A belated mea culpa

This is roundabout; bear with me.

Matt Yglesias highlights a story about the closure of Walter Reed hospital, and notes the existence of regulations on how the land may be used. In short, the land may be conveyed directly to government agencies or various kinds of non-profit entities that submit proposals for it. It cannot be auctioned or otherwise sold to the private market.

Matt notes-- rightly-- that this is weird.

What on earth is the purpose of rules of this sort? Why not sell the land and earmark the money for these worthy purposes? That would seem to make everyone better off. You don’t see that many examples of truly pareto optimal policy changes out there, but this is one. No nefarious interest I can think of benefits from this arrangement, it’s just wasteful for no reason. And it comes up in DC all the time because a similar rule applies to a bunch of long-vacant school buildings we have.

I didn't know about these rules, and probably would have thought no more about it if not for the fact that he quoted David Alpert's reference to the regulations as "federal base closure rules." (Walter Reed is, after all, a military installation.)

Uh-oh, thinks I.

A little reading later, I believe I owe the following apology:

In 1988, the Pease Air Force Base on the edge of my hometown had been slated for closure, and it was shuttered in 1991, at important savings to the federal government and important anti-stimulus for the local area during the early 90s recession. The land was transferred to a QUANGO, the Pease Development Authority, which spent its first few years trying and failing to attract high profile firms to come use large amounts of the land all at once. In the meantime, a huge chunk of real estate and infrastructure sat basically vacant.

In 1992 (at the ripe old age of 21) I ran for the New Hampshire House of Representatives, as a Libertarian. And my distinctive policy proposal was: break up the PDA, stop trying to land the One Big Firm that would come replace the Air Force as a dominant employer, and allow the base to be parceled and auctioned. Market-led base redevelopment rather than local-politico-led posturing.

It's now pretty clear to me that this would have been impossible under federal law, and that the PDA/ tradeport model was as close as any local authorities could come to letting commerce take hold there. (At least they didn't turn the base into a megaprison complex.) Doesn't mean it was a good model, and almost twenty years later I still think there's underutilized capital there. But it would have been wholly outside the New Hampshire legislature's authority to fix this.

Of course: 1) No one else seemed to know this, either; certainly, my opponents never slapped me down as an ignorant kid who didn't know the rules. 2) I was a 21-year old third-party candidate running against two Democratic incumbents in a solid Democratic (two-seat) district. I wasn't ever going to win. 3) Had I won, I would hardly have been the most ignorant member of New Hampshire's 400-person part-time lower legislative house, or the first to find that the thing they'd talked about on the campaign trail couldn't be done.

Nonetheless: I apologize to the voters of my then-district, and to my opponents in that race. I spent several months arguing something on the basis of insufficient information, and making claims that it turns out were false or impossible.

A point that should be obvious

Opposing someone else's expression or activity on the grounds that it's "provocative"-- that it will provoke various observers and third parties to some negative reaction-- is usually a dishonest way of dodging agency. It means: "I've made the decision that my dislike for your expression is more important than your freedom, and I intend to aggress against you to shut you up, but I want to make it seem like you're the one who's made a decision to be aggressive." It's a decision posing as a passive reaction. It's then, perversely, often followed by the idea that the expression's primary purpose was to provoke, and so denying that the first person has any non-aggressive interest at all in the expression.

Some of this was worked out and widely endorsed during the controversy over the Danish cartoons.

But it applies just as forcefully to the way that defenders of laicite talk about the various forms of Islamic women's covering (from headscarves to the burka/ niqab).

And, boy oh boy, does it apply to the despicable demagoguery around building a mosque in lower Manhattan.

Sarah Palin, the 2008 Republican vice-presidential nominee, has urged “peace-seeking Muslims” to reject the center, branding it an “unnecessary provocation.” A Republican political action committee has produced a television commercial assailing the proposal. And former House Speaker Newt Gingrich has decried it in speeches.[...]

He added: “The average American just thinks this is a political statement. It’s not about religion, and is clearly an aggressive act that is offensive.”

Update: Isaac Chotiner had the same thought.

What I've been reading: Steven Pincus,1688: The First Modern Revolution

I have enough to say about this book that I keep putting off the blog post, but eventually that makes the post an overdue assignment, and I don't need to add any of those to my life. So let's see what I can rush through:

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This is an important book with a powerful, distinct argument pressed forward in lots of ways. It isn't, and shouldn't be mistaken for, a freestanding popular history of the Glorious Revolution, though given the conventions of history book publishing it physically looks like it could be. Instead, it's an argument in support of the following propositions:

Contrary to the traditional Whig understanding, the Glorious Revolution was not a consensual, peaceful restoration of a stable and traditional English political order.

Contrary to the modern revisionist understanding, the Glorious Revolution was not a conservative elite Anglican coup against a moderate James II as punishment for his support of religious toleration.

James II was an innovating modernizer, rapidly building up and centralizing an absolutist modern state on the close model of Louis XIV's state in France. This included an aggressive plan for Catholicizing England and English institutions (not merely allowing Catholics religious freedom), but the Catholicism James promoted was the Gallican Catholicism of France and the Jesuits, putting him on the other side of a profound split from the papacy and Catholic Spain and the Holy Roman Empire-- all of which ultimately aligned with William of Orange and the Netherlands against Louis and James. Gallicanism was as much a political project as a religious one, and the Glorious Revolution cannot be well understood as the last shot of the Wars of Religion. Instead, it was part of a long-term and Europe-wide fight against Louis' absolutist modernization and imperial ambition.

This means that the Revolution cannot be (as it often has been) read in a narrowly English or even British context; and it also means that it cannot be read in a narrow timeframe that ends in 1689. But neither was England just a field on which to fight out the European conflict; Pincus forcefully denies another revisionist thesis that sees the Revolution as essentially a Dutch invasion.

James had domestic modernizing opponents, those who sought to pursue a different modernizing and state-building project on non-absolutist, commercial rather than aristocratic, tolerant rather than Gallican grounds. They (along with more traditionalist Anglican Tories) rose against James in a genuine domestic violent insurrection-- one that would have failed without the invasion by William at the head of an armed force that included Dutch as well as Anglo-exile forces, but one without which William would not have made the crossing.

Pincus maintains that this fits a general pattern. Revolutions, he thinks, are made against modernizers. An initial state modernization project either reveals that traditional institutions are fragile, or makes them so, or both. And so at the moment that state capacity is being built up, the popular allegiance to it is shaken-- change no longer seems unthinkable, as change is already being pursued, indeed already seems inevitable. And revolutions are also made by modernizers. That is, they are the violent and (at least semi-)popular overthrow of a modernizing state by rival modernizers-- not, despite frequent rhetoric, by restorationists. He maintains that revolutions are events in early state modernization and consolidation-- and that the English Revolution was the first of them.

The book is sweeping and general-- which is to say that it pursues depth of evidence of a number of different kinds, aimed at making its interpretive claim irresistible. It offers quantitative and archival history; economic, theological, ideological, and diplomatic history; domestic and international history, all arranged to clear argumentative purpose. Again, this doesn't amount to a narration of events-- much is explained but much is not. (I know a lot about the era for a non-historian, but I read the book with wikipedia open next to me, and made a lot of use of it.)

The cumulative effect is sometimes devastating for the rival views, and I doubt that they can survive in unmodified form. That said, Pincus' own evidence sometimes points to openings that might be exploited by adherents of the rival views trying to rebuild and recover. The first major case of this I noticed was the frequency of anti-Catholic rhetoric in Whig claims he quotes in places besides where he's maintaining that the Revolution was not essentially anti-Catholic. The distinctions he draws between Gallicanism and Catholicism as such are well-taken (and for me were probably the most important revelations of the book), and they do provide a way to understand anti-Catholic language that's not narrowly confessional. But it's not always clear that the revolutionaries observed the distinction as cleanly as Pincus suggests, and he doesn't tell us how to evaluate or weigh the cases in which the distinction was not observed. I think he ultimately makes his case-- I was persuaded, anyway-- but I predict that there will be pushback here.

