Unsettling news on higher education in Quebec

Via Inside Higher Ed, a Globe and Mail poll revealed significant gaps between francophone and anglophone Canadians on the value of higher education:

Canada's two solitudes endure in the value placed on higher education, with English-speaking young adults twice as likely as their francophone peers to see a university degree as the key to success, according to a new national poll.

[...]
The poll, conducted last month for the group by Leger Marketing and released exclusively to The Globe and Mail, asked 1,500 Canadians in all parts of the country if they thought a university degree was now a minimum requirement for success. What it found was a wide gap in views when the respondents' first language was taken into account - a gap that only increased when results of the youngest of those surveyed were broken out.

Fewer than 20 per cent of 18- to 24-year-old French speakers said a university degree was required, compared with 40 per cent of the English group. That difference increased even more when compared with those whose first language is neither English or French - generally first- or second-generation Canadians. More than two-thirds of young people in this group agreed a degree is needed to be successful, a result that is in keeping with the high percentage of new Canadians who go on to higher education.

CFP: Princeton Graduate Conference in Political Theory

Graduate Conference in Political Theory
Princeton University
9-10 April 2010

The Committee for the Graduate Conference in Political Theory at Princeton University welcomes papers concerning any period, methodological approach or topic in political theory, political philosophy, or the history of political thought. Approximately eight papers will be accepted.

Each session, led by a discussant from Princeton, will be focused exclusively on one paper and will feature an extensive question and answer period with Princeton faculty and students. Papers will be pre-circulated amongst conference participants.
The keynote address will be given by Professor Sharon Krause, Professor of Political Science at Brown University.

Submissions are due via email to polthry@princeton.edu by Monday January 4th 2010. Please limit your paper submission to 7500 words and format it for blind review (the text should include your paper's title but be free from other personal and institutional information). Papers will be refereed by current graduate students in the Department of Politics at Princeton. Acceptance notices will be sent in February.

Assistance for invited participants' transportation, lodging, and meal expenses is available from the committee, which acknowledges the generous support of the Department of Politics, the University Center for Human Values, and the Graduate School of Princeton University.

All papers should be submitted by email. Submissions by snail mail will not be accepted.

Questions and comments can be directed to: polthry@princeton.edu
For more information, please visit the conference website at https://politicaltheory.princeton.edu/

Big news

Brian Leiter reports that Jeremy Waldron has accepted the Chichele Chair in Social and Political Theory at Oxford University on a half-time basis.

Waldron (the first non-Montrealer to hold the chair in more than thirty years!) was widely thought to be the correct and even obvious choice for the preeminent position in the field. Several years worth of puzzlement about how to proceed with a Plan B followed when (or so it is said; all my knowledge here is of the "everyone knows" variety) it seemed that he was not movable from New York. This compromise is an outcome to be welcomed all around-- good for political theory at Oxford, good for the field, and (I hope and trust) good for Waldron.

Elsewhere...

Peter Boettke and Tyler Cowen on primary texts in the history of ideas, and secondary literatures about them. Recommended, and of interest in political theory & philosophy as well as in the history of economic thought that Pete and Tyler mostly have in mind.

Reading recommendation: Ethics and International Affairs symposium on Walzer

The fall 2009issue features

The Moral Standing of States Revisited (p 325-347)
Charles R. Beitz

A Few Words on Mill, Walzer, and Nonintervention (p 349-369)
Michael W. Doyle

Categorizing Groups, Categorizing States: Theorizing Minority Rights in a World of Deep Diversity (p 371-388)
Will Kymlicka

Cohen symposium podcast

The G.A. Cohen symposium at GRIPP a couple of weeks ago can now be listened to online at http://www.creum.umontreal.ca/spip.php?article1133

My own presentation, I realized almost immediately afterward, should have ended with this thought:

If we re-understand the political theory/ political philosophy distinction in the way I describe, rather than the way Cohen suggests in the conservatism essay, then the conservatism essay itself is a terrific first move on Cohen's part into political theory. All the concerns I expressed about Cohen's political philosophy earlier in the talk are inapplicable to that foray into political theory. On the available evidence, I quite like Cohen-as-theorist, and it's a shame that we won't get to see more work from him in that voice.

An actual news story from a real newspaper

Pedagogy a poor second in promotions
10 December 2009
By Rebecca Attwood

Study finds 'hypocritical' sector fails to practise what it preaches. Rebecca Attwood reports

Universities stand accused of hypocrisy this week over their claims to value teaching, after a major study of promotions policy and practice found that many are still failing to reward academics for leadership in pedagogy.

Research by the Higher Education Academy and the University of Leicester's "Genie" Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning examines the promotion policies of 104 UK universities.

It states that the use of teaching criteria is inconsistent, often absent and not always applied even if included.[...]

George MacDonald Ross, senior adviser to the HEA's Philosophical and Religious Studies Subject Centre, said: "Considering how long official inquiries and policy documents have been saying that teaching and research ought to have equal status, it is quite shocking that so many older universities still fail to recognise leadership in teaching for promotion purposes, particularly at the professorial level.

