Alan Houston discovers new Benjamin Franklin letters

This is very cool (gated Chronicle article):

It sounds like a scene out of Possession: In the waning hours of a research trip to the British Library, an American scholar stumbles on a cache of letters overlooked for 250 years. It's the stuff of scholarly romance, and it happened to Alan Houston, a professor of political science at the University of California at San Diego, who made what he describes as the find of a lifetime—47 letters written by, to, and about Benjamin Franklin, and never before seen by scholars.

Mr. Houston had traveled to England to round up material for his book Benjamin Franklin and the Politics of Improvement (Yale University Press, 2008). On the last day of his visit, he was in the library's Manuscripts Reading Room looking at material on the French and Indian War.

He asked to see a volume of papers that had belonged to Thomas Birch, secretary of the Royal Society from 1752 to 1765. The volume was described simply as "Copies of Letters Relating to the March of General Braddock," referring to the ill-starred venture of a British general dispatched in 1755 to capture Fort Duquesne, in present-day Pittsburgh, from the French.

"The first thing in it was a letter from Benjamin Franklin to the secretary of the governor of Maryland," Mr. Houston said this week. "I looked at the first sentence and said, 'This doesn't sound familiar.' Then I got kind of nervous and bouncy in my chair." [...]

For two years, Mr. Houston has kept his find a secret from almost everyone else, except for a handful of Franklin experts whom he consulted to help him verify the documents.[...]

The letters will finally see the light of day this month in an issue of The William and Mary Quarterly, along with an essay by the discoverer on what Mr. Houston calls "the wagon affair of 1755."

Houston's new Franklin book is high on my summer reading list.

Quote of the day

Julian Sanchez:

In a pure libertopia, the Market will be so efficient as to dispense with the need for human intermediaries, like a Lovecraftian Elder God who casts aside the husk of an avatar to bestow the touch of madness with its own deathless tentacles.

Scattered thoughts on policy, politics, and political science

I've been intermittently following the discussions around Joseph Nye's "Scholars on the Sidelines," in the blogosphere and elsewhere. (See Dan's post here and his links back to his previous three, and the sundry other commentary to which he links; and Henry Farrell.)

President Obama has appointed some distinguished academic economists and lawyers to his administration, but few high-ranking political scientists have been named. In fact, the editors of a recent poll of more than 2,700 international relations experts declared that "the walls surrounding the ivory tower have never seemed so high."

While important American scholars such as Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski took high-level foreign policy positions in the past, that path has tended to be a one-way street. Not many top-ranked scholars of international relations are going into government, and even fewer return to contribute to academic theory. The 2008 Teaching, Research and International Policy (TRIP) poll, by the Institute for Theory and Practice in International Relations, showed that of the 25 scholars rated as producing the most interesting scholarship during the past five years, only three had ever held policy positions (two in the U.S. government and one in the United Nations).

I'm feeling cranky and Weberian about all this. Politics and science are different vocations. I don't think my crankiness is actually directed at Nye, but rather at how easy it is for us to draw the wrong lessons from his remarks.

I note that Nye's initial concern was that political scientists aren't doing public service-- we're not doing policymaking work in government. (Nye himself has of course done so, repeatedly and with distinction.) And in particular, the leaders in the field aren't doing so. And there's certainly something to this. Many leading economists end up serving for some period of time on the Council of Economic Advisors or in Treasury. Those in highest ranks of legal academia have a natural route to public service that leads to the bench. Things seem oddly different in political science.

I've heard this complaint before. A prominent IR scholar gave an address in which he eulogized the era in which IR scholars of a certain stature could expect that they'd serve as NSA or in a similar position at some point, and there was an expected rotation of faculty in and out of Harvard Gov as the party in power changed.

But, unlike in Nye's op-ed, the subtext-that-barely-counted-as-sub was "Why haven't politicians come to me on bended knee seeking out my wisdom?" And now we get toward to my point.

Nye is calling for academics of a high level of scholarly accomplishment to be willing to serve-- notice the word. They'll have to take a pay cut, move to Washington for a certain number of years, give up the lecture circuit, and do someone else's bidding. They'll give advice and can shape policy; but even someone as high-ranking as a cabinet official works for someone else. (Just ask Secretary Clinton.) For academics of the relevant rank and stature, this will be a sacrifice. If serving as an Assistant Undersecretary counts as a promotion from your day job, then you may not be the kind of scholar Nye has in mind.

