Biblio-summertime

Recent acquisitions now added to the reading list:

Andrew March, Islam and Liberal Citizenship The Search for an Overlapping Consensus

Some argue that Muslims have no tradition of separation of church and state and therefore can't participate in secular, pluralist society. At the other extreme, some Muslims argue that it is the duty of all believers to resist western forms of government and to impose Islamic law. Andrew F. March demonstrates that there are very strong and authentically Islamic arguments for accepting the demands of citizenship in a liberal democracy, many of them found even in medieval works of Islamic jurisprudence. In fact, he shows, it is precisely the fact that Rawlsian political liberalism makes no claims to metaphysical truth that makes it appealing to Muslims.

Daniel Nexon, The Struggle for Power in Early Modern Europe: Religious Conflict, Dynastic Empires, and International Change

Scholars have long argued over whether the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, which ended more than a century of religious conflict arising from the Protestant Reformations, inaugurated the modern sovereign-state system. But they largely ignore a more fundamental question: why did the emergence of new forms of religious heterodoxy during the Reformations spark such violent upheaval and nearly topple the old political order? In this book, Daniel Nexon demonstrates that the answer lies in understanding how the mobilization of transnational religious movements intersects with--and can destabilize--imperial forms of rule.

Taking a fresh look at the pivotal events of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries--including the Schmalkaldic War, the Dutch Revolt, and the Thirty Years' War--Nexon argues that early modern "composite" political communities had more in common with empires than with modern states, and introduces a theory of imperial dynamics that explains how religious movements altered Europe's balance of power. He shows how the Reformations gave rise to crosscutting religious networks that undermined the ability of early modern European rulers to divide and contain local resistance to their authority. In doing so, the Reformations produced a series of crises in the European order and crippled the Habsburg bid for hegemony.

Nexon's account of these processes provides a theoretical and analytic framework that not only challenges the way international relations scholars think about state formation and international change, but enables us to better understand global politics today.

Anna Stilz, Liberal Loyalty: Freedom, Obligation, and the State

Many political theorists today deny that citizenship can be defended on liberal grounds alone. Cosmopolitans claim that loyalty to a particular state is incompatible with universal liberal principles, which hold that we have equal duties of justice to persons everywhere, while nationalist theorists justify civic obligations only by reaching beyond liberal principles and invoking the importance of national culture. In Liberal Loyalty, Anna Stilz challenges both views by defending a distinctively liberal understanding of citizenship.

Drawing on Kant, Rousseau, and Habermas, Stilz argues that we owe civic obligations to the state if it is sufficiently just, and that constitutionally enshrined principles of justice in themselves--rather than territory, common language, or shared culture--are grounds for obedience to our particular state and for democratic solidarity with our fellow citizens. She demonstrates that specifying what freedom and equality mean among a particular people requires their democratic participation together as a group. Justice, therefore, depends on the authority of the democratic state because there is no way equal freedom can be defined or guaranteed without it. Yet, as Stilz shows, this does not mean that each of us should entertain some vague loyalty to democracy in general. Citizens are politically obligated to their own state and to each other, because within their particular democracy they define and ultimately guarantee their own civil rights.

Liberal Loyalty is a persuasive defense of citizenship on purely liberal grounds.

Avery Kolers, Land, Conflict, and Justice: A Political Theory of Territory

Territorial disputes have defined modern politics, but political theorists and philosophers have said little about how to resolve such disputes fairly. Is it even possible to do so? If historical attachments or divine promises are decisive, it may not be. More significant than these largely subjective claims are the ways in which people interact with land over time. Building from this insight, Avery Kolers re-evaluates existing political theories and develops an attractive alternative. He presents a novel link between political legitimacy and environmental stewardship, and applies these new ideas in an extended and balanced discussion of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. The result is the first systematic normative theory of territory, and an impressive example of applied philosophy. In addition to political theorists and philosophers, scholars and students of sociology, international relations, and human geography will find this book rewarding, as will anyone with wider interests in territory and justice.