"It is hypocritical for certain universities to say in their mission statements and strategies that they give equal weight to teaching and research, and not to practise this in their promotion procedures."[...]

One academic, speaking anonymously, said that while teaching and learning criteria were included in their university's promotion policies, they were not aware of anyone promoted on that basis.

As I've said once before about a riveting study of higher education: That, surprisingly enough, is not from the Onion's indispensible series of "study finds" articles, such as New Study Finds College Binge Drinking To Be A Blast, Study Finds Link Between Red Wine, Letting Mother Know What You Really Think, and Teen Sex Linked To Drugs And Alcohol, Reports Center For Figuring Out Really Obvious Things.

More on Cobell

First of all, good for the Obama administration for conducting serious settlement talks and not stonewalling in the way the Clinton and Bush administrations did so relentlessly.

Second: the $3.4 billion headline figure for the settlement is misleading.

$1.4 billion will go to the plaintiffs. I think this is on the low end of conscionability: better than nothing, but nothing to be especially proud of on the government's part. I do think that the Clinton and Bush administrations bequeathed the Obama administration an exhausted plaintiff and plaintiff class, willing to settle for much less than they should have received.

$2 billion will go to a related cause: cleaning up the inalienable fractionated property holdings that plague Indian Country. Those fractionated interests contributed to the Individual Indian Monies accounts problem-- the accounting becomes more of an administrative nightmare with every generation. And buying up the fractionated interests will put some cash into the pockets of many of the people whose IIM accounts were mishandled. But it's not compensation or restitution; it doesn't make whole the past losses.

Third: that repurchase fund is nonetheless a very good thing, and may carry economic benefits for Indian Country far beyond its cost. The insane regime of property law imposed on Indian Country during allotment and its aftermath is extremely inefficient, and makes it very hard to put a lot of land to economically productive use. The costs of the status quo aren't just the administrative costs mentioned by the Times:

For example, one 40-acre parcel today has 439 owners, most of whom receive less than $1 a year in income from it, Mr. Haynes said. The parcel is valued at about $20,000, but it costs the government more than $40,000 a year to administer those trusts.

That system also results in astronomical transaction costs that interfere with anything that anyone might want to do with that land. It can't be developed beyond the resource-extraction that generates a couple of hundred dollars per year in revenue. It can't be built on without the consent of 400+ owners; can't be consolidated into large parcels that are more efficient for farming or ranching; can't be subdivided into smaller parcels that are more efficient for housing. (And, just to emphasize the point: the interests are inalienable. No one owner can buy out the other 438.) It's economically dead land, and the foregone development possibilities are huge.

There's no reason the repurchase of fractionated interests had to be tied to the Cobell settlement, and it shouldn't really count as part of the settlement. But it's well worth doing, and in the long term could pay significant dividends.

Cobell: A look back

I wrote about the Cobell litigation, a tentative settlement for which was announced today, back in my very first piece for The New Republic online, about seven years ago. It's been lost down the archive black hole at TNR, but thanks to this copy at the Wayback Machine I can reproduce it here.

DAILY EXPRESS
Broken Trust
by Jacob T. Levy

Only at TNR Online | Post date 01.29.03

In its dollar magnitude, it's almost certainly the biggest case of financial mismanagement in U.S. history. While a final tally is years away, in part because of suspiciously lost or missing documents, there's good reason to think that the dollar figures will dwarf WorldCom's $9 billion. It's a scandal that crosses partisan lines and reaches into high levels of both the Clinton and the Bush administrations. And it's got nothing to do with Wall Street.

The shameful mishandling by the federal government of the Individual Indian Money (IIM) trust fund--created to manage the proceeds from leases of Indian land--encompasses 300,000 accounts and 56 million acres, spans more than 100 years, and involves amounts of money estimated at between 10 and 100 billion dollars. The class-action lawsuit Indian landowners have filed against the Department of Interior--currently named Cobell v. Norton--has been going on for nearly seven years, though knowledge of trust-fund mismanagement dates back much further than that. Robert Rubin, Bruce Babbitt, and Gale Norton, along with assorted deputies, have all been held in contempt of court by Judge Royce C. Lamberth of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. And yet, thanks to a combination of convoluted detail, media bias, and ideological blindness, most Americans have never even heard about it.

In 1887, thanks to the Dawes Act, tribal lands were broken up into individual lots (the policy was known as "allotment") and assigned to individual Indians as property. This was done in a combination of good and bad faith. Since the Founding there had been many in the American government--prominently including Thomas Jefferson--who wanted to encourage Indians to take up individual landownership as a way of increasing Indian agriculture and wealth. But, on the frontier, allotment was chiefly understood as a way to make it easier for outsiders to buy Indian lands at bargain prices.

