The unlicensed CV Doctor
Dear academic job applicants,
There are circumstances in which it's important to be able to specify the software packages which you can operate. Entry-level stats scholars, for example, often do specify whether they work in SAS, SPSS, etc.
Under no circumstances is "Microsoft Word" a skill worth listing on your C.V. Neither is Power Point or Excel.
Unless you're a certified sys admin, under no circumstances is any version of Windows or a Mac operating system a skill worth listing on your C.V.; it means "I know how to turn my computer on."
And-- really, truly-- under no circumstances is your ability to e-mail or to operate a web browser a skill worth listing on your C.V.
These things aren't just weighted at zero. They make you look ridiculous.
Some things end up weighted at zero-- if the OS you list is Unix or Linux, I don't actually care, but it shows enough tech cred that I understand why you want to list it. Similarly for LaTeX; at the end of the day it's your word processing software and I think it's silly to list, but it's not actively embarrassing. But why bother? Someone with higher tech standards than I might well view it as the equivalent of listing Word, and you'll do yourself damage.
JTL
Friday, January 19, 2007
Thursday, January 18, 2007
Montreal winters and grad school
At the indispensible P.H.D.
(No, it's not really set in Montreal, but it could be.)
At the indispensible P.H.D.
(No, it's not really set in Montreal, but it could be.)
It's time for a holy war
I now have a heresy named after me. (See background here and here.)
But I see no reason to accept the designation, for the reasons I offer in that last link; it's the pagan DeLong who's proposing to do away with an obviously canonical text.Will no one rid me of this troublesome apostate? Where are my Fremen legions to fight my jihad?
On the other hand, I'm pretty sure the following does count as a heresy on my part, and I won't pretend it's an orthodoxy. I finished readin Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? yesterday-- my first time to read it or any Phillip Dick. (Embarrassing, I know.) And: Blade Runner is almost incomparably better. Not only are the characters richer and deeper and better-developed; not only are every one of the major plot changes made by the movie clear improvements over the book; and not only is the mood and environment and sense of change over time better set with "blade runners" and "replicants" than with "bounty hunters" and "androids." But also the core Dickian themes of identity confusion, memory confusion, and not knowing which way reality lies are explored in a (I'm going to get attacked here) pretty tedious and plodding fashion in the book, whereas the movie (the Director's Cut, I mean) successfully spins the viewer around and brings him or her in to the characters' confusion and uncertainty.
I think it's worse than that. I think I just didn't like the book very much. It was only the search for glimmers of the movie's greatness that kept me going through it at all; on its own it was entirely flat. The couple of scenes of ostensible head-trippy confusion about identity just inspired in me a reaction of, "Oh, OK, I guess that's what's going on. Oh, no, that's what's going on. Ah."
I can't think of a time when I've thought a movie so outshone its source book; and I can't imagine how people saw such potential for a movie in such an ordinary story. It turns out the potential was there, but I think that most of what makes the movie interesting (e.g. Roy's and Rachel's struggles with their limitations, the pathos of J.F., the Deckard-Rachel dynamic, even the kind of future that's being inhabited) was not even incipient in the book. The accomplishment was that of Ridley Scott, Hampton Fancher, Vangelis, and Syd Mead and David Steiner, much more than that of Phillip K. Dick.
All right, I'll now go peacefully to my burning.
I now have a heresy named after me. (See background here and here.)
But I see no reason to accept the designation, for the reasons I offer in that last link; it's the pagan DeLong who's proposing to do away with an obviously canonical text.Will no one rid me of this troublesome apostate? Where are my Fremen legions to fight my jihad?
On the other hand, I'm pretty sure the following does count as a heresy on my part, and I won't pretend it's an orthodoxy. I finished readin Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? yesterday-- my first time to read it or any Phillip Dick. (Embarrassing, I know.) And: Blade Runner is almost incomparably better. Not only are the characters richer and deeper and better-developed; not only are every one of the major plot changes made by the movie clear improvements over the book; and not only is the mood and environment and sense of change over time better set with "blade runners" and "replicants" than with "bounty hunters" and "androids." But also the core Dickian themes of identity confusion, memory confusion, and not knowing which way reality lies are explored in a (I'm going to get attacked here) pretty tedious and plodding fashion in the book, whereas the movie (the Director's Cut, I mean) successfully spins the viewer around and brings him or her in to the characters' confusion and uncertainty.
I think it's worse than that. I think I just didn't like the book very much. It was only the search for glimmers of the movie's greatness that kept me going through it at all; on its own it was entirely flat. The couple of scenes of ostensible head-trippy confusion about identity just inspired in me a reaction of, "Oh, OK, I guess that's what's going on. Oh, no, that's what's going on. Ah."
I can't think of a time when I've thought a movie so outshone its source book; and I can't imagine how people saw such potential for a movie in such an ordinary story. It turns out the potential was there, but I think that most of what makes the movie interesting (e.g. Roy's and Rachel's struggles with their limitations, the pathos of J.F., the Deckard-Rachel dynamic, even the kind of future that's being inhabited) was not even incipient in the book. The accomplishment was that of Ridley Scott, Hampton Fancher, Vangelis, and Syd Mead and David Steiner, much more than that of Phillip K. Dick.
All right, I'll now go peacefully to my burning.
Tuesday, January 16, 2007
Monday, January 15, 2007
Not sure what I can possibly add to this.
France proposed U.K. union, papers show
January 15, 2007
Associated Press
LONDON – Would France have been better off under the Queen?
The revelation that the French government proposed a union of Britain and France in 1956, even offering to accept the sovereignty of the British Queen, has left scholars on both sides of the Channel puzzled.
Newly discovered documents in Britain's National Archives show that former French prime minister Guy Mollet discussed the possibility of a merger between the two countries with then-British prime minister Sir Anthony Eden.
"I completely fell off my seat," said Richard Vinen, an expert in French history at King's College in London. "It's such a bizarre thing to propose."
Eden rejected the idea of a union but was more favourable to a French proposal to join the Commonwealth, according to the documents. One document added that Mollet "had not thought there need be difficulty over France accepting the headship of her Majesty (Queen Elizabeth II)."
While the two countries, separated by a thin body of water, have been bitter rivals since the Middle Ages, the two EU partners now concentrate on trading tourists rather than arrows. What animosity remains has been relegated to world culinary name-calling.
Proposals for Anglo-French unity are not necessarily new. English royalty claimed the title of "King (or Queen) of France" into the 19th century.
Winston Churchill, in a last-ditch attempt to keep France on the side of the Allies in Second World War, appealed for a full union of the two countries in June of 1940.
After the war, Ernest Bevin, Britain's foreign secretary, also toyed with the idea of a "Western Union," a European and African bloc led by Britain and France.
The proposals all shared an element of desperation, said Kevin Ruane, a historian at Canterbury Christ Church University, England. ``It's so impracticable an idea that it has only been raised in extreme situations," he said.
Threatened by an Arab revolt in French Algeria and hobbled by instability at home, France was desperate to maintain its independence from both the Soviet Union and the United States, Ruane said. Eden, who fought in France during First World War and spoke the language fluently, might have seemed particularly approachable to Mollet, a former English teacher.
But even under the circumstances, the suggestion that France accept the British Queen struck historians as bizarre.
Mollet was a Socialist, and left-wing Frenchmen looked to the execution of French King Louis XVI as one of the crowning achievements of the French Revolution. They would have been unlikely to welcome a foreign monarch with open arms. "It must have been some kind of eccentric gesture," Vinen said.
The former French leader's memoirs showed nothing about the proposal, said Francois Lafon, a history professor at La Sorbonne in Paris and a Mollet biographer. Lafon suggested it was probably a political tactic to pressure the British to firm up their role for the imminent attack on Egypt.
A year after Britain turned down France's proposed merger, the French joined the Common Market, the European Union's predecessor. By the time Britain tried to join seven years later, the tables had turned.
Charles De Gaulle had brought a new order to French political life and largely revived its international standing, even as Britain's economy continued to stagnate. De Gaulle vetoed Britain's attempts to join the European Economic Community, twice.
"In retrospect, the irony of this was that the losers were the British," Vinen said. "Maybe we'd be in a better position being ruled by Charles de Gaulle in 1965 than Harold Wilson."
Not all Frenchmen were so sure.
"Can you imagine?" said Jose-Alain Fralon, author of "Help, the English are invading!" "What would the English tabloids do if they could no longer tell stories about the froggies, and what about those French who blame everything on the English?"
The British, he added, are "our most dear enemies" and "we would lose all of the saltiness in our relationship" had the two countries merged.
Still, he said, the two peoples complement each other marvelously.
"Roast beef and frogs don't go together in the same dish. But frogs legs as a starter and a good roast beef as the main dish – c'est merveilleux," he said.
The documents, which have been declassified for over twenty years, were found by a BBC producer late last month.
Sigh.
Immigration as a topic makes people say and do stupid things.
Where to begin?
Many smart businesses on both sides of the Canada-US border have accepted both currencies for decades. And not only tourism-intensive businesses; tat the supermarket where I worked as a teenager, some 200 miles south of the Canadian border, we accepted up to a dollar in coins at face value and then were supposed to check for an exchange rate after that point.
Business establishments all over the world accept the U.S. dollar under a variety of conditions.
Airports often function in multiple currencies, and there doesn't seem to be any reason to restict that convenience to people who travel by air.
As someone who hops back and forth across a border a fair amount, I instantly recognized the pizza place's rationale:
The default answer is "stick it in a dresser drawer and hope you remember to get it out before your next trip" (just like all my old Washington MetroCards)-- at which point you'll spend it in the other country. What's the dimension on which it's worse for the U.S. to have people buying an extra pizza in the U.S. than hoarding their money and spending it in Mexico? The amounts are too small for it to make sense to go to a currency exchange; the commission would eat it up. So the options are spend pesos in the U.S., spend them in Mexico, or don't spend them.
