he responded like a character from a different show. I got a kick out of it.
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
Leiter reports: political philosophy rankings
The 2008-09 round of the Leiter Report on philosophy departments is being released on Leiter's blog piecemeal, and today there's a list of interest to many readers of this blog: political philosophy.
This is a very good list, and shows the value of the Leiter Reports. Even though Arizona has been an excellent program in legal and/or political philosophy more often than not in my lifetime, I think it still gets undervalued in some circles just because the university as a whole isn't a traditional name-brand research powerhouse. Brown and Stanford have made important new commitments to political philosophy over the past several years, and I think either would now be a terrific place to study the field, but that's relatively new, and the kind of thing that could take a long time to become conventional wisdom.
Compared with the 2006 list (I assume that at some point that link will start pointing to the new list, but it hasn't yet):
Oxford has dropped to group 2 (G.A. Cohen has retired and not yet been replaced)
NYU has risen to group 1 (Samuel Scheffler has been hired)
Michigan has dropped out of group 2 (lost Darwall, but I'm still surprised at the drop)
Berkeley has dropped out of group 2 (lost Scheffler)
Toronto has dropped out of group 2 (lost Sreenivasan and Hawkins, but I'm still surprised at the drop)
Rutgers has dropped out of group 2 (probably some obvious reason for this but I don't recall)
Yale has risen into group 2
For what it's worth, I would still think that Michigan ought to be somewhere near the top.
The 2008-09 round of the Leiter Report on philosophy departments is being released on Leiter's blog piecemeal, and today there's a list of interest to many readers of this blog: political philosophy.
Top 9 Faculties in "Political Philosophy" in the English-Speaking World
In the specialty rankings, faculties are grouped according to their mean score, rounded to the nearest .5. In parentheses after the school's name, the median and mode scores are listed. Within the grouping, faculties are listed alphabetically.
Group 1 (1-3) (rounded mean of 4.5) (median, mode)
Harvard University (5, 5)
New York University (5, 5)
University of Arizona (4.5, 4.5)
Group 2 (4-9) (rounded mean of 4.0) (median, mode)
Brown University (4, 4)
Oxford University (4.25, 4.5)
Princeton University (4, 5)
Stanford University (4.5, 4.5)
University College London (3.75, 3.75)
Yale University (4, 4.25)
This is a very good list, and shows the value of the Leiter Reports. Even though Arizona has been an excellent program in legal and/or political philosophy more often than not in my lifetime, I think it still gets undervalued in some circles just because the university as a whole isn't a traditional name-brand research powerhouse. Brown and Stanford have made important new commitments to political philosophy over the past several years, and I think either would now be a terrific place to study the field, but that's relatively new, and the kind of thing that could take a long time to become conventional wisdom.
Compared with the 2006 list (I assume that at some point that link will start pointing to the new list, but it hasn't yet):
Oxford has dropped to group 2 (G.A. Cohen has retired and not yet been replaced)
NYU has risen to group 1 (Samuel Scheffler has been hired)
Michigan has dropped out of group 2 (lost Darwall, but I'm still surprised at the drop)
Berkeley has dropped out of group 2 (lost Scheffler)
Toronto has dropped out of group 2 (lost Sreenivasan and Hawkins, but I'm still surprised at the drop)
Rutgers has dropped out of group 2 (probably some obvious reason for this but I don't recall)
Yale has risen into group 2
For what it's worth, I would still think that Michigan ought to be somewhere near the top.
Monday, January 19, 2009
Hither and Yon, local edition: "Lost in the state of nature"
I'll be giving a talk called "Lost in the state of nature: the political theory of the Island," Wednesday, January 21, 7 pm, in the Shatner Building cafe at McGill; the talk will of course be followed immediately by the season premiere of Lost.
Sponsored by the McGill Political Science Students' Association.
RSVP on facebook if you like.
Theories about the conversion of Locke into Bentham may be ventured in comments below...
I'll be giving a talk called "Lost in the state of nature: the political theory of the Island," Wednesday, January 21, 7 pm, in the Shatner Building cafe at McGill; the talk will of course be followed immediately by the season premiere of Lost.
Sponsored by the McGill Political Science Students' Association.
RSVP on facebook if you like.
Theories about the conversion of Locke into Bentham may be ventured in comments below...
Sunday, January 18, 2009
CFP: Theories of federalism
European Consortium of Political Research
European Consortium of Political Research
5th ECPR General Conference, Potsdam
10 - 12 September, 2009
Section Title: International Political Theory
Panel Title: Theories of federalism
PANEL CHAIR
Name: Nenad Stojanovic
Institution: Universität Zürich & Université catholique de Louvain
Email: nenad@ipz.uzh.ch
PANEL CO-CHAIR
Name:
Institution:
Email:
PANEL DISCUSSANT
Name: Helder De Schutter
Institution: University of Oxford
Email: schutter@alumni.princeton.edu
ABSTRACT - Submit a Paper to this Panel
While recent decades have witnessed a remarkable rise in empirical research on federalism, normative approaches to federalism have only very recently started to appear. Interest in these normative issues has coincided with the emergence of a normative interest in forms of self-government for nations. This manifests itself in two related areas: 1. Multinational States. Multinational states are typically confronted with claims to self-government rights by substate national and/or linguistic groups. With respect to these claims, a number of theorists have focused on federalism’s ability to provide self-government to national groups while maintaining a state-wide level of political decision-making. 2. Transnational political constellations. A number of theorists have argued that the form of democracy that is desirable above the level of the domestic state (such as for the EU and other regional multinational associations, as well as at a global level) should not be unitary but federal in nature, because federalism is better able to combine transnational decision-making with significant forms of political autonomy for national groups. Both debates ('domestic' and 'transnational' federalism) overlap extensively and tackle similar issues. The objective of the panel is to contribute to the development of normative theories of federalism in both fields. Here is a tentative guideline of questions for paper givers: - Is federalism in multinational states normatively superior to unitary forms of decision-making, or to secession? - Is federalism in the EU normatively superior to a unitary EU or to a more confederal EU? - How is federalism in transnational political contexts different from federalism in multinational domestic states? - Is federalism democratic? - Is federalism divisive? What are the sources of unity in federal political constellations? - What is the theoretical relationship between federal and consociational arrangements? - Is it unjust that in a multinational federal political constellation resources are distributed on the basis of territorial units instead of individual needs? Could/should we opt for non-territorial forms of federalism? Does federalism disadvantage non-territorial minorities? - What are the relations between the ethnocultural rights of national groups and those of immigrants?
Friday, January 16, 2009
Elsewhere: The Life of Levy
My old friend Todd Seavey has an inimitable style of storytelling-as-biography. Every person named in a story is given an appositive description linking them, in every way Todd knows, to other persons named in the story, to intellectual themes or cultural trends he finds of interest, or to noteworthy events. This is so regardless of whether every person listening has already heard the footnoted stories already and knows how they connect or even already knows the person in question. He makes it work; it's highly entertaining, and although he was speaking that way before the advent of html it strikes me that it's the conversational equivalent of hypertext.
