Pluralism and civicness

I'm going to past here something that could have been a comment on this post of Russell Arben Fox's. But it ends up being my own rant about the idea of civil religion more than an engagement with Russell's own arguments-- I'm interested in using one paragraph of his as a point of departure, while recognizing that he goes from it to other ideas to which my comments below aren't really germane. And that gives me the excuse to get a new substantive post up on this site!

Russell is investigating the potential contours of an era-appropriate civil religion.

But rather than picking apart different aspects of the thread, I want to focus on [Damon Linker's] original claim: namely, that with the fortunate passing of the Bush administration's attempt to instantiate a more or less "public orthodoxy" of a particular evangelical-Catholic persuasion, and with the tremendous unlikelihood of any kind of liberal mainline Protestantism regaining its hold upon America's character, what then will be our civil religion? This, of course, is really a two-part question: first, do we need one, and two, if we do, what should it be? My answer to the first part is, very simply, yes, because you can't not have one; religious establishments--defining the term fairly broadly, of course--our an inevitability in democratic societies, because people the great bulk of human beings bring religion with them wherever they go, and so long as you allow the unwashed masses to occasionally vote and even run for office--that is, so long as you actually have some elements of democracy--then you're going to have majorities looking to order their communities along the lines of their beliefs, and so some kind of "civil" belief ought to emerge and be established so as to provide such majorities with both guidelines and boundaries.

Note: he asks "do we need one?" and answers "yes, because you can't not have one."

But it seems to me that there's important omitted emphasis: one might ask "do we need one?" And the response "yes, because you can't not have one" seems a little more suspect when phrased that way.

Russell notes that we will inevitably have "majorities looking to order their communities along the lines of their beliefs." Sure. But "majorities" and "communities" are both plural nouns; and minorities will try to do the same thing, as well. The national unity that "civil religion" arguments aspire to seems to me illusory.

For the current era, Russell notes the likely triumph of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism over the conservative evangelical-Catholic fusion. But the latter cluster of beliefs doesn't thereby disappear. It's not held a Rousseauian minority that is at all likely to think "the fact that we were outvoted shows that we were wrong." But that's just what Rousseau thought minorities were like in a well-ordered society. And a Rousseauian civil religion is one with boundaries between the permissible and the impermissible-- between, in the local context, religious beliefs that are American and those that are un-American.

Moralistic Therapeutic Deism may be one of two things going forward. One, it may be the language that state officials are permitted to use in talking about religion in public. Two, it may be the de facto religion of a majority of northern whites. I can't see anything more than those that it could possibly be. To name only the two biggest outlier groups: The black church rests on beliefs and languages that are incompatible with it; neither jeremiad nor prophecy sits at all comfortably with this other thing that sits halfway between Episcopalianism-lite and Unitarianism. The white southern evangelicals, charismatics, and fundamentalists (overlapping, not identical, groups) who made up the core constituency of the Republican civil religion (Catholics were well-represented among its intellectual class but not its voting class) aren't going anywhere, and aren't going to be persuaded to join the MTD civil religion. They never have been; they might withdraw from politics as they did post-Scopes, but that only makes them a disaffected, partly-seceded internal minority, not part of the hoped-for consensus.

And if I'm right that MTD can't be a consensus set of actual substantive religious commitments, then it also can't be a permanent set of parameters or guidelines around public religiosity. Rejecting MTD isn't un-American, and won't become un-American. When the electoral tide turns again, MTD's conservative rival will again look like the dominant expression of white Christianity. And, again, it will be no more than that.

There are a variety of different ways of political-religious being in a religiously plural society. The attempt to have a civil religion, whatever else it means, is typically an attempt to willfully deny that fact, or to make it cease to be true through especially coercive denials that it is true. Consider one of my betes noirs: the Pledge of Allegiance.

