In which I geek out...

more than would be seemly to do on Open University.

So, there's something delightfully immersive about the geekiness around me in Montreal. Within a two-block radius of my front door, there's this place, my terrific neighborhood comics shop; this place, my neighborhood gaming shop and one of the best gaming shops I've ever seen; and the neighborhood armory. (I don't say my neighborhood armory, because SCA geekery isn't my type of geekery, but there seems to constantly be a huge group of SCA warriors in a big field on the mountain path where I bike with my dog). Right across the street from my department is the student center... officially the William Shatner University Centre, named for McGill's Kobayashi-Maru-winningest generous alumnus.

But today I saw the thing that put it all over the top-- made me burst out loud laughing. The old campus gym, which contains the swimming pool, is named afer a former Principal [a.k.a. chancellor or president] and is called...

wait for it...

the Sir Arthur Currie Memorial Gymnasium-Armoury. Yes, we have a swimming pool in a building named Arthur Currie.

If you have to ask, I'm not going to explain it...

Update: Coincidentally, other blogospheric geeks have been raving about Montreal this week.

I just noticed...
that Judith Shklar's wonderful autobiographical essay, "A Life of Learning," is available online. I'd completely forgotten that Shklar spent her teen years in pre-Quiet Revolution Montreal, and that she attended McGill:

When my father was at last able to settle his financial affairs, we finally went to Montreal. It was not a city one could easily like. It was politically held together by an equilibrium of ethnic and religious resentments and distrust. And in retrospect, it is not surprising that this political edifice eventually collapsed with extraordinary speed. The girls’ school that I attended there for some three years was dreadful. In all that time I was taught as much Latin as one can pick up in less than a term at college. I also learned some geometry, and one English teacher taught us how to compose précis, which is a very useful skill. The rest of the teachers just stood in front of us and read the textbook out loud. What I really learned was the meaning of boredom, and I learned that so well that I have never been bored since then. I report without comment that this was thought to be an excellent school. I dare say that there were better ones around, but I remain unconvinced by those who respond with vast nostalgia to the manifest inadequacies of high-school education today.

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.


Well, Montreal's much easier to like these days, and I think students now tend to be rather fonder of their time at McGill. But I'm still fascinated-- and now interested to go look up Frederick Watkins. And the thought that there might be a young Judith Shklar waiting to be inspired in class is an exciting and daunting one.

Update: So I google Watkins... and one of the first pages to come up is the ASPLP page that I put up myself, because Watkins was president right after Lon Fuller.

Watkins was a Rousseau scholar who later went to Yale. Given the timing of his years here, I'll bet that he had something to do with the creation of the McGill Library's Rousseau collection.

For the first time I can recall...

There are no academic social scientists or humanists among this year's class of MacArthur Fellows.

Maybe a couple of such years, plus Little Miss Sunshine, could remove the award's mystique and diminish its outsized effect on the psyches of people in our fields...?

Nah, probably not.

For the couple of people who still follow this blog with a bloglines account or some similar, but who don't do the same for Open University: I've got a big post up there about the Pope and Islam.

Congratulations revisited

In this post at the beginning of the summer, which mainly congratulated some graduate students I advise and one who taught for me on various honors and awards, I mentioned that there was more good news coming up. It turned out that there was more of it than I knew: two of my former advisees (that is, people on whose dissertation committees I sat-- I didn't chair them) and another former TA (all comparativists, as it happens) won four best dissertation prizes among them.

Deborah Boucoyannis was awarded the APSA European Politics and Society section's Ernst B. Haas Best Dissertation Award for the best dissertation on European politics and society as well as the Seymour Martin Lipset award for best comparative dissertation from the Society for Comparative Research, for "Land, Courts and Parliaments: The Hidden Sinews of Power in the Emergence of Constitutionalism."

Joon-Suk Kim was awarded the APSA Federalism and Intergovernmental Relations section's William Anderson Award for the best doctoral dissertation in the general field of federalism or intergovernmental relations, or state and local politics for "Making States Federatively: Alternative Routes of State Formation in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe."

And Matthew Kocher, TA for the Constitutionalism course way back when, was awarded The APSA Gabriel Almond Award for the best dissertation in comparative politics for ""Human Ecology and Civil War."

