Great Books

From the Chronicle, an essay by W.A. Pannapacker called "Confessions of a Middlebrow Professor," parts of which strike home for me.

In my early 20s, when I was starting out as a graduate student in the humanities, I hosted a small gathering at my apartment. It didn't take long for my guests to begin scrutinizing my bookshelves. (I do the same thing now, of course, whenever I am at a party.) I remember that there were numerous battered anthologies, at least a hundred paperback classics, the Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (acquired as a Book-of-the-Month Club premium), probably six copies of PMLA, and several shelves of books that I had retained from childhood, including the Time-Life Library of Art and the Old West Time-Life Series in "hand-tooled Naugahyde leather."

Perhaps the most revered set of volumes from my childhood—proudly displayed—was Great Books of the Western World, in 54 leatherette volumes. I remember I bought them all at once for $10 at a church sale when I was about 13; it took me two trips to carry them home in plastic grocery bags.

"Your clay feet are showing," said one of my guests, another graduate student, as she removed Volume 1 of the Great Books from my shelves. I caught the biblical allusion, but it took me a couple of years to realize the implication of the remark: My background was lacking. If graduate school was a quiz show, then I was Herbert Stempel trying to make it in the world of Charles Van Doren.[...]

The Great Books were expressions of hope for many people who had historically not had access to higher education.

There was something awe-inspiring about that series for me, even if I acquired it a generation late. The Great Books seemed so serious. They had small type printed in two columns; there were no annotations, no concessions to the beginner.[...]
there was a reason that you could buy the Great Books for $10 by that time. The whole notion of a stable canon of books had gone out of fashion, and not even recently: Writers such as Dwight MacDonald had been mocking the Great Books since they first appeared. As Beam observes, "The Great Books were synonymous with boosterism, Babbittry, and H.L. Mencken's benighted boobocracy." Display them in your living room, and you might as well put plastic covers on the colonial couch beneath your reproduction Grandma Moses with the copy of The Power of Positive Thinking on your coffee table. Great Books, Beam writes, "were everything that was wrong, unchic and middlebrow about middle America."

As Paul Fussell wrote in Class: A Guide Through the American Status System, "It is in the middle-class dwelling that you're likely to spot the 54-volume set of the Great Books, together with the half-witted two-volume Syntopicon, because the middles, the great audience for how-to books, believe in authorities."

I'm about the same age as Pannapacker, and like him, was not to the academic or highbrow manner born. I read my first Marx, Smith, Mill, Shakespeare, Plutarch, and Plato in that Great Books set. In sixth grade I carried the Marx and Smith volumes by turn into school with me and read them during reading time-- and if I didn't understand much, I also didn't understand nothing, when I worked at it.

And, like Pannapacker, I've received the occasional smirk or snarky comment about them, in my life as it is now.

Of course, lots of the substantive criticisms are right-- the two-volume Synopticon is bizarre. And the books themselves as physical objects, which once impressed me, now don't. I don't read from them anymore. The paper on which they're printed is unbelievably thin and fragile, the print ridiculously small. Even before all those public-domain works went online, it was easier to get a cheap Penguin or Dover paperback of whatever I wanted to read than to try to do serious scholarly reading out of those volumes. But they're still on the top shelf of the bookcases in my living room, and I'm still grateful to them-- and to Mortimer Adler's democratizing middlebrowness.

Come to Montreal: Canadian Political Science Association Annual Meeting, June 1-3 2010

Call for papers: open call in political theory as well as call for papers on "non-ideal and institutional theory

The CFP for the 2010 CPSA in Montreal is now open: Call for papers, Instructions for submitting, Proposal submission form.

Proposals are due by November 3, 2009.

For political theorists:

We welcome paper, panel, and roundtable proposals in all areas of political theory. In addition, we will be holding a conference within the conference on "Non-ideal and institutional theory." That CFP is below.

Workshop 8 – Political Theory: Non-ideal and Institutional Theory
Organizers: Jacob T. Levy (McGill) and Jennifer Rubenstein (Viriginia)

From the ethics of conduct during wartime to justice in transitional societies to restitution for collective harms, political theorists have long been concerned with understanding political morality in morally compromised or materially constrained settings—in what Arendt termed “dark times.” Since Rawls, we have come to call this “non-ideal” theory: theory about moral choices and political circumstances that wouldn’t arise at all under ideal conditions. In recent years, political philosophers have done a great deal of methodological and metatheoretical work on the ideal/non-ideal distinction, while political theorists have undertaken non-ideal normative analysis of a wide range of problems. We seek both papers that are explicitly about non-ideal political theory and papers that do non-ideal theory, in order to encourage engagement between methodological reflections and normative arguments.

We especially welcome papers that do these things with attention to political institutions, by—for example— proposing institutional designs for non-ideal settings, analyzing ideal versus non-ideal ways of thinking about the justice of institutional structures, or showing how particular institutions are themselves the sources of the morally compromised settings in which decision-making must take place. In other words, we invite papers that construe institutions as either sources of injustice or as mechanisms for mitigating injustice, as obstacles to reform or as frameworks for pursuing it.