One thing Nye is not doing is making the traditional ritualistic call for greater public intellectualism. He's not asking us to write more op-eds or more pop-academic books that get six-figure advances, or to give more lectures on the lecture circuit, or to blog more. But within political science, the divide between those who do a lot of that kind of thing and those who don't is salient and sometimes deeply felt, so I think Nye's call for public service easily gets mixed up with that divide. In his call for sacrifice and service, he gives inadvertent comfort and solace to those who are well-paid to stand on their professorial soapbox and tell the world what it should do.

Yes, I'm perfectly well aware that I'm saying this on my blog where I often offer political opinions. But I consider this blog a kind of self-indulgence, not a kind of service, and I'm asking for those to be kept distinct.

Another thing he's not doing is calling for all of academia to look like the traditional dream of the activist-scholar determined to Make A Difference for one's preferred pre-research political cause. If economics is the model being looked toward, then notice what the model actually looks like. Christina Romer, Laura Tyson, and their peers were researchers first. They were researchers on matters of public importance, and they were certainly engaged in speaking research to power when the opportunity arose. But they were doing peer-reviewed research at the highest levels. The perpetual temptation to substitute activism for scholarship, or to conflate the two, isn't what Nye is indulging. But inevitably that's what we hear.

Nye might be right that there is a problem of top scholars not engaging in public service. But there is also a (perpetual, structural) problem of academics leveraging their real expertise into general-purpose pontification, in the classroom as well as in public. And I worry that Nye's call to fix the first problem tempts us to worsen the second, in the following way:

Nye claims that one reason for the disconnect between political science and public service is that the former has become too abstract, too formal and theoretical, too disconnected from scholarship about matters of public policy. And he calls for political science to re-valorize such scholarship.

The solutions must come via a reappraisal within the academy itself. Departments should give greater weight to real-world relevance and impact in hiring and promoting young scholars. Journals could place greater weight on relevance in evaluating submissions. Studies of specific regions deserve more attention. Universities could facilitate interest in the world by giving junior faculty members greater incentives to participate in it. That should include greater toleration of unpopular policy positions.

Well, maybe. I'll try to write a follow-up post on some of the substantive questions about research methods and agendas. But one thing that occurs to me is that Nye neglects the possible role of institutions like the one of which he's a former Dean. Public policy schools, well-funded by tuition-paying MPP/MPA students, have served to drain a steady share of the policy-relevant political scientists out of political science departments. And it's within departments, not professional schools, that the intellectual course of the discipline is ordinarily shaped, if only because that's where Ph.D. students who will be the next generation of professors are trained. (Yes, joint appointments etc. But at the margin, the most policy-relevant political scientists have a higher-paying gig across the street training MPP students. Even if they all act as half-members of political science departments, that still means they've got half the investment, half the influence of those without such policy-relevant research.) There are mitigating effects; the resources public policy schools bring to campus mean there are more faculty positions to go around for policy-relevant researchers. But I do suspect there's some effect here. And notice that it's compatible with the puzzle to be explained: what's different about political science? Economists simply don't have a comparable salary difference between econ faculty posts and public policy faculty posts. Law professors are situated in professional schools all along. Public policy schools do something to political science as a discipline that they don't do to the others.

AAAS, &c.

Via Brian Leiter, the new elections to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences have been announced. (See earlier AAAS posts: 2008, 2007, 2006.

Two political theorists were elected, Philip Pettit and Danielle Allen. (Of interest to students of nationalism: Rogers Brubaker was also elected.) I suggested two years ago that "Philip Pettit is surely overdue."

Another year, another opportunity to ask: Where is Michael Walzer on this list?

In other news, Gerald Gaus has been awarded the Gregory Kavka Prize in Political Philosophy for his article "On Justifying the Moral Rights of the Moderns: A Case of Old Wine in New Bottles," Social Philosophy and Policy (2007), 24:1:84-119.

Update: Just noticed this. Go back to the list of new inductees and scroll down to the very final name on the last page.

Welcome to Canada,

Will Wilkinson and many like you. Happy to have you here, though the whole "wake up Canadian!" bit is a teensy bit irksome as I enter month 10 of the permanent residency application process!

Carole Pateman nominated for APSA presidency

From the APSA newsletter:

After careful consideration of suggestions from the APSA membership and organized groups, the Nominating Committee has agreed on the following slate of distinguished political scientists as its nominees for elective office in the association. [...] Unless there is any contestation, elected officers will assume office following action at the Business Meeting on September 5 at the 2009 APSA Annual Meeting in Toronto. If there is a contest, an election will be held by ballot of the entire membership. Procedures for nominations are documented in Article V (1, 2) of the APSA Constitution and Section 4 of the Business Meeting Rules.