The Pledge is perhaps the apex of American civil religiosity. It states a public creed, one that eventually (though not originally) incorporated God, one that is recited ritualistically like the Lord's Prayer in front of an idol fetish golden calf object of veneration. It was the creation of the nationalist Protestant socialist Francis Bellamy, at a moment of very high immigration from southern and eastern Europe-- and very high native anxiety about that. It was also written within living memory of the Civil War. "One nation, indivisible" was not neutral consensus talk! The Pledge insisted that Lost Causers were un-American, as were the ultramontanist immigrant believers in post-First Vatican Catholicism (whose allegiance couldn't be pledged in the same way, or so it was thought-- foreign princes and potentates and all). It was an episode in a particularly ugly era in American nationalism-- the era of the Spanish-American War, allotment and a new level of brutal assimilationism directed at Indians, the coerced 1890 Declaration from the Mormons and the concomitant Late Church of LDS vs US, which held that Congress could dissolve the Mormon Church and confiscate its assets (not merely criminalize polygamy), the Chinese Exclusion Act, and all of the well-known ideological panic about southern and eastern European immigrants. I think it's important that we remember the Pledge as part of that era, and as expressing the same determination to coerce one American identity.

The Pledge was Liberty Cabbage for the previous generation-- an attempt to simultaneously claim a greater national unity than actually existed and to bring it into being by casting dissidents beyond the pale. But the substantive pluralism and disagreements remained. And the boundaries of the pale were only as stable as a victorious electoral coalition.

Yes, free persons organizing their lives democratically will do so in ways that are informed by their religious commitments-- no doubt to a degree that I as a nonbeliever find unpalatable. But they will do so according to their various religious commitments. Sometimes some of them will say that their cluster of political-religious views represent the unified view of a nation; but their saying it doesn't make it so. And so I think Russell's wrong to say that we must have a civil religion, because we will have a civil religion-- where a is a singular article. We have religions, and hence in a democratic society we will have politicized religions, and religiously-infused political movements, and local religious minorities of varying stripes. By saying that I don't mean to say that the story ends there; I'm all for constitutional constraints on the ways and degree to which religion can legitimately infuse politics. But I don't think there's some plausible future in which those constitutional constraints become a new consensus religion that trumps the religious pluralism of the society, and I oppose dressing up my understanding of the appropriate constraints in nationalist-religious garb. And I don't think that the attempt to do so-- the attempt to marry the attenuated religiosity of some northern whites to a vision of the American constitutional order-- will do much of anything to prevent the next turning of the religious-political wheel.

Steve's place

My colleague Steve Saideman is having his new-blogger burst of ideas and posts. (By contrast: I've had one post in the last month that included even a single paragraph-long thought. It's been mostly link-and-quote posts or conference announcements or book announcements or coffee jokes around here for quite a while now.) Go have a look.

Someone's probably noted this before, but...

isn't there something odd in the party of "A Choice, Not An Echo" embracing the identity of "dittoheads"?

Multicultural Manners

I've posted a new paper on SSRN: Multicultural Manners. It's my first real paper about Montreal. It's also a bit earlier of a draft than I usually post, so comments would be especially welcome.

Audio of conference on Bouchard-Taylor report

The GRIPP conference on the Bouchard-Taylor report blogged about here can now be listened to online here.

Carens, "The Case for Amnesty"

Boston Review hosts a symposium featuring a lead essay by Joseph Carens (probably the political theorist who has thought longest and hardest about justice and immigration) and a number of distinguished respondents (including my colleague Arash Abizadeh)on the moral case for amnesty for illegal immigrants.

Tomorrow at McGill: "Two Cultures," with Canada's Kyoto Prize Winners

On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of SNow's "Two Cultures," McGill will host a discussion on "Two Cultures: Humanities and the Sciences," with Canada's first two winners of the Kyoto Prize, Charles Taylor (McGill) and Anthony Pawson (University of Toronto).

