Milton Friedman, RIP. See also Tyler Cowen. Free to Choose was the first book I read in the human sciences, the first serious book about politics or economics I ever read, and obviously had a huge, transformative effect on me at an early (11 or 12 or so) age.

Update:

Quoth Ogged:

On the occasion of Milton Friedman's death, Jacob Levy brings out the big guns in the ever-ongoing precocious nerdosity contest. [...] I am slain. As a big Doors fan, I wanted to find out about this Nietzsche character who Jimbo loved so much, so I read Thus Spake Zarathustra in 8th grade, during which I was what, 13? I think we should set aside questions of whether we understood what we read, counting books just as long as we believed that we understood something of them. Can anyone beat Levy?

Aw, heck, that's not even the nerdiest thing I did when I was 11 or 12-- ask me sometime what I wrote in sixth grade. I'm not going to blog it, though. It turned up in an old box when I was packing to leave college; my housemates got at it and read it and I've never lived it down.

Various announcements

At Chicago:
There will be a memorial service for Iris Marion Young in Bond Chapel on the U of C campus, Sunday, November 14, at 2 pm. It will be followed by a reception in Pick. Chicago grad students have assembled a collection of tributes here.

At McGill:
The Atlas Institute and the Center for Human Rights and Legal Pluralism are cosponsoring a panel on "Finding Common Ground: The Challenge of Freedom in the West and in the Muslim World," Tuesday, November 14th, 4:30-5:30 p.m., Ballroom B, New Residence Hall. Panelists include Payam Akhavan, Professor of Law, Center for Human Rights and Legal Pluralism, School of Law, McGill University; Alejandro Chafuen
President, Atlas Economic Research Foundation, Virginia, USA; Father Kail Ellis, OSA
Dean, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Villanova University, Pennsylvania, USA; A. Uner Turgay, Professor of Islamic Studies, Institute of Islamic Studies, McGill University. A reception will follow.

At U de Montreal:
Workshop on Left-Libertarianism and its critics
Journée d’études autour des travaux de Peter Vallentyne

Friday 10 Novembre 2006
UNIVERSITÉ DE MONTRÉAL
Pavillon Claire McNicholls
Salle Z 315

Programme
9 h 30 Accueil
10 h 15 Peter Vallentyne Left-Libertarianism : a presentation
11 h 00 Peter Dietsch The Interpretation of self-ownership at the heart of left-libertarianism
11 h 45 Speranta Dumitru Le partage des ressources génétiques
14 h 15 Vincent Bourdeau Égalité de contrôle et égalité des bénéfices. Justifications républicaines et libertariennes de gauche de l’accès aux ressources naturelles.
15h00 Roberto Merrill Libertarisme de gauche et républicanisme : le test de l’esclavage
16h00 Christian Nadeau Non domination et propriété de soi
Débat à 17h30 : Éthique libertarienne (Peter Vallentyne) et éthique minimale (Ruwen Ogien)


At ASPLP:
The 2006 Annual Meeting of the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy will (confusingly!) take place in Washington DC on January 5-6 2007, in conjunction with the American Association of Law Schools Annual Meeting. The program follows.

American Conservative Thought and Politics
Conference co-chairs: Melissa S. Williams and Sanford Levinson


Friday, January 5, 2007

3:30-5:15 pm: "American Conservative Thought and Politics: Perspectives from Political Science"
Washington 4, Exhibition Level, Marriott Wardman Park

Paper: Nathan Tarcov, Professor of Social Thought and Political Science, University of Chicago

Commentator: John Holbo, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, National University of Singapore
Commentator: TBA

Chair: Melissa Williams, Professor of Political Science and Director, Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto

6:30 pm: Wine and Cheese Reception
Washington 3, Exhibition Level, Marriott Wardman Park


Saturday, January 6, 2007

8:00-9:00 a.m: American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy Breakfast
Marriott Salon III, Lobby Level, Marriott Wardman Park

