Deadline extended: CFA: McGill Visiting Fulbright Chair in the Theory and Practice of Federalism, 2010-2011

See the award announcement here (cumbersome pdf) and information on applying here and here. Applications go through Fulbright/ CIES, not directly to McGill.

The deadline for all Canada-US visiting Fulbright Chairs has apparently been extended to September 30. The McGill Visiting Fulbright Chair in the Theory and Practice of Federalism is open to junior or senior scholars, doing empirical, normative, or theoretical work, who wish to spend a semester of or the whole of AY 2010-11 at McGill in the Department of Political Science and the Research Group on Constitutional Studies. Applicants must be US citizens or permanent residents, and must not also be Canadian citizens or permanent residents. Stipend of $CAN 25000, plus up to $CAN 1000 for in-country travel and enrichment.

Feel free to contact me directly for more information-- the Fulbright website is kind of cumbersome.

CFA: GRIPP graduate fellowships, 2009-10


[le francais suit]

Groupe de recherche interuniversitaire en philosophie politique de Montréal (GRIPP) Fellowship program

The Groupe de recherche interuniversitaire en philosophie politique de Montréal (GRIPP) invites applications to its graduate student fellowship program for the academic year 2009-10. Interested graduate students should submit a letter of application of one page (300 words) explaining their research agenda, the work they propose to do in 2009-10, and the link between their individual projects and GRIPP's research axes, described below. Applicants should also describe their existing fellowship and stipend awards, if any. Applications should also be accompanied by the email address of a Professor capable of commenting on the academic qualifications of the applicant.

All fellows will be expected to take part in a faculty and graduate student seminar that will meet roughly biweekly throughout the academic year, and will be given the opportunity to present work to that seminar. Meetings of the Montreal Political Theory Workshop will ordinarily be scheduled during the regular seminar time, and attendance at the MPTW will be expected in the same fashion as attendance at other meetings of the seminar.

Admission to the fellowship will be awarded based on the merit of the individual research project and its fit with GRIPP's research agenda. The size of the awards will vary by level of study and by the availability of other fellowship support, but may be up to $5000 for Ph.D. students and $2000 for M.A. students.

Please submit applications to danielweins@gmail.com . Deadline is September 11.

Research axes:

GRIPP is made up of over twenty professors of political philosophy and political theory from Concordia University, McGill University, the University of Montréal, and the University of Québec at Montréal, as well as associated postdoctoral fellows and graduate students. Under the conceptual umbrella of "New developments in democratic theory: toward an integrated approach," its research projects cluster along four axes, though each is meant to enrich and inform all of the others.

1) History and principles: The evaluation of democratic institutions and of their ability to respond to contemporary political challenges must be based on a solid grasp of the founding and organizing principles of democratic theory. We thus begin with a critical confrontation with the most important texts in the liberal and democratic traditions. We seek in particular to uncover arguments and conceptual resources from the tradition of political theory that have been relatively neglected in the contemporary renaissance of liberal and democratic thought, including attention to passions, affects, and emotions; to dissensus and disagreement; to aesthetics; and to institutional constraints.

2) The moral psychology of the democratic agent: Political theories have often depicted moral agents in very reductive fashions as beings moved by purely self-regarding interests and preferences which rules and institutions must constrain. A recentering of the theory of liberal democracy which gives a greater importance to democratic practices should at the same time endow us with a richer conception of the democratic agent, of that agent's disposition and character, and of the virtues to which that agent might aspire.

3) Democracy and diversity: GRIPP seeks to build on the turns to multiculturalism and pluralism in liberal and democratic theory, with a particular emphasis on theoretical approaches to the democratic management of diversity that steer between the aspiration to consensus and the acceptance of radical fragmentation; and on associational and jurisdictional pluralist approaches to understanding the diverse sources of norms in modern societies.

4) Democracy, justice, and transnational institutions: GRIPP seeks to bring political philosophy into fuller engagement with the various social, technological, cultural, and economic phenomena of globalization, and to understand how political principles and political actors can be understood in transnational contexts.

---------------------------

Groupe de recherche interuniversitaire en philosophie politique de Montréal (GRIPP)

Programme de Bourse

Le GRIPP a le plaisir d'offrir plusieurs bourses d'étude de deuxième et troisième cycle pour l'année académique 2009-10. Les étudiants intéressés sont invités à soumettre une lettre de candidature d'une page (300 mots) détaillant leurs projets de recherche, le travail proposé pour l'année académique 2009-10 et les liens entre leurs programmes de recherche et les travaux des membres du groupe. Les candidats devraient aussi indiquer les bourses reçues jusqu'à présent. Enfin, chaque demande devrait être accompagnée de l’adresse électronique d’un répondant pouvant témoigner de la qualité de la candidature.

- Hide quoted text -

Chaque boursier s'engage à participer à un séminaire de deuxième et troisième cycle qui se tiendra toutes les deux semaines pendant l'année académique pendant lequel les étudiants auront l'opportunité de présenter leurs recherches aux membres du groupe., ainsi qu'aux ateliers en philosophie politique pendant l'année académique.


Les bourses individuelles seront attribuées au mérite selon la qualité du projet de recherche et ses liens avec le programme de recherche du GRIPP. Les bourses individuelles prendront en compte le niveau d'étude de chaque candidat/e et la disponibilité d'autres sources de soutien, jusqu'à un maximum de $5000 pour les étudiants au troisième cycle, et de $2000 pour les étudiants au deuxième cycle.

Veuillez soumettre vos projets par courriel au Professeur Daniel Weinstock à danielweins@gmail.com .

La date d'échéance est le 11 septembre

Axes de recherche :

Le GRIPP est composé de plus de vingt professeurs de philosophie et de théorie politiques oeuvrant dans les quatre universités montréalaises : l¹Université de Montréal, l¹Université de Québec à Montréal (UQÀM), les universités Concordia et McGill. Sous l¹intitulé général : « Nouveaux développements en théorie démocratique : vers une approche intégrée », les projets de recherche qui lui sont associés se rassemblent autour de quatre axes distincts:



1) Histoire et principes : L¹évaluation des institutions démocratiques et de leur capacité à relever les défis politiques contemporains suppose une solide compréhension des principes et fondements de la théorie démocratique. Celle-ci requiert une confrontation critique des textes les plus importants des traditions démocratiques et libérales. Une telle confrontation suppose, plus particulièrement, la mise en évidence d¹arguments et de ressources conceptuelles de ces traditions, jusqu¹à présent relativement négligés; citons, pour exemple, les passions, affects et émotions; le dissensus et le différend; l¹esthétique; ainsi que les contraintes institutionnelles.