Again, sincere and hearty congratulations all around. I know that Boucoyannis' and Kim's dissertations were excellent and well-deserving; while I've only read one paper of Kocher's and so can't testify to the quality of his dissertation first-hand, that paper and the conversations we had over the years about ethnic violence lead me to not be at all surprised that the dissertation was superb.

Something new

I'll be taking part in a new blog that's launching today: Open University, at the New Republic, along with a terrific group of co-bloggers. I'm at the APSA Annual Meeting now which will probably prevent me from posting much for a few days, but there's already an interesting bunch o' stuff there. Go check it out.

A tale of two campuses...

specifically my undergraduate alma mater and my previous site of employment.

Top Parties and Professors

If you're preparing for the next step in education or just like to get competitive about schools, the Princeton Review has released its annual list of the country's top colleges.

The survey quizzes 115,000 students at 361 top colleges across the country, investigating everything from top academics to top parties, best libraries and, of course, top food.

The University of Chicago heads this year's list for the best overall academic experience for undergraduates, edging out Stanford and Rice for the top spot.

[...]

The rankings even go so far as to identify the college where kids are the "happiest."

"These are really interesting ways to look at a university," Franek said, "because the kids do know a lot about what's going on."

And where are students most content this year?

Brown takes the cake.

Both results seem about right to me.

Apparently I now belong to an iconic cohort.

According to this NYT review, The Emperor's Children by Claire Messud

"is a masterly comedy of manners — an astute and poignant evocation of hobnobbing glitterati in the months before and immediately following Sept. 11.

"“The Emperor’s Children” entwines the stories of Danielle Minkoff, Marina Thwaite and Julius Clarke, who met at Brown University and came to New York in the early 1990’s, giddy with the parochial entitlement of expensively educated young Americans. Each expected to do something important and each, at 30, is still struggling to make something of him- or herself."

Well, as an early-90s Brown alum who was 30 on 9/11, who had at that time only recently stopped living in New York half the year, and who worked in an intellectual profession and had a number of friends who worked closer to the publishing/ writing/ cultural commentary/ media worlds descibed, I can't say I really recognize the stereotypes in play, other than as stereotypes.

"The most pragmatic of the three (she has Midwestern roots), Danielle has a job as a producer of television documentaries, but her skills exceed the demands of her job, and she finds herself doing stories about liposuction. Julius, a gay half-Vietnamese transplant from a small town near Detroit, is a freelance critic and flibbertigibbet who has failed to live up to his collegiate precocity. He has written no books, has found no steady work and despises the “bourgeois regularity” required to hold down an office job. Marina, a “celebrated” beauty and the daughter of the legendary journalist and liberal opinion-maker Murray Thwaite, has been struggling for years to finish a book that will reveal how children’s fashions reflect “complex and profound truths” about our culture. In their way, these three embody the different methods by which American privilege is accrued and idly sustained."

Danielle is barely evocative of anyone I know, and Julius and Marina not at all. Maybe I ran in the wrong circles, but I tended to know Brown alumnae who, by 30, had, well, held jobs and made some early inroads on careers, gotten advanced degrees or gotten married or otherwise established themselves a bit more firmly in the world. I suppose there were people I knew of whose parents would subsidize a decade of flibbertigibbetting, but mostly I knew people who, one way or another, had to adjust the long-term career plan around the short-term rent plan.

I'll have a look at the book, which does sound interesting. But it's odd to feel like I belong to a cohort that could evoke a set of associations so utterly unfamiliar to me.

I don't typically post about my blogroll, just occasionally tweak it. But I realized today that I'd clicked through to, and quite appreciated even when I disagreed with, a lot of Scott Lemieux posts over the past several months, sometimes without fully processing that "the guy who wrote this excellent post also wrote that other really interesting one I read last week." I finally put that together, and started reading the blog Lemieux shares with two co-bloggers on a regular basis instead of just clicking through to particular posts. So I thought I'd note the addition to the blogroll, for anyone who's even further behind than I was in realizing that Lawyers, Guns, and Money is filled with smart and entertaining stuff.

My expectation of my lifespan just went up by about forty years.

Some good news

I've had no shortage of wonderful discoveries about Montreal and McGill in the last six weeks. Here's a new set I wasn't expecting at all-- exciting for both my research and my teaching next year.