While the workshop focuses on issues that have thus far been taken up primarily in the context of analytic normative theory, we actively encourage papers with historical or critical perspectives on these issues. Finally, while the workshop itself addresses substantive problems in non-ideal and institutional theory, papers need not be explicitly framed in those terms.

More American students enrolling at Canadian universities

See this story.

Michael Sandel to take to the airwaves

Sandel's Harvard course on "Justice" will be broadcast by PBS, as you may have heard. This article in the Chronicle by Christopher Shea (of the Boston Globe's Ideas section) treats that news in the context of Sandel's intellectual career and distinctive positions. Frequent blogtopic Charles Taylor , occasional blog commentator Josh Cohen, and Stephen Holmes all offer comments.

New SSPP website

The Society for Social and Political Philosophy ["historical, continental, and feminist perspectives," says the tagline] has a new website and blog.

MacArthur

Looks like I can just repost this verbatim, with this year's link on top, and substituting in "one economist."

posted September 23 2008: Continuing a recent trend...

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

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

Shocking headline of the day

"Students Tend to Ignore Hygiene Tips, Study Finds"

That, surprisingly enough, is not from the Onion's indispensible series of "study finds" articles, such as New Study Finds College Binge Drinking To Be A Blast, Study Finds Link Between Red Wine, Letting Mother Know What You Really Think, and Teen Sex Linked To Drugs And Alcohol, Reports Center For Figuring Out Really Obvious Things.

Best passage:

College health officials who want students to change their habits must be creative, communicate through social-networking sites, and lose the scientific jargon and polite euphemisms, says Benjamin J. Chapman, an assistant professor of family and consumer sciences and a food-safety specialist at North Carolina State.

"For example," he says, "don't refer to something as a 'gastrointestinal illness.' Instead tell them, 'This could make you puke,' or 'Dude, wash your hands.'"

I hereby formally ask my students to wash their hands from time to time in the event of an H1N1 outbreak, and in exchange promise not to address them as "dude."

Berlin Centenary Conference at Harvard

Isaiah Berlin: Centennial Reflections

Harvard University, September 25th-26th 2009

Tsai Auditorium, Center for Government and International Studies,

1730 Cambridge St, Cambridge MA








Friday September 25
10:00am Welcoming Remarks

10:15-12:30pm Politics Between Utopia and Reality
Michael Walzer – Should We Reclaim Political Utopianism

Malachi Hacohen – Cosmopolitanism, the European Nation State and Jewish Life: Berlin and Popper

2:15-4:30pm Literature and the History of Ideas
Svetlana Boym – Dialogues on Liberty Beyond the Cold War: Isaiah Berlin and Anna Akhmatova

Alan Ryan – The History of Ideas as Psychodrama

9:00pm “Multi-Media Session” Featuring clips of filmed conversations with Isaiah Berlin

Saturday September 26

10:15-12:30pm Liberty and Liberalism
Janos Kis – Berlin's Two Concepts of Positive Liberty

Martha Nussbaum – Political Liberalism and Comprehensive Liberalism

2:15-4:30pm Pluralism: Historical Origins and Philosophical Foundations
Pratap Mehta – What is Pluralism and How Does it Matter?

Bernard Yack – The Significance of Berlin's Counter-Enlightenment

5:00-6:00pm Special Session
Amartya Sen – What Difference Does Pluralism Make?

Discussants and Chairs: Ioannis Evrigenis, Peter Eli Gordon, Stanley Hoffmann, Erin Kelly, Louis Menand, Michael Rosen, Nancy Rosenblum, Emma Rothschild, T. M. Scanlon.
Sponsored by the Department of Government, the Department of Philosophy, the Center for Jewish Studies, and the Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics.

Le fédéralisme multinational en perspective : un modèle viable ?

Colloque organisé par Michel Seymour à l’Université du Québec à Montréal

25-26-27 septembre 2009, salle D-R200 de l’UQAM (Pavillon Athanase-David, 1430 Saint-Denis)

Qu’est-ce que le fédéralisme multinational ? Quels sont les enjeux soulevés par la présence de plusieurs peuples au sein d’un État fédéral ? Est-ce que le fédéralisme apparaît tout indiqué pour gérer la diversité nationale ? Ces questions se posent au Canada depuis toujours, mais elles se posent aussi dans plusieurs autres sociétés. Des États fédéraux multinationaux tels que l’URSS, la Yougoslavie et la Tchécoslovaquie n’existent plus. La Belgique vacille face au défi d’accommoder la diversité nationale en son sein. Aussi, même si d’autres États multinationaux fédéraux ou quasi-fédéraux tels que l’Inde, l’Espagne et le Canada existent encore, la question de la viabilité de l’État fédéral multinational doit être soulevée.

Des questions plus spécifiques peuvent aussi être posées qui mettent en relation les expériences de sociétés particulières avec la problématique générale du fédéralisme multinational. Quelles sont les promesses du fédéralisme multinational canadien ? Que penser de la reconnaissance du Québec comme nation, de la résolution possible du déséquilibre fiscal, de la limitation du « pouvoir fédéral de dépenser », du rôle international que joue ou que pourrait jouer le Québec et du fédéralisme asymétrique ? S’agit-il d’éléments qui composent le fédéralisme multinational ?