2) Psychologie morale de l¹agent démocratique : les théories politiques ont souvent décrit les agents moraux en des termes très réducteurs, comme des êtres mus par des intérêts et des préférences purement égoïstes que les règles et les institutions cherchent à limiter. Un recentrement de la théorie de la démocratie libérale, qui a pour effet de reconnaître l¹importance des pratiques démocratiques, devrait avoir pour autre conséquence le développement d¹une conception plus riche de l¹agent démocratique, de ses dispositions et de son caractère, ainsi que des vertus auxquelles il peut aspirer.



3) Démocratie et diversité : Le GRIPP entend contribuer aux récents tournants de la théorie démocratique libérale vers le multiculturalisme et le pluralisme, en s'intéressant plus particulièrement aux approches théoriques de la diversité qui tentent de maintenir le cap entre l'aspiration au consensus et la célébration d¹une fragmentation radicale. Le GRIPP s¹intéresse également aux courants pluralistes en théorie sociale et du droit qui tentent de mettre en évidence la diversité des sources des normes dans les sociétés modernes.



4) Démocratie, justice, et institutions transnationales : Le GRIPP cherche à encourager un dialogue fructueux entre les réflexions en philosophie politique et les différents phénomènes sociaux, politiques, technologiques, culturels et économiques liés à la globalisation. Un des objectifs poursuivis est de clarifier la façon dont notre compréhension des principes et des acteurs politiques est affectée lorsqu¹on les considère dans des contextes transnationaux.

Chinese Politics, McGill University

The Department of Political Science invites applications for a tenure-track position at the Assistant Professor level in the area of Chinese Politics. The Department is particularly interested in candidates whose research is on Chinese domestic politics but who can also teach on some aspect of China’s international relations. The successful candidate will have the linguistic abilities required for field work in China. The Department seeks applicants whose research is theoretically and empirically informed, who possess strong training in qualitative and/or quantitative and/or formal methods, and who can teach effectively at the undergraduate and graduate levels. An applicant’s record of performance must provide evidence of outstanding research potential. Candidates should have already completed the PhD or be very near completion. Applications should include a curriculum vitae, graduate transcript, three letters of reference, a sample of written work and materials pertinent to teaching skills. The position start date is August 1, 2010. Review of applications will begin on October 1, 2009 and will continue until the position is filled. For more information about the Department and University, visit our web site at www.mcgill.ca/politicalscience/.



PLEASE FORWARD SUPPORTING MATERIALS TO:

Professor Richard Schultz
James McGill Professor and Chair
Department of Political Science
McGill University
855 Sherbrooke Street West
Montreal, Quebec, Canada H3A 2T7

Quote of the day

From the Gazette, in an article about the elimination of English translations from the hard copies of community newspapers distributed for free in some parts of greater Montreal, due to shrinking ad revenue, and the resulting complaints and petitions:

"If we don't start sticking up for our rights we've lost them" [LaSalle borough councillor Michael] Vadacchino said. [...] "I understand the economics of it, of course, it's a business, but as a citizen, that's not my problem, they've given this service for years, so now what?"

Rawls' religion, revisited

Paul Weithman, a Notre Dame philosopher who writes consistently engaging and important work on ethics, philosophy, and religion, ran across our discussion a while back about the publication of John Rawls' senior thesis on religion. (To be clear, I still haven't read that work.) He thought that blogreaders might be interested in his review of the volume. An excerpt:

As Adams notes, Rawls's reading of Augustine "is neither persuasive nor fair". (p. 43) This difficulty with the critical part of A Brief Inquiry raises a question that would be asked about this book anyway, the question of why Rawls's senior thesis is interesting enough to publish.

Though the ambition, systematicity and achievement of the thesis are extraordinary for someone in his early twenties, A Brief Inquiry would not have been worth publishing if Rawls had not later accomplished what he did. Nor would the thesis hold the interest that it does if the subject matter were not so surprising. Rawls's doctoral dissertation was on a philosophical rather than a religious subject. As far as I know, there are no plans to publish it; if the dissertation were published, it would be the object of far less fascination -- and would elicit far less comment -- than Rawls's undergraduate thesis.

Unlike Rawls's dissertation, A Brief Inquiry fascinates because it shows that someone whom many philosophers thought they knew well through his published work once had a very different intellectual and spiritual life. The thesis also extends a tantalizing invitation to engage in counterfactual history. Reading it in conjunction with "On My Religion" does not exactly convey the poignancy of a lost innocence that might have been kept, since there is very little innocence in A Brief Inquiry. Rawls was well aware of the war he was going off to fight after graduation and of the "demonic" character of the foe against whom it was being waged. (p. 197) But if innocence was not lost, deep religious conviction was. We cannot help but wonder how differently a great man's life would have gone had the events of mid-century affected him otherwise.

Not all readers are tantalized by counterfactual history. Even those who are not are bound to experience some pleasure in finding familiar Rawlsian ideas -- such as the natural lottery and the rejection of merit -- in unexpected places. (p. 240) Further, those who know Rawls's work well may be interested to learn that claims they find puzzling were present in Rawls's thought from the start, rather than accepted later on the basis of arguments that can eventually be recovered from his mature writings.

[...]

A Brief Inquiry may anticipate some of Rawls's later claims and arguments. But are we really going to read Rawls's later philosophical work differently in light of his undergraduate thesis?