The McGill David Hume Collection
The McGill David Hume Collection research grant, for those who'd like to come visit and consult those archives
Jean-Jacques Rousseau collection

Looking forward to beginning to consult them-- and to talking with those who come on the research grants.

Newly posted on SSRN: My paper Three Perversities of Indian Law. Comments welcome.

(No, I haven't dropped off the face of the earth, just off the map of the United States. Blogging's not a priority while packing, moving, unpacking, immigrating, or writing APSA papers-- or while enjoying Montreal's spectacular but too-brief summers.)

Congratulations all around

To, as I mentioned last week, Loren Goldman political theory graduate student in the poli sci department, for winning this year's Wayne C. Booth Graduate Student Prize for Excellence in Teaching, for his terrific job TAing the winter quarter of my course on 18th century political thought;

To Leigh Jenco, Mara Marin, and Emily Nacol, also political theory graduate students, for winning a William Rainey Harper Fellowship, a Mellon Foundation Dissertation-Year Fellowship, and another Mellon Foundation Dissertation-Year Fellowship, respectively, for 2006-07;

(There's been some more very good news for a former graduate student, but it's not public yet, so I'll put this placeholder here until it is.)

And to Shelley Clark, who is neither a political theorist nor a graduate student but who I have the good fortune to be married to, for again winning the "Best Teacher in a Core Class" award in public policy, for teaching "Statistical Methods for Policy Research."

Always nice when good things, and good recognition, happen to good, deserving people!

An inconsequential reflection on packing a library

My books reflect nothing like an even alphabetical spread. "I" and "J" disappear into the same box with room to spare. But "Ha"-- Habermas, Hampshire, Hardin, Hart, Hayek-- goes on for a very long time. And "Ma"-- Machiavelli, MacIntyre, Madison (including Publius), Mandeville, and Marx-- took three boxes by itself.

Congratulations...

to Loren Goldman, the very deserving winner of this year's Booth Graduate Student Prize for Excellence in Teaching for the social sciences, for his outstanding performance as TA in the winter term of my course on "The Long 18th Century."

A most remarkable story from today's Chronicle, of interest within political theory and political science, but also perhaps more broadly. (subscription probably required.)

Book Prize Is Yanked From Yale Professors Over Author's Role in Graduate-Student Labor Dispute

By JENNIFER HOWARD

Two Yale University professors, Ian Shapiro and Michael J. Graetz, expected to receive a 2006 Sidney Hillman Award on Tuesday at a ceremony in New York City. Instead, they got phone calls on Tuesday morning telling them that the judges had reversed the decision to honor the professors' book on the repeal of the estate tax, Death by a Thousand Cuts: The Fight Over Taxing Inherited Wealth.

"I was stunned," said Mr. Shapiro, a professor of political science. "I'd been about to get in the car to go to the city to pick up the award."

Mr. Graetz echoed his co-author's shock. "It came out of the blue for me," he said. "Obviously, I was disappointed."

The telephone calls came from Bruce Raynor, president of the Sidney Hillman Foundation, which sponsors the awards. The foundation is a project of the labor union Unite Here, of which Mr. Raynor is general president. The awards and the foundation are named for Sidney Hillman, who was a leading worker-rights activist in the New Deal era and founding president of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, a precursor of Unite Here.

First presented in 1950, the awards honor "journalists, writers, and public figures who pursue social justice and public policy for the common good," according to the foundation's Web site.

Mr. Raynor told the authors that the last-minute reversal had been based on information that came to light about Mr. Shapiro's dealings with members of GESO, the Graduate Employees and Students Organization, in its efforts to organize a graduate-student union at Yale in the 1990s. Unite Here has been involved with GESO's continuing union drive at Yale.

In an interview with The Chronicle, Mr. Raynor cited allegations of "unfair labor practices" and unspecified "threats against graduate students" by Mr. Shapiro.

"It flies in the face of Sidney Hillman's beliefs and his life," he said, "to present the award to someone who had been actively engaged in resisting union-organization attempts by graduate teaching assistants to join Sidney Hillman's union."
[...]

Mr. Graetz and Mr. Shapiro pointed out that the book, which was published last year by Princeton University Press, does not address labor organizing. "There is no connection to GESO at all," Mr. Graetz said. "This book has absolutely nothing to do with the graduate students."