In any event, he's now posted a highly idiosyncratic origin story-cum-intellectual-biography-cum-narration-of-shared-cultural-interests of, well, me. It's roughly his standard format turned inside-out-- biography-as-storytelling, in which I'm the framing device for some reflections all his own.
My old friend Todd Seavey has an inimitable style of storytelling-as-biography. Every person named in a story is given an appositive description linking them, in every way Todd knows, to other persons named in the story, to intellectual themes or cultural trends he finds of interest, or to noteworthy events. This is so regardless of whether every person listening has already heard the footnoted stories already and knows how they connect or even already knows the person in question. He makes it work; it's highly entertaining, and although he was speaking that way before the advent of html it strikes me that it's the conversational equivalent of hypertext.
In any event, he's now posted a highly idiosyncratic origin story-cum-intellectual-biography-cum-narration-of-shared-cultural-interests of, well, me. It's roughly his standard format turned inside-out-- biography-as-storytelling, in which I'm the framing device for some reflections all his own.
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
Liberalism and libertarianism, again
Last fall's Princeton panel has now had its west coast counterpart, at Stanford.
Brad DeLong posts his remarks here. I do wish I had Brad's way with words:
Two thoughts:
1) Josh Cohen is a leading political theorist/ philosopher and an important figure on the center-left of intellectual life-- but I can't think that I've ever read him describing himself as a liberal. He seems to me an odd choice if one is constructing this as Team Liberal and Team Libertarian.
2) It struck me at the Princeton session that "Team Liberal and Team Libertarian" is the wrong construction for the project. If there must be a debate with sides (rather than a discussion around common issues) then it ought to be something like "Team 'Kissing Cousins' Thesis and Team 'Distant Relatives' Thesis."
Last fall's Princeton panel has now had its west coast counterpart, at Stanford.
Liberals and Libertarians: Kissing Cousins or Distant Relatives?
Description:
A DEBATE BETWEEN LIBERALS AND LIBERTARIANS
LIBERALS
Joshua Cohen / Political Science, Stanford University
Pamela Karlan / Law, Stanford University
Bradley DeLong / Economics, UC Berkeley
LIBERTARIANS
Brink Lindsay / Cato Institute
Will Wilkinson / Cato Institute, Blogger at FlyBottle
Virginia Postrel / Dynamist
That liberals and libertarians share philosophical origins is clearly implied by the common Latin root for both words, liberalis, meaning open or generous. Both philosophies advocate civil liberties, individual autonomy, limited state interference in private affairs, and a non-bellicose foreign policy. Where the two stances have diverged is with respect to fiscal and regulatory issues. Although liberals generally view markets as the best way of organizing production and distribution, they have been more sympathetic than libertarians to governmental involvement in the management of markets for the public good. Moreover, whereas both liberals and libertarians generally concur that the public sector should avoid excessive spending, the former have been more supportive of government programs to expand opportunity and provide social insurance.
During the 1960s and 1970s, when the public sector was expanding and government spending was rising sharply, libertarians leaned strongly toward a “fusionist” coalition with traditional social conservatives and generally supported the Republican realignment of the 1980s and 1990s. Since 2000, however, the Republican party has succumbed to ideologies that have shifted it steadily away from core libertarian principles by curtailing civil liberties, expanding government intrusions into private affairs, running up huge fiscal deficits, expanding federal control over local institutions such as schools, and launching costly military invasions in the absence of direct threats.
In the wake of these developments, the “fusionist” coalition between libertarians and conservative republicans has substantially frayed and perhaps the time has come to reconsider the historical estrangement between liberals and libertarians. Given shared positions with respect to civil liberties, state involvement in private affairs, fiscal responsibility, and the War in Iraq, it may be fruitful to search for common ground in other areas. Is there room for compromise on contested regulatory and fiscal issues, or are liberals and libertarians destined to be occasional tactical allies with fundamentally conflicting strategic visions? And regardless of possibilities for closer political cooperation, what libertarian insights do liberals need to do a better job of appreciating, and vice versa?
Brad DeLong posts his remarks here. I do wish I had Brad's way with words:
One way to understand Keynes's General Theory is that Say's Law is false in theory but that we can build the running code for limited, strategic interventions that will make Say's Law roughly true in practice. The modern American liberal economist's view of libertarianism is much the same: libertarianism is false in theory, but it is very much worth figuring out a set of limited, strategic interventions that will make the libertarian promises roughly true in practice.
Two thoughts:
1) Josh Cohen is a leading political theorist/ philosopher and an important figure on the center-left of intellectual life-- but I can't think that I've ever read him describing himself as a liberal. He seems to me an odd choice if one is constructing this as Team Liberal and Team Libertarian.
2) It struck me at the Princeton session that "Team Liberal and Team Libertarian" is the wrong construction for the project. If there must be a debate with sides (rather than a discussion around common issues) then it ought to be something like "Team 'Kissing Cousins' Thesis and Team 'Distant Relatives' Thesis."
Friday, January 09, 2009
The news I miss on red-eye flights
Cass Sunstein chosen as new administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. Congratulations to him!
Notes Orin Kerr, "this is terrific news for other legal academics. Cass currently writes about 120 law review articles a year, all of which place in top journals, amounting to about 30% of the total placed articles in those journals. With Cass working full-time in Washington, I'm betting that his scholarly productivity will plummet. He might write as few as 20 articles a year! That means that there will be 100 more non-Cass placements free every year for the next few years for the rest of us, which gives other scholars a great opportunity to place their articles while Cass is working in government."
But Orin neglects the cost to all of Cass' foregone coauthors.
Cass Sunstein chosen as new administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. Congratulations to him!
Notes Orin Kerr, "this is terrific news for other legal academics. Cass currently writes about 120 law review articles a year, all of which place in top journals, amounting to about 30% of the total placed articles in those journals. With Cass working full-time in Washington, I'm betting that his scholarly productivity will plummet. He might write as few as 20 articles a year! That means that there will be 100 more non-Cass placements free every year for the next few years for the rest of us, which gives other scholars a great opportunity to place their articles while Cass is working in government."
But Orin neglects the cost to all of Cass' foregone coauthors.
2008 books in political theory, continued
See this post for part 1.
Ten interesting and important books, by my lights, in political theory in 2008 by young and mid-career scholars. This will be a much more idiosyncratic list built around my own interests than the first one was-- not that the first one represented Objective Truth or anything, but, e.g., I'm pretty confident that there will be APSA panels or conferences or workshops or review symposia about most of the books I named there. Some of the books below are ones I suspect not many people have heard of yet; I want to encourage more people to have a look at them. In any case, well-known or not, consensus choices or not, these are interesting-to-me books published last year. Further contributions welcome in comments!