On May 5, 2009, McGill University will host an event honouring the first two Canadian recipients of the Inamori Foundation’s prestigious Kyoto Prize, often described as Japan's equivalent to the Nobel Prize.

This occasion will feature a public conversation between the 2008 Laureates, Dr. Charles Taylor (Dept of Philosophy, McGill) and Dr. Anthony Pawson (University of Toronto and the Samuel Lunenfeld Research Institute of Mount Sinai Hospital) on the subject of Two Cultures: Humanities and the Sciences.

The theme is drawn from a 1959 lecture by physicist and novelist C.P. Snow, who argued that a growing communication gap between scientists and other intellectuals was getting in the way of solving world problems. The landmark Two Cultures lecture, and subsequent book, sparked widespread debate.

Fifty years later, many scientific and other academic fields have become ever more specialized and arcane. Yet, many educators are striving to bridge the gaps among disciplines. And the Internet revolution is making knowledge more broadly accessible than ever. So where do we stand? Has the rift between the two cultures widened even further? Or is it finally beginning to narrow?

Dr. Taylor, the Kyoto Prize winner in Arts and Philosophy, and Dr. Pawson, the winner in Basic Sciences, will discuss the Two Cultures for about 40 minutes. They will then take questions from an audience of around 300 people. Prof. Antonia Maioni, Director of the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada, will moderate the forum.

The Kyoto Prize, founded in 1985, is awarded annually to people who have made significant contributions in the three categories of Advanced Technology, Basic Sciences, and Arts and Philosophy. Through this Prize, the Inamori Foundation seeks not only to recognize outstanding achievements but also to promote academic and cultural development and to contribute to mutual international understanding.

When: Tuesday, May 5, 2009, from 4-6 p.m.

Where: Moyse Hall, Arts Building
McGill University
853 Sherbrooke Street West, Montreal

A reception will follow.

The caffeine won't kill you...

but the water will. That's why it's safer to stick with espressos.

This many cups of coffee will kill you:

[...]an oral lethal dose for an 80kg human would extrapolate to 15,360mg of total caffeine. This technically is equivalent to the amount of caffeine absorbed from drinking 113 cups of coffee really really really quickly. However, the reality is that this figure would instead result in a fatality due to water intoxication since 113 cups is close to 30 litres of water.

TOMORROW: GRIPP year-end conference: "The Bouchard-Taylor report, one year later: international perspectives/ Le rapport Taylor-Bouchard, un an plus tard: perspectives internationales

* This conference will provide an opportunity to critically reflect on the Commissioners' report, their analysis and recommendations, as well as the broader lessons we might draw from the process. Drawing on their diverse national experiences of multiculturalism, the invited speakers will extend the Québec debate on "reasonable accommodation."

* May 1st and 2nd, 2009
* Université de Montréal (Salle 1035, Pavillon J-Armand Bombardier)

Participants include:

* Tariq Modood, Bristol University
* Jeff Spinner-Halev, University of North Carolina
* Avigail Eisenberg, University of Victoria
* Monique Deveaux, Williams College
* Will Kymlicka, Queen's University
* Éléonore Lepinard, Université de Montréal
* Manuel Toscano Méndez, Universidad de Malaga and CRÉUM
* Jacob Levy, McGill University
* Dominique Leydet, Université du Québec à Montréal

Tentative Program:

Friday MAY 1

8.45-9 Registration, Coffee

9-9.30 Welcome
Daniel Weinstock

9.30-12 Perspectives from English Canada
Avigail Eisenberg
Will Kymlicka
Commentator: Dominique Leydet

12-1.30 Lunch (catered)

1.30-5 Perspectives from Europe
Tariq Modood
Éléonore Lepinard
Jean Bauberot
Commentator: Jacob Levy


Saturday MAY 2

8.45-9 Coffee

9-11 Perspectives from the U.S.
Monique Deveaux
Jeff Spinner-Helev
Commentator: Manuel Toscano Méndez

11-11.30 Break

11.30-12.30 Synthesis
Anna Carastathis


* Please note: Although most presentations will be made in English, we encourage passive bilingualism, and individuals may request simultaneous translation as needed.