More information is here.

GRIPP: Cécile Laborde – Political Liberalism and the Separation-Establishment Debate: A Republican Interpretation

Wednesday, September 16, 4-6 pm, University of Montreal room Z-330 (Pavillon McNicoll): Cécile Laborde, Professor of Political Theory at University College London, and the author most recetnly of Critical Republicanism. The Hijab Controversy and Political Philosophy (Oxford Political Theory series, Oxford University Press, 2008) will present her paper "Political Liberalism and the Separation-Establishment Debate: A Republican Interpretation" to a session of the Groupe de Recherche Interuniversitaire en Philosophie Politique.

On nationalism and federalism

Via Matt Yglesias, I see that Lawrence Martin is in the Globe and Mail making the following interesting point.

Since its debut election campaign in 1993, the Bloc has never been beaten by a federalist party. Not in six elections. The demise of the Bloquistes is often predicted. It never happens. They are entrenched. In the next campaign, they are on course to rout the Liberals and Conservatives in Quebec again. [...]

The coddling of the BQ sees Canadian taxpayers subsidize the separatist party to the tune of millions of dollars to run its election campaigns. In that they have to campaign in only one province, the system absurdly favours it over federalist parties. The Bloc is allowed to participate in the English-language debates while running no candidates outside Quebec. Again, nothing is done. We wouldn't want to risk offending their delicate sensibilities.

But, for all its inroads, the Bloc has no reason to celebrate.

There's a great paradox at work here, a rollout of unintended consequences. The Bloc successes have bred failure. The better the BQ does, the further it gets from its goal of sovereignty. The separatists were closest to realizing that ambition in the early-to-mid-nineties, shortly after the Bloc arrived on the scene. Since that time, support for the sovereignty option, despite all the Bloc victories, has consistently been in decline.

The Bloc, it can be mischievously argued, has served the cause of a united Canada. Rarely over the past half-century has Canadian unity been as solid as it is today. It may well be that the Bloc, with its imposing fed-baiting presence in Ottawa, suffices for many Quebeckers as their instrument of sovereignty. It gives vent to pride, to autonomist passions. It wins concessions for the franchise.

If we were to take away the Bloc, if only Canada-minded federalist parties represented Quebeckers in Ottawa, a different scenario is easily imaginable. Conditions could well exist for a more spirited and fractious separatist movement.

Benefiting from the shrewd leadership of Gilles Duceppe and a smart, disciplined caucus, the Bloc has been able to address many of Quebec's grievances. But its steady progress now sees it scraping the barrel in search of meaningful injustices to fortify its underlying pathology (witness its current election advertising planning).

The idea that secessionist politics could be a stabilizing force in a multinational federation figures prominently in Wayne Norman's Negotiating Nationalism (see especially ch. 6) as well as in my own "Federalism, Liberalism, and the Separation of Loyalties," which adds to Norman's arguments an account of how the federal structure of the rest of constitution affects the outcomes of secessionist politics in one culturally distinct province. Three years after his book and two years after my article, I still think we're right, but it's a claim that makes Canadian audiences look at me funny. Interesting to see it start to go mainstream.

Sunstein confirmed

I haven't yet seen this mentioned on the scholar-blogs that had covered the nomination up until now: my former colleague Cass Sunstein was confirmed by the Senate yesterday in a 57-40 vote, to serve as White House's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. According to Politico, the vote was mostly party-line, with just five Republicans voting yes and four Democrats voting no.

The Chronicle notes the following:

Among them, Ilya Somin, an assistant professor of law at George Mason University and a prominent libertarian, wrote on the blog the Volokh Conspiracy that Mr. Sunstein was "well-qualified for the job and is better from a libertarian perspective than most others whom the administration could have appointed." Glenn H. Reynolds, a professor of law at the University of Tennessee who often takes libertarian positions on his blog, InstaPundit.com, praised Mr. Sunstein as an "open-minded" liberal whose views have at times been misrepresented by his opponents.

In an interview just before Thursday's Senate vote, Mr. Reynolds said the debate over Mr. Sunstein illustrates why it is difficult for many scholars to make the transition from academe to government.

"When you are an academic, you are rewarded for saying interesting things and thought-provoking things, and that is what we do," Mr. Reynolds said. "The reason politicians seldom say interesting or thought-provoking things is because in their business they are punished for it."

It tells you something of significance about the current makeup of the Senate Republican caucus that, when faced with a highly qualified appointee to a very technical post who is supported by many of the intellectual lights of the academic right and opposed by Glenn Beck, they vote no en masse.

McGill's Brenda Milner awarded Balzan Prize

From the Gazette:

A Montreal neuropsychologist is among four winners of the 2009 Balzan Prize that were announced Monday.

Brenda Milner, professor of psychology at the Montreal Neurological Institute and professor in the department of neurology and neurosurgery at McGill University, received the prize for cognitive neurosciences.