Mr. Shapiro also defended his dealings with graduate students over the years. "In the 1990s, when I was director of graduate studies in political science, I told a group of our students that I thought they had every right to try and form a union," he said, "but in my view it was not a good idea and not a good use of their time. ... I've never threatened anyone in my life, and I'm generally supportive of unions."
[...]

Although Mr. Shapiro and Mr. Graetz had written "an excellent book," Mr. Raynor told The Chronicle, the decision came down to "more than just the words on the page."

Once news of the award got out, Mr. Raynor said, his office received dozens of complaints "from numerous current and former graduate teaching assistants who'd been involved in these campaigns."

"We got deluged by this information that we did not know," he said. "I brought it to the attention of the judges."

One of those judges, Harold Meyerson, editor at large of The American Prospect, said that Mr. Raynor called him on Monday and said, "Harold, we have a problem." Mr. Raynor then told him about the objections to the award but left the final decision to him and the other judges, who include Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor of The Nation, and Sheryl WuDunn, an editor at The New York Times.

Mr. Meyerson read a reporter the statement he delivered Tuesday night at the awards ceremony. "Normally judges evaluate the dancer, not the dance," he said. "What we tried to do in the excruciatingly limited time available to us was to gauge the severity and credibility of the allegations. ... A crucial factor for us was that the National Labor Relations Board in the region issued a complaint against several Yale professors, and Professor Shapiro most particularly, for these actions."

As Mr. Meyerson and Mr. Shapiro both noted, the labor board never adjudicated the graduate students' complaint because their labor action failed to meet certain legal criteria.

"There was never any hearing on the merits of the complaint," Mr. Shapiro said. "People like me never got to come into a hearing and say, What's the evidence that I threatened anyone?"

[...]

The news of an official intra-Vatican debate on whether condoms might be permissible within marriage to prevent the spread of HIV is simultaneously very welcome and very strange. For one thing, it is strange that even the most wholehearted natural lawyer could think that married couples with, say, medically-documented infertility, or married couples in which the woman is post-menopausal, would be acting sinfully by using condoms within marriage to prevent HIV transmission. There is an odd elevation of the condom as symbol of contraception into an absolute moral rule-- a rule that is by then utterly untethered from its supposed underlying moral justification. Intercourse with condoms is "disordered," according to Catholic doctrine, because it intereferes with reproduction; but if it does not do so, if the condom use has both only the intent and only the effect of reducing the likelihood of HIV transmission, what could the moral problem possibly be, even in doctrinal terms? Of course, the debate isn't restricted to infertile couples. But infertile couples are the limiting case to show how strange a position is being articulated by those who elevate "no condoms" into an absolute moral and doctrinal prohibition.

But that's not what struck me the most. Quoth the Times, unsupported by quotes or evidence:
A change would address a relatively small part of the problem since most transmission of AIDS is not between married couples.

Well, a change might have only a very small effect in the world, because the reluctance of married couples to use condoms in high-HIV settings has a lot more to do with their desire to have children than it does with a desire to follow church doctrine. But that doesn't mean that intra-marital transmission is a "relatively small part of the problem." Indeed, it appears to be a major problem in much of Africa-- men who acquire HIV prior to marriage transmit it to their wives (and thence to their children) after marriage, when sexual frequency goes up and condom use goes down compared to premarital relations. (See: Bruce and Clark, 2004, Clark 2004.) The change in doctrine might not make much of a change in infection rates, but that's because married couples refrain from condom use for other reasons than Catholic doctrine.

Intelligentsia wedding of the year

Katha Pollitt and Steven Lukes

Published: April 30, 2006

Katha Pollitt and Steven Lukes were married yesterday at Provence, a restaurant in Manhattan. Justice Emily Jane Goodman of State Supreme Court in Manhattan officiated.

Ms. Pollitt, 56, is keeping her name. She writes a magazine column, Subject to Debate, in The Nation and is the author of "Virginity or Death! and Other Social and Political Issues of Our Time," a collection of her columns scheduled to be published by Random House in June. She is also the author of "Antarctic Traveller" (1982), a volume of poetry. She graduated from Radcliffe and received a Master of Fine Arts from Columbia. Ms. Pollitt is the daughter of the late Leanora and Basil Pollitt, who lived in Brooklyn.