Sharon Krause, Civil Passions
Burke Hendrix, Ownership, Authority, and Self-Determination: Moral Principles and Indigenous Rights Claims
Dennis Rasmussen, The Problems and Promise of Commercial Society: Adam Smith's Response to Rousseau
Annelien De Dijn, French Political Thought from Montesquieu to Tocqueville: Liberty in a Levelled Society
Elisabeth Ellis, Provisional Politics: Kantian Arguments in Policy Context
Jenet Kirkpatrick, Uncivil Disobedience:
Studies in Violence and Democratic Politics
Jason Maloy,The Colonial American Origins of Modern Democratic Thought
Dana Villa, Public Freedom
Alan Houston, Benjamin Franklin and the Politics of Improvement
Adrian Vermeule, Law and the Limits of Reason
See this post for part 1.
Ten interesting and important books, by my lights, in political theory in 2008 by young and mid-career scholars. This will be a much more idiosyncratic list built around my own interests than the first one was-- not that the first one represented Objective Truth or anything, but, e.g., I'm pretty confident that there will be APSA panels or conferences or workshops or review symposia about most of the books I named there. Some of the books below are ones I suspect not many people have heard of yet; I want to encourage more people to have a look at them. In any case, well-known or not, consensus choices or not, these are interesting-to-me books published last year. Further contributions welcome in comments!
Must we put passions aside when we deliberate about justice? Can we do so? The dominant views of deliberation rightly emphasize the importance of impartiality as a cornerstone of fair decision making, but they wrongly assume that impartiality means being disengaged and passionless. In Civil Passions, Sharon Krause argues that moral and political deliberation must incorporate passions, even as she insists on the value of impartiality. Drawing on resources ranging from Hume's theory of moral sentiment to recent findings in neuroscience, Civil Passions breaks new ground by providing a systematic account of how passions can generate an impartial standpoint that yields binding and compelling conclusions in politics. Krause shows that the path to genuinely impartial justice in the public sphere--and ultimately to social change and political reform--runs through moral sentiment properly construed. This new account of affective but impartial judgment calls for a politics of liberal rights and democratic contestation, and it requires us to reconceive the meaning of public reason, the nature of sound deliberation, and the authority of law. By illuminating how impartiality feels, Civil Passions offers not only a truer account of how we deliberate about justice, but one that promises to engage citizens more effectively in acting for justice.
Much controversy has existed over the claims that Native Americans and other indigenous peoples have a right—based on original occupancy of land, historical transfers of sovereignty, and principles of self-determination—to a political status separate from the states in which they now find themselves embedded. How valid are these claims on moral grounds?
Burke Hendrix tackles these thorny questions in this book. Rather than focusing on the legal and constitutional status of indigenous nations within the states now ruling them, he starts at a more basic level, interrogating fundamental justifications for political authority itself. He shows that historical claims of land ownership and prior sovereignty cannot provide a sufficient basis for challenging the authority of existing states, but that our natural moral duties to aid other persons in danger can justify rights to political separation from states that fail to protect their citizens as they should.
Actual attempts at political separation must be carefully managed through well-defined procedural mechanisms, however, to foster extensive democratic deliberation about the nature of the politic al changes at stake. Using such procedures, Hendrix argues, indigenous peoples should be able to withdraw politically from the states currently ruling them, even to the point of choosing full independence.
Adam Smith is popularly regarded as the ideological forefather of laissez-faire capitalism, while Rousseau is seen as the passionate advocate of the life of virtue in small, harmonious communities and as a sharp critic of the ills of commercial society. But, in fact, Smith had many of the same worries about commercial society that Rousseau did and was strongly influenced by his critique.
In this first book-length comparative study of these leading eighteenth-century thinkers, Dennis Rasmussen highlights Smith's sympathy with Rousseau's concerns and analyzes in depth the ways in which Smith crafted his arguments to defend commercial society against these charges. These arguments, Rasmussen emphasizes, were pragmatic in nature, not ideological: it was Smith's view that, all things considered, commercial society offered more benefits than the alternatives.
Just because of this pragmatic orientation, Smith's approach can be useful to us in assessing the pros and cons of commercial society today and thus contributes to a debate that is too much dominated by both dogmatic critics and doctrinaire champions of our modern commercial society.
This study makes a major contribution to our understanding of one of the most important and enduring strands of modern political thought. Annelien de Dijn argues that Montesquieu’s aristocratic liberalism - his conviction that the preservation of freedom in a monarchy required the existence of an aristocratic ‘corps intermédiaire’ - had a continued impact on post-revolutionary France. Revisionist historians from Furet to Rosanvallon have emphasised the impact of revolutionary republicanism on post-revolutionary France, with its monist conception of politics and its focus on popular sovereignty. Dr de Dijn, however, highlights the persistence of a pluralist liberalism that was rooted in the Old Regime, and which saw democracy and equality as inherent threats to liberty. She thus provides a new context in which to read the work of Alexis de Tocqueville, who is revealed as the heir not just of Restoration liberals, but also of the Royalists and their hero, Montesquieu.
If we are to vindicate moral reasoning in politics, Elisabeth Ellis argues in this original and provocative work, we must focus on the conditions of political discourse rather than the contents of any particular ethical system. Written in an engaging, direct style, Provisional Politics builds on Ellis’s prize-winning interpretation of Kant’s theory of provisional right to construct a new theory of justice under conditions of agency and plurality. She develops this new perspective through a series of cases ranging from the treatment of AIDS widows in Kenya to the rights of non-citizens everywhere, as well as the clash between democratic decision-making and the politics of species conservation. The book concludes with a sobering discussion of the probable limits of political agency.
Studies in Violence and Democratic Politics
Uncivil Disobedience examines the roles violence and terrorism have played in the exercise of democratic ideals in America. Jennet Kirkpatrick explores how crowds, rallying behind the principle of popular sovereignty and desiring to make law conform to justice, can disdain law and engage in violence. She exposes the hazards of democracy that arise when citizens seek to control government directly, and demonstrates the importance of laws and institutions as limitations on the will of the people.
Kirkpatrick looks at some of the most explosive instances of uncivil disobedience in American history: the contemporary militia movement, Southern lynch mobs, frontier vigilantism, and militant abolitionism. She argues that the groups behind these violent episodes are often motivated by admirable democratic ideas of popular power and autonomy. Kirkpatrick shows how, in this respect, they are not so unlike the much-admired adherents of nonviolent civil disobedience, yet she reveals how those who engage in violent disobedience use these admirable democratic principles as a justification for terrorism and killing. She uses a "bottom-up" analysis of events to explain how this transformation takes place, paying close attention to what members of these groups do and how they think about the relationship between citizens and the law.
Uncivil Disobedience calls for a new vision of liberal democracy where the rule of the people and the rule of law are recognized as fundamental ideals, and where neither is triumphant or transcendent.
This first examination in almost 40 years of political ideas in the seventeenth-century American colonies reaches some surprising conclusions about the history of democratic theory more generally. The origins of a distinctively modern kind of thinking about democracy can be located, not in revolutionary America and France in the later eighteenth century, but in the tiny New England colonies in the middle seventeenth. The key feature of this democratic rebirth was honoring not only the principle of popular sovereignty through regular elections but also the principle of accountability through non-electoral procedures for the auditing and impeachment of elected officers. By staking its institutional identity entirely on elections, modern democratic thought has misplaced the sense of robust popular control that originally animated it.