President-Elect (2009-10)
Carole Pateman, UCLA

The President-Elect holds that title for one year, and then assumes the Presidency after the following year's [2010, in this case] annual meeting.

While the most accomplished political scientists often cross subfields, and many APSA presidents have engaged with or contributed to political theory (Beer, Lowi, Lipset, Dahl, Rudolph, etc.), by my reckoning Pateman will be only the second APSA president whose primary field is political theory in the past 45 years, after Judith Shklar, and the third in the past fifty, adding in Carl Friedrich.

Pateman was also the first woman president of the International Political Science Association.

Comment on Brooks

The NYT appears not to be running this, so here's the letter I wrote to the editor in response to David Brooks' goofy column on "The End of Philosophy" last week.

To the editor:

David Brooks unhelpfully confuses two claims: that moral judgment is like aesthetic judgment, and that moral judgment is immediate, emotional, and entirely intuitive. He is right that these have both been put forward as accounts of the evolution of morality, but wrong to think that they go together. Aesthetic judgment, after all, is subject to considerable refinement by education, reflection, and the acquisition of acquired tastes. Brooks says that when you put something that tastes disgusting into your mouth, "you just know." But we outgrow sugar cereals for lobster, or fruit punch for fine wine, even if the acquired taste seems disgusting at first. Ethical judgments, too, are probably educable, even though they are built on a visceral reaction.

The "warmer view of human nature" Brooks mentions is suspect as well. Empathy and altruism "within our families, groups and sometimes nations" are compatible with brutal behavior and dehumanization outside those boundaries. One of the traditional worries about relying on moral emotions and moral intuitions rather than moral argument has been that it leaves no space to think past the edges of our groups.

Jacob T. Levy

Note to students: yes, I thought about using my traditional counterpart to "fine wine" in that argument, but was afraid that it involved a trademarked name brand and therefore couldn't be run in the Times.

Soon to be added to the reading list...

upon its release later this month.

Cary J. Nederman, Lineages of European Political Thought: Explorations Along the Medieval/Modern Divide from John of Salisbury to Hegel, Catholic University of America Press, 2009

This book examines some of the salient historiographical and conceptual issues that animate current scholarly debates about the nature of the medieval contribution to modern Western political ideas. On the one hand, scholars who subscribe to the "Baron thesis" concerning civic humanism have asserted that the break between medieval and modern modes of political thinking formed an unbridgeable chasm associated with the development of an entirely new framework at the dawn of the Florentine Renaissance. Others have challenged this hypothesis, replacing it with another extreme: an unbroken continuity in the intellectual terrain between the twelfth and the seventeenth centuries (or later). The present book seeks to qualify both of these positions. Cary J. Nederman argues for a more nuanced historiography of intellectual continuity and change that depends upon analyzing a host of contextual as well as philosophical factors to account for the emergence of the European tradition of political theory in the medieval and early modern periods. He finds that categories such as "medieval" and "modern" can and should be usefully deployed, yet always with the understanding that they are provisional and potentially fluid.

The book opens with an introduction that lays out the main issues and sources of the debate, followed by five sets of interrelated chapters. The first section critically assesses some of the leading scholars who have contributed to the current understanding of the relationship between medieval and modern ideas. The central part of the book includes three sections that address salient themes that illuminate and illustrate continuity and change: Dissent and Power, Empire and Republic, and Political Economy. The volume closes with a few examples of the ways in which medieval political doctrines were absorbed into and transformed during the modern period up to the nineteenth century.

Nederman is perhaps the leading current scholar of medieval political theory, and this looks like an exciting book (at least to me; I understand that there are a lot of people who would think "exciting" a laughably weird way to describe a book of the historiography of the medieavl-modern divide in political theory).

As it happens, both of the universities at which I've taught in the undergraduate history of political thought sequence break between Machiavelli and Hobbes, not between the medieval era and Machiavelli. (At Chicago the first term is ancient-medieval-Renaissance; at McGill there's an ancient term and a medieval-Renaissance term. At both there's then a 17th-c/18th-c class, and a 19th-c/early 20th-c class.) But at the graduate level, both universities take the other tack, breaking between medieval and early modern with Machiavelli belonging to the latter. There's good reason to be puzzled here, and I'll be interested to see what Nederman has to say.

Somehow...

I missed this very important academic group blog when it launched just over a year ago.

Note to self: learn Latin

It turns out that teaching medieval political [and legal] thought is a lot of fun. This is a ride I'll be happy to ride again.