Please RSVP!

* Admission is free and open to all, but advance registration is required. Please register by Monday, April 20 at the latest by e-mailing Will at willcolish@gmail.com.


* For more information, please contact Anna by e-mail at acarastathis@gmail.com or by telephone at 514-343-6111 extension 2932.


* Note: To access the Bouchard-Taylor report, which can be downloaded in French or in English, visit http://www.accommodements.qc.ca/index-en.html


* Organized by Daniel Weinstock and Anna Carastathis, with assistance from Will Colish and Martin Blanchard, Centre de recherche en éthique de l'Université de Montréal.

Elsewhere

Julian Sanchez on the lies being told about Cass Sunstein

a terrific Crooked Timber seminar on Steven Teles' The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement

My colleague Steve Saideman has taken up blogging, starting with an entry into the growing field of Joseph-Nye-on-political-science studies.

That insane Mark Taylor NYT op-ed on abolishing departments, tenure, disciplines, and in-person teaching gets ably dismantled in very different ways by Michael Bérubé and David Bell.

My colleague Will Roberts has a series of posts responding to Brad DeLong's recently-posted paper on Marx.

Dan Nexon calls for a referee boycott of journals that don't send ultimate decision letters to the referees.

The reading list: "Justice Ginsburg's Common Law Federalism"

David L. Franklin, "Justice Ginsburg's Common Law Federalism

Abstract:
This essay examines an often-overlooked facet of the federalism debate in which Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has pursued a distinctive approach: the role of the state-court common law judge in our federal system. In a series of majority and dissenting opinions, Justice Ginsburg has made clear that she places an exceptionally high value on the capacity of common law judges to render justice and to provide effective remedies to injured parties on a case-by-case basis. Although she acknowledges that Congress has virtually unlimited power to supplant or override this traditional judicial function, she insists upon a clear and unambiguous statement of congressional intent before countenancing such a result. Justice Ginsburg's vision of the common law judge as a guarantor of individualized justice informs and reflects her view of the law more generally. She draws a relatively sharp divide between the realms of common law and positive law and, more than any other justice on the current Court, conceptualizes common law regimes such as contract and tort as serving primarily remedial rather than regulatory purposes.

It's a cheap line, but someone had to say it.

NYT: To Save Money, M.I.T. Drops 8 Sports Teams

Me: MIT has 8 sports teams?

Alan Houston discovers new Benjamin Franklin letters

This is very cool (gated Chronicle article):

It sounds like a scene out of Possession: In the waning hours of a research trip to the British Library, an American scholar stumbles on a cache of letters overlooked for 250 years. It's the stuff of scholarly romance, and it happened to Alan Houston, a professor of political science at the University of California at San Diego, who made what he describes as the find of a lifetime—47 letters written by, to, and about Benjamin Franklin, and never before seen by scholars.

Mr. Houston had traveled to England to round up material for his book Benjamin Franklin and the Politics of Improvement (Yale University Press, 2008). On the last day of his visit, he was in the library's Manuscripts Reading Room looking at material on the French and Indian War.

He asked to see a volume of papers that had belonged to Thomas Birch, secretary of the Royal Society from 1752 to 1765. The volume was described simply as "Copies of Letters Relating to the March of General Braddock," referring to the ill-starred venture of a British general dispatched in 1755 to capture Fort Duquesne, in present-day Pittsburgh, from the French.

"The first thing in it was a letter from Benjamin Franklin to the secretary of the governor of Maryland," Mr. Houston said this week. "I looked at the first sentence and said, 'This doesn't sound familiar.' Then I got kind of nervous and bouncy in my chair." [...]

For two years, Mr. Houston has kept his find a secret from almost everyone else, except for a handful of Franklin experts whom he consulted to help him verify the documents.[...]