Plus the next batch of planned purchases and additions to the reading list:

Cary Nederman, Lineages of European Political Thought: Explorations Along the Medieval/Modern Divide from John of Salisbury to Hegel

Elisabeth Ellis, Provisional Politics: Kantian Arguments in Policy Context

Alan Houston, Benjamin Franklin and the Politics of Improvement

Andrew Jainchill, Reimagining Politics after the Terror: The Republican Origins of French Liberalism

Helena Rosenblatt, Liberal Values: Benjamin Constant and the Politics of Religion

Julian Franklin, Jean Bodin and the Rise of Absolutist Theory

Those were the days

Matt Yglesias points to this entertaining clip of a c. 1991 CBC TV news report on the amazing new phenomenon of Internet.

I love that c. 2:18, we switch directly from a shot of the names of usenet groups to a paean to the no-cursing, no-swearing, no-putdowns, no-personal-attacks norms of Internet from the guy who looks like Steve Gutenberg. Yes, it's true that usenet groups did have norms, and norm-enforcement. But they sure as heck also had flamewars and viciousness-- and indeed had flamewars and viciousness about what the norms were and who had authority to enforce them. As one would expect, the more intimate and specialized the group, and the more the participants had real-world reasons to care about one another's opinions, the more civilized things were. High-traffic groups with regular influxes of newbies (e.g. every September when a new generation of college freshmen got internet access), or groups about controversial topics like politics or religion, or fandom groups where geek passions ran high-- all of these were prone to, well what we now recognize as normal internet behavior.

It was only a couple of months after I first encountered Mosaic in 1993 that I met a guy who told me about the huge quantity of porn he'd downloaded from online sources. (This conversation was in front of his sister, which I found especially odd.) I think he was spending his time on porn BBS sites, not on the newly-html'ed World Wide Web, but it did serve as an early hint to me that adding pictures and graphics to the existing online universe of words wasn't necessarily going to improve the world.

Also chez Yglesias: the safety of bike-riding in cities goes up as the number of riders goes up. I think that the terrific new bixi program in Montreal has already noticeably increased traffic in the city's bike lines-- and that drivers are learning to respond appropriately, and remembering that the bike lanes exist.

Good for Obama

From the Cairo address:

Likewise, it is important for Western countries to avoid impeding Muslim citizens from practicing religion as they see fit – for instance, by dictating what clothes a Muslim woman should wear. We cannot disguise hostility towards any religion behind the pretence of liberalism.
[...]

The sixth issue that I want to address is women's rights.

I know there is debate about this issue. I reject the view of some in the West that a woman who chooses to cover her hair is somehow less equal, but I do believe that a woman who is denied an education is denied equality. And it is no coincidence that countries where women are well-educated are far more likely to be prosperous.

It's an extraordinary speech overall, hitting lots of very important themes and ideas. I started off a little annoyed, because the only terrorist attack mentioned is 9/11 and the reaction to it is made to seem like a purely American one. I understand that it's vital to avoid describing a civilizational war, and that this generates an impulse to compartmentalize 9/11. Making 9/11 a localized security threat against the United States, and the response to it a localized war in Afghanistan, is a way of forestalling Bush-era maximalism.

But it also makes the security account seem parochial: the U.S. responded to Al Qaeda's attacks on New York and Washington, and that's the extent of the American interest. I don't want to see the deaths in Madrid, London, Bali, Casablanca, Jakarta, Riyadh, and Istanbul disappear from our historical memory of 9/11 and its aftermath. And invoking them doesn't have to mean describing a global civilizational struggle-- indeed it allows one to emphasize that much of Al Qaeda's violence is committed against targets within Muslim countries. Through Obama's address, 9/11 is mentioned several times, and other attacks are only alluded to.

But that's my only substantial objection to a very important, and very effective, speech. And I was of course especially glad to see the passages with which I began, and don't at all mind the implied swipe at France and Turkey. The American doctrine of religious freedom does have a distinct position from the Jacobin doctrine of laicite, and it's worthwhile to stress the implication for Muslim liberty in America.

Odd search that brought someone here

similarities and differences in liberal thought by bill, rawls and barry

Who, I wonder, is "bill"?