I know, I know, it's supposed to be all "symbolic."
But it's an act of interpretation, not a natural fact, that makes this a symbol of "cultural secession." And it's a particularly bad synecdoche. Why not treat it as symbolic of the cleverness of Mexican-American entrepreneurs, and their canniness at combining currency trading with pizza delivery and thereby speeding up their pursuit of the American Dream? Or, for that matter, why not express appreciation to the consumers who are spending their had-earned pesos north of the border rather than south, and keeping the local economy that much stronger?
I'm surprised that the massive remittance economy hasn't ever been demagogued; seems ripe for it. But this is effectively the reverse of remittances. Weird.
Immigration as a topic makes people say and do stupid things.
Mr. Ramirez, 20, received his change in American coins and said he liked the chain’s new “Pizza por Pesos” promotion. He had been in the United States for 15 days — his home is in Guanajuato, Mexico — and he wanted to spend the last of his Mexican currency.
“I just arrived,” he said in Spanish, smiling nervously. “It’s my first time here.”
The employees at this Pizza Patrón in East Dallas, one of 59 in five Southwestern and Western states, were still puzzling over the conversion rates almost a week after the chain started accepting peso bills on Jan. 8.
But the promotion has already hit a nerve in the nationwide immigration debate. The company’s Dallas headquarters received about 1,000 e-mail messages on Thursday alone. Some were supportive, but many called the idea unpatriotic, with messages like, “If you want to accept the peso, go to Mexico!” There were even a few death threats.[...]
Just before 8 p.m., the phone rang with another boycott announcement. “Next thing you know, we’re going to be raising Mexico’s flag,” the caller complained.
Where to begin?
Many smart businesses on both sides of the Canada-US border have accepted both currencies for decades. And not only tourism-intensive businesses; tat the supermarket where I worked as a teenager, some 200 miles south of the Canadian border, we accepted up to a dollar in coins at face value and then were supposed to check for an exchange rate after that point.
Business establishments all over the world accept the U.S. dollar under a variety of conditions.
Airports often function in multiple currencies, and there doesn't seem to be any reason to restict that convenience to people who travel by air.
As someone who hops back and forth across a border a fair amount, I instantly recognized the pizza place's rationale:
“It’s for convenience,” Mr. Palacios said. “Most of Mexico’s people, they go in December to Mexico to celebrate and be with family. They come back and say, ‘Oh, I’ve got 200 pesos; what do I do with it?’
The default answer is "stick it in a dresser drawer and hope you remember to get it out before your next trip" (just like all my old Washington MetroCards)-- at which point you'll spend it in the other country. What's the dimension on which it's worse for the U.S. to have people buying an extra pizza in the U.S. than hoarding their money and spending it in Mexico? The amounts are too small for it to make sense to go to a currency exchange; the commission would eat it up. So the options are spend pesos in the U.S., spend them in Mexico, or don't spend them.
I know, I know, it's supposed to be all "symbolic."
“It’s a trivial example, but Hispanics now have their own pizza chain,” Mr. Krikorian said. “It’s a consequence of having too many people arrive from a single foreign culture, and may well reflect a kind of cultural secession"
But it's an act of interpretation, not a natural fact, that makes this a symbol of "cultural secession." And it's a particularly bad synecdoche. Why not treat it as symbolic of the cleverness of Mexican-American entrepreneurs, and their canniness at combining currency trading with pizza delivery and thereby speeding up their pursuit of the American Dream? Or, for that matter, why not express appreciation to the consumers who are spending their had-earned pesos north of the border rather than south, and keeping the local economy that much stronger?
I'm surprised that the massive remittance economy hasn't ever been demagogued; seems ripe for it. But this is effectively the reverse of remittances. Weird.
Sunday, January 14, 2007
Winter
Brad DeLong complains:
To which I reply in his comments:
Well, the day that it was 22 in the beautiful Bay area it was 39 here in New France. This climate change thing has worked out well for my first winter in Montreal-- very mild overall, milder than I remember New Hampshire winters of my youth. Took the chien for a 2-hour bike ride yesterday.
On the other hand...
On the other hand, the good times may be ending. Highs in the next week are predicted at 18, 14, 8, 30, 31, 13, 4. (I can think in kilometers and kilograms and liters but *cannot* think in celsius.) So, yes, if 22 frightens you, you might want to hold off on joining us in Canadia.
Brad DeLong complains:
Oh S--- It's Cold!
Headed out the door at 7:15 AM with the Labrador. Sun rises at 7:20. It felt like... Labrador: 22F.
This isn't supposed to happen in San Francisco.
I am not, repeat not, moving to Canadia anytime soon.
My gloves are inadequate. I can't find my facemask with the neoprene mouth covering. I'm not evolved for this.
To which I reply in his comments:
Well, the day that it was 22 in the beautiful Bay area it was 39 here in New France. This climate change thing has worked out well for my first winter in Montreal-- very mild overall, milder than I remember New Hampshire winters of my youth. Took the chien for a 2-hour bike ride yesterday.
On the other hand...
On the other hand, the good times may be ending. Highs in the next week are predicted at 18, 14, 8, 30, 31, 13, 4. (I can think in kilometers and kilograms and liters but *cannot* think in celsius.) So, yes, if 22 frightens you, you might want to hold off on joining us in Canadia.
Bad signs, good signs
It's a bad sign-- of incipient middle age, or senility, or old-dogness, or just falling into caricaturable absent-mindedness-- when seven years of "Tuesday-Thursday 1:30-2:50" schedules leave you so programmed that, on just the third day of class at your new university, you show up half an hour late to your own 1-2:20 lecture.
It's a good sign-- that your students are highly dutiful and responsible, or reliable and eager, or maybe even interested in hearing your wars of religion lecture-- that almost all of them are still there when you arrive.
It's a bad sign-- of incipient middle age, or senility, or old-dogness, or just falling into caricaturable absent-mindedness-- when seven years of "Tuesday-Thursday 1:30-2:50" schedules leave you so programmed that, on just the third day of class at your new university, you show up half an hour late to your own 1-2:20 lecture.
It's a good sign-- that your students are highly dutiful and responsible, or reliable and eager, or maybe even interested in hearing your wars of religion lecture-- that almost all of them are still there when you arrive.
Saturday, January 13, 2007
Award season
I had always been faintly impressed with the X-Men movies for featuring three Oscar-winners: Ian McKellan, Halle Berry, and Anna Paquin.
But I just channel-surfed past Mars Attacks! with:
Jack Nicholson (12 nominations, three Oscars)
Glenn Close (five Oscar nominations)
Natalie Portman (one nomination)
Annete Bening (two nominations)
What movies that themselves couldn't possibly have been Oscar contenders have had the biggest concentration of heavy-hitting actors, either by Oscar nominations or Oscar wins? I hope that the answer is some lesser Altman pic with a sprawling cast, or some high-ambition catastrophe like Ishtar or Cleopatra, or else some legendary monstrosity like Caligula, or at best something quirky like Murder By Death. But I fear that it'll be some goofy cameo-heavy thing akin to Mars Attacks!-- maybe a Cannonball Run. Wouldn't that be awful?
Godfather III of course doesn't count-- it was, after all, nominated for Best Director and Best Picture. And I'll resist the temptation to count Titanic, since everyone else in the world seemed to think it was a great movie, even though I think it was a high-ambition catastrophe that happened to draw a couple of brilliant young actors in the making (it took me a couple of years to be able to see DiCaprio and Winslett as actors again, notwithstanding Gilbert Grape and Heavenly Creatures-- really for DiCaprio it took me until this year, when The Departed and Blood Diamond successfully applied a sledge hammer to my head and forced me to see past "I'm king of the world!") as well as Kathy Bates.
And no, that judgment is not just because I now live in a city whose most famous resident is Celine Dion.
I had always been faintly impressed with the X-Men movies for featuring three Oscar-winners: Ian McKellan, Halle Berry, and Anna Paquin.
But I just channel-surfed past Mars Attacks! with:
Jack Nicholson (12 nominations, three Oscars)
Glenn Close (five Oscar nominations)
Natalie Portman (one nomination)
Annete Bening (two nominations)
What movies that themselves couldn't possibly have been Oscar contenders have had the biggest concentration of heavy-hitting actors, either by Oscar nominations or Oscar wins? I hope that the answer is some lesser Altman pic with a sprawling cast, or some high-ambition catastrophe like Ishtar or Cleopatra, or else some legendary monstrosity like Caligula, or at best something quirky like Murder By Death. But I fear that it'll be some goofy cameo-heavy thing akin to Mars Attacks!-- maybe a Cannonball Run. Wouldn't that be awful?
Godfather III of course doesn't count-- it was, after all, nominated for Best Director and Best Picture. And I'll resist the temptation to count Titanic, since everyone else in the world seemed to think it was a great movie, even though I think it was a high-ambition catastrophe that happened to draw a couple of brilliant young actors in the making (it took me a couple of years to be able to see DiCaprio and Winslett as actors again, notwithstanding Gilbert Grape and Heavenly Creatures-- really for DiCaprio it took me until this year, when The Departed and Blood Diamond successfully applied a sledge hammer to my head and forced me to see past "I'm king of the world!") as well as Kathy Bates.
And no, that judgment is not just because I now live in a city whose most famous resident is Celine Dion.
Monday, January 08, 2007
Fascinating.
Via The Chronicle, news of a for-profit, annually-updated ranking service for doctoral programs-- one without a pure reputational component (subscription needed). Unsurprisingly, it seems that Washington University St. Louis is a big beneficiary of rankings that measure research productivity without getting confounded by name recognition-- that's a kind of face verification of the service's plausibility.