The freedom to take part in civic life--whether in the exercise of one's right to vote or congregate and protest--has become increasingly less important to Americans than individual rights and liberties. In Public Freedom, renowned political theorist Dana Villa argues that political freedom is essential to both the preservation of constitutional government and the very substance of American democracy itself.
Through intense close readings of theorists such as Hegel, Tocqueville, Mill, Adorno, Arendt, and Foucault, Villa diagnoses the key causes of our democratic discontent and offers solutions to preserve at least some of our democratic hopes. He demonstrates how Americans' preoccupation with a market-based conception of freedom--that is, the personal freedom to choose among different material, moral, and vocational goods--has led to the gradual erosion of meaningful public participation in politics as well as diminished interest in the health of the public realm itself. Villa critically examines, among other topics, the promise and limits of civil society and associational life as sources of democratic renewal; the effects of mass media on the public arena; and the problematic but still necessary ideas of civic competence and democratic maturity.
Public Freedom is a passionate and insightful defense of political liberties at a moment in America's history when such freedoms are very much at risk.
This fascinating book explores Benjamin Franklin’s social and political thought. Although Franklin is often considered “the first American,” his intellectual world was cosmopolitan. An active participant in eighteenth-century Atlantic debates over the modern commercial republic, Franklin combined abstract analyses with practical proposals. Houston treats Franklin as shrewd, creative, and engaged—a lively thinker who joined both learned controversies and political conflicts at home and abroad.
Drawing on meticulous archival research, Houston examines such tantalizing themes as trade and commerce, voluntary associations and civic militias, population growth and immigration policy, political union and electoral institutions, freedom and slavery. In each case, he shows how Franklin urged the improvement of self and society.
Engagingly written and richly illustrated, this book provides a compelling portrait of Franklin, a fresh perspective on American identity, and a vital account of what it means to be practical.
Human reason is limited. Given the scarcity of reason, how should the power to make constitutional law be allocated among legislatures, courts and the executive, and how should legal institutions be designed? In Law and the Limits of Reason, Adrian Vermeule denies the widespread view, stemming from Burke and Hayek, that the limits of reason counsel in favor of judges making "living" constitutional law in the style of the common law. Instead, he proposes and defends a "codified constitution" - a regime in which legislatures have the primary authority to develop constitutional law over time, through statutes and constitutional amendments.
Vermeule contends that precisely because of the limits of human reason, large modern legislatures, with their numerous and highly diverse memberships and their complex internal structures for processing information, are the most epistemically effective lawmaking institutions.
Thursday, January 08, 2009
Blogging on jet lag and 2 hrs sleep in the last 2 days
You know, it's remarkable how entertaining and enjoyable and rewatchable I find Shrek, given that its moral is "It doesn't matter whether you're beautiful or ugly; all that matters is that you're not short."
By contrast, no matter how much fun I found watching Legally Blonde once in my life, I'll never watch it again. Its moral that "people who are beautiful and rich and popular but don't work very hard on their studies have it unfairly tough, until such time as the rest of us realize that their beauty entitles them to academic success" is too execrable to put up with twice.
You know, it's remarkable how entertaining and enjoyable and rewatchable I find Shrek, given that its moral is "It doesn't matter whether you're beautiful or ugly; all that matters is that you're not short."
By contrast, no matter how much fun I found watching Legally Blonde once in my life, I'll never watch it again. Its moral that "people who are beautiful and rich and popular but don't work very hard on their studies have it unfairly tough, until such time as the rest of us realize that their beauty entitles them to academic success" is too execrable to put up with twice.
Tuesday, January 06, 2009
The return of the big book
In late 2005 I wrote:
Well, the last twelve months look rather different. Herewith a quick rundown of some of the books published since December 2007-- some of them works that people I know have been eagerly awaiting for years. In this post I'll list ten by well-established prominent senior figures in the field; I'll follow up with a post on ten by young and mid-career scholars. No rankings or claims of "ten best" or "ten most important;" more like my equivalent of Larry Solum's Legal Theory Bookworm (and, unsurprisingly, there's a bit of overlap with the books he's highlighted over the past year).
Thomas Christiano, The Constitution of Equality: Democratic Authority and Its Limits
G.A. Cohen, Rescuing Justice and Equality
George Kateb, Patriotism and Other Mistakes
Charles Larmore, The Autonomy of Morality
David Miller, National Responsibility and Global Justice
[See also my article "National and statist responsibility," Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy]
Martha Nussbaum, Liberty of Conscience: In Defense of America's Tradition of Religious Equality
Josiah Ober, Democracy and Knowledge: Innovation and Learning in Classical Athens
Philip Pettit, Made With Words; Hobbes on Language, Mind, and Politics
Nancy Rosenblum, On The Side of Angels: An Appreciation of Parties and Partisanship
[There will be a symposium on On the Side of Angels on this blog in the near future.]
In late 2005 I wrote:
2005 was a kind of curious year in book publishing in political theory and philosophy. The market was mainly filled with huge Companions or Very Short Introductions or anything else besides actual monographs. It doesn't seem to me that there was any book that captured everyone's attention. There was no new book in the prestigious Oxford Political Theory series. People have been talking for the past few years about the absence of any set of questions so exciting and energizing as to draw everyone out of their niches and into a common conversation. This year seemed to me the year in which that absence filtered through to the lagging-indicator of newly-published monographs.
Now, there's nothing wrong with that. The exciting, unifying, common-conversation Big Ideas are only sometimes productive. There need to be signficant periods of time when people are working in their niches and making progress there. Frankly, I enjoy going to APSA more in the years when it's filled with scores of panels with interesting new papers, each following its own logic of argument and discovery, than in the years when everyone feels compelled to give a paper about, e.g., deliberative democracy.
But in those fragmentary moments, excellent books can get published that don't get noticed because they're in other people's niches. I like to see good work get read and recognized, and like to discourage the occasional bout of "nothing good is being done these days" despair. So, as a partial corrective, a list of ten excellent, interesting, important, or potentially transformative books in political theory
Well, the last twelve months look rather different. Herewith a quick rundown of some of the books published since December 2007-- some of them works that people I know have been eagerly awaiting for years. In this post I'll list ten by well-established prominent senior figures in the field; I'll follow up with a post on ten by young and mid-career scholars. No rankings or claims of "ten best" or "ten most important;" more like my equivalent of Larry Solum's Legal Theory Bookworm (and, unsurprisingly, there's a bit of overlap with the books he's highlighted over the past year).
What is the ethical basis of democracy? And what reasons do we have to go along with democratic decisions even when we disagree with them? And when do we have reason to say that we may justly ignore democratic decisions? These questions must be answered if we are to have answers to some of the most important questions facing our global community, which include whether there is a human right to democracy and whether we must attempt to spread democracy throughout the globe.