Pronunciation

L'affaire Sotomayor has clearly given me fodder for the next round of revisions on Multicultural Manners. It's just the right kind of case; there's lots of local variation in what's reasonable (anglophones in China and Chinese in English-speaking countries-- maybe it's true of westerners/ Europeans in general, I just don't know-- routinely adopt new locally-appropriate names rather than either put up with hearing their name mangled all the time or trying to force locals to wrap their mouths around unfamiliar sounds, but I don't think this is widespread in other cases); neither an ironclad rule of "always pronounce the name the way it was pronounced in its original language" or "always localize pronunciation" seems even plausible, much less reasonable; there will be questions of local respect in deciding which languages are so homegrown that keeping the original pronunciation is tied up with questions of political equality (Puerto Rico is part of the United States, and it's more problematic to exotify Spanish in that "we can't be expected to talk furriner talk!" way than it would be with, say, Russian); and the question exists in that same interpersonal space between rights-bearers, especially acute in crowded multiethnic cities, that is the focus of the paper. Isolated Amish folks don't often run into the problem of how outsiders pronounce their names, and probably don't care much.

Language cases get short shrift in the paper as it is, even though I knew they were relevant, as I got interested in the idea that seeing-and-being-seen united a whole bunch of cases of interest. But hearing-and-being-heard is structurally similar.

Also related: the inconsistent mess of customs about how to pronounce place-names (cf the by-now-famous Obama shift from an Anglicized "Afghanistan" to a less-Anglicized "Pakistan" within the same set of remarks), and whether to translate words within place names. There's no possibility of consistency here; only a pretentious nitwit walks around saying "Paree" in English for "Paris," but only a clod would say "San Joo-an" or "Saint John" for "San Juan." So we're inevitably in the muddled middle. Someone who says "Me-hico" in English sounds ridiculous to me. But I understand that there's a generation of English speakers to whom my "Bay-jing" instead of Peking sounds just as absurd. And I say Bay-jing with very English sounds; it's no close approximation of how the word sounds in Mandarin.

But being stuck in the muddled middle is not the same as denying that their are locally-right and locally-wrong answers, things that are polite and things that are otherwise.

Huh?

"Sotomayor’s Rulings Are Exhaustive but Often Narrow ">, NYT, Adam Liptak:

Judge Sotomayor’s six years on the trial court and more than a decade on the Second Circuit probably confirmed those intuitions, in part because of the idiosyncratic dockets of the federal courts in New York. They hear many important cases involving business, securities, employment, white-collar crime and immigration. But they do not regularly confront the great issues of the day.

Because everyone knows that securities law is boring local concern of Manhattanites and, on a national level, pretty trivial; that's been one of the great lessons of the last year, right? And the prosecution of (real or alleged) white-collar crime on Wall Street has sure never been newsworthy. And there's nothing morally weighty in immigration law, or anything. Not like the exciting Supreme Court where one gets to decide whether a requirement that strippers wear pasties infringes on the right of free speech.

What on earth can this mean-- that only constitutional law offers Great Issues? That only abortion and gay marriage count? Note: speculation on my part; he doesn't name those issues. I just don't know how one can write that list of things the Second Circuit's docket centers on and then dismiss it in the next sentence.

Now available: Toward a Humanist Justice

Toward a Humanist Justice: The Political Philosophy of Susan Moller Okin, edited by Debra Satz and Rob Reich.

The late Susan Moller Okin was a leading political theorist whose scholarship integrated political philosophy and issues of gender, the family, and culture. Okin argued that liberalism, properly understood as a theory opposed to social hierarchies and supportive of individual freedom and equality, provided the tools for criticizing the substantial and systematic inequalities between men and women. Her thought was deeply informed by a feminist view that theories of justice must apply equally to women as men, and she was deeply engaged in showing how many past and present political theories failed to do this. She sought to rehabilitate political theories--particularly that of liberal egalitarianism, in such a way as to accommodate the equality of the sexes, and with an eye toward improving the condition of women and families in a world of massive gender inequalities. In her lifetime Okin was widely respected as a scholar whose engagement went well beyond the world of theory, and her premature death in 2004 was considered by many a major blow to progressive political thought and women's interests around the world.