In the second case I'm less sure what to think. His narrative of rival imperial and economic visions, and of Whig-revolutionary triumph in the second half of the 1690s over a Tory restorationist mindset, seems to demand the destruction of the East India Company. But the Whig attempt to do so failed. Pincus leads us through the sequence of events, and then shows that Whigs triumphed on the related but distinct ground of banking (in the creation of the Bank of England and the destruction of the Tory Land Bank). But I was left dissatisfied; it seems as though the survival of the Company is more important disconfirmatory evidence of Pincus' thesis than he allows. I predict pushback here, and am eager to see how it turns out.

But it is to the book's (Pincus') credit that I end the book understanding that these are moments of possible weakness in his claim, on the basis of evidence he has supplied. More importantly, it is to the book's (Pincus') credit that it has such a clear and controversial thesis that we can talk about what would be disconfirmatory evidence; and that, despite its novelty, the thesis is supported so powerfully across so many areas that one can identify the discrete patches of ground left to defend by those whose views Pincus is critiquing.

I think the book is a major event in historical scholarship, but I also think it repays reading for political theorists. Some thoughts on why:

I learned a lot about a semi-minor figure I'm writing on (Robert Molesworth); and learned enough to seriously change how I'll teach Locke's Letter Concerning Toleration in the future. His exclusion of religions that demand allegiance to a foreign prince, I now think, was certainly not a euphemism for Catholicism as such. Instead, it emphasizes the political-not-confessional divides in the way that Pincus shows was common among (at least) Whig and revolutionary intellectuals and leaders. The upshot is that Locke was acknowledging that the Catholicism of Elizabethan times, the Catholicism that taught that heretical monarchs could be deposed and killed on order of the Pope, was intolerable in a regime of toleration-- but insisting that by-then-contemporary Catholicism was tolerable. This is largely my interpolation-- Locke qua philosopher rarely appears in 1688, and even Locke the important Whig exile intellectual often appears only passively-- I think much more is quoted from letters to Locke or accounts of things told to him than is quoted from Locke, and he begins to seem like a curiously blank center of Whig and exile networks. But it's a treat to be able to read a book in another field that supplements and contextualizes things I already know in a way that changes what they seem to mean.

Moreover, the reader of Pincus' book is left understanding what was radical and revolutionary in the Second Treatise, and what the chapter on property was about in a way that transcends the justification of expropriation in America. The idea that labor was the source of property was at the core of the Whig non-zero-sum political economy, opposed to the Tory account that treated the finite sum of land in the world as the core resource, and commerce as just a matter of moving things around. I look forward to my next re-reading of the Second Treatise; I think that having read this book will make it exciting again.

The Whig account of the Revolution as limited in aim, consensual, and mainly intended to undo the absolutist innovations of James receives one of its canonical statements in Burke. While everyone understands that Burke is no neutral narrator, I think his account still has a substantial influence on those of us who read more political theory than history. Here, again, theorists have something important to learn from the book. Pincus' Whig revolutionaries were tamed and staved off eventually; the Revolution was, in the French idiom, brought to an end by the 1720s, giving rise to the relative stability of the Hanoverian era. But the Revolutionary era itself here seems more like the Americans' long-distance memory of it in the 1770s than like Burke's account of it a little bit later.

Similarly, I think that political theorists, political scientists, and sociologists who worry about revolutions as a category really need to read this book-- the introductory treatment of their literatures and development of a rival claim about what revolutions are and why they happen, and then then enough of the rest of the book to understand why 1688 qualifies. Revolutions aren't a key idea for me-- but state-building and state-consolidation are, and here too I learned a lot and had my ideas sharpened considerably. The sharper ideas aren't always in agreement with Pincus', but they're indebted to his book.

Very, very highly recommended.

What I've been reading: Don Herzog, Cunning

This is the funniest book of political theory I've ever read.

That sounds like a faint praise, and like a very low bar to clear. But I laughed-- actually laughed-- more often reading Cunning than reading Harry Frankfurt's On Bullshit, or Montesquieu's Persian Letters, or Mandeville's Fable of the Bees, or Hume's Essays, all of which I think are genuinely funny works. (And much much more often than when reading the last officially-meant-to-be-funny work of political theory published in my lifetime that I made my way through-- a disappointing book from an author who's both brilliant and funny but who produced a text that was neither.)

It's subversive (and admits to being self-subversive, too), sarcastic, and constantly surprising, which helps keep the laughs coming; it never settles into shtick.

Cunning is also the work of a word-crafter, precisely written and a delight to read on that count alone, even without the wit.

This book is a humanist essay, not a monograph bound within one or another disciplinary genre. (And Herzog has entertaining things to say about the monographs within the disciplinary genres.) It ranges from major works of literature to almost-unknown figures of history to contemporary social science and philosophy, and in so doing manages to feel genuinely new in its reflections on instrumental rationality.

That's terribly hard by this point. Everyone in social science and the cognate areas of philosophy is familiar with all the decades' worth of back-and-forth on rational actors who choose efficient means toward given ends that even hearing the words triggers a whole set of preprogrammed responses and counter-responses. So Herzog gives us a new word: cunning. He invites and provokes thought on the ways in which the word can be praise and the ways in which it implies wickedness. He plays with the figure of cunning Odysseus to great effect, and helps the reader to wonder what kind of character Odysseus can finally be. The book unsettles some of those very entrenched thoughtless patterns of thought about rationality-- and it doesn't propose new safe patterns into which one could settle. Any reader who feels smug seeing Herzog whack at the other side's idols and icons has missed the point, or has stopped reading at the moment of smugness and missed the turnabout on the following page.

The reflections on method and genre in the introduction and scattered throughout ["foundational justifications are philosophers' pet unicorns; their colorful folklore tells us what they look like, but we have yet to see one"], the bracing skepticism and useful modelling of how we can proceed despite skepticism, are all very useful. But it would be a mistake to read this book in the spirit of ends-means rationality, mining it for what is useful in it. Read this to enjoy it, and learn from it along the way.

Robert Paul Wolff on writing a dissertation

Here. I endorse almost every part of this, and of course especially this:

In Philosophy, a dissertation is The Defense of a Thesis. [That is why a dissertation is referred to familiarly as a thesis.]

What is a thesis? It is a proposition, expressed in a declarative sentence. Here are some examples of theses:

Contrary to popular opinion, David Hume and Immanuel Kant have almost identical views on the role of the mind in empirical knowledge. [This is the thesis of my doctoral dissertation]

God is dead.

God is not dead; he has just been on vacation.

In all situations, I am morally obliged to choose the act that will produce the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people.

Here are some examples of things that are not theses:

Kant and Hume on the role of the mind in empirical knowledge

Nietzsche's view of religion

Act utilitarianism

Each of these is a topic, not a thesis. You cannot write a dissertation defending a topic.

I take exception to the boldfaced portion of this:

In order to write a dissertation, you must be prepared to defend a thesis. If you cannot state the thesis of your dissertation in a single declarative sentence, you are not ready to write. Do not make the mistake of thinking that if you begin writing, your thesis will become clear eventually. That way lies disaster. You ought to be able to begin your dissertation with the sentence, "In this dissertation, I shall defend the thesis that p." You should then be able to conclude your dissertation with this sentence: "Thus we see that p."

The beginning and end of that paragraph are certainly right. The middle is right only

"If you are like me, and work in your head,"

Some people can work through an article-length idea in their heads. It has become clear in reading Wolff's memoirs that he really can work through a book-length idea in his head. But most of us can't.

What is true is that until you know your thesis, you cannot write your introduction or conclusion. What is probably true is that if you do not know your thesis, much of what you are writing won't end up in your final dissertation. But the last thing graduate students need to think is "you are not ready to write," full stop. Write. Try an idea out. See where it goes. Maybe you have a thesis for one chapter that you're pretty sure about; write that. Or maybe you have an objection to a standard view in the literature that you're pretty sure about. Write that. (A literature review per se isn't writing, but it does get you in the habit of putting words onto paper, and it sometimes leaves you with a more useful resource than scattered notes.)