The answer depends in part upon who "we" are. Among scholars of religious ethics, Rawls is often read as defending a thoroughly secular liberalism. That he defends secular liberalism, and does not systematically engage religion in his published works, is thought to show that he is dismissive of it or antagonistic toward it. Furthermore, his dismissal of or antagonism toward religion is assumed to be rooted in his ignorance of it. A Brief Inquiry definitively refutes the charges of ignorance and dismissal. "On My Religion" puts to rest the charge of antagonism. Acquittal of these charges clears the way for a much more sympathetic reception of Rawls's work by religious ethicists who were previously suspicious or hostile.[8]

What publication of the thesis offers all readers of Rawls -- and not just religious ethicists -- is a helpful corrective to some common interpretive errors. The Rawls of Theory of Justice is sometimes read as having ranged widely if not self-indulgently over problems in ethics that are only loosely connected to political philosophy, especially in Theory of Justice, Part III. Moreover, some readings of Rawls's move from Theory of Justice to Political Liberalism treat that move less as a transition than as a rupture caused by a fundamental shift of concern. Together, these two readings suggest that Rawls produced a body of work that, while hardly incoherent, lacks a unity of focus and underlying motivation. Those who read Rawls's work this way may find their reading reinforced by the addition of A Brief Inquiry to Rawls's corpus, since his political philosophy seems quite far removed from the self-described religious orthodoxy and evident piety of the senior thesis.

I believe, on the contrary, that Rawls maintained a disciplined focus on a few questions he took to be central. Continuities of concern and motivation tie his mature work together, and -- as Nagel and Cohen stress in their introduction and as Adams argues in his essay -- there are marked continuities between that work and A Brief Inquiry. Moreover, once we identify claims in Rawls's later work that are continuous with views he held very early on, we will be drawn to readings of justice as fairness that give those claims an importance or centrality they might not otherwise seem to have had. In this way, at least, A Brief Inquiry promises to change how Rawls is sometimes read and to blunt criticisms that are sometimes made.

Highly recommended.

G.A. Cohen

I was on vacation and away from blogging access when I received the sad news of G.A. Cohen's sudden passing. I seem to be among the few practicing political theorists who had never met him-- he was twice away from Oxford when I happened to be coming through to give a paper, and his last visitorship at McGill was five years before my arrival, though we had been in intermittent touch about bringing him back for a semester in the next few years. Given the tremendous personal presence described by his friends, students, and colleagues, I'm sorry not to have had the chance. In any case, I have nothing of personal note to add to the touching remembrances many have already posted. (See Chris Bertram, his roundup of others' notes, this delightful one from Chris Brooke, Jo Wolff, etc.)

But the following paragraph seemed to me to warrant highlighting here:

Like his immediate predecessor as the Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at the University of Oxford, Gerald Allan Cohen was born and educated in Montreal [indeed, both received BAs from McGill-- JTL]. There, the similarities end. Charles Taylor embodied the two founding cultures of his home city, French and Scottish, while Cohen recalled that he was 10 years old before he realised that there were some people who were neither Jews nor communists.

Cohen wrote of his "Montreal Communist Jewish childhood" in If You're An Egalitarian, How Come You're So Rich?, a partly-autobiographical work from 2006 that explores the roots of his own egalitarian commitments. In it he noted the complex place of McGill in the social world of his childhood: an object of "widespread hope and expectation," but also one to which Jewish children were taught "we would gain admission[...] only if we scored rather better than the minimum required for non-Jews," even years after McGill's "delicate discrimination" against Jews had ceased.

That reminds me to link again to Judith Shklar's autobiographical essay, and her remarks about her own undergraduate days at McGill-- when the discrimination was still in full force.

I do not look back fondly to my college days at McGill University either. That may have something to do with the then-prevailing entrance rules: 750 points for Jews and 600 for everyone else. Nor was it an intellectually exciting institution, but at least when I arrived there, just before my 17th birthday, I was lucky to be in the same class as many ex-servicemen, whose presence made for an unusually mature and serious student body. And compared to school it was heaven. Moreover, it all worked out surprisingly well for me. I met my future husband and was married at the end of my junior year, by far the smartest thing I ever did. And I found my vocation.

Originally I had planned to major in a mixture of philosophy and economics, the rigor of which attracted me instantly. But when I was required to take a course in money and banking it became absolutely obvious to me that I was not going to be a professional economist. Philosophy was, moreover, mainly taught by a dim gentleman who took to it because he had lost his religious faith. I have known many confused people since I encountered this poor man, but nobody quite as utterly unfit to teach Plato or Descartes. Fortunately for me I was also obliged to take a course in the history of political theory taught by an American, Frederick Watkins. After two weeks of listening to this truly gifted teacher I knew what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. If there was any way of making sense of my experiences and that of my particular world, this was it.

Watkins was a remarkable man, as the many students whom he was to teach at Yale can testify. He was an exceptionally versatile and cultivated man and a more than talented teacher. He not only made the history of ideas fascinating in his lectures, but he also somehow conveyed the sense that nothing could be more important. I also found him very reassuring. For in many ways, direct and indirect, he let me know that the things I had been brought up to care for, classical music, pictures, literature, were indeed worthwhile, and not my personal eccentricities. His example, more than anything overtly said, gave me a great deal of self-confidence, and I would have remembered him gratefully, even if he had not encouraged me to go on to graduate school, to apply to Harvard, and then to continue to take a friendly interest in my education and career. It is a great stroke of luck to discover one’s calling in one’s late teens, and not everyone has the good fortune to meet the right teacher at the right time in her life, but I did, and I have continued to be thankful for the education that he offered me so many years ago.

University of Toronto Centre for Ethics fellowships



Centre for Ethics

University of Toronto


Visiting Faculty Fellowships 2010-11


The University of Toronto’s Centre for Ethics invites applications for its Visiting Faculty Fellowships. For the academic year 2010-11, two fellowships will be awarded to outstanding scholars and teachers interested in writing and conducting research about ethics during a year in residence at the University of Toronto.

Fellows will participate in a bi-weekly seminar at the Centre, together with local faculty as well as the Centre’s graduate and post-doctoral fellows. Fellows are also expected to participate regularly in the Centre’s other activities, including seminars, colloquia, and public lectures; and to be in residence in Toronto for the term of their appointments, which will run from September 1, 2010 to May 15, 2011. Although regular teaching obligations are not attached to the Fellowships, one of the goals of the Centre for Ethics is to enhance the undergraduate student experience at the University of Toronto. We strongly encourage Fellows to participate in informal events in the Ethics, Society and Law program and in Trinity College, and to consider teaching a one-term course at the upper level.