Next year: more Vitoria; more Marsilius if it can be managed. Possibly some Gentili-- that stretches the timeframe, but I have it on good authority that the next course in the sequence begins early modernity with Hobbes. Integrate the Digest and the Institutes through the whole term, instead of assigning excerpts from them at the beginning of the term along with other ancient texts, then reading Bartolus and Accursius separately later on. Maybe more generally, spread the ancient works through the course.

Longer term: do some excerpting from the Ordinary Gloss for the class, to choose topics continuous with course themes. NB: This is almost sure to require doing some translations of my own, which in turn requires learning medieval law Latin, which therefore moves several steps up my to-do list.

What to drop in order to make room for these cool things? Hmm... that annoying Florentine is taking up a lot of classes at the end...

Galston on Rawls on religion

here. A sample:

Still, one has to wonder whether the residuum of religious belief helped Rawls affirm the basics of his philosophy with more confidence than he otherwise could have mustered. Otherwise (and more bluntly) put: Rawls's religious background may account for the aspects of his political philosophy that I and many others find oddly other-worldly.

Let me give an example. Rawls famously, and controversially, rejected merit as a basis for distribution. Not only are our natural endowments unearned and beyond our control; so too is their development and use: "Even the willingness to make an effort, to try, and so to be deserving in the ordinary sense is itself dependent on happy family and social circumstances." Cohen and Nagel find a theological version of this thought in the senior thesis. "There is no merit before God," Rawls wrote, "Nor should there be merit before him. True community does not count the merits of its members. Merit is a concept rooted in sin, and well disposed of." And more: "The human person, once perceiving that the Revelation of the Word is a condemnation of the self, casts away all thoughts of his own merit."

Now it is possible to argue that we are all equally meritless sinners in the eyes of God (although it is hardly the case that all religions and theologies concur on this point). But does moral equality before God imply equality of merit before our fellow men? Should a God's-eye point of view structure human relations here on earth? In the world as we experience it, some people work harder to develop and exercise their gifts than others, some people are more responsible than others, and some people contribute more to the general welfare than others. If we think of ourselves as contributing nothing to these results, for good or ill, then the core of human liberty and personhood vanishes. To live human lives, we must assume that we are more than dependent variables, more than the passive outcome of external forces, whether material, social, or divine.

Highly recommended; read the whole thing. And, yes, I find this so interesting that it makes me a lot more hesitant about my initial reaction to the publication of Rawls' senior thesis.

Update: As is evident in comments, my immediate enthusiasm for Galston's essay has not been widely shared. Paul Gowder has been expressing his disapproval at some length on his own blog as well as in comments; he also points to hilzoy's critique.

Quote of the day...

And perhaps my new favorite Foucault quote. (No, I don't recall having had an old favorite Foucault quote.) From Security, Territory, Population, p. 304, lecture of 22 March 1978.

We should never forget that Europe as a juridical-political entity, as a system of diplomatic and political security, is the yoke that the most powerful countries (of this Europe) imposed on Germany every time they tried to make it forget the dream of the sleeping emperor

Less pithy follow-up:

So, if the emperor never really wakes up, we should not be surprised that Germany sometimes gets up and says: "I am Europe. I am Europe since you wished it that I be Europe."

Hither and yon, Santa Fe edition

Tomorrow at the Federal Bar Association's Indian Law conference I'll be presenting Three Perversities of Indian Law.

GRIPP year-end conference: "The Bouchard-Taylor report, one year later: international perspectives/ Le rapport Taylor-Bouchard, un an plus tard: perspectives internationales

* This conference will provide an opportunity to critically reflect on the Commissioners' report, their analysis and recommendations, as well as the broader lessons we might draw from the process. Drawing on their diverse national experiences of multiculturalism, the invited speakers will extend the Québec debate on "reasonable accommodation."



* May 1st and 2nd, 2009
* Université de Montréal (Salle 1035, Pavillon J-Armand Bombardier)


Participants include:

* Tariq Modood, Bristol University
* Jeff Spinner-Halev, University of North Carolina
* Avigail Eisenberg, University of Victoria
* Monique Deveaux, Williams College
* Will Kymlicka, Queen's University
* Éléonore Lepinard, Université de Montréal
* Manuel Toscano Méndez, Universidad de Malaga and CRÉUM
* Jacob Levy, McGill University
* Dominique Leydet, Université du Québec à Montréal


Tentative Program:

Friday MAY 1

8.45-9 Registration, Coffee

9-9.30 Welcome
Daniel Weinstock

9.30-12 Perspectives from English Canada
Avigail Eisenberg
Will Kymlicka
Commentator: Dominique Leydet

12-1.30 Lunch (catered)

1.30-5 Perspectives from Europe
Tariq Modood
Éléonore Lepinard
Jean Bauberot
Commentator: Jacob Levy


Saturday MAY 2

8.45-9 Coffee

9-11 Perspectives from the U.S.
Monique Deveaux
Jeff Spinner-Helev
Commentator: Manuel Toscano Méndez

11-11.30 Break

11.30-12.30 Synthesis
Anna Carastathis


* Please note: Although most presentations will be made in English, we encourage passive bilingualism, and individuals may request simultaneous translation as needed.