Dr. Lukes, 65, is a professor of sociology at New York University and the author of "Emile Durkheim: His Life and Work" (1973), and "The Curious Enlightenment of Professor Caritat: A Comedy of Ideas" (1995). He graduated from Oxford, where he also received a master's degree and a doctorate in sociology. Dr. Lukes is the son of the late Martha and Stanley Lukes, who lived in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, England.

The bride's first marriage ended in divorce. The bridegroom was a widower.

For no particular reason that I'm aware of, Amazon has put The Multiculturalism of Fear on a 15%-off sale, in case any readers have been eagerly waiting for a chance to snag a copy below cover price.

These are a few of my favorite things.

Caffeine addiction and They Might Be Giants, in the same commercials. Disappointed not to have seen them yet.

Political theory, political science, and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences

Borrowing one of Brian Leiter's annual blog-posts for philosophy and law, a quick look at political theory and political science in the 2006 class of the AAAS.

Not many political scientists this year:

Nathaniel Beck, NYU
Michael Dawson, Chicago
Lee Epstein, Wash U
David Lake, UCSD
Keith Poole, UCSD
John Roemer, Yale

of whom only Roemer is a theorist.

(No political philosophers were among the philosophy inductees.) Last year there were nine inducted in political science, plus political philosopher Charles Larmore.

Looking through the overall list, it certainly includes most of the people it ought to among political theorists: among others, Barry, Josh Cohen, Dahl, Elshtain, Elster, Gutmann, Hardin, Holmes, Kateb, Mansbridge, Pateman, Pitkin, Rosenblum, Wolin. Dunn, Dworkin, MacIntyre, Nussbaum, Pocock, Skinner, Tuck, and Waldron are all on the list in various places (foreign members, history, philosophy, law.) But there are a few conspicuous absences among political theorists, along with one shocking one.

Conspicuous: Harvey Mansfield has never been inducted, nor Seyla Benhabib. Seniority matters a lot for the AAAS, so I won't start listing deserving people with PhDs from the 80s or 90s. But at the right level of seniority, Peter Euben is conspicuously missing, as is Michael Zuckert. (Hm. Other than the kind-of case of Galston, is Saxonhouse the only Straussian on the list? There's surely something strange there.) Philip Pettit is surely overdue, though his absence so far is understandable since little of his career has been spent in the U.S.

The shocking absence is Michael Walzer. That's truly an embarrassment for the selection process.

I don't know how that process works, but assume that current members nominate new ones. If it's commonplace (or even allowed) for people to nominate their departmental colleagues, maybe that has disadvantaged Walzer because he's spent so long at the Institute for Advanced Study? One way or another, I would hope that the oversight won't last much longer.

Update: It's been pointed out to me that William Connolly is missing, another serious omission; which reminded me to check for his colleague Richard Flathman, also inexplicably missing. I'd be interested in hearing further thoughts about oversights-- including in the other political science subfields.

Why I love Gilmore Girls even when I hate it:

Yet again, Gilmore Girls has reached a stage wherein almost all of the major characters are acting stupidly and annoyingly in one way or another, and I find myself in sympathy with none of them. What's worse, last night Jess reappeared, and we were all supposed to swoon for how mature he's gotten-- even to feel sorry for him for his mistreatment at Rory's hands. One of those stretches where I realize that both the main plotlines irk me.

And yet...

And yet, when Luke accompanies his geeky newfound daughter on a field trip, and the show wants to make clear how out-of-place Luke is with her and her geeky friends, it has a busful of them sing Tom Lehrer's "The Elements." They started about halfway through, but then kept going much longer than I thought they would in an uninterrupted scene. I kept expecting them to cut away; instead, they went all the way through to "haven't been discah-vered." The scene's very, very funny-- and so is Luke's "What the hell was that?" afterward. Like Cheers and Frasier, Gilmore Girls is terrific at entertainingly playing both sides of various highbrow/ lowbrow, literary cultural references/ puncturing pretentiousness fences.

Thoughts on "The Israel Lobby"

I've had some brief things to say elsewhere about the paper "The Israel Lobby," by Steve Walt and my soon-to-be-former colleague John Measheimer (henceforth M&W). Herewith a few more considered judgments.

