Hither and yon, warm weather edition: two talks at UCLA

Thursday, November 13, 7 pm, public lecture in 2232 School of Public Affairs: "Freedom and Federalism." More information here.

Friday, November 14, noon, workshop in School of Public Affairs Building room 5391 (Faculty Lounge): "Contra politanism: against the moral teleology of political forms." (Please e-mail in advance for a copy of the paper.)

Senior fellowship at CREUM

Thursday, 6 November 2008 in Fellowships, Notices by Martin Blanchard | No comments

The University of Montreal’s Centre de recherche en éthique (CREUM) is proud to announce its senior fellowship grant. We are inviting applications of professor-researchers for residential fellowships which can vary in length according to individual circumstances. Fellowships up to 40,000 $ will be awarded for the academic year 2009-2010.

CREUM’s mission is to contribute to interdisciplinary research and graduate training in the areas of fundamental and applied ethics.

We encourage applications from researchers working in the principal research domains of CRÉUM : fundamental ethics, ethics and politics, ethics and health, ethics and economy, ethics and the environment. We also accept applications from different domains, inasmuch as their research has a direct link with ethics.

The University of Montreal is a francophone institution. Applicants are expected to have at least a working knowledge of French.

The CREUM will offer to its senior fellow :

- A research grant up to 40 000 $ ;
- An individual office ;
- Access to the services of the University of Montreal (libraries, sports center, etc.) ;
- Assistance for material organisation of the stay.

In return, the fellow will be expected :

- To pursue the research project submitted in their application ;
- To participate in the Center’s activities (conferences, seminars, lectures) ;
- To present their work in progress in the context of Center’s seminars and workshops.

Applications will be judged according :

- To the significance of their proposed research and its relevance to CREUM’s mission ;
- To the quality of candidates’ previous research and their ability to benefit from the activities of the Center.
Applicants must submit all of the following to the CREUM by December 31, 2008 :

- A curriculum vitae ;
- One scholarly paper or publication written in the course of the last three years ;
- A statement (1 500 words or less) describing the proposed research project ;
- Two letters of reference (sent directly to the Center before the deadline) ;

Postmark deadline is December 31, 2008. Send applications to :

Daniel M. Weinstock, director
Centre de recherche en éthique (CREUM)
University of Montreal
C.P. 6128, succursale Centre-Ville
Montreal (Quebec)
Canada H3C 3J7

Quote of the day, special 1L edition

"Oh, I don't believe in hypothetical situations, Mr Donaghy. That's like lying to your brain." Kenneth, 30 Rock, November 6 2008.

Remember, remember...

when, a year ago, Ron Paul raised a whole lotta money on Guy Fawkes Day? It's forever ago in political time, and hard to remember that it seemed particularly interesting interesting. But my post about Ron Paul, Guy Fawkes, and V for Vendetta was one of the most-read things I've ever written, oddly enough. And I still think that the migration from the defense of the British state through Alan Moore's anti-Thatcherism to Ron Paul, the fact that a traditional British celebration of the defeat of the enemies of the state could end up animating an agenda of radical anti-statism, is one of the stranger things I've ever seen in political symbolism. So, for this year's Guy Fawkes Day, a link to look backward at.

Do Libertarians Fit in a Liberal World?

Todd Seavey has written an article for Reason about the liberalism and libertarianism conference at Princeton a coupleof weeks ago.

The challenge is structuring inter-faith dialogue: Indonesia in comparative perspective

Today at McGill: The challenge is structuring inter-faith dialogue: Indonesia in comparative perspective

Thursday, 6 November 2008
9:00 am ― 2:00 pm
Thomson House
Ballroom
3650 McTavish Street

Co-sponsored by the Embassy of the Republic of Indonesia; Department of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Indonesia, Ministry of Religious Affairs of the Republic of Indonesia; McGill University’s IAIN Indonesia Social Equity Project and the Centre for Developing-Area Studies.