Wolff is absolutely right to emphasize the importance of slow-but-steady writing-- a page or two a day, every day, of new writing, not revising. But I doubt that any but a handful of students are well-served by telling them to : Start on Page 1, with the sentence, "In this dissertation, I shall defend the thesis that p." This is all of a piece with my concerns above. Almost every successful dissertation I've seen written was written from the inside out, not from the beginning to the end. If you're going to write from page 1, you have have to know your thesis cold before you start writing. If you wait until you know your thesis cold before you start writing, you'll wait far too long.

When you write from the inside out, you should make every effort to write a beginning and end that make it look as if you've written from beginning to end! And that will require some revision of the middle chapters. By the time you're writing your introduction, you know your story, and you'll want to adjust the middle portions to make them fit more cleanly together and more cleanly into the story.

Wolff's absolutel right on what a dissertation is, and in large part right about writing. But I fear that parts of his advice encourage too much delay. Start writing.

Visiting Fulbright Chair in the Theory and Practice of Constitutionalism and Federalism, 2011-12; application deadline August 2

Visiting Fulbright Chair in the Theory and Practice of Constitutionalism and Federalism, 2011-12.

Open to US citizens (who are not also Canadian citizens or permanent residents). The Research Chair awards provide a fixed sum of US$25,000 for stays of 4 to 9 months (one semester or the full academic year). Click here to apply.

Specializations: Normative, jurisprudential, comparative, historical, or analytic/formal studies of constitutional theory and practice, with preference for studies that encompass some aspect of constitutional federalism. Methodologically open within political theory and political science, including intellectual and institutional history.

Additional Grant Activity: Candidates would be invited to take part in a faculty and graduate seminar, with respondents, focused on the chair’s work in progress.
Comments: The McGill University Department of Political Science is an internationally recognized Ph.D. granting department with 29 faculty members with interests spanning Canadian Politics, Comparative Politics, International Relations, and Political Theory. Normative, comparative, Canadian, and jurisprudential research programs on constitutionalism and federalism are all represented within the department. The Research Group on Constitutional Studies, of which the visiting scholar will be a member during his or her visit, encompasses researchers from the Departments of Political Science and Philosophy and the Faculty of Law studying constitutional theory and its antecedents, jurisprudential pluralism and federalism, legal theory, and empirical constitutional politics.

Contact: Olga Naiberguer, Associate Director, International Programs, olga.naiberguer@mcgill.ca or
Jacob Levy, Department of Political Science, jacob.levy@mcgill.ca
www.mcgill.ca/politicalscience

Note: French language ability commensurate with the requirements of the project and the host institution is required. Facility with French not required but an asset.

What I've Been Reading: Geoffrey Brennan and Philip Pettit, The Economy of Esteem

I mean to start doing more book-blogging here, along the lines that Tyler Cowen does it-- my thoughts and reactions to what I read, rather than worked-out reviews. These'll sometimes be opaque to those who haven't read the books, but might at least stimulate interest in them. What follows is rather longer than I expect these posts will usually be.

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This is a superb book by two outstanding scholars, demonstrating a terrific fusion of rigorous philosophical argument and formal/ economic reasoning, in the service of an argument that modern economics is radically incomplete. Against the invisible hand of the marketplace that relies on interest, and the iron hand of regulation that relies on punishment, they set an intangible hand relying on the quest for esteem. In the heart of the book, they walk through one type of setting after another and one type of problem after another, showing in an abstract and powerful way what the tradeoffs and dynamics are within the pursuit of esteem, what social institutions and individual choices look like when thought of in esteem-seeking terms.

It’s also, to my mind, a sometimes strange and frustrating book. I may not be its target audience, for much of it seems designed to refute the null hypothesis that esteem-seeking is irrelevant or powerless, and that only interest-seeking matters. I suppose that it ought to be persuasive to anyone subscribing to that hypothesis. But then again someone holding it has disregarded a great deal of evidence and argument already, and won’t necessarily cease to do so just because the argument Is presented in terms he or she finds cognitively familiar.

As a result, Brennan and Pettit often—not always, but often—talk about the desire for esteem as an unusual feature of human life, something that has its primary effects in the domain of civil society set apart from the market and the state. But it is pervasive; it pervades and intertwines with the pursuits of wealth and power. It is indeed more pervasive than they are, no matter how powerfully they shape our macro-social institutions. The desire to avoid disesteem and humiliation , and the willingness to follow norms the breaking of which is shameful, surrounds us and shapes us, all the time.

Another oddity of emphasis, that is I think connected. The authors are conscientious about regularly noting perverse cases—“intangible backhand” problems in which the desire for esteem results in misaligned incentives or undesirable behaviors. But these are always treated as exceptional, as interestingly quirky—kind of the way that economists present Giffen goods. The language of “esteem” and “estimable” encourages this.

But there are plenty of other words and concepts that might be used, but that barely register in the book: Pride. Glory, vanity, or their traditional hybrid vainglory. Egotism (as distinct from the egoism of homo economus). Above all, as far as I’m concerned: status. Many of the dynamics that are presented in such successful abstraction seem likely to be beneficial so long as we think of them as esteem-seeking—and immediately take on a more baleful aspect when we think of them as status-seeking.

The book notes that sometimes the economy of esteem is blocked from its best operation by a systematic disesteem for whole groups of people, e.g. racial prejudice. And its treatment of what happens within the subordinated group as a result are very interesting. But the superordinate group isn't mentioned, and I kept thinking that some whiteness studies would have done some good here. The authors are interested in the disincentive to performance among the subordinate group who can't receive full-- or, sometimes, any-- esteem rewards for excellence. But the counterpart is the unearned status boost for even the least estimable members of the superordinate group. Jim Crow was economically destructive, but represented a categorical increase in status for lower-class whites; they gained a status floor beneath which they could not normally fall, just in virtue of not being black. And so they became dogged supporters and enforcers of Jim Crow, to protect and maintain their own otherwise-precarious status gains.

The often-positive-sum esteem settings the authors focus on are important and interesting. But they are not the whole of the economy of esteem, and are probably not the most important ways that esteem and status affect social institutions, the market, and politics.

A final complaint, minor in fact though it bothered me a great deal. Brennan and Pettit do make occasional reference to the historical importance of the view that esteem-seeking was a primary motivation. But their desire to contrast the intangible and invisible hands means that Adam Smith almost always appears as a synecdoche for the economistic worldview—and doesn’t appear often in any case. But Smith’s greatest work, the Theory of Moral Sentiments—mentioned here primarily as a source for the invisible hand metaphor!—is a work that’s centrally about the relationship between esteem-seeking and moral psychology, between the desire for praise and the desire for praiseworthiness, between human motivation and the good opinion of others; in short, about the core material of this book. And the book omits altogether the great critic of esteem-seeking behavior, Smith’s contemporary Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

The book in fact contains many good answers to traditional critiques of esteem-seeking, draws credible connections between the pursuit of esteem and the attainment of excellence, and greatly adds to our understanding. And I want to emphasize again how admirable its combination of economic and philosophical reasoning is. This may be the finest manifestation I know of the intellectual atmosphere that existed at the Australian National University’s Research School of the Social Sciences (where the authors were longtime colleagues) for many years, and that’s high praise. But the book by its own admission is meant to be research-agenda-opening, not primarily question-answering. Much work remains to be done in thinking about status, power, and interest-based motivations alongside each other, sometimes rivalrous, sometimes reinforcing, always interacting—and about what follows for the methodologies of the social sciences.