"Her pioneering work has greatly influenced the field of cognitive neurosciences for more than half a century," said a statement from Balzan judges. It added that the 2009 award was “for her pioneering studies of the role of the hippocampus in the formation of memory and her identification of different kinds of memory systems.”

The studies will further scientific understanding of Alzheimer’s disease.

This is just the latest award for Milner, who has been inducted into the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Royal Society of London and the Royal Society of Canada.

In 2005, she received the Gairdner Award for medical science, and the previous year was promoted to Companion of the Order of Canada.

Other Balzan winners this year are Briton Terence Cave in the field of literature, Italian Paolo Rossi for history of science, and Swiss-German Michael Gretzel for the science of new materials.

Balzan prizes are awarded annually in a rotating fields of research, with two in the humanities and two in the sciences.

Winners are awarded one million Swiss francs ($1,016,000), half of which must be dedicated to research.

CFA: GRIPP Postdoc at McGill, 2010-2011

The departments of political science and philosophy at McGill University, the Groupe de recherche interuniversitaire en philosophie politique de Montréal (GRIPP), and the Research Group on Constitutional Studies (RGCS) will offer one or more postdoctoral fellowships at McGill in 2010-11. Area of specialization is open within political theory and political philosophy, but we are especially interested in applicants whose research is relevant to at least of these GRIPP research themes:

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


Ph.D. must be in hand by 1 September 2010; preference may be given to candidates whose Ph.D.s will be in hand by 15 April 2010. Preference may also be extended to those with a knowledge of French, and to Canadian citizens or permanent residents.

The fellow will be expected to be in residence at McGill for the academic year, and will be expected to take part in the intellectual life of GRIPP and RGCS, including regular workshops and conferences. There is no teaching requirement, but there may be an option to teach one class for additional pay.

Please submit CV, writing sample, research statement, graduate transcript, and three letters of recommendation to: GRIPP postdoctoral fellowship, Political Science, McGill University, 855 Sherbrooke St W, Montreal QC H3A 2T7. Review of applications will begin September 20. Contact Jacob Levy, jtlevy@gmail.com , with questions.

Sigh.

I've complained before about the APSA online service for annual meeting papers, PROceedings, which until this year used the terrible, terrible allacademic.com interface.

Now PROceedings is gone, so that's good. APSA's now using SSRN, which has numerous advantages-- conference papers will automatically show up on an author's page of other SSRN working papers, for example. And SSRN generates a stable URL for each paper, which PROceedings didn't do.

But... look at this mess. SSRN is ideal for searches by paper title or author. And its specialized subject-matter journals allow for browsing. But dumping hundreds of APSA papers into an unsorted pile means that browsing in this context is impossible. The APSA annual meeting is very usefully sorted into lots of divisions and organized sections, and for that matter into individual panels, to help people find the papers they want to attend. None of that categorization is carried over to SSRN.

Compare the interface with the online meeting program, which is better than ever this year. You can browse by division, or browse by tme, or search by keyword, or...

Wouldn't it be nice to be able to browse through the program and, when you reach a paper or panel listing, click right on a hotlink to go to the paper?

Instead it seems that the idea is: browse the APSA program, find a paper you're interested in, click over to SSRN, search for just that paper by author name. You can neither get to the papers from the program, nor see the program categories when you're looking through the papers.

(The other problem with SSRN, of course, is that it lacks full-text searches, for no reason I understand. But that's a chronic problem with them, not distinctive to the conference site.)

Conference conflicts

Whose idea was it to schedule the Midwest and the New England Political Science Associations at the same time next year? Not that I have any interest in ever going to Midwest again, but surely it's not in New England's interest to compete directly with the dominant regional association.

Ah, the beginning of the school year...

when the google searches that lead to this blog start turning up "jacob t. levy professor ratings" and the like.

Faced with an intro class of 330 students that starts next week, I take this opportunity to mention to people conducting such web searches that Professor Levy is mean and scary and to be avoided at all costs. He is rated PG-13 in the US, G in Quebec, and 14A in the Rest of Canada; and two thumbs sideways by Siskel and Ebert.

Matthew L. M. Fletcher, "The Tenth Justice Lost in Indian Country"

Turtletalk's Matthew Fletcher has written a paper with a very smart insight.

This short paper prepared for the 2009 Federal Bar Association’s Annual Meeting offers preliminary results of a study of the OSG in the Supreme Court from the 1998 through the 2008 Terms. I study the OSG’s success rates before the Court in every stage of litigation, from the certiorari process, the Court’s calls for the views of the Solicitor General, and on the merits of the cases that reach final decision after oral argument.

The paper begins with the preliminary data on the OSG’s success rate in Indian law cases. The data demonstrates that the OSG retains its success rate in both the certiorari process and on the merits when the United States is in opposition to tribal interests. But when the OSG sits as a party alongside tribal interests, and especially when the OSG acts as an amicus siding with tribal interests, the OSG’s success rate drops dramatically.

I've commented before on strong the OSG's brief was in Plains Commerce, and how surprising it is that the court ruled the other way without even seeming to take the OSG's office seriously. The finding here-- which amounts to the finding that "impairs tribal sovereignty" is a better predictor of which way the court rules than "outcome argued for by the Solicitor General," and that the SG office's general success record before the court doesn't carry over to the pro-tribal side of Indian law cases-- is the general form of that surprise. Recommended.