9:00 am. – Introduction: Professor Phil Buckley (McGill University, IISEP);

-Welcome from McGill University: Prof. Christopher Manfredi, Dean, Faculty of Arts
-Opening comments: His Excellency Djoko Hardono, the Ambassador of the Republic of Indonesia to Canada

-Opening comments: Bpk Andri Hadi, Director-General for Information and Public Diplomacy, Department of Foreign Affairs, Republic of Indonesia

9:30: Framing the question of Inter-faith dialogue
Prof Patrice Brodeur, Canada Research Chair on Islam, Pluralism, and Globalization at the Faculty of Theology and the Science of Religions, University of Montreal
Professor Phil Oxhorn (CDAS, McGill University)

10:20-12:00 Panel 1 (Moderator: Professor Jamil Ragep, McGill University)

1. Prof. Franz Magnis Suseno: Pluralism and Relations Between Religions: The Focus on Indonesia (25 minutes)

2. Prof Wayan Wita : Some Concepts of Local Genius and Culture for Universal Interfaith, Hinduism Perspectives (25 minutes)

Responses: Professor Davesh Soneji; Professor Jacob Levy

12:20-2:00: Panel II (Moderator: Professor Erik Kuhonta, McGill University)
1. Prof. Dr. Bahtiar Effendy: “Interfaith Dialogue: The Indonesian Perspective.”
2. Dr. Arif Zamhari Rohman PhD

Respondents: Professor Ellen Aitken; Mr. Jaime F. Opazo Sáez

2:00pm: Closing remarks

Now online

The special issue of Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy devoted to a symposium on David Miller's National Responsibility and Global Justice, including my National and statist responsibility,among many other pieces. (Institutional subscriptions likely necessary.)

Readings for the day after

Fabio Rojas, "why i admire the obama i know and fear for the obama that is to come"

Franklin Foer, "Hail to the chief, any chief"

Todd Seavey, "Time for Obama Honeymoon to End" (NB: in parliamentary procedure, the time to reconsider something that's just happened isn't until a member of the previous majority says so!)

David Bernstein, "The end of white supremacy"

Mike Potemra at the Corner, "The View From Harlem, worth quoting:

Why was I, a John McCain voter, there [at the Obama celebration in Harlem]? A bit of personal history. I was born in 1964, and on the day I was born the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Prince Edward County in Virginia had to reopen its public schools. The county had closed the schools because they decided it was better to have no public schools at all than to have to admit black kids into them. Here we are, just 44 years later, with an African-American president, a president elected with the electoral votes of that very same Commonwealth of Virginia.

I voted for John McCain because I admire him immensely as a person, and agree with him on many more issues than I do with Senator Obama. And I ask a rhetorical question: Can we McCain voters, without embarrassment, shed a tear of patriotic joy about the historic significance of what just happened? And I offer a short, rhetorical answer.

Yes, we can.

[Update:] Will Wilkinson, "One night of romance"

Scattered thoughts on the day after:

I keep seeing the phrase "record turnout" thrown around. It's not true. I don't think turnout is an end in itself, and don't think that lower turnout signals an unhealthier democracy. But those who disagree shouldn't then take it on faith that an inspirational candidate automatically translated into higher turnout. It appears that turnout will be lower both in absolute terms and as a proportion of the electorate than in 2004. McCain got about 7 million fewer votes than Bush; Obama got about 3 million more than Kerry. The disspiritedness and disillusionment of Republicans and Republican-leaning Independents mattered, a lot. A Republican base, faced with the catastrophic failure of a presidency they had rooted for and the nomination of a candidate they'd always disliked, stayed home-- not in droves but not in trickles either. [Update: This Politico story is claiming turnout of 130 million, but I don't see how to square that with any other reported numbers.]

Ted Stevens is winning? That's repulsive. And it's a very bad omen for the rebuilding of a sane, honest, principled Republican Party that a smart decent guy like John Sununu got thumped while Ted Stevens got reelected. More broadly, the extinction of New England Republicanism seems to me a bad thing-- the GOP that is the regional party of the resentful South is a particularly unattractive opposition party. On the other hand, it's a wonderful thing that (apparently) three states of the Confederacy voted for Obama.

Yay for the marijuana referenda, boo for the marriage referenda-- and I really hope that California Prop 8 isn't construed retroactively so as to annul existing marriages.