It looks like the Political Science rankings (again, subscription probably required) use the following data:
Number of faculty
Percentage of faculty with a book publication
Books per faculty
Percentage of faculty with a journal publication
Journal publications per faculty
Percentage of faculty with journal publication cited by another work
Citations per faculty
Citations per paper
Percentage of faculty getting a new grant
New grants per faculty
Total value of new grants per faculty
Average amount of grant
Percentage of faculty with an award
Awards per faculty
And the top ten departments:
Wash U
Harvard
Yale
SUNY Stony Brook
UIUC
U Kansas
U Maryland College Park
Princeton
UCSB
UVA
Update:
Chris Lawrence observes: "I’m not going to say that they’re implausible, but the fact that there’s one UC school ranked in the top ten and it’s not located in Berkeley or San Diego makes me a mite skeptical."
True enough. I treat Wash U as intuitive confirmation; Wash U in general and political science in particular has turned into the kind of place that's much better than its reputation, because reputation is such a lagging indicator. I certainly won't say that the list as a whole conforms to my intuitions. Of course, if all the rankings did was to confirm intuitions then no one would be paying $30,000 a year to subscribe to it. But there's plausibly counterintuitive and... less plausibly counterintuitive.
A few quirks:
Maryland seems to make the top 10 list on the basis of very high "faculty with a book" and "books per faculty" results. On the other hand, Stony Brook has no books but lots of articles. We're used to poli sci rankings that track American Politics rankings which are more journal-dependent; Maryland's more a theory/ public law/ APD kind of place, where books are more important. It's to the ranking system's credit that it recognized poli sci was a hybrid discipline, whereas books don't show up in, e.g., the chemistry rankings. We're not told how heavily the two categories are weighted, nor are we told what counts as a relevant "book publication" (probably *not* only a peer-reviewed monograph from an academic press). UVA also seems to be very pulled up by the book measure.
The citation measure has a huge range, from more than 9 citations/ faculty member at Harvard to 1-1.25 at Kansas, Maryland, and Virginia. Insofar as that means the latter three are producing a lot of work that doens't get read in the discipline, that's a bad sign, and maybe an underweighted bad sign. I suspect that, if we saw the top 20 on this measure alone, it would correspond a lot more closely to informed intuitions; and that's a vote in favor of the informed intuitions.
Grants are a funny category. On the one hand, they're inputs not outputs, and so in some sense shouldn't be counted at all-- but that ship has long since sailed. And they're inputs that are directly relevant to grad student support. On the other hand, I look at the tiny Princeton figures and think, "well, yeah, why bother with big bureaucratic grant programs so often when you're institution's so rich that it can routinely provide research accounts comparable to a smallish NSF grant?" And money already sloshing around the institution is just as good for grad students as money coming in on government checks.
FINAL UPDATE: So, it turns out that the formula is 60% publications and citations, 30% grants, and 10% awards (from Fulbrights to Nobels), which is arbitrary but fine. But for hybrid book-journal fields, the formula within "publications" is 5:1 books:articles. I'm all for books, and am well within the bookish part of the discipline; for political theory a 5:1 ratio is probably fine. (Always assuming that "books" means "peer-reviewed monographs.") But it clearly underweights journal articles in American and methods in particular and maybe in IR as well. Given the dominance of American in both numbers and disciplinary centrality, that's a problem.
Via The Chronicle, news of a for-profit, annually-updated ranking service for doctoral programs-- one without a pure reputational component (subscription needed). Unsurprisingly, it seems that Washington University St. Louis is a big beneficiary of rankings that measure research productivity without getting confounded by name recognition-- that's a kind of face verification of the service's plausibility.
It looks like the Political Science rankings (again, subscription probably required) use the following data:
Number of faculty
Percentage of faculty with a book publication
Books per faculty
Percentage of faculty with a journal publication
Journal publications per faculty
Percentage of faculty with journal publication cited by another work
Citations per faculty
Citations per paper
Percentage of faculty getting a new grant
New grants per faculty
Total value of new grants per faculty
Average amount of grant
Percentage of faculty with an award
Awards per faculty
And the top ten departments:
Wash U
Harvard
Yale
SUNY Stony Brook
UIUC
U Kansas
U Maryland College Park
Princeton
UCSB
UVA
Update:
Chris Lawrence observes: "I’m not going to say that they’re implausible, but the fact that there’s one UC school ranked in the top ten and it’s not located in Berkeley or San Diego makes me a mite skeptical."
True enough. I treat Wash U as intuitive confirmation; Wash U in general and political science in particular has turned into the kind of place that's much better than its reputation, because reputation is such a lagging indicator. I certainly won't say that the list as a whole conforms to my intuitions. Of course, if all the rankings did was to confirm intuitions then no one would be paying $30,000 a year to subscribe to it. But there's plausibly counterintuitive and... less plausibly counterintuitive.
A few quirks:
Maryland seems to make the top 10 list on the basis of very high "faculty with a book" and "books per faculty" results. On the other hand, Stony Brook has no books but lots of articles. We're used to poli sci rankings that track American Politics rankings which are more journal-dependent; Maryland's more a theory/ public law/ APD kind of place, where books are more important. It's to the ranking system's credit that it recognized poli sci was a hybrid discipline, whereas books don't show up in, e.g., the chemistry rankings. We're not told how heavily the two categories are weighted, nor are we told what counts as a relevant "book publication" (probably *not* only a peer-reviewed monograph from an academic press). UVA also seems to be very pulled up by the book measure.
The citation measure has a huge range, from more than 9 citations/ faculty member at Harvard to 1-1.25 at Kansas, Maryland, and Virginia. Insofar as that means the latter three are producing a lot of work that doens't get read in the discipline, that's a bad sign, and maybe an underweighted bad sign. I suspect that, if we saw the top 20 on this measure alone, it would correspond a lot more closely to informed intuitions; and that's a vote in favor of the informed intuitions.
Grants are a funny category. On the one hand, they're inputs not outputs, and so in some sense shouldn't be counted at all-- but that ship has long since sailed. And they're inputs that are directly relevant to grad student support. On the other hand, I look at the tiny Princeton figures and think, "well, yeah, why bother with big bureaucratic grant programs so often when you're institution's so rich that it can routinely provide research accounts comparable to a smallish NSF grant?" And money already sloshing around the institution is just as good for grad students as money coming in on government checks.
FINAL UPDATE: So, it turns out that the formula is 60% publications and citations, 30% grants, and 10% awards (from Fulbrights to Nobels), which is arbitrary but fine. But for hybrid book-journal fields, the formula within "publications" is 5:1 books:articles. I'm all for books, and am well within the bookish part of the discipline; for political theory a 5:1 ratio is probably fine. (Always assuming that "books" means "peer-reviewed monographs.") But it clearly underweights journal articles in American and methods in particular and maybe in IR as well. Given the dominance of American in both numbers and disciplinary centrality, that's a problem.
Wednesday, January 03, 2007
In memoriam
Two major losses to the American academy in the past few days; two insightful and iconoclastic scholars passed away.
Elizabeth Fox-Genovese
Seymour Martin Lipset
Two major losses to the American academy in the past few days; two insightful and iconoclastic scholars passed away.
Elizabeth Fox-Genovese
Seymour Martin Lipset
Wow.
John Holbo, as evidenced by his MLA talk, is very, very smart. I hope he brings this level of A-game to the other conference at which he's presenting before he returns to Singapore.
My favorite line:
"First, necessity is not the mother of subventions."
(It's not just a good pun-- it's really powerfully important to the point he's making.)
Now this kind of thing isn't my kind of thing. I'm a cloth-and-paper traditionalist, and I haven't been in any hurry to see blogging as more than a sideline to scholarship and an efficient means of information distribution. But John makes an excellent case. Often more-moderate arguments are more-effective ones, but not, I think, here. He's not arguing in an apologetic spirit for blogging to be seen as a kind-of-okay thing for scholars to be doing that they shouldn't be embarrassed about or denied tenure for. He's arguing in an aggressive, almost confrontational manner that blogging and related phenomena can be central, and can help fix a lot that is currently broken. He's directly challenging the romanticized image of the monograph-journal-and-library institutional framework, and pointing out that it doesn't work as imagined now, and couldn't work as imagined givem the various constraints, so rearguard attempts to conserve it are likely to be counterproductive.
I've known, since before The Valve got launched, that John was up to something big that I didn't quite get. I'm starting to get it.
Go read.
John Holbo, as evidenced by his MLA talk, is very, very smart. I hope he brings this level of A-game to the other conference at which he's presenting before he returns to Singapore.
My favorite line:
"First, necessity is not the mother of subventions."
(It's not just a good pun-- it's really powerfully important to the point he's making.)
Now this kind of thing isn't my kind of thing. I'm a cloth-and-paper traditionalist, and I haven't been in any hurry to see blogging as more than a sideline to scholarship and an efficient means of information distribution. But John makes an excellent case. Often more-moderate arguments are more-effective ones, but not, I think, here. He's not arguing in an apologetic spirit for blogging to be seen as a kind-of-okay thing for scholars to be doing that they shouldn't be embarrassed about or denied tenure for. He's arguing in an aggressive, almost confrontational manner that blogging and related phenomena can be central, and can help fix a lot that is currently broken. He's directly challenging the romanticized image of the monograph-journal-and-library institutional framework, and pointing out that it doesn't work as imagined now, and couldn't work as imagined givem the various constraints, so rearguard attempts to conserve it are likely to be counterproductive.
I've known, since before The Valve got launched, that John was up to something big that I didn't quite get. I'm starting to get it.
Go read.
What I'll be doing this semester
Borrowing a blogging idea from Brad De Long, since I enjoy it when he does it.
Political Science 613: Hume, Smith, and the Scottish Enlightenment
This is a graduate seminar on the political and moral thought of David Hume and Adam Smith, and as a secondary matter on their contemporaries and intellectual context in the Scottish Enlightenment as well as in France. It aims to convey, through close readings of primary texts, supplemental readings of secondary texts, discussion, and a research paper, both a broad understanding of the intellectual currents of the Scottish Enlightenment, and at least a moderately deep grasp of Hume and Smith. The most important themes of the course will include justice and sympathy; the theory of commercial society and its development; the relationship between private morality and public benefit; the critique of 17th-century contractarianism; and Hume’s and Smith’s contributions to political economy and political science as descriptive and explanatory disciplines.