Please RSVP!

* Admission is free and open to all, but advance registration is required. Please register by Monday, April 20 at the latest by e-mailing Will at willcolish@gmail.com.


* For more information, please contact Anna by e-mail at acarastathis@gmail.com or by telephone at 514-343-6111 extension 2932.


* Note: To access the Bouchard-Taylor report, which can be downloaded in French or in English, visit http://www.accommodements.qc.ca/index-en.html


* Organized by Daniel Weinstock and Anna Carastathis, with assistance from Will Colish and Martin Blanchard, Centre de recherche en éthique de l'Université de Montréal.

Bush, Obama, and the size of government

As my old friend Todd Seavey details, he and I have made a bet on the growth of government under the Obama and Bush administrations, by three measures, in each case comparing Obama's [first] term with GWB's first term: the change in federal expenditures as a % of GDP over four years, the change in total government expenditure at all levels over four years, and the change in the federal budget, in percentage terms from its starting point, measured in constant dollars.

As will surprise few of either Todd's readers or mine, he's predicting socialist apocalypse under Obama, and I'm... not.

Discussing Obama's budget reminds me to link to this NYT profile of Peter Orszag, who I certainly can't call an old friend since we haven't been in touch at all since high school, but who was a friendly acquaintance from the high school debate team and my partner for one or two tournaments. I liked this bit:

As he heads to his job as White House budget director, he already seems to pulse with energy, but he asks his driver to stop at Starbucks for enormous doses of iced and hot tea. His epic caffeine intake concerned him until he solved the problem with typical Orszagian efficiency: he underwent genetic testing, confirmed that he could safely metabolize large amounts and happily moved on to the next worry.

They can test for that? And what, precisely, counted as "epic?" Peter's probably almost a foot taller than I am; I'm now curious how my intake compares.

And that, in turn, reminds me to finally blog about the most important article from the NYT in the past several days, mentioned to me by several sources. If I were putting up a separate post about it, its headline would of course be "I'm going to live forever... and break some Olympic records while I'm at it: part of a continuing series."

So even as sports stars from baseball players to cyclists to sprinters are pilloried for using performance enhancing drugs, one of the best studied performance enhancers is fine for them or anyone else to use. And it is right there in a cup of coffee or a can of soda.

Exercise physiologists have studied caffeine’s effects in nearly every iteration: Does it help sprinters? Marathon runners? Cyclists? Rowers? Swimmers? Athletes whose sports involve stopping and starting like tennis players? The answers are yes and yes and yes and yes.[...]

Now, Dr. Tarnopolsky and others report that caffeine increases the power output of muscles by releasing calcium that is stored in muscle. The effect can enable athletes to keep going longer or to go faster in the same length of time. Caffeine also affects the brain’s sensation of exhaustion, that feeling that it’s time to stop, you can’t go on any more. That may be one way it improves endurance, Dr. Tarnopolsky said.

The performance improvement in controlled laboratory settings can be 20 to 25 percent, Dr. Tarnopolsky said. But in the real world, including all comers, the improvement may average about 5 percent, still significant if you want to get your best time or even win a race.[...]

The beneficial effects on exercise, though, remain. Even if you are a regular coffee drinker, if you have a cup of coffee before a workout or a race, you will do better, Dr. Tarnopolsky said. “There is no question about it,” he added.

He puts the caffeine research to use when he trains and competes. Dr. Tarnopolsky is an elite triathlete, ski orienteer and trail runner who has competed at national and international levels. And, he said, he loves coffee: “I love the smell. I love the taste. It’s heaven.”

And before a race? He always has a cup.

I've gotten steadily more athletic over my adult life. I think we now have an explanation as to why that is.

Joan Scott, "Secularism and Women's Equality"

Today at McGill: Joan Scott, "Secularism and Women's Equality," Leacock 232, 4 pm.

Joan Scott will look at the current popular assumption that there is a relationship between secularism and gender equality. According to Prof. Scott this secular versus religion argument has been revived as a way of talking about the unacceptability of Muslims, especially in Western European states where they constitute large immigrant populations. Prof. Scott will argue that historically there is no relationship between processes of secularization (separation of church and state) and rights/equality for women; indeed, that the public/private separation (politics/religion) parallels the political/domestic split that consigns women to childbearing and child rearing; the problem of how to address sexual difference plagues secularists still. If there has been a growing flexibility in the realm of sex and sexuality in some areas of the West, it's questionable whether it is a product of secularism.