1. As the Larry Summers affair should have taught us all:
a) Some pernicious stereotypes might be empirically correct.
b) Scholars must be free-- really free-- to reach empirical conclusions that bear out pernicious stereotypes.
c) But it's a tricky and delicate business; it requires not only serious consideration of rival explanations but also genuine scholarly expertise in the subject at hand.

Academic freedom does and should protect scholars who reach controversial conclusions. But scholars who know that they're going to further pernicious stereotypes, and know that they're going to take refuge in an academic freedom that op-ed columnists and full-time pundits don't enjoy, should really think three times about whether or not they're presenting scholarly conclusions and writing as experts.

Mearsheimer and Walt are among the country's leading scholars of security and of international power relations. That's pretty far afield from being specialists in Middle East policy. More importantly, it's very far afield from being specialists in interest group politics, or in the nexus between interest group politics and policy formation, or in the domestic political sources of foreign policy. (Indeed, they're committed to not being specialists in that last, which is part of the problem.) There are serious political scientists who specialize in all these things. There are political scientists who specialize, for example, in the study of the nexus between ethnic interest-group lobbying and foreign policy outcomes. Some of these think that AIPAC has very significant power, that it lives up to its reputation as one of the two or three most influential lobbies in Washington and the most influential foreign policy lobby. There's nothing anti-Semitic about reaching that conclusion. Some of them don't; they reach the conclusion that AIPAC "succeeds partly because it is pushing on an open door- it advocates policies that most Americans favor on the merits" (James Lindsay, "Getting Uncle Sam's Ear: Will Ethnic Lobbies Cramp America's Foreign Policy Style," The Brookings Review Winter 2002 Vol. 20 No.1 pp. 37-40). The most substantial study of the question found that

"U.S. governments, especially since 1973, have viewed assistance to Israel as being in the interests of American foreign policy in toto and in the Middle East [and so supported such assistance for their own reasons...] although AIPAC is a capable organization, its requests have merely tended to parallel the preferences of U.S. presidents, not determined them. When a president strongly wishes to go against the AIPAC's desired policy, he is readily able to do this and succeed." (Joseph Scolnick, review of Goldberg, Foreign Policy and Ethnic Interest Groups, and Organski, The $36 Billion Bargain, APSR 86(2):585-586)

I'm not competent to evaluate the dispute between those scholars of ethnic interest group effects on foreign policy who do and those who don't think that AIPAC can drive foreign policy. This may be a dispute between scholars who generally emphasize interest-group pluralism and those who generally stress state autonomy or presidential action; I don't know. And I'm certainly none the wiser for reading "The Israel Lobby," which doesn't come to terms with the dispute or even do much more than nod in the direction of this literature.

2. Social scientists seek to explain variation. U.S. support for Israel-- diplomatic, military, and financial-- had a point of inflection roughly 1970-73. It's not clear that the Jewish population of the U.S., or that population's level of commitment to Israel, or anything else having to do with "the Lobby" that is M&W's only explanatory variable changed much at that time. Jews, as Ongaski points out, had been in the U.S. all along, and had supported Israel all along, and you can't explain variation with a constant.

Even at the new, high, level of support, there has been variation that corresponds very well to particular U.S. presidencies and very poorly to any change in "the Lobby."

3. The core of the paper's difficulty has little to do with Israel or Jews and a great deal to do with its core purpose. M&W are committed to the neorealist view that powerful states act in their security interest. They're also, independently, committed to opposition to the Iraq War and to what they see as U.S. overreach in the Middle East; they think that the U.S. does not effectively pursue its security interests in the region. So there's a puzzle, an anomaly-- of their own making. If you are both committed to a predictive theory and committed to an interpretation of a particular case by which it falsifies your theory, then there's a puzzle for your views, but not yet a puzzle about the world.

They proceed to address this puzzle with a slippery-- I do not say sloppy-- ambiguity between explanatory and evaluative claims.

The mere existence of the Lobby suggests that unconditional support for Israel is not in the American national interest. If it was, one would not need an organized special interest to bring it about.