The Bob Barr campaign was a mess, and by any reasonable measure the enterprise of trying to advance libertarian ideas with third-party presidential candidates seems overdue for retirement. (The teenage LP activist who still lives in my memory is very angry at me for writing that sentence.) But I can't help it-- I'm pleased to see Barr's vote exceed the two-party gap in an important state that then tilted Democratic, North Carolina. (And southern Libertarians are traditionally more likely to be Republican voters otherwise, so it's very plausible that Barr tipped the state.) That does at least send a tiny little but audible signal to the Republicans that the big-spending, trade-undermining, civil-liberties-attacking path of the Bush years cost them some small-government voters who they can't take for granted.

Twenty years ago I hadn't heard of Barack Obama, so I don't have twenty years worth of belief that he could never be president to overcome. Twenty years ago I very much had heard of Joe Biden, and watching the scene in Grant Park on TV my brain kept skipping a beat at seeing him up there. I have twenty years worth of accumulated belief that he was never rising above his Senate seat, and changing that belief is taking some work.

While I think Obama will be more purely his own man and less the product of competing pressure groups on his staff than any president since, well, let's say LBJ, I'm still very happy to hear of the Rahm Emanuel invitation. It's good news for the fight to save NAFTA from Obama's Ohio primary rhetoric, since Emanuel was one of the champions of NAFTA ratification in 1993.

I hear a lot of commentary about Obama seeming subdued last night, all of it at least mildly negative but noting that it's understandable less than 24 hours after the death of his grandmother. I have to say that I liked it; I like it when he's serious and sober and professorial, which is a lot of the time. (I didn't understand "professorial" being used as a term of abuse after the third debate.) Though it's hard to rank Obama and Bill Clinton as political orators, I enjoy listening to Obama more, in large part because of his calm seriousness. When Clinton feels someone's pain, he increases mine. His smile and warmth can occasionally be infectious but often strike me as flippant or self-satisfied. I loved Clinton's 2004 convention address, but always hated watching his State of the Union talks and eventually just quit doing so; and in presidential debates he always left me feeling like I was being lied to even when I wasn't. (All of this is totally compatible with the praise I sometimes heap on the Clinton presidency, the Clinton years, and the Clinton brand of New Democratic politics, by the way.) The happiness of the sneaky kid who's getting away with something never seemed far from him-- except when he exploded in anger at not getting away with something. The contrast between Clinton's heat and Obama's cool is already a commonplace, but it's true, and I'm much more at ease with Obama's style.

Moreover, to be sober about the duties and responsibilities that are now his seems entirely in order.

Tarr, "Subnationalism and Constitutional Space," Friday November 7 at McGill

Friday, November 7, 12-2 pm, G. Alan Tarr will present a paper, "Federalism and Subnational Constitutional Space" in the Gold Room at McGill's Faculty Club. Responses will be provided by Professor Filippo Sabetti and by Erin Crandall, both of McGill Political Science, prior to a general discussion.

Alan Tarr is the foremost scholar of constitutionalism in American states. He is the Director of the Center for State Constitutional Studies, and Chair of the Department of Political Science, Rutgers University, Camden. He is the author of Understanding State Constitutions (Princeton) and the editor of numerous volumes on state constitutions and constitutional politics. This year he is Fulbright Visiting Chair in Public Policy, Governance and Public Administration
at the University of Ottawa, where he is studying subfederal constitutionalism in comparative perspective.

If you are interested in attending, please e-mail me at jtlevy-at-gmail.com for the paper.

I hope that I'm the first...

to offer the claim that the new Starbucks offer merges the theory of instrumentally rational voting and the theory of expressovist voting.

Elsewhere on election day

My friend Todd Seavey has decided to devote his blog this week to denunciations, in his inimitable style, of quisling Obamatarians and liberaltarians like, well, me.

And another college friend (and my onetime newsroom boss) Naomi Camilleri wrote up a thoughtful post on "Why don't we vote?" In the comments thread there I speak up for the nonvoter.

I am not an economist...

and Greg Mankiw is.

And yet, I'm pretty sure about this bit.

Mankiw writes:

On a regular basis, I am offered opportunities to make some extra money. It could be giving a talk, writing an article, editing a journal, and so on. What incentive is there to put forward that extra work effort?

To a large extent, the beneficiaries of that extra effort are my kids. My lifestyle is, as a first approximation, invariant to my income. But if I make an extra few dollars today, I will leave more to my kids when I move on. I won't leave them enough so they can lead lives of leisure, but perhaps I will leave them enough so they won't have to struggle too much to afford a downpayment on their houses or to send their own kids to college.[...]