CFP: Hegel After Spinoza

Hegel After Spinoza: A Volume of Critical Essays
Edited by Hasana Sharp and Jason Smith

Call for Papers

The names Hegel and Spinoza have come to represent two irreconcilable paths in contemporary philosophy. This opposition has taken different forms, but has its roots in mid- to late-20th century French philosophy. Althusser announced that he required a “detour” away from Hegel and through Spinoza in order to arrive at a genuinely materialist Marxism. Pierre Macherey staged a careful deconstruction of Hegel’s claim to have superseded Spinoza’s system in Hegel ou Spinoza, which concomitantly served as a defence of Spinozism against the Hegelianism dominant in France in the 1960s and ‘70s. Among the most influential articulations of this antagonism are the polemics of Deleuze celebrating the immanent and vitalist thinking of a materialist tradition beginning with Lucretius and passing through Spinoza to the present, to which he opposes the logic of totality, negativity, and contradiction found in Hegel. Spinoza, for Deleuze and others, stands for a rejection of negativity and lack as the foundation of philosophical and political thought, and as a salutary alternative to the negativity (in both the logical and existential senses) associated not only with Hegel, but with Hobbes, Freud, Sartre, Heidegger, and Lévinas as well. Feminists have likewise celebrated Spinoza as providing a joyful alternative to a tradition that emphasizes anxiety, mortality, and combat. This opposition, in its various expressions, underscores that reading Hegel has always been and remains a political act.

We are seeking essays to contribute to an anthology on the relationship between Spinoza and Hegel that move beyond the stalemate of current debates in continental philosophy. The title we have proposed for this collection points toward a horizon that no longer opposes a “bad” Hegel to a “good” Spinoza; we seek essays that indicate how contemporary readings of Spinoza—no longer the thinker of absolute substance, but of immanent causality, singular connections, transindividuality, and the multitude—might illuminate otherwise less visible threads in Hegel’s thought, and open the way to a re-reading of Hegel, beyond the institutionalized figure we take for granted. How might a productive and mutually enlightening encounter be produced between these two great systematic thinkers? What political possibilities are opened up by reading Hegel and Spinoza as useful contrasts rather than moral alternatives? The anthology will be published in a series that treats historical topics in light of contemporary continental thought. We are open to a broad range of topics within this rubric, but are especially interested in new readings that avoid simply recapitulating either the pantheism controversy in 19th century Germany or the French polemics of the 20th century.

Please send papers of 7,500-10,000 words to
Hasana Sharp (hasana.sharp_at_mcgill.ca) or Jason Smith (Jason.Smith_at_Artcenter.edu) by 15 June, 2010.

Deadline extended: CFA: McGill Visiting Fulbright Chair in the Theory and Practice of Federalism, 2010-2011

See the award announcement here (cumbersome pdf) and information on applying here and here. Applications go through Fulbright/ CIES, not directly to McGill.

The deadline for all Canada-US visiting Fulbright Chairs has apparently been extended to September 30. The McGill Visiting Fulbright Chair in the Theory and Practice of Federalism is open to junior or senior scholars, doing empirical, normative, or theoretical work, who wish to spend a semester of or the whole of AY 2010-11 at McGill in the Department of Political Science and the Research Group on Constitutional Studies. Applicants must be US citizens or permanent residents, and must not also be Canadian citizens or permanent residents. Stipend of $CAN 25000, plus up to $CAN 1000 for in-country travel and enrichment.

Feel free to contact me directly for more information-- the Fulbright website is kind of cumbersome.

CFA: GRIPP graduate fellowships, 2009-10


[le francais suit]

Groupe de recherche interuniversitaire en philosophie politique de Montréal (GRIPP) Fellowship program

The Groupe de recherche interuniversitaire en philosophie politique de Montréal (GRIPP) invites applications to its graduate student fellowship program for the academic year 2009-10. Interested graduate students should submit a letter of application of one page (300 words) explaining their research agenda, the work they propose to do in 2009-10, and the link between their individual projects and GRIPP's research axes, described below. Applicants should also describe their existing fellowship and stipend awards, if any. Applications should also be accompanied by the email address of a Professor capable of commenting on the academic qualifications of the applicant.

All fellows will be expected to take part in a faculty and graduate student seminar that will meet roughly biweekly throughout the academic year, and will be given the opportunity to present work to that seminar. Meetings of the Montreal Political Theory Workshop will ordinarily be scheduled during the regular seminar time, and attendance at the MPTW will be expected in the same fashion as attendance at other meetings of the seminar.

Admission to the fellowship will be awarded based on the merit of the individual research project and its fit with GRIPP's research agenda. The size of the awards will vary by level of study and by the availability of other fellowship support, but may be up to $5000 for Ph.D. students and $2000 for M.A. students.

Please submit applications to danielweins@gmail.com . Deadline is September 11.