With respect to institutional reforms, the authors are very concerned to make the point that professionals should be treated like professionals, and rewarded with esteem for excellence, rather that either micromanaged in a punitive regulatory fashion or "incentivized" (as the ugly word goes) with constant payments for performance. This is persuasive and important-- and indeed helps to make sense of how and why many professions are organized the way that they are. But it's a lesson that operates within boundaries, too. Professions as sectors, and firms of professionals like law firms, face market discipline, even when professionals as individual workers are not paid by commission. I think the authors are concerned to show that, e.g., civil servants and public school teachers also ought to be treated as professionals, with their time use regulated by the intangible hand and not the invisible or the iron hand. No doubt there's something to that; but it needs to be paired with an understanding of what will take the place of the market boundaries faced by private-sector professions. And there's something slightly underwhelming about "treat schoolteachers better" as the institutional takeaway from a book that, on its face, is attempting a major overhaul in how social science is done.

(At least, a major overhaul in how economics is done. Sociology, it must be said, has never been blind to the importance of status. But economists-- even, apparently, very fine and professionally-interdisciplinary economists-- sometimes have trouble acknowledging that sociology has gone somewhere before they have.)

The best part of the book by far is Part II, "Within the Economics of Esteem," that formalizes and analyzes many features of esteem-seeking behavior, and casts light on lots of situations. (Not accidentally, many of these are set in universities and among academics; I've maintained several times on this blog that academic life is more usefully modeled as status-seeking than as interest-seeking.) Readers of these chapters need to be brave enough not to be frightened away by the mere appearance of a diagram or an equation, but these are no more difficult than what appears in an introductory microeconomics class and in any case their ideas and intuitions are clearly explained in the accompanying prose. But pause to appreciate the models if you can. They're pitched at a very well-chosen level. They simplify and abstract, as models do... but they don't simplify into straight lines or monotonic curves. Brennan and Pettit have thought carefully about discontinuities, asymmetries, sharp angles, and indeterminate zones, and they simplify just enough to highlight them, rather than simplifying them away-- and many of the best ideas of the book are found in the discussions and justifications of those discontinuities, asymmetries, and so on.

I'm going to live forever, part 4,872 in a continuing series

Good news:

Drinking several cups of tea or coffee a day appears to protect against heart disease, a 13-year-long study [of 40,000 people] from the Netherlands has found.

Less good news:

Consuming between two to four coffees a day was also linked to a reduced risk... the protective effect ceased with more than four cups of coffee a day,

But at least:

even those who drank this much were no more likely to die of any cause, including stroke and cancer, than those who abstained.

Liberty and civil society

[Note: originally written as a contribution to the Cato Unbound symposium on Philip Blond's Redy Toryism. Russell Arben Fox's reply to the symposium, and I guess mainly to me, is here, and it's of course a much better and more interesting defense of an idea like Red Toryism than was the piece of Blond's to which we had to reply.]

My old friend Patrick Deneen writes:

"The contemporary conspiracy between State and Market -- apparently locked in battle, but more fundamentally consonant in their hostility toward, and evisceration of, the institutions of civil society -- mutually reinforce each other, strengthening simultaneously commercial and State concentrations of power that recent events reveal to have been deeply intertwined. Both are based upon the radically individuated anthropology of classical liberalism, an anthropology that both necessarily precedes and ultimately succors the progressivist liberalism that it purports to oppose. ... The only true locus of human liberty is to be found in the institutions of civil society, yet our dominant philosophies both regard its requirements for stability, self-sacrifice and generational continuity as an obstacle to individual liberty."

I can't imagine the time horizons over which the purported changes have happened. The civil society that is a semi-distinct sphere of human society, the order of intermediate and sometimes-voluntary associations that mostly lack either coercive power over outsiders or expressly commercial purposes, isn't any older than the state and the market as distinct spheres. Like them, it arises in the world of modern social differentiation. The medieval church was, to our eye, quite state-like; the medieval guild looked a great deal like a participant in the market. From the time that civil society in this sense is really identifiable as a sphere-- the time when The Church became churches which were required to peacefully coexist, when one of the guilds evolved into the Freemasons and others were replaced by fraternal societies that did not regulate the labor market, when the intergenerational corporate form became democratized and demonopolized and made accessible to voluntary associations, and so on, in other words from the 18th or early 19th century onward-- there has always been augmentation of material wealth on the market and there has always been an increase in the coercive power of the state. And yet the grand narrative of the decline of civil society is, according to its leading empirical scholar Robert Putnam, the story of a civic-minded Greatest Generation inadvertently raising baby boomers who watched too much television. The pessimistic take on civil society is that it flourished and its forms proliferated until the 1950s, 60s, or 70s. (The optimistic take is that it flourishes still, and that its forms continue to proliferate, even if fewer hours are being volunteered for the Rotary.) The timing matches neither an unusucal increase in state power (certainly not compared with the 1910s or the 1930s and 40s!) nor an unusual increase in market power.

The life of religious institutions in particular is somewhat more complicated. One of the great institutional accomplishments of American civil society, the Catholic school system, has indeed fallen victim to the market. The system rested on the service of men and, especially, women who opted to forego market rewards for lifelong religious-education vocations. The opportunity costs of that decision have risen dramatically, especially for women who had been excluded from the labor market altogether. It is unclear whether the system is sustainable on current trends. If it is not, there will be a loss to the social world. But it will not be because of, nor will it engender, a loss of liberty.

Liberty is productive of civil society. The tremendous creativity of nineteenth-century Americans in creating churches, voluntary associations, universities, and fraternal societies is a testament to this. And the existence of a rich and vibrant civil society is a sign of freedom. I do not believe that a society that lacked such a civil society would be a free one-- but the lack would be more symptom than cause. Free persons do create and inhabit and maintain and perpetuate organizations and institutions. They do so partly under the umbrella of a coercive state that allows the institutions to be intermediate, rather than rival armed camps enforcing the rights of the members. And they do so partly with the wealth and leisure that the market makes possible. There are, of course, countervailing effects and complex relationships. But there is nothing like a simple inverse relationship between civil society and a reifiied sum of "state plus market."

The phrase "civil society" is a complicated one. It suggests the self-governing city or city-state, free of feudal power or coercive religious jurisdiction. In early modernity, this sense of a complete political society with rough equality before the law and excluding religious violence becamse generalized to the entities we now think of as nation-states-- the Hobbesian, Weberian, Westphalian states that overpowered coercive church jurisdiction and suppressed the possibility of religious civil war. And so, in the writings of someone like John Locke, civil society is political society, theself-contained and unified political society that can apply a general law and that excludes external (e.g. church) claims of political power. There was an important sense in which that society offered freedom-- freedom from the inquisitors and their Protestant equivalents. That is, civil society-as-state suppressed the power of intermediate institutions. In the 18th century, thinkers such as Adam Ferguson and Adam Smith came to imagine social spheres distinct from political society-- a society, and an economy, that could persist over time and survive changes in political regime. (Scottish society and the Scottish economy changed, but did not disappear, when the Scottish state disappeared into the British.) That, too, was an advance in our understanding of freedom-- our social lives are not wholly constituted by our political lives. Hegel was later to use the phrase to refer almost entirely to the market, under an appropriate legal regime-- the legal regime that recognizes free bourgeois citizens, legally autonomous and interacting with each other as equals. That is the social world of liberal agents creating new voluntary associations as easily, and with the same rules, as they create economic firms or political parties.

To say that liberty is only possible in civil society is an interesting thought when it admits of this complexity. But when it treats the non-political non-economic domain as the whole meaning of the phrase, it is misleading at best.

The Queen's Speech

"My government will invest in new high-speed broadband internet connection," spoken by an 84-year old woman wearing an actual ginormous crown in imperial purple sitting on an actual throne.

I'm sure that to Commonwealthers the theater (theatre) of the Queen's Speech (or its viceregal equivalents) is old hat, but this is the first one I've ever actually watched. It strikes me as wonderfully odd. It seems undignified for the Queen to have to read a first-person speech written by some newly-elected politico and simultaneously undignified for the elected leader of a great power not to be able to deliver his own agenda to Parliament, and just wildly incongruous to have the longest-serving head of state in the world (is that right?) wading through a detailed list of bills to be introduced ("alcohol-related violence!") and through boringly jargony catchphrases. And yet it all works-- I enjoyed it more than I've enjoyed a State of the Union, like, ever.