This volume stems from a conference on Okin, and contains articles by some of the top feminist and political philosophers working today. They are organized around a set of themes central to Okin's work, namely liberal theory, gender and the family, feminist and cultural differences, and global justice. Included are major figures such as Joshua Cohen, David Miller, Cass Sunstein, Alison Jaggar, and Iris Marion Young, among others. Their aim is not to celebrate Okin's work, but to constructively engage with it and further its goals.

Table of Contents
Introduction: Toward a Humanist Justice , Debra Satz, (Stanford University) and Rob Reich, (Stanford University)

PART 1: Rethinking Political Theory

1. Okin's Liberal Feminism as a Radical Political Theory , Nancy Rosenblum, (Harvard University)
2. Justice and Gender: Reflections on Susan Moller Okin , Joshua Cohen, (Stanford University)
3. Okin's Contributions to the Study Of Gender in Political Theory , Elizabeth Wingrove, (University of Michigan)
4. Can Feminism be Liberated from Governmentalism? , John Tomasi, (Brown University)

PART II: Gender and the Family

5. Equality of Opportunity and the Family , David Miller, (Oxford University)
6. "No More Relevance than One's Eye Color": Justice and Okin's Genderless Society , Molly Lynn Shanley, (Vassar College)
7. On the Tension Between Sex Equality and Religious Freedom , Cass Sunstein, (University of Chicago)

PART III: Feminism and Cultural Diversity

8. From Liberal to Post-Colonial to Multicultural Feminism: Competing Approaches to the study of Gender, Citizenship and Fate of Religious Arbitration , Ayelet Shachar, (University of Toronto)
9. Okin and the Challenge of Essentialism , Alison Jaggar, (University of Colorado at Boulder)
10. The Dilemma of a Dutiful Daughter: Love and Freedom in the Thought of Kartini , Chandran Kukathas, (London School of Economics)

PART IV: Development and Gender

11. Reinventing Globalization to Reduce Gender Inequality , Robert Keohane, (Princeton University)
12. The Gendered Cycle of Vulnerability in the Less Developed World , Iris Marion Young, (University of Chicago)

That last chapter will be one of the final pieces by Iris Young to see print.

Kymlicka interviewed about Canadian multiculturalism...

in the Globe and Mail. Includes some discussion of the Tamil community's distinctive political profile, as well as discussions about the Canadian high-skill immigration model.

I Can't Quite Believe My Eyes

From the AP and currently appearing on the NYT front page: Church of Scotland Votes to Appoint Gay Minister

The Church of Scotland has voted in favor of appointing an openly gay minister -- the latest case involving sexuality to create a division in the Anglican Communion.

[...]

The case has divided Scottish religious leaders and follows tensions within the worldwide 77 million-member Anglican Communion. About 900 elders and ministers took part in a debate on Rennie's case, but many chose to abstain from casting a vote.

Anglicans have conducted lengthy debate over sexuality issues since the Episcopal Church -- the Anglican body in the U.S. -- consecrated the first openly gay bishop, V. Gene Robinson of New Hampshire in 2003.

Emphasis added.

It is a matter of some considerable historical importance that the Church of Scotland is not an Anglican church or part of the Anglican Communion. There is a church in Scotland that is part of the Communion, the Scottish Episcopal Church, but this is not that; this is the much larger, and official, Church of Scotland. A reporter who lacked any knowledge of the history, or of Scotland, but who knew a little bit about religion, might have noticed that the decisionmaking structure involving "about 900 elders and ministers" judging a minister didn't seem very much like that involved in confirming Robinson's appointment as bishop, insofar as it lacked a House of Bishops. Decisionmaking by "ministers and elders" is an institutional form distinctively associated with Presbyterianism ("presbyter" = "elder"). Episcopal churches have bishops ("episcopos" = "bishop.") The Church of Scotland is Presbyterian. Anglican Churches are Episcopal.

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.