Let's suppose Greg Mankiw takes on an incremental job today and earns a dollar. How much, as a result, will he leave his kids in T years?

The answer depends on four tax rates. First, I pay the combined income and payroll tax on the dollar earned. Second, I pay the corporate tax rate while the money is invested in a firm. Third, I pay the dividend and capital gains rate as I receive that return. And fourth, I pay the estate tax when I leave what has accumulated to my kids.

Let t1 be the combined income and payroll tax rate, t2 be the corporate tax rate, t3 be the dividend and capital gains tax rate, and t4 be the estate tax rate. And let r be the before-tax rate of return on corporate capital. Then one dollar I earn today will yield my kids:

(1-t1){[1+r(1-t2)(1-t3)]^T}(1-t4).

Mankiw goes on to analyze the different long-term returns ostensibly generated by the tax plans of Obama and McCain.

Let's look at something again:

"On a regular basis, I am offered opportunities to make some extra money. It could be giving a talk, writing an article, editing a journal, and so on. [...] Let t1 be the combined income and payroll tax rate[...]"

Obama is proposing a significant hike in the payroll tax on people who earn more than $250,000, and it's fair to note that this would elevate top marginal tax rates considerably above the Clinton-era rates that people often refer to Obama as reinstating. It's also fair to note that it makes Social Security much more redistributive (it's always been somewhat redistributive) and much less like the insurance or pension plan the average voter perceives it to be. Indeed it makes Social Security so much more redistributive that we may see a test of a longstanding article of faith among left-leaning opponents of means-testing: that Social Security that taxed some in order to give to others would be politically vulnerable, and that keeping the program universal with payouts tied fairly closely to "contributions" was a necessary part of the political strategy of keeping the program untouchable and immortal.

But nothing in Obama's plan involves changing the fact that the payroll tax is a payroll tax, that is, a tax on wages and salaries. The honorarium Mankiw receives for giving a talk or writing a commissioned article, the royalties he receives for writing a book-- these things aren't subject to the payroll tax. The payroll tax is paid on the check he receives every month from Harvard, and not on those other bits and pieces.

Now I understand that he's trying to model the general case of "incentives to do a little more work for a little more compensation." But most people can't fine-tune their work-income tradeoffs the way a famous academic with lots of discretionary paid speaking engagements and writing assignments can. A regular salaried white-collar worker can work hard in the pursuit of whatever merit raises are on offer next year, without knowing precisely what they'll be. A working-class worker is going to be far below the threshold that's needed to make Mankiw's model work (top income tax brackets as well as maxed out on current consumption, so the marginal dollar is entirely invested and subject to compounded taxes on investment as well as inheritance taxes later). So the choice of these little lumps of extra work-for-income was important for the simulation to proceed. And it proceeds on a false basis: that extra lump of work is not taxed at the (payroll+ top income tax) rate, but only at the top income tax rate.

It also seems to me that one has to be pursuing a pretty odd investment strategy if one is paying capital gains taxes on the dollar investment every year. It may be worth noting the distorting effect created by the incentive not to realize your gains every year-- but given the existence of the tax, behavior adjusts accordingly, and people don't realize their gains every year and subject themselves to the tax. Maybe that means they forgo the chance to maximize each year's return by switching around-- but you only maximize that way if you're an omniscient forecaster. Mortals maximize expected value by buying and holding index funds. The omniscient forecaster who would otherwise be capable of getting a 10% return won't continue to chase it at the price of paying capital gains taxes every year, unless he's awfully dumb for an omniscient guy; he'll do what us mortals do and live with the market-tracking return that isn't taxed every year.

The capital gains oddity might be a tolerable approximation; the misrepresentation of marginal lumps of income and the payroll tax seems to me entirely out of bounds.

Newly or recently purchased

Justinian, The Digest of Roman Law

Justinian, The Institutes of Justinian

William of Ockham, A Short Discourse on Tyrannical Government (Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought)

John of Salisbury, Policraticus (Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought)

J.H. Burns, ed., The Cambridge History of Medieval Political Thought c.350-c.1450 (I had really thought that I already owned this, and now wish that I'd bought it on sale at APSA!)