The letters will finally see the light of day this month in an issue of The William and Mary Quarterly, along with an essay by the discoverer on what Mr. Houston calls "the wagon affair of 1755."

Houston's new Franklin book is high on my summer reading list.

Quote of the day

Julian Sanchez:

In a pure libertopia, the Market will be so efficient as to dispense with the need for human intermediaries, like a Lovecraftian Elder God who casts aside the husk of an avatar to bestow the touch of madness with its own deathless tentacles.

Scattered thoughts on policy, politics, and political science

I've been intermittently following the discussions around Joseph Nye's "Scholars on the Sidelines," in the blogosphere and elsewhere. (See Dan's post here and his links back to his previous three, and the sundry other commentary to which he links; and Henry Farrell.)

President Obama has appointed some distinguished academic economists and lawyers to his administration, but few high-ranking political scientists have been named. In fact, the editors of a recent poll of more than 2,700 international relations experts declared that "the walls surrounding the ivory tower have never seemed so high."

While important American scholars such as Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski took high-level foreign policy positions in the past, that path has tended to be a one-way street. Not many top-ranked scholars of international relations are going into government, and even fewer return to contribute to academic theory. The 2008 Teaching, Research and International Policy (TRIP) poll, by the Institute for Theory and Practice in International Relations, showed that of the 25 scholars rated as producing the most interesting scholarship during the past five years, only three had ever held policy positions (two in the U.S. government and one in the United Nations).

I'm feeling cranky and Weberian about all this. Politics and science are different vocations. I don't think my crankiness is actually directed at Nye, but rather at how easy it is for us to draw the wrong lessons from his remarks.

I note that Nye's initial concern was that political scientists aren't doing public service-- we're not doing policymaking work in government. (Nye himself has of course done so, repeatedly and with distinction.) And in particular, the leaders in the field aren't doing so. And there's certainly something to this. Many leading economists end up serving for some period of time on the Council of Economic Advisors or in Treasury. Those in highest ranks of legal academia have a natural route to public service that leads to the bench. Things seem oddly different in political science.

I've heard this complaint before. A prominent IR scholar gave an address in which he eulogized the era in which IR scholars of a certain stature could expect that they'd serve as NSA or in a similar position at some point, and there was an expected rotation of faculty in and out of Harvard Gov as the party in power changed.

But, unlike in Nye's op-ed, the subtext-that-barely-counted-as-sub was "Why haven't politicians come to me on bended knee seeking out my wisdom?" And now we get toward to my point.

Nye is calling for academics of a high level of scholarly accomplishment to be willing to serve-- notice the word. They'll have to take a pay cut, move to Washington for a certain number of years, give up the lecture circuit, and do someone else's bidding. They'll give advice and can shape policy; but even someone as high-ranking as a cabinet official works for someone else. (Just ask Secretary Clinton.) For academics of the relevant rank and stature, this will be a sacrifice. If serving as an Assistant Undersecretary counts as a promotion from your day job, then you may not be the kind of scholar Nye has in mind.

One thing Nye is not doing is making the traditional ritualistic call for greater public intellectualism. He's not asking us to write more op-eds or more pop-academic books that get six-figure advances, or to give more lectures on the lecture circuit, or to blog more. But within political science, the divide between those who do a lot of that kind of thing and those who don't is salient and sometimes deeply felt, so I think Nye's call for public service easily gets mixed up with that divide. In his call for sacrifice and service, he gives inadvertent comfort and solace to those who are well-paid to stand on their professorial soapbox and tell the world what it should do.

Yes, I'm perfectly well aware that I'm saying this on my blog where I often offer political opinions. But I consider this blog a kind of self-indulgence, not a kind of service, and I'm asking for those to be kept distinct.