Research axes:

GRIPP is made up of over twenty professors of political philosophy and political theory from Concordia University, McGill University, the University of Montréal, and the University of Québec at Montréal, as well as associated postdoctoral fellows and graduate students. Under the conceptual umbrella of "New developments in democratic theory: toward an integrated approach," its research projects cluster along four axes, though each is meant to enrich and inform all of the others.

1) History and principles: The evaluation of democratic institutions and of their ability to respond to contemporary political challenges must be based on a solid grasp of the founding and organizing principles of democratic theory. We thus begin with a critical confrontation with the most important texts in the liberal and democratic traditions. We seek in particular to uncover arguments and conceptual resources from the tradition of political theory that have been relatively neglected in the contemporary renaissance of liberal and democratic thought, including attention to passions, affects, and emotions; to dissensus and disagreement; to aesthetics; and to institutional constraints.

2) The moral psychology of the democratic agent: Political theories have often depicted moral agents in very reductive fashions as beings moved by purely self-regarding interests and preferences which rules and institutions must constrain. A recentering of the theory of liberal democracy which gives a greater importance to democratic practices should at the same time endow us with a richer conception of the democratic agent, of that agent's disposition and character, and of the virtues to which that agent might aspire.

3) Democracy and diversity: GRIPP seeks to build on the turns to multiculturalism and pluralism in liberal and democratic theory, with a particular emphasis on theoretical approaches to the democratic management of diversity that steer between the aspiration to consensus and the acceptance of radical fragmentation; and on associational and jurisdictional pluralist approaches to understanding the diverse sources of norms in modern societies.

4) Democracy, justice, and transnational institutions: GRIPP seeks to bring political philosophy into fuller engagement with the various social, technological, cultural, and economic phenomena of globalization, and to understand how political principles and political actors can be understood in transnational contexts.

---------------------------

Groupe de recherche interuniversitaire en philosophie politique de Montréal (GRIPP)

Programme de Bourse

Le GRIPP a le plaisir d'offrir plusieurs bourses d'étude de deuxième et troisième cycle pour l'année académique 2009-10. Les étudiants intéressés sont invités à soumettre une lettre de candidature d'une page (300 mots) détaillant leurs projets de recherche, le travail proposé pour l'année académique 2009-10 et les liens entre leurs programmes de recherche et les travaux des membres du groupe. Les candidats devraient aussi indiquer les bourses reçues jusqu'à présent. Enfin, chaque demande devrait être accompagnée de l’adresse électronique d’un répondant pouvant témoigner de la qualité de la candidature.

- Hide quoted text -

Chaque boursier s'engage à participer à un séminaire de deuxième et troisième cycle qui se tiendra toutes les deux semaines pendant l'année académique pendant lequel les étudiants auront l'opportunité de présenter leurs recherches aux membres du groupe., ainsi qu'aux ateliers en philosophie politique pendant l'année académique.


Les bourses individuelles seront attribuées au mérite selon la qualité du projet de recherche et ses liens avec le programme de recherche du GRIPP. Les bourses individuelles prendront en compte le niveau d'étude de chaque candidat/e et la disponibilité d'autres sources de soutien, jusqu'à un maximum de $5000 pour les étudiants au troisième cycle, et de $2000 pour les étudiants au deuxième cycle.

Veuillez soumettre vos projets par courriel au Professeur Daniel Weinstock à danielweins@gmail.com .

La date d'échéance est le 11 septembre

Axes de recherche :

Le GRIPP est composé de plus de vingt professeurs de philosophie et de théorie politiques oeuvrant dans les quatre universités montréalaises : l¹Université de Montréal, l¹Université de Québec à Montréal (UQÀM), les universités Concordia et McGill. Sous l¹intitulé général : « Nouveaux développements en théorie démocratique : vers une approche intégrée », les projets de recherche qui lui sont associés se rassemblent autour de quatre axes distincts:



1) Histoire et principes : L¹évaluation des institutions démocratiques et de leur capacité à relever les défis politiques contemporains suppose une solide compréhension des principes et fondements de la théorie démocratique. Celle-ci requiert une confrontation critique des textes les plus importants des traditions démocratiques et libérales. Une telle confrontation suppose, plus particulièrement, la mise en évidence d¹arguments et de ressources conceptuelles de ces traditions, jusqu¹à présent relativement négligés; citons, pour exemple, les passions, affects et émotions; le dissensus et le différend; l¹esthétique; ainsi que les contraintes institutionnelles.



2) Psychologie morale de l¹agent démocratique : les théories politiques ont souvent décrit les agents moraux en des termes très réducteurs, comme des êtres mus par des intérêts et des préférences purement égoïstes que les règles et les institutions cherchent à limiter. Un recentrement de la théorie de la démocratie libérale, qui a pour effet de reconnaître l¹importance des pratiques démocratiques, devrait avoir pour autre conséquence le développement d¹une conception plus riche de l¹agent démocratique, de ses dispositions et de son caractère, ainsi que des vertus auxquelles il peut aspirer.