1. January 3: Introduction
2. January 10: Locke, Hutcheson, Mandeville
John Locke, Two Treatises of Civil Government, Peter Laslett ed., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960 [1688]: Second Treatise chs. 2, 3, 5, 7-9, pp. 269-282, 285-302, 318-363
Francis Hutcheson, Philosophical Writings, R.S. Downie ed., London: Everyman, 1994 [1755], pp. 155-88, 191-7
Francis Hutcheson, An Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections, with Illustrations on the Moral Sense, Aaron Garrett ed., Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2002 [1728], pp. 22-9, 110-137
Francis Hutcheson, An Inquiry Into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue in Two Treatises, Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2004 [1725], pp. 85-134
Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees, vol 1, F.B. Kaye ed., Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1988 [1725], pp. 3-57, 85-93, 107-172
3. January 17: Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws; all but Books 27-28, 30-1 but with greatest attention to Books 20-21.
Recommended: The Fable of the Troglodytes, from Montesquieu, Persian Letters
4. January 24: Hume, Treatise
5. January 31: Hume, Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals— with discussion of the Treatise continued.
February 7: Hume, Essays, essays #1-26 (recommended: the remaining ‘withdrawn’ essays)
February 14: Hume, History, selections TBA
February 28: Ferguson, Civil Society.
Course packet:
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Discourses and Other Early Political Writings, Victor Gourevitch ed., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997 [1755]; Second Discourse, pp. 114-188
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, William Payne ed., Amherst NT : Prometheus, 2003 [1762], pp. 259-308
March 7: Smith TMS, entire
March 14: Smith TMS, discussion continued
March 21: Smith LJ
March 28: Smith WN—read as much as possible, but at least Books I, III, and IV
April 4: Smith WN, discussion continued; read the rest of the work
April 15: Special Montreal Political Theory Workshop daylong symposium on Hume and Smith, with papers by Samuel Fleischacker, Sharon Krause, Sankar Muthu, and Andrew Sabl.
Core recommended secondary reading:
Alexander Broadie, ed., The Cambridge Companion to the Scottish Enlightenment
Athol Fitzgibbons, Adam Smith's System of Liberty, Wealth, and Virtue
Samuel Fleischacker, Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations: A Philosophical Companion
Charles Griswold, Adam Smith and the Virtues of Enlightenment
Knud Haakonssen, The Science of a Legislator
Knud Haakonssen, Natural Law and Moral Philosophy
Knud Haakonssen, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Adam Smith
Istvan Hont, Jealousy of Trade
Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff, eds., Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment
John Stewart, Opinion and Reform in David Hume’s Political Philosophy
Science of a Legislator, Wealth and Virtue, and Philosophical Companion should be considered just shy of being required reading to finish befor the end of the semester.
Additional recommended secondary reading:
Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment and Enlightenment Contested
J.G.A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, especially vols. 2 and 3
John Robertson, The Case For The Enlightenment
Jerome Schneewind, The Invention of Autonomy
Borrowing a blogging idea from Brad De Long, since I enjoy it when he does it.
Political Science 613: Hume, Smith, and the Scottish Enlightenment
This is a graduate seminar on the political and moral thought of David Hume and Adam Smith, and as a secondary matter on their contemporaries and intellectual context in the Scottish Enlightenment as well as in France. It aims to convey, through close readings of primary texts, supplemental readings of secondary texts, discussion, and a research paper, both a broad understanding of the intellectual currents of the Scottish Enlightenment, and at least a moderately deep grasp of Hume and Smith. The most important themes of the course will include justice and sympathy; the theory of commercial society and its development; the relationship between private morality and public benefit; the critique of 17th-century contractarianism; and Hume’s and Smith’s contributions to political economy and political science as descriptive and explanatory disciplines.
1. January 3: Introduction
2. January 10: Locke, Hutcheson, Mandeville
John Locke, Two Treatises of Civil Government, Peter Laslett ed., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960 [1688]: Second Treatise chs. 2, 3, 5, 7-9, pp. 269-282, 285-302, 318-363
Francis Hutcheson, Philosophical Writings, R.S. Downie ed., London: Everyman, 1994 [1755], pp. 155-88, 191-7
Francis Hutcheson, An Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections, with Illustrations on the Moral Sense, Aaron Garrett ed., Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2002 [1728], pp. 22-9, 110-137
Francis Hutcheson, An Inquiry Into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue in Two Treatises, Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2004 [1725], pp. 85-134
Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees, vol 1, F.B. Kaye ed., Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1988 [1725], pp. 3-57, 85-93, 107-172
3. January 17: Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws; all but Books 27-28, 30-1 but with greatest attention to Books 20-21.
Recommended: The Fable of the Troglodytes, from Montesquieu, Persian Letters
4. January 24: Hume, Treatise
5. January 31: Hume, Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals— with discussion of the Treatise continued.
February 7: Hume, Essays, essays #1-26 (recommended: the remaining ‘withdrawn’ essays)
February 14: Hume, History, selections TBA
February 28: Ferguson, Civil Society.
Course packet:
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Discourses and Other Early Political Writings, Victor Gourevitch ed., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997 [1755]; Second Discourse, pp. 114-188
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, William Payne ed., Amherst NT : Prometheus, 2003 [1762], pp. 259-308
March 7: Smith TMS, entire
March 14: Smith TMS, discussion continued
March 21: Smith LJ
March 28: Smith WN—read as much as possible, but at least Books I, III, and IV
April 4: Smith WN, discussion continued; read the rest of the work
April 15: Special Montreal Political Theory Workshop daylong symposium on Hume and Smith, with papers by Samuel Fleischacker, Sharon Krause, Sankar Muthu, and Andrew Sabl.
Core recommended secondary reading:
Alexander Broadie, ed., The Cambridge Companion to the Scottish Enlightenment
Athol Fitzgibbons, Adam Smith's System of Liberty, Wealth, and Virtue
Samuel Fleischacker, Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations: A Philosophical Companion
Charles Griswold, Adam Smith and the Virtues of Enlightenment
Knud Haakonssen, The Science of a Legislator
Knud Haakonssen, Natural Law and Moral Philosophy
Knud Haakonssen, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Adam Smith
Istvan Hont, Jealousy of Trade
Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff, eds., Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment
John Stewart, Opinion and Reform in David Hume’s Political Philosophy
Science of a Legislator, Wealth and Virtue, and Philosophical Companion should be considered just shy of being required reading to finish befor the end of the semester.
Additional recommended secondary reading:
Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment and Enlightenment Contested
J.G.A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, especially vols. 2 and 3
John Robertson, The Case For The Enlightenment
Jerome Schneewind, The Invention of Autonomy
Tuesday, January 02, 2007
A different question about federalism
Matt Yglesias writes:
As a number of his commentators note (and see also Will Baude), there really is a fair amount of variation o those policy questions that haven't been taken away from the states by either Congressional preemption or federal judicial constraints. And some of the range of permissible institutional variation got removed in the 1940s-60s. (This is one of those assaults on federalism that I think was necessary to break Jim Crow but that we should still recognize was constitutionally costly-- ideally the 14th Amendment, 15th Amendment, and Voting Rights Act should not be interpreted to constrain institutional choice as tightly as they have been read in the last half-century, but otherwise southern states seemed likely to use their institutional leeway to concoct further ways to keep blacks out of political power in perpetuity.) Moreover, the different systems fo selecting judges and the different rules about initiatives, referenda, and recalls do make for very different kinds of political systems.
But still-- he's right, there's been no radically green or libertarian state government, no state government that was operationally socialist no matter how aspirationally socialist some of the old Scandianvian midwestern states were, etc. And every state has a separately-elected unitary governor, only one state has a unicameral legislature, no state has tried to get a PR or statewide STV system through VRA approval. Two observations.
One is that there was much more institutional variation during the period 1776-89. After the federal constitution was ratified, it became a focal point for how Americans thought about constitutional organization.
The second is that, as far as I can tell, this is actually very common in federations. So I doubt that "shockingly little" and that "somewhat unusual." I think the U.S. is typical here. I know a lot about a lot of federal systems (though of course not everything about all of them) and this kind of isomorphism between provincial governments and the federal government is, to the best of my knowledge, universal. To take the simplest case: I don't know of any federation with a presidential form of government that has even one province with a parliamentary one, or of any federation with a parliamentary form of governance that has even one province with an independently-elected executive.
Some federations do constrain institutional choice more than the "republican guaranty" clause does in the U.S. constitution-- India, for example-- but in general the constraint just seems to be familiarity. There might also be party issues at stake. Federations are hard on parties to begin with-- any parties that aren't explicitly provincial/ regional (e.g. the Parti Quebecois) have to juggle their national and their provincial positions, trying to appeal to the very different median voters of each province severally as well as of the country as a whole. If parties had to compete in completely different electoral environments from one province to another, I imagine that the task would become hopeless. First past the post rules send you toward the median voter; proportional representation rules and STV rules mandate very different strategies. If I were a political party, I wouldn't want my strategic calculations to be rendered impossible like that. So the dominant political parties in any system might have a strong interest in isomorphism between the central and the provincial governments.
Indeed as a constitutional designer I'd worry that different electoral systems from state to state would encourage the growth of very different party systems at the state and the federal levels. (This turns out to be bad. See Mikhail Filippov, Peter C. Ordeshook and and Olga Shvetsova, Designing federalism: A theory of self-sustainable federal institutions, one of the best political science books on comparative federalism.) But that worry can't explain the isomorphism, just justify it. I suspect the explanation lies in some combination of party self-interest and sheer familiarity.