Another thing he's not doing is calling for all of academia to look like the traditional dream of the activist-scholar determined to Make A Difference for one's preferred pre-research political cause. If economics is the model being looked toward, then notice what the model actually looks like. Christina Romer, Laura Tyson, and their peers were researchers first. They were researchers on matters of public importance, and they were certainly engaged in speaking research to power when the opportunity arose. But they were doing peer-reviewed research at the highest levels. The perpetual temptation to substitute activism for scholarship, or to conflate the two, isn't what Nye is indulging. But inevitably that's what we hear.

Nye might be right that there is a problem of top scholars not engaging in public service. But there is also a (perpetual, structural) problem of academics leveraging their real expertise into general-purpose pontification, in the classroom as well as in public. And I worry that Nye's call to fix the first problem tempts us to worsen the second, in the following way:

Nye claims that one reason for the disconnect between political science and public service is that the former has become too abstract, too formal and theoretical, too disconnected from scholarship about matters of public policy. And he calls for political science to re-valorize such scholarship.

The solutions must come via a reappraisal within the academy itself. Departments should give greater weight to real-world relevance and impact in hiring and promoting young scholars. Journals could place greater weight on relevance in evaluating submissions. Studies of specific regions deserve more attention. Universities could facilitate interest in the world by giving junior faculty members greater incentives to participate in it. That should include greater toleration of unpopular policy positions.

Well, maybe. I'll try to write a follow-up post on some of the substantive questions about research methods and agendas. But one thing that occurs to me is that Nye neglects the possible role of institutions like the one of which he's a former Dean. Public policy schools, well-funded by tuition-paying MPP/MPA students, have served to drain a steady share of the policy-relevant political scientists out of political science departments. And it's within departments, not professional schools, that the intellectual course of the discipline is ordinarily shaped, if only because that's where Ph.D. students who will be the next generation of professors are trained. (Yes, joint appointments etc. But at the margin, the most policy-relevant political scientists have a higher-paying gig across the street training MPP students. Even if they all act as half-members of political science departments, that still means they've got half the investment, half the influence of those without such policy-relevant research.) There are mitigating effects; the resources public policy schools bring to campus mean there are more faculty positions to go around for policy-relevant researchers. But I do suspect there's some effect here. And notice that it's compatible with the puzzle to be explained: what's different about political science? Economists simply don't have a comparable salary difference between econ faculty posts and public policy faculty posts. Law professors are situated in professional schools all along. Public policy schools do something to political science as a discipline that they don't do to the others.

AAAS, &c.

Via Brian Leiter, the new elections to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences have been announced. (See earlier AAAS posts: 2008, 2007, 2006.

Two political theorists were elected, Philip Pettit and Danielle Allen. (Of interest to students of nationalism: Rogers Brubaker was also elected.) I suggested two years ago that "Philip Pettit is surely overdue."

Another year, another opportunity to ask: Where is Michael Walzer on this list?

In other news, Gerald Gaus has been awarded the Gregory Kavka Prize in Political Philosophy for his article "On Justifying the Moral Rights of the Moderns: A Case of Old Wine in New Bottles," Social Philosophy and Policy (2007), 24:1:84-119.

Update: Just noticed this. Go back to the list of new inductees and scroll down to the very final name on the last page.

Welcome to Canada,

Will Wilkinson and many like you. Happy to have you here, though the whole "wake up Canadian!" bit is a teensy bit irksome as I enter month 10 of the permanent residency application process!

Carole Pateman nominated for APSA presidency

From the APSA newsletter:

After careful consideration of suggestions from the APSA membership and organized groups, the Nominating Committee has agreed on the following slate of distinguished political scientists as its nominees for elective office in the association. [...] Unless there is any contestation, elected officers will assume office following action at the Business Meeting on September 5 at the 2009 APSA Annual Meeting in Toronto. If there is a contest, an election will be held by ballot of the entire membership. Procedures for nominations are documented in Article V (1, 2) of the APSA Constitution and Section 4 of the Business Meeting Rules.