I especially liked that the official statement of the government's agenda doubles as the Queen's Christmas card/ annual letter ("The Duke of Edinburgh and I look forward to our visit to Canada in June").

Two political theory doctoral students win major fellowships

Two pieces of good news for theory students I've noticed recently from very competitive fellowship competitions:

Kiran Banerjee Wins Canada’s Most Prestigious PhD Award

[University of Toronto] PhD student, Kiran Banerjee, has won the Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship, Canada’s most prestigious scholarship for doctoral students. The award recognizes students in the social sciences and humanities, natural sciences and engineering, and health sciences who have demonstrated leadership skills and high standards of scholarly achievement in their graduate studies. The award is worth $50,000 annually for up to three years. Kiran, one of 174 students to receive the award this year, is writing a doctoral dissertation on `Statelessness and the limits of contemporary citizenship: a theory of transnational political inclusion and open membership’.

James Ethan Bourke awarded ACLS fellowship

James Ethan Bourke
Doctoral Candidate
Duke University
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation/ACLS Early Career Fellowship Program Dissertation Completion Fellowships 2010


The Politics of Incommensurability: A Value Pluralist Approach to Liberalism and Democracy

This dissertation explores the meaning and political implications of Isaiah Berlin’s theory of value pluralism. Value pluralism is the idea that goods or values are often conflicting and incommensurable to one another; that is, they cannot be measured by a common rubric or systematically ranked against one another. The argument has four main parts: 1) an analysis of what Berlin and others have meant by “value pluralism;” 2) a critique of current attempts to link value pluralism to one or another political view; 3) a new interpretation of the core claim of incommensurability and an analysis of how it affects practical reasoning; and 4) a constructive argument about the liberal-democratic institutions and practices that value pluralism supports.

And they all died happily ever after

First draft thoughts on the Lost finale, to be updated as time permits:

I'm pleased to see that the critics are nearly unanimous in their correct view that the finale was terrible-- though one of the highest-profile Lostologists, EW's Doc Jensen, inexplicably sticks to the incorrect view that it was not terrible.

------
http://io9.com/5545911/lost-was-the-ultimate-long-con?skyline=true&s=i
"Lost, arguably the most important genre show of the past decade, ended with a fizzle. People will tell you it was fine until the last 15 minutes, but they're wrong."

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/25/arts/television/25lost.html?ref=television

"Desmond and Jack walked into a cave for the final showdown with evil, and Desmond said, “This doesn’t matter, him destroying the island, you destroying him.” Jack, serious to the end, replied, “All of this matters.” It was the sort of thesis-antithesis, drama-of-ideas moment that the show had always specialized in. The problem was that several hours later, after the show’s mystical, walk-into-the-white-light ending, it was Desmond who would be proved more right."

http://www.slate.com/id/2242745/entry/2255005/
"I can only hope that some pissed-off, enterprising Lost fan will do for the final season what other irate fanboys have done for the Star Wars prequels: re-edit the whole sloppy mess into something better."


http://www.slate.com/id/2242745/entry/2254926/
"Well, shit."

http://www.slate.com/id/2242745/entry/2254865/
"That spooky island that so much blood and treasure were spilled over—the one that holds the key to life and transfixed 20 million viewers each week at its peak? Oh, it's still out there. Don't trouble yourself about it. Just join us in this cheesily nondenominational church and let the good times roll. In lieu of a truly clever conclusion, please enjoy watching a minute of slow-motion hugging between the characters."

http://www.slate.com/id/2242745/entry/2254778/
"After six seasons, you call a prom of the dead in a chapel of love where everybody is farting rainbows, where all the primary Oceanic 815 survivors are redeemed, where a loving "Dad" opens a Spielbergian door of light to the greater beyond ("Where are we going?" "Let's go find out.")—a finale?"


http://www.salon.com/entertainment/tv/review/2010/05/24/lost_season_finale_recap
"A series like "Lost" doesn't need to solve all of its riddles, but it does need to address the right ones. (The first season of "Twin Peaks" is an object lesson in how to provide enough resolution while preserving the delicious mysteries of a fictional universe.) From statements the producers of "Lost" have made over the past five years, they developed a dynamic with die-hard fans (and disillusioned fans and skeptical non-fans) that was infinitely more complex than any of the personal relationships among the series' characters. Could it be that in resisting the geekiest, nitpickingest, most Aspergerian demands of their audience they swung too far in the opposite direction, dismissing as trivial everything but the cosmic (the tedious and largely unnecessary Jacob-Smokey background) and the sentimental (making sure that every character receives his or her designated soul mate or therapeutic closure of the most banal Dr. Phil variety)?"


http://defamer.gawker.com/5545877/the-lost-finale-was-incredibly-dumb
"Once upon a time, there was a television show about a bunch of people on an island. For six years it was one of the most fascinating things on TV. And then it ended, in the worst way possible. Lost ended tonight, and with it the hopes and dreams of millions of people who thought it might finally get good again. SPOILER ALERT: It didn't. "
--------------

I'll begin positive. Absolutely loved the Jack-Fake Locke conversation about the real Locke, and the final exchange between Ben and Locke (although I can't entirely disagree with this critique of that moment, either). Got a kick out of the Star Trek II visual reference. Happily endorse Hugo's ascension and mostly endorse Ben's resolution-- though the latter desperately needed for him to do something, when instead he was utterly passive at just the wrong moment, neither Gollum at the Crack of Doom nor Vader helping to strike down the Emperor. Yay, Frank's alive and awesome. Yay, Miles and duct tape. Yay, Enos jokes. Yay, Juliet-Sawyer. (A lot of the episode consisted of trying to get the audience to just say 'yay'-- 'Yay, it's Vincent/ Rose & Bernard/ Juliet/ Frank/ Penny/ pianist Daniel/ Charlotte!' That's OK, in this kind of thing, and they got a few 'yay's out of me. But a 'yay' moment is narrative popcorn, not protein.) The cliffside fight was pretty great.

And after that... I'm kind of out of positive things to say.

The idea is emerging that the finale emphasized Character over Plot or Mythology, and therefore that we who disliked it failed to appreciate that Lost was a character-driven show. This idea is also incorrect.

No episode in which Christ symbolism was slathered on like cake frosting can be accused of being light on myth. And the finale laid it on even thicker than the season premiere. The island plotline was all about the Rules and the glowy soul-magic electromagnetism. The widely-reviled final Jack-Christian scene and church scene were mythology. But a) they were new mythology, unconnected with anything we've seen before, and b) they were bad mythology. We'll return to why.

And conversely: 'shipper fanfic is not the same as characterization. The only moments of real character resolution were on the island. Jack accepted both that he can be wrong and that he can be right, accepted that his responsibility to help others is compatible with a limit on his ability to do so and that he needs to be willing to pass responsibility to others. Kate ran to instead of running away, and in so doing saved the day; and came to terms with her connection to Jack. And Hurley grew up-- understanding that he can help others without being subordinate to them.

But nothing in the Sideways-verse offered any character resolution-- and indeed it undermined the resolutions those three characters reached on the island. The Jack-Christian touchy-feely was entirely unearned, and untrue to Jack's complicated relationship to his father. Sayid's One True Love being declared to be fricking Shannon was wildly untrue to his character as it's developed through the show. Sun and Jin's beatific bliss at discovering that they were already dead (which means, for Jin, that he has never seen and will never see his daughter) doesn't make a lick of sense. And the same problem repeats. Indeed, much of the problem is the sameness. The lovey flashbacks could have substituted any couple for any other couple. Everyone had precisely the same reaction to their remembrance of the island and of their death-- regardless of what they'd lost in either the real world or in their Sideways hallucination. Those of you who think you're "character" fans-- do you approve of Jack showing not an instant of a flicker of regret at discovering that he didn't really have a son, and never would?