Matt Yglesias writes:
States seem to differ primarily in how they deal with some fairly trivial regulatory matters. Each state's rules governing alcoholic beverages differ somewhat from its neighbors, cigarette taxes and where (if ever) you're permitted to smoke indoors vary, but you don't see a ton of policy variation. No state, no matter how right-wing, has just voted to dismantle its public school system nor have we seen a state attempt single-payer health care. I wonder if this is parasitic on the fact that there's shockingly little institutional variation among American states.
US federalism is somewhat unusual in that the states have essentially total autonomy in terms of how they want to arrange the institutions of state government. The federal constitution only contains a vague requirement of a "Republican form of government" which seems to offer a lot of leeway. Nevertheless, 49 out of 50 states choose bicameralism. Zero states out of fifty opt for parliamentary-style governance where the state executive must maintain the confidence of the legislature. All fifty states, including tiny Rhode Island, implement a an interstitial country (or "parish") level of government between the state and towns and cities. All the states elect their legislators on the basis of single-member constituencies. You'd think that some state, at least, would try something different along some of these dimensions and see how it works out.
As a number of his commentators note (and see also Will Baude), there really is a fair amount of variation o those policy questions that haven't been taken away from the states by either Congressional preemption or federal judicial constraints. And some of the range of permissible institutional variation got removed in the 1940s-60s. (This is one of those assaults on federalism that I think was necessary to break Jim Crow but that we should still recognize was constitutionally costly-- ideally the 14th Amendment, 15th Amendment, and Voting Rights Act should not be interpreted to constrain institutional choice as tightly as they have been read in the last half-century, but otherwise southern states seemed likely to use their institutional leeway to concoct further ways to keep blacks out of political power in perpetuity.) Moreover, the different systems fo selecting judges and the different rules about initiatives, referenda, and recalls do make for very different kinds of political systems.
But still-- he's right, there's been no radically green or libertarian state government, no state government that was operationally socialist no matter how aspirationally socialist some of the old Scandianvian midwestern states were, etc. And every state has a separately-elected unitary governor, only one state has a unicameral legislature, no state has tried to get a PR or statewide STV system through VRA approval. Two observations.
One is that there was much more institutional variation during the period 1776-89. After the federal constitution was ratified, it became a focal point for how Americans thought about constitutional organization.
The second is that, as far as I can tell, this is actually very common in federations. So I doubt that "shockingly little" and that "somewhat unusual." I think the U.S. is typical here. I know a lot about a lot of federal systems (though of course not everything about all of them) and this kind of isomorphism between provincial governments and the federal government is, to the best of my knowledge, universal. To take the simplest case: I don't know of any federation with a presidential form of government that has even one province with a parliamentary one, or of any federation with a parliamentary form of governance that has even one province with an independently-elected executive.
Some federations do constrain institutional choice more than the "republican guaranty" clause does in the U.S. constitution-- India, for example-- but in general the constraint just seems to be familiarity. There might also be party issues at stake. Federations are hard on parties to begin with-- any parties that aren't explicitly provincial/ regional (e.g. the Parti Quebecois) have to juggle their national and their provincial positions, trying to appeal to the very different median voters of each province severally as well as of the country as a whole. If parties had to compete in completely different electoral environments from one province to another, I imagine that the task would become hopeless. First past the post rules send you toward the median voter; proportional representation rules and STV rules mandate very different strategies. If I were a political party, I wouldn't want my strategic calculations to be rendered impossible like that. So the dominant political parties in any system might have a strong interest in isomorphism between the central and the provincial governments.
Indeed as a constitutional designer I'd worry that different electoral systems from state to state would encourage the growth of very different party systems at the state and the federal levels. (This turns out to be bad. See Mikhail Filippov, Peter C. Ordeshook and and Olga Shvetsova, Designing federalism: A theory of self-sustainable federal institutions, one of the best political science books on comparative federalism.) But that worry can't explain the isomorphism, just justify it. I suspect the explanation lies in some combination of party self-interest and sheer familiarity.
Sunday, December 31, 2006
Five things
Dan tagged me with this game (it's not a "meme," people-- it's just a blogospheric parlor game). Five things most people don't know about me:
1) I type using two index fingers and my right thumb for the spacebar. People call this "hunt and peck" but I don't look at the keyboard, and I move along at 60-65 words per minute. I started typing very early, both because of my terrible handwriting, and because my grandfather was determined to introduce me to computers early on (so I spent a summer when I was six or so pointlessly writing programs in BASIC on his Commodore PET-- I had fun and learned a lot of math while learning what BASIC's math functions did, and it's only in retrospect that the pointlessness is apparent). So I was typing long before anyone was going to teach me to touch-type, and the habits were way too ingrained to unlearn later.
Unfortunately, other than the PET my typing was done on a manual typewriter-- and one of the habits I've been unable to unlearn is pounding on the keys much too hard. It's not only noisy; in the long run it's bad for the keyboards.
2) Career paths not taken, part 1: from the ages of 9 through 17 or so, I was almost constantly involved in theater, stage, performances, etc. I took a couple of years of kids' acting lessons from this guy (and he was in most of my earliest plays-- local Equity stock theaters that cast area kids in choruses and extra parts). When I was 10 I appeared in a TV ad for my uncle's race for a Florida judgeship [judicial elections-- shudder]; indeed I gave a 29.5 second testimonial to him, and he appeared only to speak the final two words ["Thanks, Jacob!"] I was never what you would call a good actor; and I didn't have my first dance lessons until I was 16, which was way too late for getting very far in musicals. The crowning moment was my honest-to-god Broadway tryout, for Oliver!-- which happened to come during the ten-day period when I dropped from soprano to bass. (Think Peter Brady singing "Who Will Buy?")
For a couple of years I was in one of those kids' song-and-dance troupes that goes around singing at malls, outside the entrance to Fanieul Hall, and so on. For several months we were the opening act for a solo tour by "Maria of Sesame Street," as she was billed. One of the other kiddie performers in the troupe (and someone I also went to high school with) was future CBS News correspondent (and an operatic singer to boot) Trish Regan.
3. Career paths not taken, part 2: politics. Let's see: I was, at 18, an elected delegate to the New Hampshire Democratic Convention. (My birthday was after the filing deadline but before the election; no one filed; I ran a write-in campaign.) At 21 I ran for the NH House of Representatives as a Libertarian, winning 12% of the vote. At 16, when my hometown had a Charter Commission (the local equivalent of a Constitutional Convention), I wrote, circulated petitions for, and spoke at Commission meetings on behalf of the creation of a nonvoting seat for a student from the local high school (which I didn't attend) on the school board-- as far as I know the provision's still in place. The first holder of that seat was Chip Griffin, now a blogger and political consultant. I was a tireless teenaged letter-to-the-editor writer, was heavily involved in one city council race and one gubernatorial race, and interned for a term in the Washington office of then-Congressman (now-Senator) Byron Dorgan. My own State House race was my test to see whether I really liked electoral politics and wanted to carve out a place for it in my life. The answers were no and no.
4. Career paths not taken 3: journalism, radio, and business administration. After three years as a reporter for my college radio station, I became its CEO for a year-- during the 91-92 recession, with bankruptcy looming. (The station is an independent corporation and depends on commercial ad revenue.) I've fired two people (non-student full-time staffers); one filed suit purporting discrimination on the grounds of anti-Semitism (yes, I'm Jewish, and so was her immediate supervisor); and I still authorized paying her a settlement because it was much, much cheaper than paying our lawyers for a suit would have been. Glad I've had to make payroll in my life, and glad I don't have to do it on a regular basis.
5. I was pretty isolated and out of the loop as a kid-- and, in pre-internet days, geeky kids didn't always have a way of finding out what other geeky kids did. When I went to math geek camp [a.k.a. Johns Hopkins' CTY program] at age 13, that was my first exposure to Dungeons & Dragons. 1984 is shockingly late for a kid as geeky as I was to have first played D&D...
Tag: (Ah, fun with exponents! You tag five people, then they tag five people, and so on, and so on until you're in a Clairol commercial that has used up all the atoms in the universe.) Belle Waring, laloca, Aeon Skoble, Andrew Norton, and Fabio Rojas.
Dan tagged me with this game (it's not a "meme," people-- it's just a blogospheric parlor game). Five things most people don't know about me:
1) I type using two index fingers and my right thumb for the spacebar. People call this "hunt and peck" but I don't look at the keyboard, and I move along at 60-65 words per minute. I started typing very early, both because of my terrible handwriting, and because my grandfather was determined to introduce me to computers early on (so I spent a summer when I was six or so pointlessly writing programs in BASIC on his Commodore PET-- I had fun and learned a lot of math while learning what BASIC's math functions did, and it's only in retrospect that the pointlessness is apparent). So I was typing long before anyone was going to teach me to touch-type, and the habits were way too ingrained to unlearn later.
Unfortunately, other than the PET my typing was done on a manual typewriter-- and one of the habits I've been unable to unlearn is pounding on the keys much too hard. It's not only noisy; in the long run it's bad for the keyboards.
2) Career paths not taken, part 1: from the ages of 9 through 17 or so, I was almost constantly involved in theater, stage, performances, etc. I took a couple of years of kids' acting lessons from this guy (and he was in most of my earliest plays-- local Equity stock theaters that cast area kids in choruses and extra parts). When I was 10 I appeared in a TV ad for my uncle's race for a Florida judgeship [judicial elections-- shudder]; indeed I gave a 29.5 second testimonial to him, and he appeared only to speak the final two words ["Thanks, Jacob!"] I was never what you would call a good actor; and I didn't have my first dance lessons until I was 16, which was way too late for getting very far in musicals. The crowning moment was my honest-to-god Broadway tryout, for Oliver!-- which happened to come during the ten-day period when I dropped from soprano to bass. (Think Peter Brady singing "Who Will Buy?")