This book provides a philosophical account of the moral foundations of democracy and of liberalism. It shows how democracy and basic liberal rights are grounded in the principle of public equality, which tells us that in the establishment of law and policy we must treat persons as equals in ways they can see are treating them as equals. The principle of public equality is shown to be the fundamental principle of social justice. This account enables us to understand the nature and roles of adversarial politics and public deliberation in political life. It gives an account of the grounds of the authority of democracy. It also shows when the authority of democracy runs out. It shows how the violations of democratic and liberal rights are beyond the legitimate authority of democracy and how the creation of persistent minorities in a democratic society, and the failure to ensure a basic minimum for all persons, weaken the legitimate authority of democracy.
In this stimulating work of political philosophy, acclaimed philosopher G. A. Cohen sets out to rescue the egalitarian thesis that in a society in which distributive justice prevails, people’s material prospects are roughly equal. Arguing against the Rawlsian version of a just society, Cohen demonstrates that distributive justice does not tolerate deep inequality.
In the course of providing a deep and sophisticated critique of Rawls’s theory of justice, Cohen demonstrates that questions of distributive justice arise not only for the state but also for people in their daily lives. The right rules for the macro scale of public institutions and policies also apply, with suitable adjustments, to the micro level of individual decision-making.
Cohen also charges Rawls’s constructivism with systematically conflating the concept of justice with other concepts. Within the Rawlsian architectonic, justice is not distinguished either from other values or from optimal rules of social regulation. The elimination of those conflations brings justice closer to equality.
George Kateb has been one of the most respected and influential political theorists of the last quarter century. His work stands apart from that of many of his contemporaries and resists easy summary. In these essays Kateb often admonishes himself, in Socratic fashion, to keep political argument as far as possible negative: to be willing to assert what we are not, and what we will not do, and to build modestly from there some account of what we are and what we ought to do.
Drawing attention to the non-rational character of many motives that drive people to construct and maintain a political order, he urges greater vigilance in political life and cautions against “mistakes” not usually acknowledged as such. Patriotism is one such mistake, too often resulting in terrible brutality and injustices. He asks us to consider how commitments to ideals of religion, nation, race, ethnicity, manliness, and courage find themselves in the service of immoral ends, and he exhorts us to remember the dignity of the individual.
The book is divided into three sections. In the first, Kateb discusses the expansion of state power (including such topics as surveillance) and the justifications for war recently made by American policy makers. The second section offers essays in moral psychology, and the third comprises fresh interpretations of major thinkers in the tradition of political thought, from Socrates to Arendt.
In The Autonomy of Morality Charles Larmore challenges two ideas that have shaped the modern mind. The world, he argues, is not a realm of value-neutral fact, nor does human freedom consist in imposing principles of our own devising on an alien reality. Rather, reason consists in being responsive to reasons for thought and action that arise from the world itself. Larmore shows that the moral good has an authority that speaks for itself. Only in this light does the true basis of a liberal political order come into view, as well as the role of unexpected goods in the makeup of a life lived well.
This book presents a non-cosmopolitan theory of global justice. In contrast to theories that seek to extend principles of social justice, such as equality of opportunity or resources, to the world as a whole, it argues that in a world made up of self-determining national communities, a different conception is needed. The book presents and defends an account of national responsibility which entails that nations may justifiably claim the benefits that their decisions and policies produce, while also being held liable for harms that they inflict on other peoples. Such collective responsibility extends to responsibility for the national past, so the present generation may owe redress to those who have been harmed by the actions of their predecessors. Global justice, therefore, must be understood not in terms of equality, but in terms of a minimum set of basic rights that belong to human beings everywhere. Where these rights are being violated or threatened, remedial responsibility may fall on outsiders. The book considers how this responsibility should be allocated, and how far citizens of democratic societies must limit their pursuit of domestic objectives in order to discharge their global obligations.
The book presents a systematic challenge to existing theories of global justice without retreating to a narrow nationalism that denies that we have any responsibilities to the world's poor. It combines discussion of practical questions such as immigration and foreign aid with philosophical exploration of, for instance, the different senses of responsibility, and the grounds of human rights.
[See also my article "National and statist responsibility," Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy]
From one of America's most distinguished moral philosophers, a sweeping historically based argument that equal respect for all citizens is the bedrock of America's tradition of religious freedom.
In one of the great triumphs of the colonial and Revolutionary periods, the founders of the future United States overcame religious intolerance in favor of a constitutional order dedicated to fair treatment for people's deeply held conscientious beliefs. It granted equal liberty of conscience to all and took a firm stand against religious establishment. This respect for religious difference, acclaimed scholar Martha Nussbaum writes, formed our democracy.
Yet today there are signs that this legacy is misunderstood. The prominence of a particular type of Christianity in our public life suggests the unequal worth of citizens who hold different religious beliefs, or no beliefs. Other people, meanwhile, seek to curtail the influence of religion in public life in a way that is itself unbalanced and unfair. Such partisan efforts, Nussbaum argues, violate the spirit of our Constitution.
Liberty of Conscience is a historical and conceptual study of the American tradition of religious freedom. Weaving together political history, philosophical ideas, and key constitutional cases, this is a rich chronicle of an ideal of equality that has always been central to our history but is now in serious danger.
When does democracy work well, and why? Is democracy the best form of government? These questions are of supreme importance today as the United States seeks to promote its democratic values abroad. Democracy and Knowledge is the first book to look to ancient Athens to explain how and why directly democratic government by the people produces wealth, power, and security.
Combining a history of Athens with contemporary theories of collective action and rational choice developed by economists and political scientists, Josiah Ober examines Athenian democracy's unique contribution to the ancient Greek city-state's remarkable success, and demonstrates the valuable lessons Athenian political practices hold for us today. He argues that the key to Athens's success lay in how the city-state managed and organized the aggregation and distribution of knowledge among its citizens. Ober explores the institutional contexts of democratic knowledge management, including the use of social networks for collecting information, publicity for building common knowledge, and open access for lowering transaction costs. He explains why a government's attempt to dam the flow of information makes democracy stumble. Democratic participation and deliberation consume state resources and social energy. Yet as Ober shows, the benefits of a well-designed democracy far outweigh its costs.
Understanding how democracy can lead to prosperity and security is among the most pressing political challenges of modern times. Democracy and Knowledge reveals how ancient Greek politics can help us transcend the democratic dilemmas that confront the world today.
Hobbes's extreme political views have commanded so much attention that they have eclipsed his work on language and mind, and on reasoning, personhood, and group formation. But this work is of immense interest in itself, as Philip Pettit shows in Made with Words, and it critically shapes Hobbes's political philosophy.
Pettit argues that it was Hobbes, not later thinkers like Rousseau, who invented the invention of language thesis--the idea that language is a cultural innovation that transformed the human mind. The invention, in Hobbes's story, is a double-edged sword. It enables human beings to reason, commit themselves as persons, and incorporate in groups. But it also allows them to agonize about the future and about their standing relative to one another; it takes them out of the Eden of animal silence and into a life of inescapable conflict--the state of nature. Still, if language leads into this wasteland, according to Hobbes, it can also lead out. It can enable people to establish a commonwealth where the words of law and morality have a common, enforceable sense, and where people can invoke the sanctions of an absolute sovereign to give their words to one another in credible commitment and contract.