Conciliarism and Papalism (Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought)

Gratian, The Treatise on Laws (Decretum Dd. 1-20 With the Ordinary Gloss)

Marsilius of Padua, The Defender of the Peace Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought)

Syllabus-building time is expensive! But at least this year I can usefully combine my book purchases for the undergrad class (Medieval and Renaissance) and the grad class (Foundations of European Studies).

Voting with one's feet

I was looking at the 2004 presidential election results, and remembering all the chatter about Democrats moving to Canada or France in its aftermath.

And I was struck that, Free State Project notwithstanding, I've never heard any real discussion in the U.S. of people deliberately moving to another state to affect political outcomes.

In 2004, California and New York alone had about two and a half million extra (surplus, Electoral-College-wasted) votes for Kerry. About 10,000 more Democratic votes in Iowa and 4,000 in New Mexico would have switched the election. Of the total Democratic voters in California and New York, it would have taken about one out of ten thousand relocating for a few months to switch things. How many (silly exaggeration ahead) Hollywood liberals complete with their entourages and hangers-on and staffs would have had to relocate to Iowa for three months to pull it off? Real estate in Des Moines can't be that expensive for short-term rentals...

I know, I know-- elections are dynamic. If the tactic had been noticed and gotten away with, Texas had 1.7 million surplus Republicans it could ship around, too-- or the Bush campaign could have moved around spending on campaign commercials when they saw Iowa tightening (if the newcomers let themselves get polled). It's an expensive, cumbersome attempt to switch votes, when there are very fluid and fast-responding ways to do so sitting in a campaign's bank account. But... after two successive misseditbythatmuch Electoral College elections, why did we see no equivalent of the Free State Project even trying to get some reverse-migration from California and New York to Iowa, New Mexico, Ohio, Florida, New Hampshire? The Canadian immigration websites apparently spiked at over 100,000 hits per day for a little while after the 2004 election-- and while vanishingly close to none of those people did anything about it, why no spike in "Iowa rel estate" hits instead?

[Note: I'm not very good with the humor and the funny; this is meant to be silly, not a serious proposal for anyone to take any action of any sort. Just a few paragraphs out of a floating early-morning thought.]

In defense of divided government

Over at TNR, I've got a new essay up responding to John Judis' critique of divided government.

Just a friendly reminder...

that Sarah Palin's political resume does not only consist of service on the town council and in the mayor's office of Wasilla, plus her les-than-two-years as governor of Alaska.

In between the Wasilla years and the gubernatorial months (they're not yet "years") she served as a director of the [comically, almost-absurdly named] "Ted Stevens Excellence in Public Service, Inc," a Stevens-run 527.

Norman Barry, R.I.P.

The British political theorist and major contributor to the rejuvenation of classical liberal political thought has died. The University of Buckingham posts this obituary (via Brian Doherty).

Montreal and Quebec notes, October 29, 2008

A) On my way to work I saw a church that had a huge tacky banner on it from bearing the Quebec provincial logo (i.e. from some official governmental tourism agency) and the slogan "Notre patrimoine religieux, c’est sacré!"

Maybe it's been there for years, but it only registered on my eye today, and I'm dizzy with all the weirdness of it. I'm American enough to think:

1) That the government has no business telling us what's sacred, in an overtly religious setting.

2) That we don't need a tourist agency to inform us about the sacredness of houses of worship-- we can understand that just fine on our own.

3) That it's especially weird for churches to have to borrow the prestige of "patrimonie," which is what this amounts to-- trying to convince an increasingly secular population to put its old churches into the same category as the rest of the national (that is, Quebecois) inheritance and legacy and all that of which "je me souviens". The state is trying to convince us that churches are as sacred as other Quebec historical sites.

I simultaneously understand all of this and utterly fail to grok it.

B) This is not OK.

Multicultural Manners

Hither and yon:

I'll be presenting a new paper on "Multicultural Manners" Thursday, October 30th, 4-6 pm, at Concordia, as part of its
Political Science Speaker Series sponsored by the Political Science Student's Association. Hall Building, 1455 De Maisonneuve W., room 1220.

"Liberals and Libertarians: Common Cause or Separate Agendas?" Text fo remarks at Princeton

Before I had returned from my trip to Princeton for this event, the always-sage John Holbo wrote,

But here’s the main problem. It is obviously false that Obama ‘demonizes individualism’. I’ve read quite a bit of Croly and heard a lot of Obama speeches and they don’t sound like each other at all. They don’t have similar political philosophies. If you listen to Obama and hear Croly all that proves is that you need to get your hearing checked. Or your head checked.