For a couple of years I was in one of those kids' song-and-dance troupes that goes around singing at malls, outside the entrance to Fanieul Hall, and so on. For several months we were the opening act for a solo tour by "Maria of Sesame Street," as she was billed. One of the other kiddie performers in the troupe (and someone I also went to high school with) was future CBS News correspondent (and an operatic singer to boot) Trish Regan.
3. Career paths not taken, part 2: politics. Let's see: I was, at 18, an elected delegate to the New Hampshire Democratic Convention. (My birthday was after the filing deadline but before the election; no one filed; I ran a write-in campaign.) At 21 I ran for the NH House of Representatives as a Libertarian, winning 12% of the vote. At 16, when my hometown had a Charter Commission (the local equivalent of a Constitutional Convention), I wrote, circulated petitions for, and spoke at Commission meetings on behalf of the creation of a nonvoting seat for a student from the local high school (which I didn't attend) on the school board-- as far as I know the provision's still in place. The first holder of that seat was Chip Griffin, now a blogger and political consultant. I was a tireless teenaged letter-to-the-editor writer, was heavily involved in one city council race and one gubernatorial race, and interned for a term in the Washington office of then-Congressman (now-Senator) Byron Dorgan. My own State House race was my test to see whether I really liked electoral politics and wanted to carve out a place for it in my life. The answers were no and no.
4. Career paths not taken 3: journalism, radio, and business administration. After three years as a reporter for my college radio station, I became its CEO for a year-- during the 91-92 recession, with bankruptcy looming. (The station is an independent corporation and depends on commercial ad revenue.) I've fired two people (non-student full-time staffers); one filed suit purporting discrimination on the grounds of anti-Semitism (yes, I'm Jewish, and so was her immediate supervisor); and I still authorized paying her a settlement because it was much, much cheaper than paying our lawyers for a suit would have been. Glad I've had to make payroll in my life, and glad I don't have to do it on a regular basis.
5. I was pretty isolated and out of the loop as a kid-- and, in pre-internet days, geeky kids didn't always have a way of finding out what other geeky kids did. When I went to math geek camp [a.k.a. Johns Hopkins' CTY program] at age 13, that was my first exposure to Dungeons & Dragons. 1984 is shockingly late for a kid as geeky as I was to have first played D&D...
Tag: (Ah, fun with exponents! You tag five people, then they tag five people, and so on, and so on until you're in a Clairol commercial that has used up all the atoms in the universe.) Belle Waring, laloca, Aeon Skoble, Andrew Norton, and Fabio Rojas.
Upcoming
In Washington this week: the annual meetings of the American Association of Law Schools, the Federalist Society, and the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy. I'll be giving "Three Perversities of Indian Law" at the Federalist Society Friday morning. The ASPLP program follows. As always, to join the ASPLP and receive the volume of Nomos that will follow from this volume, click here and e-mail me.
------------------
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
"Leo Strauss and American Conservative Thought and Politics"
Commentator: John Holbo, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, National University of Singapore
Commentator: Arthur Jacobson, Max Freund Professor of Litigation & Advocacy.
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
"“Two There Are”: Church-State Separation and Religious Freedom"
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
"Liberty, Equality, Fraternity: Pluralist Perspectives "
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
In Washington this week: the annual meetings of the American Association of Law Schools, the Federalist Society, and the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy. I'll be giving "Three Perversities of Indian Law" at the Federalist Society Friday morning. The ASPLP program follows. As always, to join the ASPLP and receive the volume of Nomos that will follow from this volume, click here and e-mail me.
------------------
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
"Leo Strauss and American Conservative Thought and Politics"
Commentator: John Holbo, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, National University of Singapore
Commentator: Arthur Jacobson, Max Freund Professor of Litigation & Advocacy.
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
"“Two There Are”: Church-State Separation and Religious Freedom"
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
"Liberty, Equality, Fraternity: Pluralist Perspectives "
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
Saturday, December 30, 2006
There's a very strange...
blogspheric discussion afoot about federalism, whether and how American federalism is tainted by Jim Crow, antidiscrimination law vs. freedom of contract, and the bounds of civil discourse-- strange because somehow it's all come to center around Ann Althouse's judgments about who weirded her out at a conference, which seems not to be the most intellectually productive starting point. (See a roundup and reaction from Ron Bailey; more from Virginia Postrel; Dan on the basic character of the conferences and the oddity of Althouse's reactions;and Orin Kerr, Eugene Volokh, and Ilya Somin on the merits of the question. [UPDATE: See also Julian Sanchez. Or else just skip all that follows and seeThers, on the general pattern of which I was unfortunately unaware when I first posted, or Altmouse, the existence of which confirms that there's a well-known and well-established phenomenon here.]
I've got a discussion of the federalism and Jim Crow questions in my APSR paper, and a much more extensive follow-up in a an article that should be coming out in Social Philosophy and Policy any day now. (Can't be put online for a year, per SPP's copyright rules.) The upshot:
1) Federalism is valuable in a system instrumentally, as a check on overall power-- both a direct check on the power of the center and an indirect check on the power of peer provinces/ states. It is to be valued for its contribution to freedom, not as if it were a freestanding moral principle that might be superior to freedom.
2) By empowering local majorities over local minorities, federalism sometimes, predictably, threatens freedom as well.
3) These tendencies can't be reliably teased apart in practice, no matter how cleanly they can be distinguished in principle. For federalism to have its favorable effects, the provinces/ states must have some substantial power in the political system, and must be able to command some genuine loyalty from their local citizenries. Their ability to command that loyalty and hold onto that power will often come from emphasizing that which is distinctive to the local majority-- at the cost of local illiberalism and threats to local minorities. Provinces and states that are so sharply limited by the center that they could not threaten local minorities are alos likely to be effectively powerless against threats from the center, and may be coopted or may become vestigial irrelevancies. (Remember the discussion from Tocqueville, Old Regime: because the aristocrats lost so much of their effective regional governing power, power which they undoubtedly abused, they were easily coopted by Versailles and eased to be an effective check on the crown.)
4) So in any given federation there is a need for rough estimates, attention to historical context, and balancing calculations; we will lack bright-line rules that can either tell us to consistently favor provinces or to consistently disfavor them.
5) In the American context, slavery and Jim Crow are fundamental facts about American political development and state-building; they and their influence permeate everything in the system, and can rarely be dismissed as a marginal case that's beside the point of some larger political principle.
6) Most of the centralization of the American state had nothing to do with fighting Jim Crow or slavery, and indeed the federal government was itself deeply implicated in them (actively, not just through inaction). We should resist the lazy tendency to equate Washington with antiracism and the states with racism, or centralization with antiracism and federalism with racism. Neither Wilson's centralization nor FDR's had anything to do with fighting Jim Crow (indeed Wilson made it national policy, and FDR provided Jim Crow with massive subsidies and material support-- see Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White). The crucial transformation of the Commerce Clause was neither necessary nor sufficient nor particularly relevant for much-later civil rights activity-- Heart of Atlanta could have been decided on the basis of the 14th Amendment, not the Commerce Clause. To oppose the centralization of 1937 is not to support Jim Crow.
7) But, finally, the Union Army, the federal courts, and Congress did play decisive roles in breaking racial despotism, and I doubt that any balance of advantage calculations could possibly show that the indirect costs to freedom from the attendant erosion of federalism came close to outweighing the benefits. I've met a lot of conservative/ southern agrarian types whose view of federalism seems to be otherwise; and there were moments in the American libertarian movement when some undoubtedly antiracist libertarians (Murray Rothbard) sided with the Dixiecrats, mistaking the means (federalism) for the end (freedom). This is an old mistake-- Lord Acton made it with respect to the American Civil War-- but it's still a mistake.
Jim Crow does in a real sense taint American federalism, though Ilya Somin is certainly right to say that it taints American centralization, too. It doesn't taint the whole of American federalism, or of federalist jurisprudence. And in order to preserve the states in their ability to protect freedom in the overall system, the states have to be left some leeway-- not treated with such knee-jerk suspicion that every arguably bad state law is considered a Jim Crow-like mortal threat to civic values. But in figuring out the balance of advantages about any particular allocation of responsibility between the states and the center, Jim Crow must loom large in the American historical memory.
In my own assessment, the American center remains massively too powerful, and federalism in the U.S. generally needs to be bolstered not further eroded. But, yes, the project of bolstering it should be haunted by Jim Crow, and chastened by the memory.
UPDATE: Oy. I just read some more of Althouse's own posts on all this-- which are a really bizarre mix of extreme defensiveness, extreme personal vitriol, and a dramatic interest in herself and her own sense of righteousness. And I then remembered the tone, and remembered where I'd heard of Ann Althouse before. (I know she's become a big-deal blogger, but she's never been on my to-read list.) She was the one who found Feministing blogger Jessica guilty of having breasts while standing in the same room as Bill Clinton. The arguments that followed spiralled nastily quickly-- I think due to that same combination of traits. I don't know Professor Althouse-- never met her-- and I have no idea whether the persona of her blog corresponds to her character. (Blogging's not for everybody, and it can be very tricky to keep control of the tone of one's blogging.) But the blog persona seems to be consistent across the two cases, and to be... something less than admirable.
UPDATE AGAIN:
A commentor on this Amber Taylor post writes:
Not quite. I agree that we lack bright-line rules and are in the world of judgment calls. I strongly disagree that those whose judgment calls differ from Althouse's are to be presumed racist until they prove (to her!) otherwise. That's more than a stylistic difference. Part of really recognizing complexity is recognizing the likelihood of reasonable disagreement.
Althouse's position isn't really an anti-dogmatist one. It's dogmatism without a theory. She's drawn a bright line in a particular place, and those on the wrong side of it are presumed to be arguing in bad faith for malicious motives because no one could ever really hold such a view. Her bright line isn't drawn deductively, but it's a much brighter line than those that have been drawn by any of her critics. Even if I draw the federalism line kind of close to where she does, I do so on the basis of balancing considerations some of which she's preemptively declared it illegitimate to even take into account.