9 am- 10:40 pm: "American Conservative Thought and Politics: Perspectives from Law"
Marriott Salon III, Lobby Level, Marriott Wardman Park

Paper: Richard Garnett, Associate Professor, Notre Dame Law School, Notre Dame University

Commentator: Robert George, McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence, Princeton University
Commentator: Elizabeth Harman, Assistant Professor of Philosophy and the University Center for Human Values, Princeton University

Chair: Sanford Levinson, W. St. John Garwood and W. St. John Garwood, Jr. Centennial Chair,
University of Texas Law School; Professor, Department of Government, University of Texas


10:50am- 12:30 pm, "American Conservative Thought and Politics: Perspectives from Philosophy"
Marriott Salon III, Lobby Level, Marriott Wardman Park

Paper: David Sidorsky, Professor, Department of Philosophy, Columbia University

Commentator: Patrick Deneen, Associate Professor of Government and Markos and Eleni Tsakopoulos-Kounalakis Chair in Hellenic Studies, Georgetown University
Commentator: Elizabeth Emens, Associate Professor of Law, Columbia University

Chair: Jacob T. Levy, Tomlinson Professor of Political Theory, McGill University

Election blogging

My posts at Open University over the last couple days: Referendum Power, Consolidating New England, Bye-bye, If not Gerry's mander, then whose?, The Wrong Target.

From today's NYT, the first discussion I've ever seen in such a prominent place of one of the most appalling facts about Chicago governance.

What people do want, he said, is room to grow. To accommodate developers looking to build structures whose dimensions fall outside the parameters of zoning requirements, Mr. Matlak said he frequently changed the zoning of a particular lot. According to city tradition, aldermen have exclusive authority to change zoning requirements — often called spot zoning — to allow construction that would otherwise violate the city’s zoning ordinances.

This “aldermanic privilege” can work to preservationists’ benefit — or add to their consternation, depending on what is being changed and who is making the changes. Some aldermen act independently, bowing to the demands of developers, while others seek community input before making a zoning change that could result in a large condo building going up on a block of single-family homes.

That is to say, aldermen-- city councillors, members of a collective legislative body-- have massive-- as far as I cal tell, unlimited-- discretion to waive zoming requirements in the districts they represent. This makes them not only delegates of their districts but also feudal lords (or, to put it more politely, "discretion-wielding executives") over their districts.

Now: model something in your head. The aldermen have the collective authority to pass the zoning laws to which they will then have the individual authority to grant exemptions. What rules will they pass?

Of course, they could decide to pass rules that wouldn't ever need exemptions-- fair, transparent, easily-comprhehensible rules that accommodate the needs of the real estate market. That would, y'know, minimize the demands on their time. It's possible. When members of an academic department are passing curricular rules, that sort of consideration does come up: "what rule can we pass now that will save me from having to talk about this in office hours henceforth?"

On the other hand, they could pass rules that would make development all but impossible without their individual say-so-- rules such that all roads to development must go through the alderman's office. That wouldn't maximize the alderman's leisure time. But if, in the euphemism of microeconomics, "side payments" were permitted-- or massively unofficially tolerated-- then it could maximize some other maximands of the aldermen.

Now say that you've ever heard anything about city politics in the city of Chicago. Which model would you guess is chosen?

The truth isn't quite as simple as the model; but it's shockingly close. "Side payments" need not be bribes into the alderman's pockets. It can be "community investment" in the alderman's politically-preferred charitable causes, or local makework jobs that turn the developer into a branch of the alderman's reelection machine. But, one way or the other, the aldermen collectively make themselves separately into the bottlenecks for a massive amount of the city's real estate activity, and they're entirely clear-eyed about the rents that allows them to extract, the political friends it allows them to reward, and the political enemies it allows them to punish.

I referred to this long ago in the long-ago "Why is there no Gap in Hyde Park?" thread, but it seems generally to be a dirty little secret of Chicago politics. It seems to me that the NYT reporter was missing the bigger story in the midst of the "architectural preservation" one...