Read the whole thing; John's epic-length posts are always worth it.

I hadn't been sure whether to post my panel remarks here, but John's post settled it for me. He's having an argument with Jonah Goldberg about whether Obama is kin to the collectivist progressives of the turn of the twentieth century, and-- as you'll see below-- I think he's right and Goldberg's wrong. (I recognize I haven't provided an argument to that effect. Only had ten minutes to talk.)

Remarks:

The great economist Joseph Schumpeter, referring to the fortunes of the word ‘liberal,’ once commented that "as a supreme, if unintended, compliment, the enemies of the system of private enterprise have thought it wise to appropriate its label." Many of my fellow libertarians, or classical liberals as we sometimes insist on calling ourselves, share that view; egalitarian liberals are enemies who stole our name. I think that it’s much more pithy than it is true, and that classical liberals and those who a century ago took the name of “new liberals” but who I’ll just call left-liberals share much that is morally and philosophically important and true, and that we’re ideological cousins sprung from common intellectual ancestry. We’re also sprung from a common class and cultural matrix. Liberals were not the party of the peasantry or the working class, neither were they the party of the aristocracy, the high clergy, and the military. They were the party of religious dissenters and minorities, smallholders, the petit bourgeoisie, merchants, and sometimes lawyers.

Now, the timing of our session is odd, for this argument. On the one hand, I have arguments I’ve been developing for many years about why libertarians belong not in a great fusionist alliance with conservatives but rather in common cause with our fellow liberals. I think that’s been an interestingly hard argument to make, but we meet at a time, a few weeks before an election, when I think the immediate conclusion to draw is boringly easy. No libertarian can hope to see the party of torture, denials of habeas corpus, indefinite detention without trial, and boundless unsupervised executive power returned to office. If our core root liberalism, if our roots in the struggles of common law against absolutist king or in John Locke or in Montesquieu or in the American Revolution mean anything at all, then it means a four percentage-point difference in marginal income tax rates is less important than removing the party of torture and detention without trial from power. That’s morally so overwhelmingly important as to make my traditional arguments about libertarians leaving the fusionist alliance seem kind of silly.

Conversely, I’ve had arguments as to why left-liberals should welcome us into common cause, and why they as well as we should be prepared to be changed by the alliance or the fusion. I think that the US Democratic Party ought to build on the accomplishments of the Clinton years, and extend and deepen the New Democratic agenda. To a libertarian, those years of trade deals completed and successfully ratified, market liberalization spreading around the world, and moderate budget restraint at home have to look something like a paradise—and it was a time that showed the progressive potential of market-led growth. But the paradise is lost, and we are in for not only a recession and a financial contraction but also for an era of bad policy responses and reactions. I have no illusions that Democrats are going to come shopping for market-oriented or neoliberal or deregulatory reform ideas in the next couple of years. Though I think it’s worth noting that Obama is from and of the market-friendly University of Chicago Law School, and that the Republican Party not only nominated the moralizing anti-market anti-bourgeois noblesse d’epee John McCain but is likely to face a Palin-Huckabee contest four years from now that will confirm a Republican turn toward a singularly unattractive populism.

But this moment will pass, and anyway I have little comparative advantage in talking about current events. Instead, I’d like to talk about political theory, about the divergence between classical and egalitarian liberalisms, and about what they can bring to each other today.