FINAL UPDATE: Althouse responds. She's displeased that both Dan and Jonathan Adler declared my post to be the 'last word' (not a claim I made). And, apparently, she thinks we're talking across genres:
Or, as she says elsewhere, what she does is
Maybe I don't. So, rather than perpetuate the genre mistake and argue further, I'll direct you to her own last word.
blogspheric discussion afoot about federalism, whether and how American federalism is tainted by Jim Crow, antidiscrimination law vs. freedom of contract, and the bounds of civil discourse-- strange because somehow it's all come to center around Ann Althouse's judgments about who weirded her out at a conference, which seems not to be the most intellectually productive starting point. (See a roundup and reaction from Ron Bailey; more from Virginia Postrel; Dan on the basic character of the conferences and the oddity of Althouse's reactions;and Orin Kerr, Eugene Volokh, and Ilya Somin on the merits of the question. [UPDATE: See also Julian Sanchez. Or else just skip all that follows and seeThers, on the general pattern of which I was unfortunately unaware when I first posted, or Altmouse, the existence of which confirms that there's a well-known and well-established phenomenon here.]
I've got a discussion of the federalism and Jim Crow questions in my APSR paper, and a much more extensive follow-up in a an article that should be coming out in Social Philosophy and Policy any day now. (Can't be put online for a year, per SPP's copyright rules.) The upshot:
1) Federalism is valuable in a system instrumentally, as a check on overall power-- both a direct check on the power of the center and an indirect check on the power of peer provinces/ states. It is to be valued for its contribution to freedom, not as if it were a freestanding moral principle that might be superior to freedom.
2) By empowering local majorities over local minorities, federalism sometimes, predictably, threatens freedom as well.
3) These tendencies can't be reliably teased apart in practice, no matter how cleanly they can be distinguished in principle. For federalism to have its favorable effects, the provinces/ states must have some substantial power in the political system, and must be able to command some genuine loyalty from their local citizenries. Their ability to command that loyalty and hold onto that power will often come from emphasizing that which is distinctive to the local majority-- at the cost of local illiberalism and threats to local minorities. Provinces and states that are so sharply limited by the center that they could not threaten local minorities are alos likely to be effectively powerless against threats from the center, and may be coopted or may become vestigial irrelevancies. (Remember the discussion from Tocqueville, Old Regime: because the aristocrats lost so much of their effective regional governing power, power which they undoubtedly abused, they were easily coopted by Versailles and eased to be an effective check on the crown.)
4) So in any given federation there is a need for rough estimates, attention to historical context, and balancing calculations; we will lack bright-line rules that can either tell us to consistently favor provinces or to consistently disfavor them.
5) In the American context, slavery and Jim Crow are fundamental facts about American political development and state-building; they and their influence permeate everything in the system, and can rarely be dismissed as a marginal case that's beside the point of some larger political principle.
6) Most of the centralization of the American state had nothing to do with fighting Jim Crow or slavery, and indeed the federal government was itself deeply implicated in them (actively, not just through inaction). We should resist the lazy tendency to equate Washington with antiracism and the states with racism, or centralization with antiracism and federalism with racism. Neither Wilson's centralization nor FDR's had anything to do with fighting Jim Crow (indeed Wilson made it national policy, and FDR provided Jim Crow with massive subsidies and material support-- see Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White). The crucial transformation of the Commerce Clause was neither necessary nor sufficient nor particularly relevant for much-later civil rights activity-- Heart of Atlanta could have been decided on the basis of the 14th Amendment, not the Commerce Clause. To oppose the centralization of 1937 is not to support Jim Crow.
7) But, finally, the Union Army, the federal courts, and Congress did play decisive roles in breaking racial despotism, and I doubt that any balance of advantage calculations could possibly show that the indirect costs to freedom from the attendant erosion of federalism came close to outweighing the benefits. I've met a lot of conservative/ southern agrarian types whose view of federalism seems to be otherwise; and there were moments in the American libertarian movement when some undoubtedly antiracist libertarians (Murray Rothbard) sided with the Dixiecrats, mistaking the means (federalism) for the end (freedom). This is an old mistake-- Lord Acton made it with respect to the American Civil War-- but it's still a mistake.
Jim Crow does in a real sense taint American federalism, though Ilya Somin is certainly right to say that it taints American centralization, too. It doesn't taint the whole of American federalism, or of federalist jurisprudence. And in order to preserve the states in their ability to protect freedom in the overall system, the states have to be left some leeway-- not treated with such knee-jerk suspicion that every arguably bad state law is considered a Jim Crow-like mortal threat to civic values. But in figuring out the balance of advantages about any particular allocation of responsibility between the states and the center, Jim Crow must loom large in the American historical memory.
In my own assessment, the American center remains massively too powerful, and federalism in the U.S. generally needs to be bolstered not further eroded. But, yes, the project of bolstering it should be haunted by Jim Crow, and chastened by the memory.
UPDATE: Oy. I just read some more of Althouse's own posts on all this-- which are a really bizarre mix of extreme defensiveness, extreme personal vitriol, and a dramatic interest in herself and her own sense of righteousness. And I then remembered the tone, and remembered where I'd heard of Ann Althouse before. (I know she's become a big-deal blogger, but she's never been on my to-read list.) She was the one who found Feministing blogger Jessica guilty of having breasts while standing in the same room as Bill Clinton. The arguments that followed spiralled nastily quickly-- I think due to that same combination of traits. I don't know Professor Althouse-- never met her-- and I have no idea whether the persona of her blog corresponds to her character. (Blogging's not for everybody, and it can be very tricky to keep control of the tone of one's blogging.) But the blog persona seems to be consistent across the two cases, and to be... something less than admirable.
UPDATE AGAIN:
A commentor on this Amber Taylor post writes:
I think that Jacob Levy is right on and essentially agrees with Ann Althouse. I think Levy's criticism goes to Althouse's style, rather than her substance.
[...]
That is, top-down thinking is very limited when thinking about Federalism. Althouse agrees with this fundamental point when she criticizes the libertarian worship of ideas (really top-down ideas) and failure to acknowledge the limitations (or exceptions to) top-down thinking exhibited by libertarians.
Personally, I am not as bothered by Althouse's style as is Levy. But like Levy, I agree with Althouse on substance.
Not quite. I agree that we lack bright-line rules and are in the world of judgment calls. I strongly disagree that those whose judgment calls differ from Althouse's are to be presumed racist until they prove (to her!) otherwise. That's more than a stylistic difference. Part of really recognizing complexity is recognizing the likelihood of reasonable disagreement.
Althouse's position isn't really an anti-dogmatist one. It's dogmatism without a theory. She's drawn a bright line in a particular place, and those on the wrong side of it are presumed to be arguing in bad faith for malicious motives because no one could ever really hold such a view. Her bright line isn't drawn deductively, but it's a much brighter line than those that have been drawn by any of her critics. Even if I draw the federalism line kind of close to where she does, I do so on the basis of balancing considerations some of which she's preemptively declared it illegitimate to even take into account.
FINAL UPDATE: Althouse responds. She's displeased that both Dan and Jonathan Adler declared my post to be the 'last word' (not a claim I made). And, apparently, she thinks we're talking across genres:
I'm writing in a different mode from them. I'm not trying to model an academic writing style or demeanor. I'm writing in a way that makes the squares exclaim "You, a law professor!" I'm doing something different here.
Or, as she says elsewhere, what she does is
not the political/law/academic blogging those bloggers who like to take shots at me do. Oh, no! It's something else. Do you get it?
Maybe I don't. So, rather than perpetuate the genre mistake and argue further, I'll direct you to her own last word.
Wednesday, December 27, 2006
Genres
Jonathan Adler asks:
The usual discussions ensure in comments (what's literature? who's to judge? how dare you? Of course Stranger in a Strange Land is literature! Of course it's not! Lem! Wells! Verne! Shelley! Canticle!) But the question made me think about something else.
I take it that the question would by now have a different flavor when asked about fantasy, both because of the recognized status of Tolkien and because of the advent of magical realism. There's no meaningful way to draw the boundaries of the category "fantasy" that excludes Rushdie, Garcia Marquez, Murakami, etc., unless it's purely arbitrarily limited to sword-and-sorcery. SF has an occasional Margaret Atwood novel, plus, for example, Never Let Me Go. But, notwithstanding all the technological excitement and anxiety of the past quarter-century, there hasn't been a genre that is to SF as magical realism is to fantasy-- a clearly literary style that makes use of the genre's resources while so completely transcending the genre's boundaries as to have their primary readership far outside the genre's audience. We've had SF married to the political-suspense-thriller genre, and to historical fiction (steampunk, the Baroque Trilogy), but not to high literary fiction to create science-fictional realism (or whatever). I wonder why?
Jonathan Adler asks:
A well-crafted sci-fi book can be a fun read, but are there many modern science fiction works that would qualify as "literature"? Any science fiction books that would qualify as literary masterpieces?
The usual discussions ensure in comments (what's literature? who's to judge? how dare you? Of course Stranger in a Strange Land is literature! Of course it's not! Lem! Wells! Verne! Shelley! Canticle!) But the question made me think about something else.
I take it that the question would by now have a different flavor when asked about fantasy, both because of the recognized status of Tolkien and because of the advent of magical realism. There's no meaningful way to draw the boundaries of the category "fantasy" that excludes Rushdie, Garcia Marquez, Murakami, etc., unless it's purely arbitrarily limited to sword-and-sorcery. SF has an occasional Margaret Atwood novel, plus, for example, Never Let Me Go. But, notwithstanding all the technological excitement and anxiety of the past quarter-century, there hasn't been a genre that is to SF as magical realism is to fantasy-- a clearly literary style that makes use of the genre's resources while so completely transcending the genre's boundaries as to have their primary readership far outside the genre's audience. We've had SF married to the political-suspense-thriller genre, and to historical fiction (steampunk, the Baroque Trilogy), but not to high literary fiction to create science-fictional realism (or whatever). I wonder why?