Faculty fellows will receive stipends intended to help maintain their salary during the fellowship year at its usual level. Stipends will normally amount to up to one half of the fellow’s academic year salary, up to a maximum of C$ 50, 000. In addition, fellows will receive a research allowance; an office in the Centre, equipped with a computer; and access to library and other University facilities. Their home institution is expected to provide at least half of their salaries, in addition to all benefits. Fellows between regular academic appointments are eligible for funding to be determined on an individual basis.

Fellows are selected by an interdisciplinary faculty committee in the Centre for Ethics. Applicants are judged on the quality of their achievements in their field of specialization and their ability to benefit from work in the Centre; the contributions they are likely to make in the future in higher education through teaching and writing about ethics; and the probable significance of their proposed research and its relevance to the purposes of the Centre. Applicants must hold a university faculty appointment at the time of application. There is no restriction on discipline or citizenship.

For fellowships beginning in September 2010, applicants must submit hard copies of:

1. A curriculum vitae;
2. A scholarly paper in English written or published in the past three years (no more than 10,000 words; on longer papers, applicants must indicate their own excerpt);
3. A statement (no more than 1,500 words) describing the proposed research project;
4. Three letters of reference (at least one from someone who was not a dissertation supervisor) sent directly to the Director, Centre for Ethics at the address below.



All materials, including letters of reference, must be received by November 16, 2009. Successful applicants will be asked to provide salary information on a confidential basis to the Centre’s Director.

Please send applications to: Professor Melissa Williams (Director), Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto, 6 Hoskin Avenue, Toronto, Ontario Canada M5S 1H8.

Coming soon...

Lost University.

See especially the Philosophy 101 class on major thinkers. I'm not sure what it means to be one of the faculty for the class, but am bitterly disappointed not to be among them.

Poli sci and department sizes

Via Henry Farrell and Chris Blattman, an article showing consistent disparities across disciplines in student-faculty rations (technically majors-faculty ratios), with poli sci consistently turning up as an extreme case of too few faculty for too many students, followed by econ and psych. As Blattman puts it, this has direct bearings on "why your economics and politics professors seem to have so little time for you."

I was going to post that, in addition to the explanations discussed in those two posts, there was likely to be convergence in absolute department sizes-- certainly, once a university has determined to maintain or create a department (thereby getting into the measurable pool in the first place), there's good reason not to follow a strict proportionality rule that allows faculty size to fall to 1 or 2. You don't want a single sabbatical to destroy the department's course offerings in a year, for example. This will skew the results away from proportionality between enrollments and faculty sizes. But then I clicked through and read the paper itself, and it covers this under "minimum effective size." I would add to the paper's discussion that there's also a considerable degree of organizational isomorphism-- the kind of thing that is a "department" has a size that's somewhat more than two and somewhat fewer than 100, and there will tend to be both functional and normative pressure keeping departments at within-a-near-order-of-magnitude similar absolute sizes, regardless of student enrollment. This, again, means that low-enrollment departments won't be allowed to shrink too far-- and high-enrollment departments won't be allowed to grow too much.

The paper's got kind of a funny-- funny strange as well as funny ha-ha-- when its authors turn to explaining the apparent departure from the economists' prediction of faculty sizes that are proportionately responsive to student demand by saying that there might be politics afoot. Really! You don't say?

Cheap flights to Toronto

Attention APSA-goers: WestJet appears to be running a big Bastille-Day-only sale. It's possible to get from Montreal to Toronto and back for just $18.

Special issue of the CLR James Review: "Creolizing Rousseau"

The C.L.R. James Journal is pleased to announce the publication of its Spring 2009 special issue, Creolizing Rousseau, guest co-edited by Jane Anna Gordon and Neil Roberts.

The CLR James Journal: A Review of Caribbean Ideas
Special Issue: Creolizing Rousseau
Volume 15, Number 1, Spring 2009

Table of Contents

EDITORS’ NOTE

Introduction: The Project of Creolizing Rousseau
Jane Anna Gordon and Neil Roberts


DEBATING CREOLIZATION: AN INTRODUCTION

Of Legitimation and the General Will: Creolizing Rousseau through Frantz Fanon
Jane Anna Gordon

From Mestiçagem to Cosmopolitanism
Alexis Nouss

Beyond Négritude and Créolité: The Ongoing Creolization of Identities
Mickaella Perina

CREOLIZING ROUSSEAU

Rousseau, the Master’s Tools, and Anti-Contractarian Contractarianism
Charles W. Mills

Rousseau and Fanon on Inequality and the Human Sciences
Nelson Maldonado-Torres

From Rousseau’s Theory of Natural Equality to Firmin's Resistance to the Historical Inequality of Races
Tommy J. Curry

Rousseau and the Problem of Democratic Transition in Postcolonial Africa
George Carew

C.L.R. James and the Creolizing of Rousseau and Marx
Paget Henry

Virtuous Bacchanalia: Creolizing Rousseau’s Festival
Chiji Akoma and Sally Scholz

REVIEW ESSAYS

Rousseau, Social Alienation, and the Possibility of Generative Critique: A Review Essay
Emily C. Nacol

On Pateman and Mills’s Contract and Domination
Lewis R. Gordon

Space, Power, Consciousness and Women's Resistance: A Review Essay
Gertrude Gonzáles de Allen

ACCEPTANCE LETTER OF WILSON HARRIS, FIRST RECIPIENT OF THE CPA NICOLÁS GUILLÉN PRIZE FOR PHILOSOPHICAL LITERATURE

BOOK DISCUSSION

Sylvia Marcos’s Taken from the Lips as a Post-secular Transmodern, and Decolonial Methodology
Nelson Maldonado-Torres

On Sylvia Marcos’s Taken from the Lips
Karen Torjesen

On Sylvia Marcos’s Journey along the Spiral of Nahuatl Gender and Eros
Madina Tlostanova

Cosmology and Gender in Sylvia Marcos’s Taken From the Lips: Gender and Eros in Mesoamerican Religions
María Lugones

Unapologetically to Introduce New Goals and Methods: A Reply
Sylvia Marcos

In addition, the complete introduction that articulates the project of creolizing Rousseau and summarizes the essay of each author can be found at:


http://www.williams.edu/africana-studies/NeilRoberts/CreolizingRousseauIntroduction/EditorsNotes.htm


If you wish to obtain a copy of the issue, please direct your requests to Paget Henry (Paget_Henry@brown.edu), Executive Editor of The C.L.R. James Journal.