3) Démocratie et diversité : Le GRIPP entend contribuer aux récents tournants de la théorie démocratique libérale vers le multiculturalisme et le pluralisme, en s'intéressant plus particulièrement aux approches théoriques de la diversité qui tentent de maintenir le cap entre l'aspiration au consensus et la célébration d¹une fragmentation radicale. Le GRIPP s¹intéresse également aux courants pluralistes en théorie sociale et du droit qui tentent de mettre en évidence la diversité des sources des normes dans les sociétés modernes.



4) Démocratie, justice, et institutions transnationales : Le GRIPP cherche à encourager un dialogue fructueux entre les réflexions en philosophie politique et les différents phénomènes sociaux, politiques, technologiques, culturels et économiques liés à la globalisation. Un des objectifs poursuivis est de clarifier la façon dont notre compréhension des principes et des acteurs politiques est affectée lorsqu¹on les considère dans des contextes transnationaux.

Chinese Politics, McGill University

The Department of Political Science invites applications for a tenure-track position at the Assistant Professor level in the area of Chinese Politics. The Department is particularly interested in candidates whose research is on Chinese domestic politics but who can also teach on some aspect of China’s international relations. The successful candidate will have the linguistic abilities required for field work in China. The Department seeks applicants whose research is theoretically and empirically informed, who possess strong training in qualitative and/or quantitative and/or formal methods, and who can teach effectively at the undergraduate and graduate levels. An applicant’s record of performance must provide evidence of outstanding research potential. Candidates should have already completed the PhD or be very near completion. Applications should include a curriculum vitae, graduate transcript, three letters of reference, a sample of written work and materials pertinent to teaching skills. The position start date is August 1, 2010. Review of applications will begin on October 1, 2009 and will continue until the position is filled. For more information about the Department and University, visit our web site at www.mcgill.ca/politicalscience/.



PLEASE FORWARD SUPPORTING MATERIALS TO:

Professor Richard Schultz
James McGill Professor and Chair
Department of Political Science
McGill University
855 Sherbrooke Street West
Montreal, Quebec, Canada H3A 2T7

Quote of the day

From the Gazette, in an article about the elimination of English translations from the hard copies of community newspapers distributed for free in some parts of greater Montreal, due to shrinking ad revenue, and the resulting complaints and petitions:

"If we don't start sticking up for our rights we've lost them" [LaSalle borough councillor Michael] Vadacchino said. [...] "I understand the economics of it, of course, it's a business, but as a citizen, that's not my problem, they've given this service for years, so now what?"

Rawls' religion, revisited

Paul Weithman, a Notre Dame philosopher who writes consistently engaging and important work on ethics, philosophy, and religion, ran across our discussion a while back about the publication of John Rawls' senior thesis on religion. (To be clear, I still haven't read that work.) He thought that blogreaders might be interested in his review of the volume. An excerpt:

As Adams notes, Rawls's reading of Augustine "is neither persuasive nor fair". (p. 43) This difficulty with the critical part of A Brief Inquiry raises a question that would be asked about this book anyway, the question of why Rawls's senior thesis is interesting enough to publish.

Though the ambition, systematicity and achievement of the thesis are extraordinary for someone in his early twenties, A Brief Inquiry would not have been worth publishing if Rawls had not later accomplished what he did. Nor would the thesis hold the interest that it does if the subject matter were not so surprising. Rawls's doctoral dissertation was on a philosophical rather than a religious subject. As far as I know, there are no plans to publish it; if the dissertation were published, it would be the object of far less fascination -- and would elicit far less comment -- than Rawls's undergraduate thesis.

Unlike Rawls's dissertation, A Brief Inquiry fascinates because it shows that someone whom many philosophers thought they knew well through his published work once had a very different intellectual and spiritual life. The thesis also extends a tantalizing invitation to engage in counterfactual history. Reading it in conjunction with "On My Religion" does not exactly convey the poignancy of a lost innocence that might have been kept, since there is very little innocence in A Brief Inquiry. Rawls was well aware of the war he was going off to fight after graduation and of the "demonic" character of the foe against whom it was being waged. (p. 197) But if innocence was not lost, deep religious conviction was. We cannot help but wonder how differently a great man's life would have gone had the events of mid-century affected him otherwise.

Not all readers are tantalized by counterfactual history. Even those who are not are bound to experience some pleasure in finding familiar Rawlsian ideas -- such as the natural lottery and the rejection of merit -- in unexpected places. (p. 240) Further, those who know Rawls's work well may be interested to learn that claims they find puzzling were present in Rawls's thought from the start, rather than accepted later on the basis of arguments that can eventually be recovered from his mature writings.

[...]

A Brief Inquiry may anticipate some of Rawls's later claims and arguments. But are we really going to read Rawls's later philosophical work differently in light of his undergraduate thesis?