Crescat Sententia has a new home at www.crescatsententia.net (not .org), as Will Baude explains
here. Everyone keep an eye on your previously-registered domain names. (Compare: the old address for Volokh.)

Call for Papers

Les ateliers de l’éthique welcomes articles and book reviews on the multiple domains of ethics, with a particular attention to the normative challenges of public policies and social practices. Submission date: 1 December 2006.

email – cynthia.chassigneux@umontreal.ca

Articles should be between 10 and 20 pages, single spaced (Times New Roman 12). Notes should be placed at the end of the text. An abstract in English and French of no more than 200 words must be inserted at the beginning of the text. Articles are anonymously reviewed by the editorial committee.

Book reviews must not exceed 5 pages, single spaced (Times New Roman 12). Book reviews are evaluated by the editorial committee.

The journal is published by my cross-town friends at the Centre de Recherche en Ethique de l'Universite de Montreal (CREUM). The current issue may be viewed here.-- JTL

Blogging scholarship

Curious but interesting: a $5,000 scholarship for a college student-blogger. I don't know anything more about it than is on the site, but worth a look.

Have I mentioned...

how happy I am to have cashed out of the US housing market by early summer?

"One day I realized that sadness is just another word for..."

I haven't read Dilbert in a long time, but a friend pointed this week's strips out to me as being funny and of, er, particular interest. have a look.

Well-said

Apropos of nothing, and recognizing that the point is in some ways an old and familiar one, I was very struck by this passage from Fontana Labs at Unfogged.

We make moral judgments about characters and narratives all the time, and our moral responses to them are accountable to the same consistency pressures that are brought to bear on our everyday moral judgments about actual circumstances. (It's interesting that our moral responses are less apt for suspension than our [dis]belief[s], since we're able to imagine with ease various counterfactual scenarios but we have a harder time imagining worlds in which basic moral principles are false.)

I think that's right, and very nicely said-- and might give a little bit of pause to our assumption that our knowledge of morality is radically uncertain and opaque. At least it suggests a real stability to moral psychology, in good Smithian fashion.

Other than fantasy that defines some humanoid races (e.g. orcs) as Evil as such and therefore outside the boundaries of compassion or sympathy, are there any counterexamples? Interesting science fiction about alien encounters is set in our moral universe-- there may be interspecies war, but the characters face all the usual moral dilemmas about killing in wartime. And in non-fantastic genres, in mainstream fiction, part of our ability to engage with or become interested in a character is typically our ability to empathize with the character's moral problems or questions or failings or successes. The occasional exceptions to that, the Hannibal Lecters, don't posit an alternative moral universe but simply fascinate by their amorality. Lots of fiction emphasizes one moral truth at the expense of others-- loyalty to family at the expense of justice, or compassion at the expense of responsibility, or retributive justice at the expense of procedural justice. But those aren't the equivalent of moral-science-fiction or moral-surrealism.

I think The Stranger might be a kind of counterexample, since it really does seem to posit an alternative moral (or rather amoral) universe, one in which killing a man because the sun was in your eyes seems like no more unreasonable a thing to do than any other. But I've never liked or understood The Stranger, so I'm not sure.

Anyway: loved that second sentence.

A prediction

The 34-year-old Haitian-born Quebecoise soprano Marie-Josée Lord (see biographical stories here and here) is going to be a major figure on opera's world stage very soon.

We saw her in the lead of Puccini's Suor Angelica at the Opera de Montreal on Saturday and were completely awestruck-- both as an actress and as a singer she gave what may be the most compelling, enrapturing operatic performance I've ever seen-- and I've seen dozens of operas at the Met and the Lyric. She has a hauntingly beautiful voice, and real mastery-- Angelica is a demanding role, with a long, uninterrupted, and difficult aria ("Senza mamma") at its heart-- and she was captivating in it.

For now, she seems to mostly sing here. I don't expect that that will last very long, but we're going to treasure being able to attend her performances for as long as it does.

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.