President-Elect (2009-10)
Carole Pateman, UCLA

The President-Elect holds that title for one year, and then assumes the Presidency after the following year's [2010, in this case] annual meeting.

While the most accomplished political scientists often cross subfields, and many APSA presidents have engaged with or contributed to political theory (Beer, Lowi, Lipset, Dahl, Rudolph, etc.), by my reckoning Pateman will be only the second APSA president whose primary field is political theory in the past 45 years, after Judith Shklar, and the third in the past fifty, adding in Carl Friedrich.

Pateman was also the first woman president of the International Political Science Association.

Comment on Brooks

The NYT appears not to be running this, so here's the letter I wrote to the editor in response to David Brooks' goofy column on "The End of Philosophy" last week.

To the editor:

David Brooks unhelpfully confuses two claims: that moral judgment is like aesthetic judgment, and that moral judgment is immediate, emotional, and entirely intuitive. He is right that these have both been put forward as accounts of the evolution of morality, but wrong to think that they go together. Aesthetic judgment, after all, is subject to considerable refinement by education, reflection, and the acquisition of acquired tastes. Brooks says that when you put something that tastes disgusting into your mouth, "you just know." But we outgrow sugar cereals for lobster, or fruit punch for fine wine, even if the acquired taste seems disgusting at first. Ethical judgments, too, are probably educable, even though they are built on a visceral reaction.

The "warmer view of human nature" Brooks mentions is suspect as well. Empathy and altruism "within our families, groups and sometimes nations" are compatible with brutal behavior and dehumanization outside those boundaries. One of the traditional worries about relying on moral emotions and moral intuitions rather than moral argument has been that it leaves no space to think past the edges of our groups.

Jacob T. Levy

Note to students: yes, I thought about using my traditional counterpart to "fine wine" in that argument, but was afraid that it involved a trademarked name brand and therefore couldn't be run in the Times.

Soon to be added to the reading list...

upon its release later this month.

Cary J. Nederman, Lineages of European Political Thought: Explorations Along the Medieval/Modern Divide from John of Salisbury to Hegel, Catholic University of America Press, 2009

This book examines some of the salient historiographical and conceptual issues that animate current scholarly debates about the nature of the medieval contribution to modern Western political ideas. On the one hand, scholars who subscribe to the "Baron thesis" concerning civic humanism have asserted that the break between medieval and modern modes of political thinking formed an unbridgeable chasm associated with the development of an entirely new framework at the dawn of the Florentine Renaissance. Others have challenged this hypothesis, replacing it with another extreme: an unbroken continuity in the intellectual terrain between the twelfth and the seventeenth centuries (or later). The present book seeks to qualify both of these positions. Cary J. Nederman argues for a more nuanced historiography of intellectual continuity and change that depends upon analyzing a host of contextual as well as philosophical factors to account for the emergence of the European tradition of political theory in the medieval and early modern periods. He finds that categories such as "medieval" and "modern" can and should be usefully deployed, yet always with the understanding that they are provisional and potentially fluid.

The book opens with an introduction that lays out the main issues and sources of the debate, followed by five sets of interrelated chapters. The first section critically assesses some of the leading scholars who have contributed to the current understanding of the relationship between medieval and modern ideas. The central part of the book includes three sections that address salient themes that illuminate and illustrate continuity and change: Dissent and Power, Empire and Republic, and Political Economy. The volume closes with a few examples of the ways in which medieval political doctrines were absorbed into and transformed during the modern period up to the nineteenth century.

Nederman is perhaps the leading current scholar of medieval political theory, and this looks like an exciting book (at least to me; I understand that there are a lot of people who would think "exciting" a laughably weird way to describe a book of the historiography of the medieavl-modern divide in political theory).