And what about Locke, who in an instant goes from a world in which he's with the woman he loves, has come to terms with his father's accident, and in which he's just regained his legs, to a world in which he has just a moment ago died a lonely and pathetic failure, murdered after an abandoned suicide attempt, having re-lost his legs and been exiled from the Island where he'd found purpose, meaning, respect, and faith? Shouldn't there be some slightly complex emotion registering on Terry O'Quinn's talented face, instead of that dude-do-you-want-a-hit-of-this? nirvana?

And the fact that everyone ends up dying happily ever after in a big group hug really seems to cheapen the arcs that the characters did have. It turns out not to matter who lived and who died, who faced what struggles or-- crucially-- what issues with non-Oceanic-815 people. The characterization of these characters, such as it was, always involved the interaction of their off-island and on-island lives. The failure to give Locke in particular any real resolution bothers me.

The awakenings were neither moments of emotional resolution in Sidewaysland-- it's not as though Sideways-Sayid or Sideways-Sawyer had emotional issues that centered on the absence of a hot blonde from their lives-- nor moments of resolution of issues from the real world. They were just magical moments, overwriting any given character's story with the blissed-out realization of having found twue wuv and being dead.

The only awakening that tugged at my heartstrings at the time was Sawyer-Juliet. But even that's a little creepy in retrospect, once you know that Juliet has just found out her son was a hallucination. (Even in retrospect that bothers me less than Jack's lack of reaction-- because father-son issues were central to Jack's whole story, and because his son was central to his Sideways arc.)

All of that said about the characterization issue, I'm still a mytharc kind of geek. And I'm as dissatisfied with the answers we got as with those we didn't.

It turns out that every mystery about the island comes down to three things:

1) The glowy soul-magic electromagnetism has various funky effects.

2) Jacob made up lots of (as far as we know) entirely arbitrary rules for his arbitrary game with Smokey, a game that had the aims of protecting the glowy soul-magic electromagnetism, protecting the world from Smokey, and (Trading Places-like) winning an argument with his brother about human nature by experimenting on people.

3) The various peoples brought to the Island each left stuff behind.

Category 1 never got any further explanation. In the final few episodes we saw the glowiness of the source of the soul-magic-electromagnetism, but we already knew that there was magical life-and-health-connected electromagnetism. What we didn't know was why or what it meant. We still don't.

And categories 2 and 3 are boring. Polar bear? Just a Dharma leftover. The Numbers? Just the arbitrary stipulative system Jacob used to list out the candidates to replace himself. The complexities of coming to and leaving the island? Jacob's made-up rules. The need for the Oceanic Six to return (without apparently needing Aaron or Walt to return)? Well, Jacob wanted some of them to show up for a job interview.

But much remains unexplained-- and in need of explanation. In particular, the history between 1977 and 2004 of Ben, Widmore, Eloise, Richard, and Jacob that led to the Purge, Widmore's exile, the Others becoming sociopathic by the time of Oceanic 815, and Widmore's, Ben's, and Eloise's off-island activities-- in other words, the plot of seasons 3-5-- doesn't make sense.

Allegedly Jacob was talking to Richard, and not to Ben, throughout these years. What was Richard saying to Ben? Did Jacob approve of the Others' new moral code? How did Widmore, Eloise, and Ben gain the mysterious knowledge that they lorded over the survivors, especially off-island in Seasons 4-5? Did Jacob tell them?

For an example of what this kind of thing looks like done right, look at the Locke-Richard-Smokey interactions as Locke timejumps. Eventually we understand who knew what when, and how they knew it, and why they said what they said, and how neatly it all fits together. I suspect that there's no such coherent storyline for the Ben-Eloise-Widmore plots; if there is, we certainly haven't been told about it.

"But those are secondary characters!" you say. Well, maybe, expect for Ben. But their conflicts and agendas were primary-- they were central for more than half of the show's length. And they were left a chaotic and unresolved mess. I'm not looking for an in-depth character study of Widmore's psychology. I just want to know that the basic moving parts of the plot were.

It's tempting to try a variant on the following:

"Smokey was manipulating Ben, either directly or indirectly through Richard, by pretending to be Jacob. Ben got corrupted by Smokey early on, leading him to think he was connected to the island's fundamental purpose when really he was working for its destruction. He was led into some conflict with Widmore and Eloise in which he was wrong and they were right, but he won. Eloise and Widmore, knowing that Jacob's will was being thwarted, spent all the intervening years trying to get back and fight for good, albeit becoming corrupted by their ruthless dedication to that cause. In the meantime, Ben led the Others into paranoia and malice, under Smokey's direction. By the time Ben met Smokey Locke, Smokey already knew Ben from years of manipulation and only had a little more work to do to finish the job." That could get us a lot of the way there.

Except...

Except that Ben never talked to anyone who he thought was Jacob before the Season 5 finale; Richard knows what Jacob looks like; and Smokey couldn't appear to Richard using Jacob's face, because Jacob wasn't dead. So we're left with the thought that Ben acted autonomously. That's a lot more interesting in terms of Ben's character; but it leaves us without a solution as to what the heck was going on.

To be continued...

Yer doin' it wrong

Inside Higher Ed reports:

A plan to eliminate 15 faculty positions regardless of tenure status might hit some speed bumps if Albion College’s faculty handbook were followed, but the college’s trustees have decided to ignore that minor inconvenience.

When Albion faculty said the dismissals might violate the handbook, the board promptly passed a resolution washing their hands of the guidelines. Indeed, the board didn’t even bother to say which parts of the book they would change; the trustees simply declared that anything standing in their way was "amended effective immediately."

And the resolution does indeed say, simply,

RESOLVED that exercising the authority of the Board of Trustees under the Charter of 1857, the Faculty Handbook is amended effective immediately in all ways necessary to
permit the reduction of 15 full time equivalent (FTE) existing faculty positions, which may include tenured faculty positions, by the beginning of the 2010-2011
academic year.

Some of the faculty have advanced various interpretations of the Faculty Handbook which are incompatible with the trustees’ fiduciary obligation to govern the College.
The Board of Trustees reaffirms its fundamental commitment to academic freedom, which tenure protects.

This amendment is made effective immediately because the Board considers it an emergency that the Board’s authority in this area be clarified.

Now, final resolution of the relationship between faculty governance and trustee authority is hard to come by, and one usually wants to avoid pushing things to the point where a resolution is needed. But let's say that the trustees are right that they have the responsibility and authority to act unilaterally if they need to. Suppose that they have the authority to unilaterally amend the Faculty hHandbook-- which is likely to be legally correct.

They still haven't acted.

"the Faculty Handbook is amended effective immediately in all ways necessary to
permit the reduction of 15 full time equivalent (FTE) existing faculty positions, which may include tenured faculty positions, by the beginning of the 2010-2011
academic year."

has no actual amendments contained within its language. The thing about written legal documents is that they contain actual words-- and amending them requires substituting other actual words, or else specifying which original words are being deleted. You can't simply declare a policy goal.

If the Faculty Handbook posed an ex ante obstacle to the firings, then I can't see that that obstacle has been removed.

Update: Paul Gowder thinks I'm wrong about this. As you'll see in the comments over there, I think he's wrong in thinking me wrong.

Problems in ethnofederalism and quasi-federalism

There are a few possible outcomes for today's election in Britain that would be of especially great interest for students of ethnofederalism and quasifederalism.

1) If the Tories gain a plurality but not a majority-- and could get over the top with the help of a Celtic party. It's improbable that they would get such help-- except for the UUP, whose candidates are standing as part of the Tory caucus this year, the gulf between the Tories and the non-English parties is substantial.

But this would also mean that Lib-Lab plus one or two Celtic parties would add up to a majority.

Imagine a hung Parliament in which the Tories have two more seats than Lib-Lab-- but Tories + SNP would be a majority, or Lib-Lab + SNP + Plaid Cyrmu would be a majority.

SNP and PC, like the Bloc Quebecois, are generally committed to not being in the business of deciding who runs the whole state. But at that point (like in the aftermath of the last Canadian election) the pressure on them to pick a side could be ratcheted up. So could the inducements offered to them to do so.