During the era when the so-called “new” or “social” liberalism self-consciously departed from its market-oriented predecessor, the new liberals often maintained that their core liberal values needed to find new institutional and policy outcomes in the wake of the industrial revolution—that a corporation as much as a state could threaten a person’s freedom, that the assembly line as much as censorship could stunt individual mental growth and development. In my view, unfortunately, they never did much more than establish those analogies. They didn’t do much interesting argumentative work on how old liberal premises and values plus new industrial circumstances yielded welfarist conclusions. In part this was because the major theorists of the turn in Britain, Thomas Green and Leonard Hobhouse, really didn’t share old liberal premises; Green had drunk too deeply at the well of Hegel and Hobhouse was too quick to reject the moral priority of individuals. I think that a great deal of the political movement of new liberalism was more continuous with the old—it drew from the same intellectual, cultural, and class circles, for example—but the theoretical turn to welfare liberalism got highly tied up with a generational intellectual turn to Hegelian idealism or to collectivism of various unattractive sorts. I think a similar story can be told in the U.S. around Woodrow Wilson and the mixing together of welfarist liberalism with progressivism, imperialism, and Jim Crow. In turn, I think that the classical liberals who lived through the 1910s to 1940s saw the development of egalitarian liberalism as being of a piece with the moral and intellectual crisis of those years—the flourishing of communism and fascism, the crisis and near collapse of liberal constitutionalism. And they thus made common cause with conservatives who they took to be on the right side of a great civilizational divide, no matter how many things they were wrong about. The liberal center did not hold; some liberals made common cause with social democrats who two generations before they had viewed as antagonists, and others made common cause with conservatives they had viewed as antagonists.

Fortunately, I think that Hegelianism, collectivism, and progressivism have been substantially unwound from welfare liberalism, certainly in the U.S. since no later than Rawls and the Warren Court. An egalitarian liberalism that is committed to the priority of liberty, to the defense of civil liberties, to the social diversity characteristic of the post-60s and 70s West, and to the anti-authoritarianism of the New Left—that’s a liberalism worthy of the name. And libertarians in Will’s and my generation, while we learned from people who learned from people who were shaped by the long crisis of the first half of the twentieth century, we inhabit a different world from the one in which the fusionist alliance with the Right made sense. National Greatness conservatism, the conservatism of Irving Kristol and John McCain that says let us have a war or a crisis just so that we may have national unity and a moral cause greater than our private lives—that’s the kind of thing that characterized progressivism and New Liberalism at their worst, but it’s effectively absent from egalitarian liberalism today.

I mean to close with a few words about what egalitarian and classical liberals can learn from each other, and what their common cause is.

From the classical liberal, the egalitarian liberal has learned one huge lesson and ought to learn three more. The huge lesson is the productive and progressive power of markets. While economic discourse will turn anti-market for a while, we are not going to return to the 1970s or the 1940s or the 1930s. Egalitarian liberals may overestimate the number of tweaks and twists and limits they can give the market with no ill effects—but they’re not going to aspire to replace the market, or complain about how awful it is that economic activity is so disorganized and uncoordinated. The three lessons they ought to learn are: first, remember that the choice is never between the existing market and the ideal regulation or the ideal intervention. It’s between the existing market and the politically likely regulation or intervention. Second, remember that egalitarianism’s moral force ought to be global, and therefore that the egalitarian has the most reason to favor openness to trade and immigration. Free trade is, along with religious freedom and the rule of law, one of liberalism’s three founding commitments, and classical liberals can help call our egalitarian friends back to their best selves by reminding them of that. And, third, remember that the exercise of coercive power tends not to be done in the interest or for the benefit of the powerless, and that often limiting state power is the most progressive policy. The American War on Drugs and the resultant criminalization of vast portions of America’s poor is the most dramatic of examples.

From the egalitarian liberal, the classical liberal has probably not yet learned any of the necessary big lessons. But I will focus on two. The first is that where distributive effects from deliberately enacted policies are inevitable, and they often are, it is better that those effects be progressive rather than regressive. At any given level of spending, we have moral reason to prefer that the spending alleviate poverty and suffering rather than that it be wasted. The view of the big-government right has been that spending on the rich didn’t count as spending, and that state-corporatism could still claim the mantle of the market. The Bush administration’s drug benefit is a spectacular example—huge government spending, but so long as it’s arranged to subsidize a corporate sector rather than to alleviate need among the poor, it doesn’t really count. Classical liberals need to be able to say that there is principled reason to prefer progressivity to regressivity and corporatism, alongside the principled reasons to favor smaller government over larger. We will not always be able to have a government that is both smaller and more progressive—but we will sometimes, as we have for the past eight years, have government that is neither, and that suggests that it’s possible to make some pareto improvements from the joint perspective of egalitarian and libertarian liberals.