Sage and Political Theory roundup

I haven't said anything in this space about recent developments at the journal Political Theory; by the time all the facts were in so that anything responsible could be said, there was nothing left to say. But it's worth noting that Inside Higher Ed has picked up on the story and provided an overview.

Update: The Chronicle, too. Therein a tangential comment I made elsewhere is deemed "provocative."

I'm going to live forever, part of a continuing series

Coffee, already thought to have a prophylactic effect against Alzheimer's, may actually partially reverse its effects, at the eminently moderate level of five cups per day.

Best college towns

Via Lee Siegelman: The top 5 college towns in North America.

Amherst
Berkeley
Montreal
Washington
Boston.

Montreal:

If you can handle the frigid winters, Montréal is a great place to be a college student. Located just seven hours from New York City, Montréal has the second highest number of post-secondary students in North America, making for ample opportunities to meet college students from all over the world studying at one of Montréal's two dozen institutions.

There are a few reasons Montréal trumps other North American cities in its college-student friendliness. First, studying in Montréal is a bargain. For Americans, tuition is significantly less than at other private colleges -- international students pay about $12,000 for tuition at McGill University, widely considered the "Harvard of Canada." Also, with a student ID, students can use Montreal's extensive public transportation system, the STM (La Société de transport de Montréal), at a 50 percent discount.

Second, there is really no city in the United States that so fluidly combines European charm with North American pragmatism. Because Montréal is a truly bilingual city, students will not need to enroll in French classes to learn the language. Students here are independent and do not confine themselves to their campuses; you'll see students shopping and clubbing on St. Catherine Street and sipping coffee in the Latin Quarter at all hours of the day.

Finally, Montréalers know how to throw a party. World-class jazz, film and comedy festivals and the only Grand Prix event in North America make four years in Montréal one hot experience.

Virtual housekeeping

I've done a round of cleanups on my home page, including links where appropriate to published versions of things that previously had links to SSRN drafts, complete citations, etc. Also tied 'em all up together in a single "recent papers" list, forgoing the annual sublists.

My homepage is, well, boring. I'm still basically writing the html I taught myself in January 1996; I've never acquired any knowledge of java or javascript of xml or (etc.), and I deleted the two pictures that used to be on the page. At the end of the day, I like text. I just wish I had a better eye for the presentation of text; I find my homepage intuitive but dull.

I'm aware that some friends and colleagues have fancy homepages. But it seems to me that the more bells and whistles it has, the harder it is to update regularly-- is that so? (Or is it just a matter of having appropriate software?)

The pages I know of that are both fancy and constantly updated are more of the promotional-site-for-one's-public-intellectual-career type than of the research-and-teaching-stuff type.

In comments, I encourage readers to identify particularly good examples of academics' homepages. Who's setting a high standard?

Fleischacker wins Gittler Award

Brian Leiter notes that Sam Fleischacker has been awarded the Joseph B. Gittler Prize from the APA for his superb On Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations: A Philosophical Companion (Princeton University Press). The prize is for "an outstanding scholarly contribution in the field of the philosophy of one or more of the social sciences."

This is one of my favorite books from the past several years, and I'm delighted to see it honored. This provides a good excuse to recommend it to all and sundry.

Visions of Canadian identity: 10 equal provinces, 33 million equal citizens, or multiple nations

Interesting poll here.

New arrivals for the reading list

Recently acquired:

Sonu Bedi,Rejecting Rights.

The language of rights is ubiquitous. It shapes the way we construct our debates over issues such as abortion, affirmative action and sexual freedom. This provocative new study challenges the very concept of rights, arguing that they jeopardize our liberty and undermine democratic debate. By re-conceptualizing our ideas about limited government, it suggests that we can limit the reasons or rationales on which the polity may act. Whereas we once used the language of rights to thwart democratic majorities, Bedi argues that we should now turn our attention to the democratic state's reason for acting. This will permit greater democratic flexibility and discretion while ensuring genuine liberty. Deftly employing political theory and constitutional law to state its case, the study radically rethinks the relationship between liberty and democracy, and will be essential reading for scholars and students of political and legal philosophy.

Josiah Ober, Democracy and Knowledge: Innovation and Learning in Classical Athens

When does democracy work well, and why? Is democracy the best form of government? These questions are of supreme importance today as the United States seeks to promote its democratic values abroad. Democracy and Knowledge is the first book to look to ancient Athens to explain how and why directly democratic government by the people produces wealth, power, and security.

Combining a history of Athens with contemporary theories of collective action and rational choice developed by economists and political scientists, Josiah Ober examines Athenian democracy's unique contribution to the ancient Greek city-state's remarkable success, and demonstrates the valuable lessons Athenian political practices hold for us today. He argues that the key to Athens's success lay in how the city-state managed and organized the aggregation and distribution of knowledge among its citizens. Ober explores the institutional contexts of democratic knowledge management, including the use of social networks for collecting information, publicity for building common knowledge, and open access for lowering transaction costs. He explains why a government's attempt to dam the flow of information makes democracy stumble. Democratic participation and deliberation consume state resources and social energy. Yet as Ober shows, the benefits of a well-designed democracy far outweigh its costs.

Understanding how democracy can lead to prosperity and security is among the most pressing political challenges of modern times. Democracy and Knowledge reveals how ancient Greek politics can help us transcend the democratic dilemmas that confront the world today.

The holiday season

I liked this series enough last year that I'm going to rerun it.


Bonne fete nationale!

And a good Jean-Baptiste. This kicks off the holiday season: Jean-Baptiste, Canada Day, and the Fourth of July in the space of 10 days (along with the Jazz Festival, of course). Viewing recommendations for the national holiday of Quebec: I am not a Canadian (if you don't know what it's a reference to, see here); and just to throw something more interesting and more francophone, if less directly thematic, into the mix, my favorite Montreal movie, Le Golem de Montreal.

Update: I seem to have forgotten to rerun it. Click on the "holiday season" tag to read last year's entries.

Obviously false dichotomies

One sees this kind of thing from time to time, and it baffles me.