This is, I think, the worst paragraph of political science I've read in many years. The best, most-justified policies don't automatically spring into being at the end of the policy-making process. An all-things-considered judgment that X is the best policy is essentially irrelevant to one's ability to predict whether or not X will be adopted. Political and policy-making actors aren't, indeed couldn't possibly be, such purely disinterested promoters of the public good that they could promote it all the time without any organized support-- even assuming that they all agreed with each other, and with M&W, about what the public good consisted of. They often need organizational and material support from interest groups even to do [what they take to be] the right thing. Free-trading Representatives still know how vulnerable they are to the organized power of protectionist lobbies, and feel safer when the pro-trade lobbies are able to rally effectively and protect them; without that protection, some of them choose keeping their seat over their principles. (And the electoral process selects for those who will make that choice.) From the fact that a policy needed a lobby to support it, one can infer nothing about the policy's justifiability.

Moreover, from the facts that a lobby exists and that its preferred policies have been adopted, one can infer very close to nothing about whether the lobby was needed. Lobbies have a professional interest in convincing donors and would-be donors that "But for us, all would be lost"-- even if it's untrue. No one has any particular interest in debunking the claim. While individual donors of huge sums may be pretty sophisticated about the political process and about the claim's truth, and pretty straightforwardly instrumental rather than symbolic in their approach to contributions, the millions of small contributors to direct-mail campaigns are pretty certainly not. A lobby could be entirely superfluous, or entirely ineffective, and still survive off the contributions of highly-motivated but relatively uninformed small donors indefinitely. Unlike the view that the best security policy magically springs into being, the view that lobbies only exist when they're needed isn't even a necessary thought for M&W's neorealism.

Something very similar holds true for the paper's treatment of moral considerations. In short: from the authors' view that support for Israel is not, in the final accounting, morally demanded, they infer that moral considerations or beliefs are irrelevant to understanding why the United States support Israel. The structure of the paper is:

Why does the United States provide [so much] support to Israel?
1. Such support is not [in our view] genuinely strategically warranted.
2. Such support is not [in our view] genuinely morally demanded.
Therefore:
3. Such support must be explained by the presence of actors who place the interests of Israel ahead of the interests of the United States.

The mistake is astonishingly elementary, but it pervades the whole paper. The snarky way to put it is: M&W treat their say-so about strategic and moral considerations as if it was naturally entitled to such overwhelming political deference that the fact that the polity hasn't accepted their say-so is deeply anomalous. The probably-fairer way to put it is: M&W proceed as if the political system has some very strong natural tendency to reach true beliefs and justified policies about strategy and morality-- such a strong tendency that, if it fails in some case, there must be an unusual explanation, such as an unusually intense and effective Lobby that includes people willing to deliberately place the interests of a foreign power over that of their own country, and that includes powerful politicians, media figures, and so on who can make their preferred policies come about.

M&W profess to treat strategic considerations, moral considerations, and The Lobby as alternative explanations of U.S. support. For those to really be comparable itsmes, they'd have to be something like "relevant actors' beliefs about strategic considerations," "relevant actors' beliefs about moral considerations," and "lobbying/ interest group influence." But beliefs don't show up. M&W's discussion of whether Israel is a morally nice place or not is neither here nor there in understanding what brings U.S. support about. "Israel discriminates against its Arab citizens" and "The Lobby" are answers to questions of completely different sorts-- one evaluative, one explanatory.

M&W's rejoinder could be: "Well, since we're right about strategic and moral considerations, if other people's beliefs about those considerations lead them to support Israel, then their beliefs are wrong. Such widespread belief in false propositions is itself anomalous and must be explained by the activities of The Lobby." Now, however, I think the implausibility of the account becomes more apparent. Politics is often marked by good-faith disagreement about hard questions. And it's often marked by people getting things wrong. One doesn't need a Lobby to explain political actors believing and acting on false propositions about morality or prudence.

Notice that I haven't been engaging M&W's substantive views about American Jews or Israel; indeed, I've been accepting them arguendo. That is, the charge I make against them can't be conflated with a charge of anti-Semitism-- and isn't refuted by the claim by Mersheimer's former student Robert Pape that M&W are "philo-Semites of the first order," whatever that might mean. M&W have been getting unearned mileage out of the predictable rhetorical move that any criticism of their paper constitutes an attempt to paint them as anti-Semites and shut down debtae, thereby proving their argument, which is why it's important to establish that my critique of their paper doesn't turn on the substance of their evaluation of Israel.