I believe that this is an inaugural event of the new McGill Institute for Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies, which succeeds the McGill Centre for Research and Teaching on Women.

APSAnet thread

Anyone with actual information about the status of APSA's website is invited to post here. So are frustrated paper-proposers who now can't find out the status of their proposal (and who undoubtedly crashed it by hitting reload dozens of times). So are those with funnier theories about what happened.

Update: seems to be fixed now.

Gaiman on Colbert

I gave Paul Gowder a hard time for his little rant about the Geek Culture takeover of the world.

But it is a little weird to live in a world in which I can just happen to turn on the TV and see one of the most popular comedians around interviewing one of the all-time great comic book writers, and singing one of Tom Bombadil's songs. I'm not sure precisely when we came to live in that world...

In Memoriam: Brian Barry

Brian Leiter has the news. Harry Brighouse follows up.

Update: My only sustained public engagement with him as a thinker was not a particularly sympathetic one. But I was tremendously impressed with both Sociologists, Economists and Democracy and Political Argument as a grad student; he was a lifelong advocate of keeping normative political work engaged with social science and social theory; and his long work at the journal Ethics did a tremendous amount for political and moral philosophy and theory. By my reckoning he didn't just raise the standards of the journal; he raised the standards of the field.

On a more personal level: I didn't know Barry well-- but I got to know him toward the end of my time as a graduate student, when I was commuting from New York to Princeton and he was teaching at Columbia. He and his wife Anni were personally incredibly warm and welcoming to me; and intellectually he treated me as someone worth talking and arguing with about our areas of shared interest. I shared a drink with him on several occasions, and always enjoyed the experience and the conversation.

I had cause to complain about the way in which he read the work of some other people, but with regard to my own work, he had read it before we ever met, talked about it (in person and in print) fairly and accurately, and was supportive and encouraging about it. I think he was the first person who included my work on a syllabus, and I was still a grad student at the time; it's hard to overstate how flattered I was by this. And he was generous with time and advice, though he had no advisorly obligations to me.

Because he genuinely retired, I almost never saw him after the publication of my review linked to above; but he was in touch enough to make clear that he took it in good spirit, and indeed he asked whether I'd follow up with a review of Why Social Justice Matters. There's a traditional joke in political theory about the mismatch between official intellectual positions and personal style-- the civic republican who's a terrible departmental citizen, the deliberativist who will never let anyone else talk and the deliberativist who hates to talk, that kind of thing. Brian Barry often comes up as a central example-- the pugilist, brawler, or (depending on your perspective) dirty fighter on the printed page who was exceptionally warm, generous, and open in person. He knew this himself, and it seemed to amuse him. I had my quarrels with the printed pugilist-- but remember and appreciate that warm and generous man.

further update: Valuable comments continue to be posted at the Crooked Timber thread from Barry's colleagues and friends. Wyn Grant gets at what I was trying to express here: "He could certainly be pugancious and unwilling to suffer fools gladly, but he was very supportive to younger scholars." Jo Wolff recounts some more examples of the pugnaciousness-- and suggests that it represents a sense on Barry'spart that "political theory can be much easier than most people make it, provided that one keeps things clear, puts down one’s ideological axe, and resists the temptation to seek novelty or paradox for its own sake.” And Paul Kelleyalso emphasizes Barry'sinterest in keeping political philosophy intellectually engaged with the social sciences, in the service of doing normative work aimed at the world.

States of the same nature

Now posted at SSRN:

"States of the Same Nature": Bounded Variation in Subfederal Constitutionalism

"That the federal constitution should be composed of states of the same nature, above all of republican States," Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws.

Abstract:
This paper offers a defense of the bounded variation in state- or provincial-level constitutionalism within a federation. The extreme positions are the traditionally easy normative ones: there's no reason for state-to-state variation in fundamental questions of constitutional value (because once we know what justice demands, it demands it the same everywhere), or the several states' sovereign peoples may enact any old rules they want, because democratic positivism trumps liberal justice. On the second model, states may be constitutionally constrained from the outside, by the federal courts enforcing the federal constitutions, but as a domestic matter their substantive variation could be unbounded. I don't deny that one or the other of these might accurately describe the legal situation in one or another federation. But I will argue that bounded variation is normatively preferable, not just as a middle way but as the right way to attain the benefits of a federal system. And there are at least some good reasons for internalizing the at least some of the boundaries within the constitutionalism and jurisprudence of each state. Constitutions are not social contracts, either of the positivist or the realist sort; and the hybrid constitutionalism of a federal order can't be understood just with reference to founding or with reference to moral truth. It seems to me that this leaves us in the domain of non-dispositive reason-giving and argument about the scope for constitutional variation. It typically does not count as much intellectual progress to say that answers will lie at some indeterminate point in the middle. But the claims of federal supremacy and of state sovereignty have been such that the middle has sometimes seemed squeezed out; there has been a perceived need to resolve the logic of state constitutionalism to a greater degree than the nature of the problem permits.