“The issue of the burqa is not a religious issue; it is a question of freedom and of women’s dignity,” Mr. Sarkozy said. “The burqa is not a religious sign; it is a sign of the subjugation, of the submission of women.”

Why would one possibly think that either of those sentences contains two mutually-exclusive categories? What generates the idea that something cannot be both a religious symbol and a symbol of women's subjugation? Is it polyanna-ism about religion?

I'm not commenting here on the merits of Sarkozy's insistence that "the burqa is not welcome in France" (though I'll probably do so at some point). But the attempt here, I guess, to deny that there are any costs or trade-offs in banning it (if it's not a "religious issue," then there's no constitutional value to balance against the constitutional value of sex equality-- that kind of thing) seems to me pointlessly dishonest.

Update

There's sophistry aplenty in the following section, expanding on why a prohbition on the burka would be costless in terms of liberty:

Où en sommes-nous avec la liberté ? Qu'en avons-nous fait ?

La liberté, ce n'est pas le droit pour chacun de faire ce qu'il veut. Être libre, ce n'est pas vivre sans contrainte et sans règle. Quand il n'y a pas de règles, quand tous les coups sont permis, ce n'est pas la liberté qui triomphe, c'est la loi de la jungle, la loi du plus fort ou celle du plus malin.

C'est le débat que nous avons sur l'école : rendre service à nos enfants, c'est leur enseigner qu'il n'y a pas de liberté sans règle.

C'est le débat que nous avons sur l'économie, sur la finance, sur le capitalisme. Nous voyons bien que le capitalisme devient fou quand il n'y a plus de règles.

C'est le débat aussi que nous avons sur le droit d'auteur. Car enfin, comment pourrait-il y avoir dans notre société de zones de non-droit ? Comment peut-on réclamer en même temps que l'économie soit régulée et qu'Internet ne le soit pas ? Comment peut-on accepter que les règles qui s'imposent à toute la société ne s'imposent pas sur Internet ? En défendant le droit d'auteur, je ne défends pas seulement la création artistique, je défends aussi l'idée que je me fais d'une société de liberté, où la liberté de chacun est fondée sur le respect du droit des autres. C'est aussi l'avenir de notre culture que je défends. C'est l'avenir de la création. Voilà pourquoi j'irai jusqu'au bout. (Applaudissements.)

Le débat sur la liberté, c'est aussi le débat sur la sécurité et sur les prisons. Quelle est la liberté de celui qui a peur de sortir de chez lui ? Quelle est la liberté pour les victimes si leurs agresseurs ne sont pas punis ? Comment peut-on parler de justice quand 82 000 peines ne sont pas exécutées parce qu'il n'y a pas assez de places dans les prisons ?

So: imprisoning women who go out of the house fully covered prevents the law of the jungle; prisons are liberty; restrictions on capitalism are liberty; copyright restrictions are liberty. No rules can possibly restrict liberty, because liberty is not the absence of rules.

I suppose I should view it as ideologically useful to have the French economic model linked so closely to the French model of laicite, both in opposition to Anglo-Saxon liberalism. But it just makes me cranky.

Journal rankings

The 2008 ISI journal rankings are out. Impact factors for selected journals of interest around here:

APSR: 1.725
Journal of Politics: 1.685
Philosophy & Public Affairs: 1.500
Ethics: 1.053
Journal of Political Philosophy: .902
Political Studies .625
Political Theory .403

Coverage remains bizarrely spotty in the rankings, and many journals covered by ISI's citation indices aren't included. History of Political Thought, European Journal of Political Theory, Review of Politics, Journal of the History of Ideas, and Polity are among the journals not listed in the rankings, while Critical Review, the Indpendent Review, the Nation, Commentary, Dissent, and the New Republic all show up. (Remember, this is supposed to be a list of scholarly journals.)

The APSR is ranked *tenth* in political science by 2008 impact factor. Five-year impact factor and the new Article Influence Score both give the expected result that the APSR is ranked first. Eyeballing the lists, it looks to me as if the 5-year IF, the AIS, and my intuitions all line up in most cases, while the one-year IF has some weird anomalies.

Academic freedom, SSHRC, and York U conference on Israel and Palestine

Les Green has been doing yeoman's work at keeping information flowing about the genuine threat to academic freedom posed by Minister of Science Gary Goodyear's intervention in the SSHRC peer-reviewed grant-making procedure. Academics who are on facebook, please come join the group he's formed and read and circulate the open letter from York faculty, also quoted below.

Sometimes there's a tendency to cry "academic freedom" only when one's own ox is being gored-- especially on Israel/ Palestine questions. If I were to attend the conference at York, I'm pretty sure that I'd be annoyed-to-outraged by a great deal of what I'd hear. And lots of invocations of academic freedom these days are just complaints that one is being criticized.

But politicized interference in what are supposed to be arm's-length impartial systems of peer review-- that's an absolutely clear violation of academic freedom. SSHRC has already compromised itself by agreeing to the extraordinary review of the grant at ministerial request; it needs to not only maintain the funding but also make a strong statement about the inappropriateness of political intervention in peer review.

Anyway, please come join the facebook group both to follow the news and to convey the support of the academic community for the York faculty who are taking the lead in this fight.

Open Letter to SSHRC President from Faculty members of Osgoode Hall Law School

June 14, 2009

AN OPEN LETTER FROM MEMBERS OF THE FACULTY OF
OSGOODE HALL LAW SCHOOL AT YORK UNIVERSITY

Dr. Chad Gaffield
President
Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council
350 Albert Street, P.O. Box 1610
Ottawa, Ontario, K1P 6G4

Dear Dr. Gaffield:

Re: Review of SSHRC Funding for Conference at York University: “Israel/Palestine: Mapping Models of Statehood and Paths to Peace”

We are writing as members of the faculty of Osgoode Hall Law School at York University to express our extreme dismay that SSHRC appears to be acceding to political pressure by revisiting its decision to fund the above-noted academic conference.

As you know, two of our esteemed colleagues, Professors Susan Drummond and Bruce Ryder, have taken a lead role in planning this event and we write in part to support them and their co-organizers, Professor Sharry Aiken and PhD Candidate Mazen Masri. However this issue has grown far beyond the need to support individual colleagues. Your decision as SSHRC President to require a special pre-conference accounting from the conference organizers, outside the normal post-conference reporting procedures for conference grants, raises the much larger question of your agency’s integrity as a funder and promoter of independent university-based research in Canada.