My point is that their substantive evaluation of the US' Middle East policy can't do the work that the paper demands of it, namely the creation of an empirical and explanatory question to which The Lobby is the only answer left standing. Indeed this is related to the problem of non-engagement with the ethnic-interest-group literature. If AIPAC suceeds only when its preferences parallel those of Presidents, then it's Presidents' beliefs about moral and strategic consideration, not M&W's beliefs, that is the appropriate alternative explanation of policy.

"The truth of a proposition has little or nothing to do with its psychodynamics. 'The truth will prevail' is merely a pious wish; history doesn't show it.'" So quoth Ralph Schultz in Heinlein's Methuselah's Children, summarizing the point nicely. That a given set of political processes fails to generate policies that track M&W's understanding of the truth about difficult strategic and moral questions is not anomalous and does not raise the kind of question to which The Lobby is a necessary answer, even if M&W are correct about the truth about those difficult strategic and moral questions. Moral truth isn't a part of social scientific explanation; relevant actors' beliefs about moral truth are such a part, but are absent from the paper. The same is true for strategic truths and beliefs about strategy.

Now, it happens that I also disagree with much-- not all-- what what M&W have to say about those strategic and moral questions; and I think they argue for their views pretty badly even when I agree with them. But others have made the relevant criticisms of those arguments already. (Update: See, e.g., this devastating response to M&W's strange history of the conflict from Benny Morris, a historian cited by M&W, and on his account distorted by them.) What I want to stress is: the paper faces a puzzle only of the authors' own creation, an anomaly only of the disjuncture between the neorealist article of faith that the best strategic policies will be adopted regardless of domestic politics and M&W's substantive views of (especially) the Iraq War. If strategically optimal or morally correct policies don't just happen, then the puzzle disappears, and we're left with a conceptual mess of a paper that purports to knock down justifications for a set of policy outcomes in order to bolster an allegedly-rival explanation for them. But justifications and explanations are not, in fact, rivals.

Update:

Compare Anne-Marie Slaughter, who knows much more about the relevant debates than I do.

At the same time, their analysis is strongly, and in my view wrongly, colored by two assumptions. First is their deep opposition to the war in Iraq; they came out in favor of continued deterrence of Saddam early, and with the luxury of hindsight, probably rightly. But because they passionately opposed the war from the beginning, they find it hard to imagine any reasons to support the war other than the Israel Lobby. Yet George Packer, whose superb book The Assassins' Gate is a must read, notes that Douglas Feith, Richard Perle, and David Wurmser, all strong "pro-Likud Americans," ended up in high positions in the Bush administration and pushed for war in Iraq. He writes:

"Does this mean that a pro-Likud cabal insinuated its way into the high councils of the U.S. government and took hold of the apparatus of American foreign policy to serve Israeli interests? . . . For Feith and Wurmser, the security of Israel was probably the prime mover. But for others, such as Wolfowitz, Iraq stood for different things -- an unfinished war, Arab tyranny, weapons proliferation, a strategic threat to oil, American weakness, Democratic fecklessness -- and regime change there became the foreign policy jackpot." Just because Walt and Mearsheimer discount each one of these factors does not mean that they were equally discounted in Washington, leaving only Israel's security as an argument for war.

Second, Walt and Mearsheimer are realists, which means that they assess the strategic value of states solely in terms of their relative power, regardless of regime type. In English, that means that Israel's status as the only stable, mature democracy in the Middle East is irrelevant in assessing America's strategic interest. We liberals, on the other hand, essentially think that regime type trumps virtually every other measure of power. That does not mean that we should support Israel automatically or uncritically, but it does provide a powerful reason for why supporting Israel -- and above all Israel's continued existince as a liberal democracy, which may often require taking a tougher line with the Israeli government that we have been prepared to do in recent years -- is very much in America's strategic interest.

New news:

As of today, I've accepted an appointment as Tomlinson Professor of Political Theory in the Department of Political Science at McGill University, effective July 1.

That's all...

Noting recent events, I link to this old post defending the mocking and satire of religious beliefs, and this one on the Islamist fatwa of death against the playwright Terence McNally for portraying Jeses (an honored prophet in Islam) as gay. Note that McNally is not and has neverbeen a Muslim. The structure of some Islamists' understanding of blasphemy rules allows them to pass potentially-violent judgment on how Christians depict Jesus; what's at stake isn't only deference on the question of how Mohammed may be portrayed.