Written by one of today's leading philosophers, Made with Words is both an original reinterpretation and a clear and lively introduction to Hobbes's thought.
Political parties are the defining institutions of representative democracy and the darlings of political science. Their governing and electoral functions are among the chief concerns of the field. Yet most political theorists--including democratic theorists--ignore or disparage parties as grubby arenas of ambition, obstacles to meaningful political participation and deliberation. On the Side of the Angels is a vigorous defense of the virtues of parties and partisanship, and their worth as a subject for political theory.
Nancy Rosenblum's account moves between political theory and political science, and she uses resources from both fields to outline an appreciation of parties and the moral distinctiveness of partisanship. She draws from the history of political thought and identifies the main lines of opposition to parties, as well as the rare but significant moments of appreciation. Rosenblum then sets forth her own theoretical appreciation of parties and partisanship. She discusses the achievement of parties in regulating rivalries, channeling political energies, and creating the lines of division that make pluralist politics meaningful. She defends "partisan" as a political identity over the much-vaunted status of "independent," and she considers where contemporary democracies should draw the line in banning parties.
On the Side of the Angels offers an ethics of partisanship that speaks to questions of centrism, extremism, and polarization in American party politics. By rescuing parties from their status as orphans of political philosophy, Rosenblum fills a significant void in political and democratic theory.
[There will be a symposium on On the Side of Angels on this blog in the near future.]
Monday, January 05, 2009
CFP: Association for Political Theory
The APT Conference 2009
Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas
October 22-24, 2009
CALL FOR PAPERS
Proposals due February 15, 2009
The Association for Political Theory (APT) invites proposals for its
seventh annual conference to be held October 22–24, 2009 at Texas A&M
University in College Station, Texas. The APT is an interdisciplinary
organization devoted to supporting political theory and political
philosophy. We recognize that scholars in a range of disciplines are
doing important critical work on social and political questions. We
welcome their participation in this conference. The APT Conference
provides a collegial setting for scholars of various professional ranks,
institutional affiliations and theoretical approaches to engage one
another in fruitful discussions of their work. To learn more about the
Association and its annual conference, please visit the APT Gateway
website .
The full text of the call for papers is now available on the APT
website. Visit the APT homepage, or click on this link to
download a printer-friendly pdf of the Call.
Paper and panel proposals can be submitted any time on the APT website.
Proposals are due by 15 February 2009.
The APT Conference 2009
Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas
October 22-24, 2009
CALL FOR PAPERS
Proposals due February 15, 2009
The Association for Political Theory (APT) invites proposals for its
seventh annual conference to be held October 22–24, 2009 at Texas A&M
University in College Station, Texas. The APT is an interdisciplinary
organization devoted to supporting political theory and political
philosophy. We recognize that scholars in a range of disciplines are
doing important critical work on social and political questions. We
welcome their participation in this conference. The APT Conference
provides a collegial setting for scholars of various professional ranks,
institutional affiliations and theoretical approaches to engage one
another in fruitful discussions of their work. To learn more about the
Association and its annual conference, please visit the APT Gateway
website .
The full text of the call for papers is now available on the APT
website. Visit the APT homepage, or click on this link to
download a printer-friendly pdf of the Call.
Paper and panel proposals can be submitted any time on the APT website.
Proposals are due by 15 February 2009.
Tuesday, December 23, 2008
Now online: "Not so Novus an Ordo: Constitutions Without Social Contracts"
The preprint version is available at Political Theory (subscription required).
Abstract:
The preprint version is available at Political Theory (subscription required).
Abstract:
Social contract theory imagines political societies as resting on a fundamental agreement, adopted at a discrete moment in hypothetical time, that binds individual persons together into a polity and sets fundamental rules regarding that polity's structure and powers. Written constitutions, adopted at real moments in historical time, dictating governmental structures, bounding governmental powers, and entrenching individual rights, look temptingly like social contracts reified. Yet something essential is lost in this slippage between social contract theory and the practice of constitutionalism. Contractarian blinders lead us to look for greater individualism, social unity, and coherence of principles than should be expected. Real constitutional orders appropriate, incorporate, and channel the histories and divisions of the societies they govern. Treating them as social contracts flattens and distorts them, making those engagements with the past or with social plurality appear anomalous and encouraging their minimization. Accordingly this article redirects attention to non-contractarian strands within constitutionalism's intellectual inheritance and lived practice.
Monday, December 22, 2008
Leiter on Shaw on Nietzsche
Brian Leiter's review of Tamsin Shaw's Nietzsche's Political Skepticism is excerpted here and posted here.
I rolled my eyes at the fact that, even in the few paragraphs excerpted on his blog, Leiter couldn't resist the following: "Most books by political theorists on Nietzsche are unreadable for philosophers; this book is the exception that proves the rule." Heaven forbid that a thoughtful and serious engagement with a political theorist not be accompanied by a sideswipe at the rest of the field! But it's a very thoughtful review of a very good book; both recommended.
Brian Leiter's review of Tamsin Shaw's Nietzsche's Political Skepticism is excerpted here and posted here.
I rolled my eyes at the fact that, even in the few paragraphs excerpted on his blog, Leiter couldn't resist the following: "Most books by political theorists on Nietzsche are unreadable for philosophers; this book is the exception that proves the rule." Heaven forbid that a thoughtful and serious engagement with a political theorist not be accompanied by a sideswipe at the rest of the field! But it's a very thoughtful review of a very good book; both recommended.
Sunday, December 21, 2008
The Philosophy of Adam Smith: A conference to commemorate the 250th anniversary of The Theory of Moral Sentiments, January 6-8, 2009, Balliol College, Oxford
The program and schedule are now online, along with paper abstracts. It's a great lineup, and I'm excited that I'll be able to be there for part of it.
The program and schedule are now online, along with paper abstracts. It's a great lineup, and I'm excited that I'll be able to be there for part of it.
Organised by the International Adam Smith Society and The Adam Smith Review
Conference organisers: Vivienne Brown, Editor The Adam Smith Review (v.w.brown@open.ac.uk)
Samuel Fleischacker, President, International Adam Smith Society (fleischert@sbcglobal.net)
Although Adam Smith is better known now for his economics, in his own time it was his first book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), which established his reputation. Just as scholarly work on Smith has challenged the free market appropriation of Smith’s Wealth of Nations, so it has also come to appreciate the importance of Smith’s moral philosophy for his overall intellectual project. This conference, to be held at the college Smith himself attended from 1740-46, and at the beginning of the year marking the 250th anniversary of the publication of The Theory of Moral Sentiments, will provide an opportunity to re-evaluate the significance of Smith’s moral philosophy and moral psychology, the relationship between them and his other writings on economics, politics, jurisprudence, history, and rhetoric and belles lettres, and the relevance of his thought to current research in these areas.