As a group we have extensive experience with the organization of academic conferences and with SSHRC granting procedures. We believe there is no basis at all for the suggestion that “major changes” were made to the plan for this conference after the grant application had been peer reviewed and funding granted. Nor do we believe that you could
possibly see any basis for this suggestion. Rather, it appears that the special accounting was demanded of our colleagues in direct response to the unprecedented and entirely inappropriate political intervention of Minister Goodyear.

We believe that SSHRC made a serious error in acceding to political interference in this manner. Whether or not SSHRC ultimately submits to the demand for a new peer review that better meets the Minister’s political ends, and whether or not the funding for this conference is ultimately jeopardized, we fear that SSHRC has already compromised the autonomy of academic research in this country. By intruding into the planning of an academic event after a funding decision has been made, SSHRC’s actions are likely to have a most unfortunate chilling effect on academics considering the exploration of controversial or unpopular topics. In addition, by casting doubt on the integrity of its own procedures, SSHRC has empowered those who would devalue academic research and discourse by insisting that academic freedom be reserved only for those who happen to share their point of view.

We hope that SSHRC will very shortly stand up to defend its own granting procedures and the values of academic excellence and autonomy they are designed to protect.

Sincerely,

Harry W. Arthurs, Professor Emeritus, Former Dean, Former President

Margaret E. Beare, Professor

Neil Brooks, Professor

Ruth Buchanan, Associate Professor

Jamie B. Cameron, Professor

Mary G. Condon, Professor

Carys J. Craig, Associate Professor

Giuseppina D’Agostino, Assistant Professor

Paul D. Emond, Associate Professor

Trevor C.W. Farrow, Associate Professor

Simon R. Fodden, Professor Emeritus

Shelley A.M. Gavigan, Professor

Joan M. Gilmour, Associate Professor

Leslie Green, Professor

Richard Haigh, Visiting Professor

Balfour J. Halévy, Professor Emeritus

Doug Hay, Professor

Allan C. Hutchinson, Distinguished Research Professor

Shin Imai, Associate Professor

Shelley Kierstead, Assistant Professor

Sonia Lawrence, Associate Professor

Jinyan Li, Professor

Michael Mandel, Professor

Ikechi Mgbeoji, Associate Professor

Louis Mirando, Chief Law Librarian

Janet Mosher, Associate Professor and Associate Dean

Mary Jane Mossman, Professor of Law (sign. after initial release)

Roxanne Mykitiuk, Associate Professor

Obiora Chinedu Okafor, Professor

Lisa Philipps, Associate Professor

Marilyn L. Pilkington, Associate Professor and Former Dean

Poonam Puri, Associate Professor

Sean Rehaag, Assistant Professor

Benjamin J. Richardson, Professor

Brian Slattery, Professor

Sara Slinn, Assistant Professor

James Stribopoulos, Associate Professor

Craig M. Scott, Professor

Kate Sutherland, Associate Professor

François Tanguay-Renaud, Assistant Professor

Eric M. Tucker, Professor

Gus Van Harten, Assistant Professor

Robert S. Wai, Associate Professor

Garry D. Watson, Professor

Cynthia Williams, Osler Chair in Business Law

Stepan Wood, Associate Professor

Alan N. Young, Associate Professor

Peer Zumbansen, Canada Research Chair & Associate Dean (Research, Graduate Studies and Institutional Relations)

Cc:
Bruce B. Ryder, Associate Professor, Osgoode Hall Law School
Susan G. Drummond, Associate Professor, Osgoode Hall Law School
Sharry J. Aiken, Assistant Professor, Faculty of Law, Queen’s University
Mazen Masri, Ph.D. candidate, Osgoode Hall Law School
Mamdouh Shoukri, President, York University
Stan Shapson, Vice-President (Research & Innovation), York University
Patrick Monahan, Dean of Law and VPA-Elect, York University
Mr. J. Craig McNaughton, Senior Program Officer Strategic Grants and joint Initiatives, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council
James L. Turk, Executive Director, Canadian Association of University Teachers
The Hon. Gary Goodyear, Minister of State (Science & Technology)
The Rt. Hon. Stephen Harper, Prime Minister of Canada
Dr. Marc Garneau, Liberal Critic for Industry, Science and Technology
Mr. Jim Maloway, NDP Critic for Science and Technology
M Robert Vincent, Bloc Critic for Science and Technology

Biblio-summertime

Recent acquisitions now added to the reading list:

Andrew March, Islam and Liberal Citizenship The Search for an Overlapping Consensus

Some argue that Muslims have no tradition of separation of church and state and therefore can't participate in secular, pluralist society. At the other extreme, some Muslims argue that it is the duty of all believers to resist western forms of government and to impose Islamic law. Andrew F. March demonstrates that there are very strong and authentically Islamic arguments for accepting the demands of citizenship in a liberal democracy, many of them found even in medieval works of Islamic jurisprudence. In fact, he shows, it is precisely the fact that Rawlsian political liberalism makes no claims to metaphysical truth that makes it appealing to Muslims.

Daniel Nexon, The Struggle for Power in Early Modern Europe: Religious Conflict, Dynastic Empires, and International Change

Scholars have long argued over whether the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, which ended more than a century of religious conflict arising from the Protestant Reformations, inaugurated the modern sovereign-state system. But they largely ignore a more fundamental question: why did the emergence of new forms of religious heterodoxy during the Reformations spark such violent upheaval and nearly topple the old political order? In this book, Daniel Nexon demonstrates that the answer lies in understanding how the mobilization of transnational religious movements intersects with--and can destabilize--imperial forms of rule.

Taking a fresh look at the pivotal events of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries--including the Schmalkaldic War, the Dutch Revolt, and the Thirty Years' War--Nexon argues that early modern "composite" political communities had more in common with empires than with modern states, and introduces a theory of imperial dynamics that explains how religious movements altered Europe's balance of power. He shows how the Reformations gave rise to crosscutting religious networks that undermined the ability of early modern European rulers to divide and contain local resistance to their authority. In doing so, the Reformations produced a series of crises in the European order and crippled the Habsburg bid for hegemony.