And one bit from further in the paper:

It is apparent that the position described here allows federal constitutional norms to have some weight in a state's domestic constitutional interpretation. It is perhaps less apparent, but noteworthy, that it allows sister-state constitutional norms and jurisprudence to have such weight. And, perhaps most surprisingly, it allows state-level norms to have weight at the federal level. Perhaps the gravitational weight of federal constitutional interpretation is greater than that of the interpretation of any one of the states, but gravity is mutual, and planets pull on the sun as well as being pulled by it.

Since I finished that draft of the paper, Professor Solum has drawn my attention to this extremely interesting argument which I'll have to incorporate into that section!

Federal Bar Association Indian Law Conference

I'll be revisiting the perversities of Indian Law thesis in light of last year's Plains Commerce Bank v Long, in a talk at the Federal Bar Association's Indian Law Conference, April 3, Pueblo of Pojoaque outside Santa Fe.

Here's an utterly unsurprising spoiler: the outcome in Plains Commerce only aggravated the perversity of the incentives facing tribal governments. In the article I said that the Montana exceptions had been whittled away to near-nothingness; in Plains Commerce the Court just shaved a bit more wood off the paper-thin bit that remained. Step by step, the Court continues to make a bad situation worse.

For newcomers to Plains Commerce, I recommend the superb amicus brief from the Solicitor General.

Stanley Fish inhabits a very different academic world from the one I inhabit...

If this is true.

I’ve been asking colleagues in several departments and disciplines whether they’ve ever come across the term “neoliberalism” and whether they know what it means. A small number acknowledged having heard the word; a very much smaller number ventured a tentative definition. I was asking because I had been reading essays in which the adjective neoliberal was routinely invoked as an accusation, and I had only a sketchy notion of what was intended by it.

Research Workshop on Thomas Hobbes

March 21-22, 2009, McGill University, Montreal
http://profs-polisci.mcgill.ca/abizadeh/Hobbes-Workshop.htm

This two-day workshop brings together a number of scholars working on Hobbes today to discuss two recent book-length manuscripts: Thomas Hobbes and the Creation of Order by Kinch Hoekstra and The Oscillations of Thomas Hobbes by Arash Abizadeh. Topics include Hobbes's treatment of morals, politics, religion, language, mind, and knowledge.

Format: To maximize the quality of discussion, participants are expected to have read the two manuscripts beforehand. Each panel will begin with two fifteen minute critiques of a section of the manuscript, followed by a brief response by the author and general discussion.

Registration: The workshop is open to everyone, but attendance is by registration and limited in number. Those wishing to attend should RSVP to the workshop coordinator Douglas Hanes, douglas.hanes@mail.mcgill.ca .

Manuscripts: Manuscripts are available on the workshop website for download. Access requires a password, which all participants will receive upon registration.

Program:

Saturday March 21
Arts 160, McGill University

9:55 am Welcome

10:00 am - 11:45 am: Linguistic Convention and Mental Inspection
Chair: Emily Carson (McGill, philosophy)
Commentators: Douglas Jesseph (South Florida, philosophy)
Justin E. H. Smith (Concordia, philosophy)
Author/Respondent: Arash Abizadeh (McGill, politics)

11:45 - 1pm: Lunch Break

1:00 pm - 2:45 pm: The State of Nature
Chair: Dario Perinetti (UQAM, philosophy)
Commentators: Ioannis Evrigenis (Tufts, politics)
Jacob Levy (McGill, politics)
Author/Respondent: Kinch Hoekstra (Berkeley, politics/law)

2:45 pm - 3:00 pm: Coffee Break

3 pm - 4:45 pm: Morals and War
Chair: Catherine Lu (McGill, politics)
Commentators: Michael LeBuffe (Texas A&M, philosophy)
Patrick Neal (Vermont, politics)
Author/Respondent: Arash Abizadeh (McGill, politics)