Plenary speakers will include:
Stephen Darwall (Professor of Philosophy, University of Michigan), "Smith on Honor and Respect"
Charles Griswold (Professor of Philosophy, Boston University), "Tales of the Self: Adam Smith's Reply to Rousseau"
David Raphael (Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, Imperial College), "The Virtue of TMS 1759"
Emma Rothschild (Jeremy and Jane Knowles Professor of History, Harvard University, and Director of the Centre for History and Economics, King's College, Cambridge and Harvard University), "TMS and the Inner Life"
Geoffrey Sayre-McCord (Professor of Philosophy, University of North Carolina), "Is the Impartial Spectator's Vision 20/20?"
ession speakers
Richard van den Berg, "PL Roederer's Reading of Smith's System of Sympathy"
Lauren Brubaker, "Smith's moderate response to Rousseau"
Richard Boyd, "Adam Smith and Nationalism"
Emily Brady, "Nature, Aesthetic Judgment, and Sympathetic Imagination"
Toni Vogel Carey, "Accounting for Moral as for Natural Things"
Maria Alejandra Carrasco, "The forked meaning of self-command"
Sergio Cremaschi, "Adam Smith's post-scepticism and his unwritten doctrines"
Remy Debes, "The Value of Persons in Smith's Moral Philosophy"
Patricio Fernandez and Nicholas Teh, "Smith and McDowell on Moral Objectivity"
Tom Ford, "Reification and Adam Smith's 'as it were'"
Fonna Forman-Barzilai, "The 'humbler department': Smith's anti-cosmopolitanism"
Christel Fricke, "Moral Norms: Conventions or Universal Principles?"
Patrick Frierson, "Smithian Intrinsic Value"
Ryan Hanley, "Smith's Skepticism"
Maureen Harkin, "Smith on Literature,"
Eugene Heath, "Moral Evolution and the Invisible Hand"
Neven Leddy, "Smith's TMS in 1759, 1790 and 1976"
Thornton Lockwood, "Moral Education in Aristotle and Adam Smith"
John McHugh, "Hume and Smith: Sympathy, Utility and the Sociality of the Self"
Alice MacLachlan, "Injustice, Entitlement, and Smithean Resentment"
James McClellan and Karin Brown, "Sophie de Grouchy's Translation of TMS"
Robert Mankin, "Smith and the Art of Dying"
Angelica Nuzzo, "The Standpoint of Morality in Adam Smith and Hegel"
Paul Oslington, "Newton and Smith on Divine Action"
Jonathan Rick, "The Impartial Spectator's Amour-Propre"
Alvaro Santana-Alcuña, "Outside the Self"
Roberto Scazzieri, "Social Mirrors: Rationality under Relational Constraints""
Eric Schliesser, "Adam Smith's Engagement with Plato's Laws"
Arby Siraki, "Adam Smith's theory of tragedy"
Spiros Tegos, "The Problem of Authority in Adam Smith"
Andrew Terjesen, "Imagination or Correspondence in Smith's 'Sympathy'"
Robert Urquhart, "Adam Smith's Problems: Tensions within TMS and WN"
Carola Freilin von Villiez, ""Dimensions of Impartiality"
Gloria Vivenza, "Cicero and Seneca in TMS"
Christopher Williams, "Taste and Testimony in Adam Smith"
Jeffrey Young, "Justice, Property, and Markets"
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
Aristocracy
I'm always a little uncomfortable trying to make Michael Oakeshott's "Rationalism in Politics" seem like a strong, attractive, plausible argument in class-- because however strong its critical bite, its affirmative case seems unavoidably to end up as an endorsement of hereditary political office. Now, I'm willing to be the elegaic Oakeshottean/ Burkean about the old British House of Lords, but at the end of the day I'm an American and our founding fathers dumped tea into the harbor and shot at redcoats when they saw the whites of their eyes and overthrew the mightiest military power in the world in order to stop the pernicious doctrine of hereditary rule and make the world safe for democracy, and it was just to Americans' good fortune that they were able to be without an aristocracy in the first place rather than having to kill theirs off in the streets of Paris, will all the unfortunate consequences that entailed.[*] In 2008 a hereditary aristocracy as a serious political force is just a silly thing to imagine.
My imagination was stunted, I finally realize. Come next year, I'm going to start with the election of Justin Trudeau to Parliament and the immediate talk of his becoming a Liberal leader, recount Michael Ignatieff's genealogy, explain the generations of Bushes and the fact that W was only President because at a crucial moment in the late 1990s some large number of poll respondents thought that he was his father, discuss the Udall family, the Romneys, the Welds, the Chafees, and so on-- then discuss the tendency for arriviste or nouveau or bootstraps-meritocratic leaders promptly establish new family legacies of their own, and point to the Clintons. Widows-and-sons in postcolonial democracies, including the Nehru-Gandhis, and so on. Family politics and legacies run strongly in democratic politics, and while they're occasionally interrupted by a Reagan, a Clinton, a Thatcher, an Obama, even those people unavoidably live in a political world of legislators and officials very many of whom are in a family business which they're learned as an apprenticeship a la Oakeshott. Oakeshott, I think, would tell us not to be surprised, or too dismayed, by this, or too impressed with the occasional poor-kid-turned-Rhodes-Scholar-turned-President.
I guess I'm still dismayed, even after the realization, but I'll try to remember not to be too self-satisfied that we live in a post-Oakeshottian world in which hereditary politics is unthinkable.
Not sure why these musings occurred to me today. I wonder.
*This is a joke. I have more than my fair share of American prejudices, and they are too deep-rooted for me to shake off entirely, but I also know that this is... not an especially accurate reading of the events of 1763-89.
Update: See also: “She’ll be good. It’s in her blood.”
And see this post from Richard Just at TNR. In my gut I agree with all of it-- but it's also exemplary of the defender of technical knowledge, the meritocratic new man who prefers SAT scores to Oakeshott's "two generations to learn".
I'm always a little uncomfortable trying to make Michael Oakeshott's "Rationalism in Politics" seem like a strong, attractive, plausible argument in class-- because however strong its critical bite, its affirmative case seems unavoidably to end up as an endorsement of hereditary political office. Now, I'm willing to be the elegaic Oakeshottean/ Burkean about the old British House of Lords, but at the end of the day I'm an American and our founding fathers dumped tea into the harbor and shot at redcoats when they saw the whites of their eyes and overthrew the mightiest military power in the world in order to stop the pernicious doctrine of hereditary rule and make the world safe for democracy, and it was just to Americans' good fortune that they were able to be without an aristocracy in the first place rather than having to kill theirs off in the streets of Paris, will all the unfortunate consequences that entailed.[*] In 2008 a hereditary aristocracy as a serious political force is just a silly thing to imagine.
My imagination was stunted, I finally realize. Come next year, I'm going to start with the election of Justin Trudeau to Parliament and the immediate talk of his becoming a Liberal leader, recount Michael Ignatieff's genealogy, explain the generations of Bushes and the fact that W was only President because at a crucial moment in the late 1990s some large number of poll respondents thought that he was his father, discuss the Udall family, the Romneys, the Welds, the Chafees, and so on-- then discuss the tendency for arriviste or nouveau or bootstraps-meritocratic leaders promptly establish new family legacies of their own, and point to the Clintons. Widows-and-sons in postcolonial democracies, including the Nehru-Gandhis, and so on. Family politics and legacies run strongly in democratic politics, and while they're occasionally interrupted by a Reagan, a Clinton, a Thatcher, an Obama, even those people unavoidably live in a political world of legislators and officials very many of whom are in a family business which they're learned as an apprenticeship a la Oakeshott. Oakeshott, I think, would tell us not to be surprised, or too dismayed, by this, or too impressed with the occasional poor-kid-turned-Rhodes-Scholar-turned-President.