Nexon's account of these processes provides a theoretical and analytic framework that not only challenges the way international relations scholars think about state formation and international change, but enables us to better understand global politics today.

Anna Stilz, Liberal Loyalty: Freedom, Obligation, and the State

Many political theorists today deny that citizenship can be defended on liberal grounds alone. Cosmopolitans claim that loyalty to a particular state is incompatible with universal liberal principles, which hold that we have equal duties of justice to persons everywhere, while nationalist theorists justify civic obligations only by reaching beyond liberal principles and invoking the importance of national culture. In Liberal Loyalty, Anna Stilz challenges both views by defending a distinctively liberal understanding of citizenship.

Drawing on Kant, Rousseau, and Habermas, Stilz argues that we owe civic obligations to the state if it is sufficiently just, and that constitutionally enshrined principles of justice in themselves--rather than territory, common language, or shared culture--are grounds for obedience to our particular state and for democratic solidarity with our fellow citizens. She demonstrates that specifying what freedom and equality mean among a particular people requires their democratic participation together as a group. Justice, therefore, depends on the authority of the democratic state because there is no way equal freedom can be defined or guaranteed without it. Yet, as Stilz shows, this does not mean that each of us should entertain some vague loyalty to democracy in general. Citizens are politically obligated to their own state and to each other, because within their particular democracy they define and ultimately guarantee their own civil rights.

Liberal Loyalty is a persuasive defense of citizenship on purely liberal grounds.

Avery Kolers, Land, Conflict, and Justice: A Political Theory of Territory

Territorial disputes have defined modern politics, but political theorists and philosophers have said little about how to resolve such disputes fairly. Is it even possible to do so? If historical attachments or divine promises are decisive, it may not be. More significant than these largely subjective claims are the ways in which people interact with land over time. Building from this insight, Avery Kolers re-evaluates existing political theories and develops an attractive alternative. He presents a novel link between political legitimacy and environmental stewardship, and applies these new ideas in an extended and balanced discussion of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. The result is the first systematic normative theory of territory, and an impressive example of applied philosophy. In addition to political theorists and philosophers, scholars and students of sociology, international relations, and human geography will find this book rewarding, as will anyone with wider interests in territory and justice.

Plus the next batch of planned purchases and additions to the reading list:

Cary Nederman, Lineages of European Political Thought: Explorations Along the Medieval/Modern Divide from John of Salisbury to Hegel

Elisabeth Ellis, Provisional Politics: Kantian Arguments in Policy Context

Alan Houston, Benjamin Franklin and the Politics of Improvement

Andrew Jainchill, Reimagining Politics after the Terror: The Republican Origins of French Liberalism

Helena Rosenblatt, Liberal Values: Benjamin Constant and the Politics of Religion

Julian Franklin, Jean Bodin and the Rise of Absolutist Theory

Those were the days

Matt Yglesias points to this entertaining clip of a c. 1991 CBC TV news report on the amazing new phenomenon of Internet.

I love that c. 2:18, we switch directly from a shot of the names of usenet groups to a paean to the no-cursing, no-swearing, no-putdowns, no-personal-attacks norms of Internet from the guy who looks like Steve Gutenberg. Yes, it's true that usenet groups did have norms, and norm-enforcement. But they sure as heck also had flamewars and viciousness-- and indeed had flamewars and viciousness about what the norms were and who had authority to enforce them. As one would expect, the more intimate and specialized the group, and the more the participants had real-world reasons to care about one another's opinions, the more civilized things were. High-traffic groups with regular influxes of newbies (e.g. every September when a new generation of college freshmen got internet access), or groups about controversial topics like politics or religion, or fandom groups where geek passions ran high-- all of these were prone to, well what we now recognize as normal internet behavior.

It was only a couple of months after I first encountered Mosaic in 1993 that I met a guy who told me about the huge quantity of porn he'd downloaded from online sources. (This conversation was in front of his sister, which I found especially odd.) I think he was spending his time on porn BBS sites, not on the newly-html'ed World Wide Web, but it did serve as an early hint to me that adding pictures and graphics to the existing online universe of words wasn't necessarily going to improve the world.

Also chez Yglesias: the safety of bike-riding in cities goes up as the number of riders goes up. I think that the terrific new bixi program in Montreal has already noticeably increased traffic in the city's bike lines-- and that drivers are learning to respond appropriately, and remembering that the bike lanes exist.

Good for Obama

From the Cairo address:

Likewise, it is important for Western countries to avoid impeding Muslim citizens from practicing religion as they see fit – for instance, by dictating what clothes a Muslim woman should wear. We cannot disguise hostility towards any religion behind the pretence of liberalism.
[...]

The sixth issue that I want to address is women's rights.

I know there is debate about this issue. I reject the view of some in the West that a woman who chooses to cover her hair is somehow less equal, but I do believe that a woman who is denied an education is denied equality. And it is no coincidence that countries where women are well-educated are far more likely to be prosperous.

It's an extraordinary speech overall, hitting lots of very important themes and ideas. I started off a little annoyed, because the only terrorist attack mentioned is 9/11 and the reaction to it is made to seem like a purely American one. I understand that it's vital to avoid describing a civilizational war, and that this generates an impulse to compartmentalize 9/11. Making 9/11 a localized security threat against the United States, and the response to it a localized war in Afghanistan, is a way of forestalling Bush-era maximalism.

But it also makes the security account seem parochial: the U.S. responded to Al Qaeda's attacks on New York and Washington, and that's the extent of the American interest. I don't want to see the deaths in Madrid, London, Bali, Casablanca, Jakarta, Riyadh, and Istanbul disappear from our historical memory of 9/11 and its aftermath. And invoking them doesn't have to mean describing a global civilizational struggle-- indeed it allows one to emphasize that much of Al Qaeda's violence is committed against targets within Muslim countries. Through Obama's address, 9/11 is mentioned several times, and other attacks are only alluded to.

But that's my only substantial objection to a very important, and very effective, speech. And I was of course especially glad to see the passages with which I began, and don't at all mind the implied swipe at France and Turkey. The American doctrine of religious freedom does have a distinct position from the Jacobin doctrine of laicite, and it's worthwhile to stress the implication for Muslim liberty in America.