For the second, I’ll note that Friedrich Hayek considered the rule of law to be such an attractive and foundationally liberal concept that he attempted to subsume most of his political theory under its rubric. I think he was right about some of that, though not all of it. But the analogical extension of the rule of law to cover questions of economic policy depend on the conceptual core of the rule of law being intact: the separation of powers, constraints on executive authority, due process, and all the rest that Hayek wrote a marvelous history of in the middle of Constitution of Liberty. This allows me to draw the theoretical point back toward the contemporary moral point with which I began. The rule of law, the subjection of the executive to law, and the protections of the due process of law—these are accomplishments that it is easy to take for granted but that are always fragile. Their defense and vindication is the common cause of liberals of whatever stripe.

That's the first time in a while...

that there hasn't been even one political theory article in an issue of the American Political Science Review, at least to the best of my recollection. Flukes happen; I just hope a fluke is all it is.

Update: the thinness of the issue overall and the editors' note confirm that it's a fluky issue all around-- odd effects of the transition in editorial teams.

To change behavior you have to change incentives watch, continued

In point of fact, the dirty little secret of the banking industry is that it has no intention of using the money to make new loans.

See prior installment here.

Today: Jon Elster and Marie-Claude Smouts at 50th Anniversary of Political Science Department at Université de Montréal

Science politique a 50 ans

Les célébrations du 50e anniversaire auront lieu les 22 et 23 octobre 2008. Nous avons invité des sommités mondiales de notre discipline pour les entendre et discuter avec elles des nouvelles frontières et des idées provocantes que soulève la recherche de pointe en science politique. Programme du 22 octobre: Marie-Claude Smouts CERI, Paris "Les idées dangeureuses en science politique: l'exemple des études postcoloniales " Jon Elster Columbia University "La rationalité en politique" 1

4h à 17h, salle JAB-1035, Pavillon J.-Armand-Bombardier

Espressotarianism

I've made pretty plain that I'm not voting Libertarian in this presidential election, though I wish Barr and the LP well and wish them many votes. I've voted Libertarian for President several times, and will vote Libertarian downticket when possible this year. I'd be thrilled to see Barr win 49.9% of the vote and crush McCain for second place. But I don't will that Barr be elected president, and that prevents me from voting for him.

But this sure does warm the cockles of my heart, and is the sort of thing that couldn't be allowed to go unnoticed on this blog.

He is fifty-nine but has the stamina of a college freshman—he consumes up to fifteen shots of espresso a day, typically in five-shot installments.

By contrast, the guy I'm actually voting for sometimes smokes cigarettes. If I were voting with the "people who remind me of me" standard that, for example, people invoke when explaining their support of Sarah Palin, then the fact that Obama and I have both taught courses at Chicago Law might well be trumped by the difference between cigarettes and 15 shots of espresso per day.

(At some point I'd like someone to ask some voter who invokes the "people who remind me of me" standard about the arrogance and narcissism of it-- what makes you so great that similitude to you is a relevant criterion for the presidency? I know that there are answers to the question and defensible reasons for identity-politics voting: "people who remind me of me are more likely to take the interests of people like me into account, and I think people like me are unjustly neglected by a system dominated by liberal elites/ whites/ Christians/ the professional class/ etc." But even when those reasons are adequate ones, there's often also a level of narcissism that goes unexamined. But now I've wandered far off-topic.)

How to paint yourself into a corner

Draft of an introductory paragraph for remarks to the "liberal and libertarians: common cause or separate agendas?" panel at Princeton.

Now, the timing of our session is odd, for this argument. On the one hand, I have arguments I’ve been developing for many years about why libertarians belong not in a great fusionist alliance with conservatives but rather in common cause with our fellow liberals. I think that’s been an interestingly hard argument to make, but we meet at a time, a few weeks before an election, when I think the immediate conclusion to draw is boringly easy. No libertarian can hope to see the party of torture, denials of habeas corpus, indefinite detention without trial, and boundless unsupervised executive power returned to office. If our core root liberalism, if our roots in the struggles of common law against absolutist king or in John Locke or in Montesquieu or in the American Revolution mean anything at all, then it means a four percentage-point difference in marginal income tax rates is less important than removing the party of torture and detention without trial from power. That’s morally so overwhelmingly important as to make my traditional arguments about libertarians leaving the fusionist alliance seem kind of silly.

"Therefore, I now sit down and thank you for your attention"? Doesn't seem quite satisfactory.