I guess I'm still dismayed, even after the realization, but I'll try to remember not to be too self-satisfied that we live in a post-Oakeshottian world in which hereditary politics is unthinkable.
Not sure why these musings occurred to me today. I wonder.
*This is a joke. I have more than my fair share of American prejudices, and they are too deep-rooted for me to shake off entirely, but I also know that this is... not an especially accurate reading of the events of 1763-89.
Update: See also: “She’ll be good. It’s in her blood.”
And see this post from Richard Just at TNR. In my gut I agree with all of it-- but it's also exemplary of the defender of technical knowledge, the meritocratic new man who prefers SAT scores to Oakeshott's "two generations to learn".
My colleagues have been doing an excellent job of explaining why it would be a disgrace to appoint Caroline Kennedy to the Senate, but I want to add one other argument to theirs. It has to do with elitism. To make a rough generalization, there are two different kinds of elitism: social elitism and intellectual elitism. Obviously, the two are intertwined in certain respects but they are basically distinct phenomena. (And even where they are closely intertwined, it's possible to see a distinction. Ivy League schools, for instance, have long embodied both strands of the elitist tradition, and still do. But over the past two generations, the relative balance at these institutions has gradually shifted away from social elitism and towards intellectual elitism--with fewer students admitted because their parents are well-connected and more admitted because of their high SAT scores.)
The difference is important because one form of elitism is considerably more valuable to a democratic society than the other. Social elitism is at best worthless, at worst illiberal and dangerous. It runs counter to the notion of equal opportunity that forms the core of the American ideal. More practically, it leads to people doing jobs for which they are not qualified. When those jobs are important ones, the consequences to society can be severe. If there are any positive outcomes that flow from social elitism, I can't think of them.
That isn't true for intellectual elitism. To be sure, this form of elitism carries plenty of downsides. It can lead to hubris (this was the cautionary tale of The Best and the Brightest) and cause people to underestimate the role that luck has played in their own success. But unlike social elitism, intellectual elitism carries clear benefits. It is worthwhile for society to esteem expertise--good for our arts, good for our sciences, and good for our politics. As long as it is tempered by other values, intellectual elitism--a fundamental belief in the worth of intelligence and curiosity--is basically a good thing.
One of the great tricks of the Republican Party in recent years has been to meld these two forms of elitism into a single slur. [...]
The election of Barack Obama suggests that American voters finally saw through this damaging conflation. Obama is probably the most intellectually elite president since Woodrow Wilson--he wrote an acclaimed book, taught at a top law school, and generally evinces a kind of academic disposition toward the world that is rare in politicians--but his entire career is a repudiation of social elitism. He went to the best schools not on the basis of his family connections but on the basis of intellectual merit. In electing Obama, voters were giving a measure of approval to this form of elitism--to expertise and intelligence in government--which is something they have not done in a long time.
And that is why I find the Caroline Kennedy situation so appalling. Just when Democrats have succeeded in decoupling intellectual elitism from social elitism--just when they have succeeded in suggesting that you can be advocates of intelligence and expertise without being advocates of unearned privilege and crude snobbery--along comes the ultimate symbol of social elitism to stake her claim to a powerful place in the Democratic Party. If Kennedy gets the seat, it will be for one reason only: her last name. And the perception that she is close to Obama threatens to meld social elitism and intellectual elitism back together in the minds of voters. That is good news for demagogues like Sarah Palin, and bad news for the country.
NOMOS XLIX: Moral Universalism and Pluralism
Nomos XLIX: Moral Universalism and Pluralism, edited by Melissa S. Williams and Henry Richardson, is now in print. It will soon ship to those who were dues-paying members of the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy in 2004.
Book Description
Moral universalism, or the idea that some system of ethics applies to all people regardless of race, color, nationality, religion, or culture, must have a plurality over which to range — a plurality of diverse persons, nations, jurisdictions, or localities over which morality asserts a universal authority. The contributors to Moral Universalism and Pluralism, the latest volume in the NOMOS series, investigate the idea that, far from denying the existence of such pluralities, moral universalism presupposes it. At the same time, the search for universally valid principles of morality is deeply challenged by diversity. The fact of pluralism presses us to explore how universalist principles interact with ethical, political, and social particularisms. These important essays refuse the answer that particularisms should simply be made to conform to universal principles, as if morality were a mold into which the diverse matter of human society and culture could be pressed. Rather, the authors bring philosophical, legal and political perspectives to bear on the core questions: Which forms of pluralism are conceptually compatible with moral universalism, and which ones can be accommodated in a politically stable way? Can pluralism generate innovations in understandings of moral duty? How is convergence on the validity of legal and moral authority possible in circumstances of pluralism? As the contributors to the book demonstrate in a wide variety of ways, these normative, conceptual, and political questions deeply intertwine.
Contributors: Kenneth Baynes, William A. Galston, Barbara Herman, F. M. Kamm, Benedict Kingsbury, Frank I. Michelman, William E. Scheuerman, Gopal Sreenivasan, Daniel Weinstock, and Robin West.
Nomos XLIX: Moral Universalism and Pluralism, edited by Melissa S. Williams and Henry Richardson, is now in print. It will soon ship to those who were dues-paying members of the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy in 2004.
Book Description
Moral universalism, or the idea that some system of ethics applies to all people regardless of race, color, nationality, religion, or culture, must have a plurality over which to range — a plurality of diverse persons, nations, jurisdictions, or localities over which morality asserts a universal authority. The contributors to Moral Universalism and Pluralism, the latest volume in the NOMOS series, investigate the idea that, far from denying the existence of such pluralities, moral universalism presupposes it. At the same time, the search for universally valid principles of morality is deeply challenged by diversity. The fact of pluralism presses us to explore how universalist principles interact with ethical, political, and social particularisms. These important essays refuse the answer that particularisms should simply be made to conform to universal principles, as if morality were a mold into which the diverse matter of human society and culture could be pressed. Rather, the authors bring philosophical, legal and political perspectives to bear on the core questions: Which forms of pluralism are conceptually compatible with moral universalism, and which ones can be accommodated in a politically stable way? Can pluralism generate innovations in understandings of moral duty? How is convergence on the validity of legal and moral authority possible in circumstances of pluralism? As the contributors to the book demonstrate in a wide variety of ways, these normative, conceptual, and political questions deeply intertwine.
Contributors: Kenneth Baynes, William A. Galston, Barbara Herman, F. M. Kamm, Benedict Kingsbury, Frank I. Michelman, William E. Scheuerman, Gopal Sreenivasan, Daniel Weinstock, and Robin West.
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