As it happens, both of the universities at which I've taught in the undergraduate history of political thought sequence break between Machiavelli and Hobbes, not between the medieval era and Machiavelli. (At Chicago the first term is ancient-medieval-Renaissance; at McGill there's an ancient term and a medieval-Renaissance term. At both there's then a 17th-c/18th-c class, and a 19th-c/early 20th-c class.) But at the graduate level, both universities take the other tack, breaking between medieval and early modern with Machiavelli belonging to the latter. There's good reason to be puzzled here, and I'll be interested to see what Nederman has to say.

Somehow...

I missed this very important academic group blog when it launched just over a year ago.

Note to self: learn Latin

It turns out that teaching medieval political [and legal] thought is a lot of fun. This is a ride I'll be happy to ride again.

Next year: more Vitoria; more Marsilius if it can be managed. Possibly some Gentili-- that stretches the timeframe, but I have it on good authority that the next course in the sequence begins early modernity with Hobbes. Integrate the Digest and the Institutes through the whole term, instead of assigning excerpts from them at the beginning of the term along with other ancient texts, then reading Bartolus and Accursius separately later on. Maybe more generally, spread the ancient works through the course.

Longer term: do some excerpting from the Ordinary Gloss for the class, to choose topics continuous with course themes. NB: This is almost sure to require doing some translations of my own, which in turn requires learning medieval law Latin, which therefore moves several steps up my to-do list.

What to drop in order to make room for these cool things? Hmm... that annoying Florentine is taking up a lot of classes at the end...

Galston on Rawls on religion

here. A sample:

Still, one has to wonder whether the residuum of religious belief helped Rawls affirm the basics of his philosophy with more confidence than he otherwise could have mustered. Otherwise (and more bluntly) put: Rawls's religious background may account for the aspects of his political philosophy that I and many others find oddly other-worldly.

Let me give an example. Rawls famously, and controversially, rejected merit as a basis for distribution. Not only are our natural endowments unearned and beyond our control; so too is their development and use: "Even the willingness to make an effort, to try, and so to be deserving in the ordinary sense is itself dependent on happy family and social circumstances." Cohen and Nagel find a theological version of this thought in the senior thesis. "There is no merit before God," Rawls wrote, "Nor should there be merit before him. True community does not count the merits of its members. Merit is a concept rooted in sin, and well disposed of." And more: "The human person, once perceiving that the Revelation of the Word is a condemnation of the self, casts away all thoughts of his own merit."

Now it is possible to argue that we are all equally meritless sinners in the eyes of God (although it is hardly the case that all religions and theologies concur on this point). But does moral equality before God imply equality of merit before our fellow men? Should a God's-eye point of view structure human relations here on earth? In the world as we experience it, some people work harder to develop and exercise their gifts than others, some people are more responsible than others, and some people contribute more to the general welfare than others. If we think of ourselves as contributing nothing to these results, for good or ill, then the core of human liberty and personhood vanishes. To live human lives, we must assume that we are more than dependent variables, more than the passive outcome of external forces, whether material, social, or divine.

Highly recommended; read the whole thing. And, yes, I find this so interesting that it makes me a lot more hesitant about my initial reaction to the publication of Rawls' senior thesis.

Update: As is evident in comments, my immediate enthusiasm for Galston's essay has not been widely shared. Paul Gowder has been expressing his disapproval at some length on his own blog as well as in comments; he also points to hilzoy's critique.

Quote of the day...

And perhaps my new favorite Foucault quote. (No, I don't recall having had an old favorite Foucault quote.) From Security, Territory, Population, p. 304, lecture of 22 March 1978.

We should never forget that Europe as a juridical-political entity, as a system of diplomatic and political security, is the yoke that the most powerful countries (of this Europe) imposed on Germany every time they tried to make it forget the dream of the sleeping emperor

Less pithy follow-up:

So, if the emperor never really wakes up, we should not be surprised that Germany sometimes gets up and says: "I am Europe. I am Europe since you wished it that I be Europe."

Hither and yon, Santa Fe edition

Tomorrow at the Federal Bar Association's Indian Law conference I'll be presenting Three Perversities of Indian Law.