If you're David Cameron under these circumstances, do you open negotiations with the SNP? Or do you rely on the pious hope that they can be left out of the calculations, because Lib-Lab won't do a deal with them either?

Now imagine if Tory seats = Lib-Lab seats precisely. If you're the SNP, can you really resist the chance to play kingmaker, to start a bidding war, to name your price?

2) If the Tories gain a plurality, but Lib-Lab together gains a very slim majority, a different set of problems arise that has nothing to do with the Celtic partiesand everything to do with the West Lothian question. This outcome would mean that the Tories had won a majority of seats in England, given party distributions elsewhere. But the government would be Lib-Lab.

Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland-- but not England-- have and regional self-government of varying degrees. England is still ruled directly from Westminster. There has been contention over whether Scottish MPs should be able to vote on individual pieces of legislation that affects England (or England and Wales) but not Scotland. But I think this election result would put the problem in a new, sharper, light. A government that has authority over English-- but not Scottish-- domestic policy would have been decisively chosen by Scottish votes, in the face of an English majority in the other direction.

I could imagine that result being inflammatory; it might finally succeed in igniting widespread English interest in the West Lothian question. That would, I think, pose more dangers for the Tories than it would offer advantages-- as a generation of conflict over Europe showed, identity questions can fracture the Conservative Party, and its leadership has little skill in finessing them. But this outcome would offer a very powerful incentive to the Tories to start playing the Little England card.

See also Chris Lawrence.

Update

We're right in the thick of condition (1)-- and it's amazing how invisible the SNP and PC are. The Bloc Quebecois doesn't enter into governments in Canada-- but it's willing to negotiate its price for tacitly supporting minority governments.

In Britain, the only choices are:

Tory-LibDem coalition, or at least arrangement to keep LibDem from voting down a Queen's Speech;

Tory-Labour grand coalition, which is never going to happen;

a minority government that could be brought down with a sneeze or a stiff breeze, whether Conservative or Labour or Lib-Lab;

or that somebody talks to the SNP and Plaid Cymru and gets their agreement not to vote down a minority government (the SNP, at least, will not take part in government.)

Thisarticle says that the SNP has begun talks with Labour. But that fact isn't being reported anywhere else, and it has the potential to be decisive.

Boring facts

Matt Yglesias chases Brad DeLong chasing David Brooks chasing his own tail as usual, on culture and policy as explanations of social outcomes.

Brooks says

If you combine the influence of ethnicity and region, you get astounding lifestyle gaps. The average Asian-American in New Jersey lives an amazing 26 years longer and is 11 times more likely to have a graduate degree than the average American Indian in South Dakota.

and follows up with

Therefore, the first rule of policy-making should be, don’t promulgate a policy that will destroy social bonds. If you take tribes of people, exile them from their homelands and ship them to strange, arid lands, you’re going to produce bad outcomes for generations.

Now, "first do no harm" to functioning social worlds is a valuable rule for policymakers to follow. And Matt's right to see the second passage as completing the meaning of the first.

But, well, here's the thing. South Dakota, arid though it might be, is not Oklahoma. South Dakota's Indians are mostly Sioux-- the members of the Lakota/ Nakota/ Dakota nations from which the state takes its name. They have been progressively crowded onto smaller and smaller portions of their ancestors' homelands as a result of gold rushes, wars, thefts, and allotments and partitions. But they have not been "exiled" from their homeland, and strange, arid South Dakota is not strange to them.

There's been plenty of bad policy directed at Indians-- but it's not the same bad policy everywhere.

Superseding reparations

This slightly mad Henry Louis Gates op-ed (apparent thesis: the history of slavery has responsibility that's widely distributed and hard to disentangle across North America, Europe, and west Africa, so thank goodness we now have a President whose half-east African, half-white ancestry gives him magical historical-responsibility-apportioning powers) made me, possibly, realize something.

Gates hints that, if reparations are owed to the descendants of slaves, they might be owed in part by [some] west Africans whose ancestors were involved in the slave trade.

I think this is finally a case that lets my moral intuition click into the patterns set by Jeremy Waldron's famously controversial article Superseding Historic Injustice. Waldron argues that forward-looking demands of distributive justice and the welfare of the poor trump backward-looking rectification. There's much more to it, but that's one of the key moral ideas. As applied to the indigenous land rights cases that he talks about, I've never found this even slightly compelling. But: I can't imagine the fact pattern or historical evidence that would make me think taxing west Africans in 2010 to make payments to African-Americans in 2010, when the latter have a standard of living between 20 and 50 times higher than the former. Liberia has a per-capita income of just over a dollar a day. Extracting even millions, to say nothing of tens or hundreds of millions, of dollars (and in dollars, that is, exhausting-and-then-some the foreign exchange reserve capacity of west African states) from people many of whom are among the poorest in the world just can't be what justice demands.

I could just fall back on the following, which is part of how I think about reparation cases anyways: the United States government and the government of the several states within it are historically and institutionally continuous with those that perpetrated slavery. There's been no repudiation of the national debt in the US since that time. So those governments are corporate actors that could still be liable for "their" misdeeds of a century and a half ago (and more recent misdeeds as well, since I think much of the case for reparations rests on the Jim Crow era). No west African state and probably no west African collectivity or corporation has that same demonstrable intergenerational continuity. The relevant actors have ceased to exist. So there's no one who could be held responsible today in west Africa, although there is in the US.

That seems plausible to me. But it also seems unnecessary to reach the conclusion. Forward-looking distributive and welfarist considerations alone would, it seems to me, trump any backward-looking evidence of continuity one could find. That's not a comfortable view for me, and maybe my intuition is still entangled with other facts about the case. But at least I can now see Waldron's point on a basic level that I've never managed before, even though I can follow the argument just fine.

(Hat tip Melissa Harris-Lacewell on twitter.)

Guy Fawkes revisited

Steve Benen and Josh Marshall are surprised that the Republican Governor's Association has decided to issue a call to Remember November in a way that seems to evoke remembering the Fifth of November. I have to say it's not obviously true that there's any Guy Fawkes reference in the video. It could be exclusively a reference to Election Day falling in November. And Benen calls back to a Michelle Bachman rally on Capitol Hill that took place last November 5-- but as far as I can tell Benen was the only one linking that to Guy Fawkes Day. The basic presumption has to be that Americans don't know the date, don't know the rhyme, and don't know the significance of either.

But here, my guess is that the Ron Paul influence on the Tea Parties has meant that rallies have signs and chants to remember November in a way that is directly descended from the Paul campaign's inadvertent association with Guy Fawkes Day.

And-- tell me if I'm imagining this-- in the "Remember November logo, the V is stylized to look both like the checkmark on a ballot and like the V from "V for Vendetta."

SO I think Benen, Marshall, and Scherer are right to see a Guy Fawkes influence here-- but it certainly doesn't amount to a wholesale appropriation of the imagery. This is a lot more tenuous than, say, the usual Republican appropriation of and code language about the American Confederacy.

In case the connection is real, I'll take the occasion to refer you to my post three years ago about the strange twists and turns and misunderstandings that ended with Guy Fawkes being a symbol to the American anti-statist right.

"Worthwhile Canadian initiative"

FIscal restraint through spending cuts, says Tyler Cowen in his NYT column.

(I'm curious: do my Canadian readers recognize the "initiative" joke?)