5 pm: Reception

6:30 pm: Dinner


Sunday March 22
Arts 160, McGill University

9:30 am - 11:15 am: Commonwealth by Acquisition and Institution
Chair: Christina Tarnopolsky (McGill, politics)
Commentators: Michael Green (Pomona, philosophy)
Travis Smith (Concordia, politics)
Author/Respondent: Kinch Hoekstra (Berkeley, politics/law)

11:15 am - 12:30 pm: Lunch Break

12:30 pm - 2:15 pm: Sovereignty and the State's Ideological Program
Chair: TBA
Commentators: Jeffrey Collins (Queen's, history)
Will Roberts (McGill, philosophy/politics)
Author/Respondent: Arash Abizadeh (McGill, politics)

2:15 pm - 2:30 pm: Coffee Break

2:30 pm - 4:15 pm: Justice Made Reasonable? The Reply to the Foole
Chair: Victor Muniz-Fraticelli (McGill, politics/law)
Commentators: Tom Sorell (Birmingham, philosophy)
Ed King (Concordia, politics)
Author/Respondent: Kinch Hoekstra (Berkeley, politics/law)

4:30 pm: Reception


This workshop has been made possible by generous support from the Dean of Arts Development Fund (McGill), Department of Political Science (University of California - Berkeley), Groupe de recherche interuniversitaire en philosophie politique de Montréal (GRIPP), Department of Political Science (McGill), and Department of Philosophy (McGill).

There's bibliophilia, and then there's...

I'm as guilty as anyone of buying all the Berlinalia that anyone slapped between two covers and marketed (e.g.). But I can recognize that an as excess, not to be repeated.

On the other hand, Berlin was an inspires-intense-loyalty charismatic thinker, not an inspires-serious-thought rigorous philosopher. It seems to me that publishing Berlin's juvenilia is a bit more in his spirit than publishing Rawls' senior thesis on religion from the days when he was religious is in Rawls' spirit.

John Rawls never published anything about his own religious beliefs, but after his death two texts were discovered which shed extraordinary light on the subject. A Brief Inquiry into the Meaning of Sin and Faith is Rawls’s undergraduate senior thesis, submitted in December 1942, just before he entered the army. At that time Rawls was deeply religious; the thesis is a significant work of theological ethics, of interest both in itself and because of its relation to his mature writings. “On My Religion,” a short statement drafted in 1997, describes the history of his religious beliefs and attitudes toward religion, including his abandonment of orthodoxy during World War II.

The present volume includes these two texts, together with an Introduction by Joshua Cohen and Thomas Nagel, which discusses their relation to Rawls’s published work, and an essay by Robert Merrihew Adams, which places the thesis in its theological context.

The texts display the profound engagement with religion that forms the background of Rawls’s later views on the importance of separating religion and politics. Moreover, the moral and social convictions that the thesis expresses in religious form are related in illuminating ways to the central ideas of Rawls’s later writings. His notions of sin, faith, and community are simultaneously moral and theological, and prefigure the moral outlook found in Theory of Justice.

I'm sure I'll read the Cohen and Nagel pieces at some point, as well as "On My Religion." Ordinarily wanting to read three essays in a book would be more than enough for me to buy it-- and my book-buying habit dovetails with a certain collectors' completism. (Why else is J.S. Mill's System of Logic on my shelves?) But I'm determined to be strong and not buy A Brief Inquiry into the Meaning of Sin and Faith , as the act of publishing it seems to me to indicate something unhealthy.

I'm going to live forever, cancer-free; part of a continuing series

via Pejman Yousefzadeh, the latest in the parade of good news about the health benefits of the nectar of the gods.

A cup of joe a day may help keep skin cancer away: A new study shows that caffeine helps kill off human cells damaged by ultraviolet light, one of the key triggers of several types of skin cancer.

The finding, detailed in Feb. 26 online issue of the Journal of Investigative Dermatology, could one day lead to the development of caffeine creams or ointments to help reverse the effects of UV damage in humans and prevent some skin cancers.

Nonmelanoma skin cancers, which rarely metastasize or cause death, are the most common form of cancer in humans, with more than 1 million new cases occurring each year in the United States alone. (Melanoma is, however, one of the deadlier cancers.)

Exposure to ultraviolet light is one of the most important factors in causing nonmelanoma cancers. The rays cause DNA damage to skin cells, which then mutate or become cancerous.

Several studies have shown that people who regularly drink coffee or tea seem to have lower incidences of nonmelanoma skin cancers. One recent study of more than 90,000 Caucasian women found that with each additional cup of caffeinated coffee consumed, there was an associated 5 percent decreased risk of developing one of these skin cancers (decaf coffee had no effect).