Saturday, December 23, 2006
Back from Belize
I'm back now, from the first two-week vacation of my adult life; our plane landed in Montreal at 12:40. Had an absolutely wonderful time, scuba dove into this remarkable thing, read lots of books (about which I'll be blogging). Eastward-facing balcony overlooking the Caribbean and the reef made for spectacular sunrises. Hey, wanna see my slide show?
Happy to go, happy to come back. It makes a real difference how pleasant your hometown airport is, doesn't it? Trudeau is clean, bright, very efficiently planned and laid out, and has enough immigration officials to get you through in a matter of minutes. (By contrast, Miami, where our connection was, has the dumb layout dreaded by international travellers everywhere-- you have to go through immigrations, collect your baggage, and get it through customs, even when you're immediately connecting onto a flight that will take you out of the country again. Also: all the commerce is in the main terminal, almost none on the concourses. Very bad.) Missed Montreal, missed my house, missed my dogs.
I think Open University may be closed for the week, so I'll probably do some blogging here instead. But of course there's also a syllabus to finish, some hundreds of e-mails to read, and a few items on my 2006 to-do list that are now looking endangered... and I'm tired, and it's the holidays!
So here's an amended repost (now with titles) in lieu of new content.
---------------
American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy Annual Meeting
American Conservative Thought and Politics
Conference co-chairs: Melissa S. Williams and Sanford Levinson
Washington DC, January 5-6 2007, in conjunction with the American Association of Law Schools Annual Meeting.
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
"Leo Strauss and American Conservative Thought and Politics"
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
"“Two There Are”: Church-State Separation and Religious Freedom"
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
"Liberty, Equality, Fraternity: Pluralist Perspectives "
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
-------------
In order to join the ASPLP-- paying a year of dues now carries the benefit of receiving the volume of Nomos on "American Conservative Thought and Politics" in about three years' time, and dues are lower than the cover price (for graduate students, very much lower)-- please click here.
I'm back now, from the first two-week vacation of my adult life; our plane landed in Montreal at 12:40. Had an absolutely wonderful time, scuba dove into this remarkable thing, read lots of books (about which I'll be blogging). Eastward-facing balcony overlooking the Caribbean and the reef made for spectacular sunrises. Hey, wanna see my slide show?
Happy to go, happy to come back. It makes a real difference how pleasant your hometown airport is, doesn't it? Trudeau is clean, bright, very efficiently planned and laid out, and has enough immigration officials to get you through in a matter of minutes. (By contrast, Miami, where our connection was, has the dumb layout dreaded by international travellers everywhere-- you have to go through immigrations, collect your baggage, and get it through customs, even when you're immediately connecting onto a flight that will take you out of the country again. Also: all the commerce is in the main terminal, almost none on the concourses. Very bad.) Missed Montreal, missed my house, missed my dogs.
I think Open University may be closed for the week, so I'll probably do some blogging here instead. But of course there's also a syllabus to finish, some hundreds of e-mails to read, and a few items on my 2006 to-do list that are now looking endangered... and I'm tired, and it's the holidays!
So here's an amended repost (now with titles) in lieu of new content.
---------------
American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy Annual Meeting
American Conservative Thought and Politics
Conference co-chairs: Melissa S. Williams and Sanford Levinson
Washington DC, January 5-6 2007, in conjunction with the American Association of Law Schools Annual Meeting.
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
"Leo Strauss and American Conservative Thought and Politics"
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
"“Two There Are”: Church-State Separation and Religious Freedom"
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
"Liberty, Equality, Fraternity: Pluralist Perspectives "
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
-------------
In order to join the ASPLP-- paying a year of dues now carries the benefit of receiving the volume of Nomos on "American Conservative Thought and Politics" in about three years' time, and dues are lower than the cover price (for graduate students, very much lower)-- please click here.
Friday, December 08, 2006
All the cool blogkids
... are playing with the new LibraryThing toy, Unsuggester
But unlike them, I can't get any really funny results. Indeed, I can barely get different results from book to book. Every book I enter yields a whole string of Christian self-help books ['how to accept that Jesus died a purpose-driven death so you can lead a prayerful life'], plus sometimes Eragon and Confessions of a Shopaholic. The fun thing about the toy is the ability to say, "aha! I defy your automated predictability, because I read both X and Y!" But I failed to find anything like that; I really don't own all of the books that Unsuggester predicts I won't own...
... are playing with the new LibraryThing toy, Unsuggester
Unsuggester takes "people who like this also like that" and turns it on its head. It analyzes the seven million books LibraryThing members have recorded as owned or read, and comes back with books least likely to share a library with the book you suggest.
But unlike them, I can't get any really funny results. Indeed, I can barely get different results from book to book. Every book I enter yields a whole string of Christian self-help books ['how to accept that Jesus died a purpose-driven death so you can lead a prayerful life'], plus sometimes Eragon and Confessions of a Shopaholic. The fun thing about the toy is the ability to say, "aha! I defy your automated predictability, because I read both X and Y!" But I failed to find anything like that; I really don't own all of the books that Unsuggester predicts I won't own...
Thursday, December 07, 2006
Wednesday, December 06, 2006
The greats
From this very smart Will Wilkinson post about Rawls (Will has a real habit of being right about important stuff), the following odd judgments.
Well, Hobbes, certainly. I understand the appeal of Spencer but can't share in that judgment-- and for Sidgwick to be even a close third reflects an unacceptable deviationism brought on by Will's training as a political philosopher rather than a political theorist. (Is Sidgwick meaningfully political at all? Can he rival Constant, Tocqueville, Hegel, or Marx?)
But-- Hume?
The second half of the 18th century saw breakthrough after breakthrough in the human sciences-- political theory, political philosophy, political economy, and political science, but also moral philosophy, moral psychology, epistemology, and also historical sociology, jurisprudence, etc., etc. In the human sciences taken in aggregrate, four of the greatest thinkers in western history wrote their major works in something like a forty-year timespan: Hume, Rousseau, Smith, and Kant. I submit that there hadn't been anything quite like that concentration of intellectual greatness in these fields since Plato and Aristotle. And qua philosophers, Hume and Kant tower over even Rousseau and Smith.
But as political philosophers? No. Smith and Rousseau tower over Hume and Kant, as important as the work of the latter two was. Please, Will, an explanation and defense...
From this very smart Will Wilkinson post about Rawls (Will has a real habit of being right about important stuff), the following odd judgments.
Who are the greatest political philosophers of the past few centuries, according to my idiosyncratic judgment? 19th C.: Herbert Spencer (maybe the most unjustly maligned thinker ever) by a hair over J.S. Mill and Henry Sidgwick. 18th C.: David Hume over Adam Smith by a nose. 17th C.: Thomas Hobbes by a nose over John Locke, for reasons similar to Rawls vs. Nozick.
Well, Hobbes, certainly. I understand the appeal of Spencer but can't share in that judgment-- and for Sidgwick to be even a close third reflects an unacceptable deviationism brought on by Will's training as a political philosopher rather than a political theorist. (Is Sidgwick meaningfully political at all? Can he rival Constant, Tocqueville, Hegel, or Marx?)
But-- Hume?
The second half of the 18th century saw breakthrough after breakthrough in the human sciences-- political theory, political philosophy, political economy, and political science, but also moral philosophy, moral psychology, epistemology, and also historical sociology, jurisprudence, etc., etc. In the human sciences taken in aggregrate, four of the greatest thinkers in western history wrote their major works in something like a forty-year timespan: Hume, Rousseau, Smith, and Kant. I submit that there hadn't been anything quite like that concentration of intellectual greatness in these fields since Plato and Aristotle. And qua philosophers, Hume and Kant tower over even Rousseau and Smith.
But as political philosophers? No. Smith and Rousseau tower over Hume and Kant, as important as the work of the latter two was. Please, Will, an explanation and defense...
Tuesday, December 05, 2006
I can't say...
that I always agree with the Chronicle's "Ms. mentor" column. But ABDs, get ye hence. And remember: writing's just like that.
that I always agree with the Chronicle's "Ms. mentor" column. But ABDs, get ye hence. And remember: writing's just like that.
Monday, December 04, 2006
Revisions
I've uploaded into SSRN the final revised version of "Federalism, Liberalism, and the Separation of Loyalties," forthcoming, American Political Science Review, c. August 2007.
I've uploaded into SSRN the final revised version of "Federalism, Liberalism, and the Separation of Loyalties," forthcoming, American Political Science Review, c. August 2007.
Sunday, December 03, 2006
I haven't seen it yet...
but my former teacher Roderick Long alerts me to the following:
Sounds like a fair characterization of my view; "uneasy tensions" are a specialty of my work in political theory, I think. I'm of course skeptical of the proffered altenative, but look forward to reading the argument for it.
but my former teacher Roderick Long alerts me to the following:
The Journal of Libertarian Studies continues to bring you exciting cutting-edge scholarship in libertarian theory. Here’s what you’ll find in issue 20.3: [...]
Jacob T. Levy has maintained that the primary case for multiculturalist legislation lies in its potential to block the oppression of some cultures by others. In a review of Levy’s book The Multiculturalism of Fear, Marcus Verhaegh worries that Levy’s approach manifests an uneasy tension between suspicion of particularist identities on the one hand and suspicion of attempts to suppress such identities on the other; Verhaegh suggests that a more positive appreciation for particularist identities can be reconciled with the kind of protection from oppression that Levy seeks by embracing a more decentralist, libertarian vision.
Sounds like a fair characterization of my view; "uneasy tensions" are a specialty of my work in political theory, I think. I'm of course skeptical of the proffered altenative, but look forward to reading the argument for it.
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