Lithwick on Liberal Law

Dahlia Lithwick is sometimes one of the best legal writers around... and sometimes just really weird. Today's Slate piece has the thesis "unlike Richard Epstein, poor Harold Koh is viewed as too extreme for the Supreme Court and that makes liberal law students sad."

my concern here is with the next generation of liberal law students, who continue to hear the message that their heroes are presumptively ineligible for a seat at the high court, whereas the brightest lights of the Federalist Society—Judge Brett Kavanaugh, professor Richard Epstein, Clarence Thomas, Theodore Olsen, Ken Starr, and Michael McConnell—are either already on the bench or will be seen as legitimate candidates the next time a Republican is in the White House. Look at the speakers list of the last national Federalist Society conference and tell me the word filibuster would have been raised if John McCain had tapped most of them. "

Olson is 70 and was passed over as too controversial already. Richard Epstein, I feel confident in saying, will never make it to a shortlist. Kenneth Starr, even though he's already been a judge, will never make it to a shortlist, and there are plenty of Democrats who would filibuster him even if it meant staying awake all night reading aloud from the phone book on the Senate floor. And from the linked Federalist Society speaker's list things look no better. Many are on the list for balance (Jed Rubenfeld: not a rising star of the right!), and many aren't lawyers. But of the rest: yes, I believe Epstein or Randy Barnett or Miguel Estrada would be filibustered. Estrada was filibustered for elevation to the circuit court; that's why he's not there now.

In the world we actually inhabit: Robert Bork was defeated; Clarence Thomas scraped by after hearings that were ugly and brutal even before the Anita Hill story broke, and had enough Democratic opposition to sustain a filibuster; Alito was opposed by enough Democrats to sustain the filibuster that was attempted, though enough his Democratic opponents voted for cloture that the vote was held; and Rehnquist's elevation to Chief Justice was opposed by a majority of Senate Democrats (though not quite 40).

By contrast, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who should probably count as precedent for the "liberal hero" model, was confirmed 96-3. I believe that Sotomayor was the first modern Democratic nominee to be opposed by a majority among Senate Republicans.

Republican Presidents have responded to this reality in just the way Lithwick says only Democrats have had to: by trimming their sails and appointing or trying to appoint people with thin paper records (David Souter, John Roberts, Harriet Meyers). The popular impression is that this is part of why Michael McConnell stepped down from the federal bench; though he's a very highly-regarded jurist, he was probably never going to be elevated to the Supreme Court by risk-averse Republican presidents. Likewise, no one ever mentioned Richard Posner on Supreme Court shortlists during the Bush administration, even though he has a claim to being the most influential living American judge; everyone knew that Bush would never appoint someone with that thick and controversial a record, no matter how "bright a light" everyone agrees that he is. See also: Alex Kozinski.

I don't get what Lithwick was thinking. "Richard Epstein would plausibly be appointed, would sail through confirmation hearings, and would not be filibustered" as a baseline for comparison about the fate of liberal law professors doesn't pass the laugh test, and she knows enough to know that.

Goldberg on Ginsburg on Indian Law

"Finding the Way to Indian Country: Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s Decisions in Indian Law Cases," Ohio State Law Journal.

we have dozens of institutions trying to be identical miniature, for instance, McGills.

A very interesting and challenging article on tuition, incentives, and teaching. It includes this crucial bit of wisdom that echoes something that's come up in this space before:

Now, if you think of universities not as revenue-maximizing institutions but as prestige-maximizing institutions, it all starts to fall into place.

Now, I don't share Usher's attitude to the pursuit of star researchers as a university-building strategy. But the point about tuition, incentives, and institutional convergence is clearly right.

LaCroix on federalism

I've already ordered my copy of Chicago law professor Alison LaCroix's new book The Ideological Origins of American Federalism and made plans to write about it online at some point. But now I notice that she's been blogging the book's themes chez Balkin:

The New Old Federalism

Commandeering Federalism

Recommended reading, and I hope to start writing some responses later this week.

Robert Paul Wolff's memoirs

Via Brian Leiter, the political philosopher Robert Paul Wolff is blogging his memoirs, and it's amazingly entertaining stuff. Three excerpts (but read the whole thing):
first installment:

It was also Arno [Mayer] who unintentionally taught me a pedagogical lesson that has stood me in good stead for forty-five years. His first lecture dealt with the waves of invasions by Germanic tribes that brought the Roman Empire to its knees. Arno had the brilliant idea of relating these invasions to the major battles that had been fought by Germany and the Allies in World War II. The terrain was of course the same, and inasmuch as the rivers and valleys had not moved in the intervening fifteen hundred years, the two made a lovely fit. The five of us sat in the last row of the lecture hall and marveled at the brilliance of Arno's presentation. But when we next met our individual classes, we discovered to our dismay that the students had been massively underwhelmed. The problem was simple. It was nineteen fifty-eight, and our students were eighteen years old, which meant that they had been four when most of those battles were fought. The Second World War was ancient history to them, something their parents did. They had never heard of the Battle of the Bulge.
Sad to say, this experience has been repeated endlessly over the decades. The Freshmen I now encounter were born during the Clinton Administration and probably came to some degree of awareness of the larger world during George W. Bush's second term. Anything before that might as well be ancient Rome. For many years, I compensated for this absence of historical memory by extracting my philosophical examples from Star Trek, but even that draws blank stares now, and as I do not get HBO, I cannot substitute The Sopranos. There is nothing that makes you feel older faster than teaching undergraduates.

second installment:

The next summer, my advisee invited me to dinner at his apartment, where he had taken up light housekeeping with a lovely Radcliffe girl. Saul [Kripke] was there as well. Saul's father was a Conservative Rabbi, and Saul had had a serious Jewish upbringing. As he talked, he davaned, which is to say he rocked back and forth vigorously. As he talked and davaned he ate, gesturing spastically, and as he talked and davaned and ate and gestured, his food scattered all over the table, as if to illustrate the law of entropy. With gentle understanding, the young Radcliffe student patiently swept the peas up from the table top and put them back on Saul's plate, where they stayed for a bit before being restrewn.
I have often wondered whether Saul, brilliant though he undoubtedly was, ever understood how much slack everyone was cutting him, from Quine on down. Somehow, I think not.

Followed immediately by:

For the most part, I went my own way in the department. Harvard professors don't really advance much beyond what is called in child development books "parallel play." No one attends anyone else's lectures, of course, and there is precious little socializing. When they encounter one another on campus, they resemble the dukes and counts at the medieval court of Burgundy, glorious and richly appointed and very formal. Each full professor proceeds in stately fashion, preceded like Cyrano's nose by his vita, and trailing in his wake several Assistant Professors who exhibit the appropriate submissive body language.

This story is the crowning achievement of the memoirs so far, but it demands to be read not excerpted-- go have a look.

Update: The posts are still coming, one a day. See here for the birth of Social Studies and for life with "Barry" (!) Moore and "Herbie" (!!!) Marcuse.

The myth of the golden age

One recurring topic around here is the problematic libertarian historical memory of an America in which once, before the Fall, there was Freedom-- whether the Fall was the New Deal or the 1937 switch in time or the 16th Amendment or the Federal Reserve Act or whatever. And I have a special interest in that subset of soi-disant libertarians who I term confederatistas for whom the Fall was apparently 1865. It's a topic of interest for me outside the blog, too: "Federalism and the Old and New Liberalisms" is substantially about the same thing.

Indeed, the second-most trafficked post in this blog's history was about related problems, though I won't link back to it because it names the odd law professor blogger whose wrath it incurred and who seems eager to resume internet fights whenever possible.

Anyways: I wish to recommend a new piece on the problem by David Boaz, VP of Cato: Up from slavery.

Is...?

This entertaining Gawker post (via Jonathan Chait) about frequent google searches for celebrities-- and the constant recurrence of one in particular-- prompted a few minutes of fooling around to come up with the following about prominent academics.

First of all, I think it's noteworthy what google gives you when you just type in the word "is" . Try it and see.

But on with the show. Google's suggested questions:

Is Cass Sunstein
Jewish

Is Cornel West
married
wife white
married to a white woman
a Christian

Is Larry Summers
Jewish

Is Milton Friedman
still alive

Is Henry Louis Gates
married
married to a white woman

Is Paul Krugman
a liberal
Jewish
a democrat
married

Is Rawls
a utilitarian

Is Tyler Cowen
autistic

Is Weber
a functionalist
a jewish name

Is Michael Ignatieff
Jewish

Is Michael Sandel
Jewish

and, best of all:

Is John Mearsheimer
Jewish