The answer depends in part upon who "we" are. Among scholars of religious ethics, Rawls is often read as defending a thoroughly secular liberalism. That he defends secular liberalism, and does not systematically engage religion in his published works, is thought to show that he is dismissive of it or antagonistic toward it. Furthermore, his dismissal of or antagonism toward religion is assumed to be rooted in his ignorance of it. A Brief Inquiry definitively refutes the charges of ignorance and dismissal. "On My Religion" puts to rest the charge of antagonism. Acquittal of these charges clears the way for a much more sympathetic reception of Rawls's work by religious ethicists who were previously suspicious or hostile.[8]

What publication of the thesis offers all readers of Rawls -- and not just religious ethicists -- is a helpful corrective to some common interpretive errors. The Rawls of Theory of Justice is sometimes read as having ranged widely if not self-indulgently over problems in ethics that are only loosely connected to political philosophy, especially in Theory of Justice, Part III. Moreover, some readings of Rawls's move from Theory of Justice to Political Liberalism treat that move less as a transition than as a rupture caused by a fundamental shift of concern. Together, these two readings suggest that Rawls produced a body of work that, while hardly incoherent, lacks a unity of focus and underlying motivation. Those who read Rawls's work this way may find their reading reinforced by the addition of A Brief Inquiry to Rawls's corpus, since his political philosophy seems quite far removed from the self-described religious orthodoxy and evident piety of the senior thesis.

I believe, on the contrary, that Rawls maintained a disciplined focus on a few questions he took to be central. Continuities of concern and motivation tie his mature work together, and -- as Nagel and Cohen stress in their introduction and as Adams argues in his essay -- there are marked continuities between that work and A Brief Inquiry. Moreover, once we identify claims in Rawls's later work that are continuous with views he held very early on, we will be drawn to readings of justice as fairness that give those claims an importance or centrality they might not otherwise seem to have had. In this way, at least, A Brief Inquiry promises to change how Rawls is sometimes read and to blunt criticisms that are sometimes made.

Highly recommended.

G.A. Cohen

I was on vacation and away from blogging access when I received the sad news of G.A. Cohen's sudden passing. I seem to be among the few practicing political theorists who had never met him-- he was twice away from Oxford when I happened to be coming through to give a paper, and his last visitorship at McGill was five years before my arrival, though we had been in intermittent touch about bringing him back for a semester in the next few years. Given the tremendous personal presence described by his friends, students, and colleagues, I'm sorry not to have had the chance. In any case, I have nothing of personal note to add to the touching remembrances many have already posted. (See Chris Bertram, his roundup of others' notes, this delightful one from Chris Brooke, Jo Wolff, etc.)

But the following paragraph seemed to me to warrant highlighting here:

Like his immediate predecessor as the Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at the University of Oxford, Gerald Allan Cohen was born and educated in Montreal [indeed, both received BAs from McGill-- JTL]. There, the similarities end. Charles Taylor embodied the two founding cultures of his home city, French and Scottish, while Cohen recalled that he was 10 years old before he realised that there were some people who were neither Jews nor communists.

Cohen wrote of his "Montreal Communist Jewish childhood" in If You're An Egalitarian, How Come You're So Rich?, a partly-autobiographical work from 2006 that explores the roots of his own egalitarian commitments. In it he noted the complex place of McGill in the social world of his childhood: an object of "widespread hope and expectation," but also one to which Jewish children were taught "we would gain admission[...] only if we scored rather better than the minimum required for non-Jews," even years after McGill's "delicate discrimination" against Jews had ceased.

That reminds me to link again to Judith Shklar's autobiographical essay, and her remarks about her own undergraduate days at McGill-- when the discrimination was still in full force.

I do not look back fondly to my college days at McGill University either. That may have something to do with the then-prevailing entrance rules: 750 points for Jews and 600 for everyone else. Nor was it an intellectually exciting institution, but at least when I arrived there, just before my 17th birthday, I was lucky to be in the same class as many ex-servicemen, whose presence made for an unusually mature and serious student body. And compared to school it was heaven. Moreover, it all worked out surprisingly well for me. I met my future husband and was married at the end of my junior year, by far the smartest thing I ever did. And I found my vocation.

Originally I had planned to major in a mixture of philosophy and economics, the rigor of which attracted me instantly. But when I was required to take a course in money and banking it became absolutely obvious to me that I was not going to be a professional economist. Philosophy was, moreover, mainly taught by a dim gentleman who took to it because he had lost his religious faith. I have known many confused people since I encountered this poor man, but nobody quite as utterly unfit to teach Plato or Descartes. Fortunately for me I was also obliged to take a course in the history of political theory taught by an American, Frederick Watkins. After two weeks of listening to this truly gifted teacher I knew what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. If there was any way of making sense of my experiences and that of my particular world, this was it.

Watkins was a remarkable man, as the many students whom he was to teach at Yale can testify. He was an exceptionally versatile and cultivated man and a more than talented teacher. He not only made the history of ideas fascinating in his lectures, but he also somehow conveyed the sense that nothing could be more important. I also found him very reassuring. For in many ways, direct and indirect, he let me know that the things I had been brought up to care for, classical music, pictures, literature, were indeed worthwhile, and not my personal eccentricities. His example, more than anything overtly said, gave me a great deal of self-confidence, and I would have remembered him gratefully, even if he had not encouraged me to go on to graduate school, to apply to Harvard, and then to continue to take a friendly interest in my education and career. It is a great stroke of luck to discover one’s calling in one’s late teens, and not everyone has the good fortune to meet the right teacher at the right time in her life, but I did, and I have continued to be thankful for the education that he offered me so many years ago.