Having carved up the land, the federal government took the authority to grant resource leases on those new lots--leasing out mining, drilling, and lumbering rights without the consent of the new landowners, who were presumed to be incapable of managing such affairs themselves. (That, and they might have had an inconvenient lack of interest in granting the leases at all.) The royalties from those leases were--and are--collected by the government. They are supposed to be paid into the relevant IIM accounts, and then paid out to individual Indians on a regular basis. The money at stake, in short, isn't government revenue. The government claims to be operating as a trustee, and to be administering a trust fund on behalf of Indian landowners.

The federal government--specifically, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) of the Department of Interior--has botched that task hopelessly for decades and admits it can't begin to provide an accurate historical accounting of who has or hasn't been paid what they're owed. It appears that for most of the trust fund's history, there was scarcely even a pretense of running it according to principles of fiduciary responsibility: Some checks came in, some checks went out. Where there should be records, there are none.

So in 1994 Congress passed legislation ordering an overhaul. And two years later, when that effort appeared to be going nowhere, Eloise Cobell of the Blackfeet tribe filed suit. Since then, BIA, Interior, and occasionally Treasury have stalled, dragged their feat, obfuscated, and self-investigated. Judge Lamberth, whose judgments are filled with strikingly sharp criticisms of government conduct and accusations of bad faith, may be drawing close to ordering a remedy. But even if, as the plaintiffs want, the IIM accounts are taken out of BIA's hands and placed into receivership, the Bureau and Interior will have to be involved in the reconstruction of the trust fund's history. That means the judiciary can't solve this problem on its own; either congressional oversight or a deliberate decision by Interior to do the right thing will be necessary.

But mustering the political pressure to make that happen will be nearly impossible. One reason is that Indian landowners and tribal governments--many of which also have lands held in trust, and which control the bulk of Indians' lobbying power--don't have quite the same interests. Individual Indians have no real reason to want any agent of the U.S. government to continue to act as their trustee, or even to continue the mandatory trusteeship at all. Given its shameful record, they certainly have no reason to want the funds managed by any part of Interior.

Tribal governments, by contrast, have an ambivalent but intimate relationship with BIA and Interior, one based on the idea that the government acts as trustee for the tribes, and one that is sure to survive the current litigation. BIA is the conduit for federal funds that go to the tribes for law enforcement, elections, and government operations; and the Bureau is in charge of the process of granting (or withholding) federal recognition of each tribe's existence and self-government rights. More importantly, though, the tribes (unlike IIM account-holders) have the legal authority to take their lands out of the trust system and handle the leases and royalties themselves; several have done so. This combination of circumstances means that the urgency of reforming the system is far lower, and the importance of the relationship with BIA much higher, for tribes than for the individual landowners. Norton tried to take advantage of this divergence of interests last year, by proposing a reform that would combine tribal and individual trust lands in a new bureau outside BIA--a move aimed at weakening tribal support for the lawsuit.

And none of this is helped by the issue's near-invisibility. While The Washington Post and some western dailies have provided pretty extensive coverage, The New York Times has run only a handful of stories since the lawsuit was filed, and broadcast coverage has been almost nonexistent. Beyond one extended piece by Sam Donaldson and one "60 Minutes" segment, there has been only the occasional two-sentence notice that cabinet secretaries were being held in contempt. In a sense the story is too big to cover; a scandal that lasts for a century isn't news. Moreover, Interior has been so slow to release documents, and the suit has dragged on for so long it's rare that there's anything fresh to say about it. And, of course, Interior--especially under Norton--has tried its hardest, with some success, to change the subject from the substance of the landowners' claims to the eye-glazing process of its own self-investigation and bureaucratic reshuffling.

But if nothing else you'd expect the right to be turning out in force on behalf of Indians in this case. Critics of government handouts, reservation governments, and intra-tribal collective ownership of property might have noticed that, this time, it was individual Indian property-owners facing a bureaucracy that was unjustly taking their royalties. Norton once counted herself among the libertarian property-rights crowd; she could have distinguished herself from Babbitt and fit property rights into compassionate conservatism by cooperating, settling the case, and getting Interior out of the money management business it does so badly. She didn't.

Nor do you hear much from the conservative and libertarian advocates of landowners' rights. The standard conservative story about Indian poverty--most recently rehearsed in a John Miller cover story for National Review--is an indictment of reservation governments, of their collective ownership of land, the barriers they put up to business formation, and their sometimes-serious difficulties sustaining an independent judiciary and other components of the rule of law. There's a great deal of truth in this story. But it's also true that, historically, the major alternative strategy to reservation governments and tribal sovereignty was ... allotment and the Dawes Act. With the mess from 1887 still unresolved, Indians have good reason not to want to go down that road again.

ASPLP: "Getting to the rule of law"

Annual Meeting of the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy
New Orleans, January 6, 2010
Hilton New Orleans Riverside, 2 Poydras Street, Belle Chasse room, Third Floor.


I. Getting to the Concept of the Rule of Law: 10:30 a.m.-12:15 p.m.

Principal paper (philosophy): Jeremy Waldron, New York University
Commentator (law): Robin West, Georgetown University
Commentator (political science): Corey Brettschneider, Brown University

II. Maintaining or Restoring the Rule of Law after September 11, 2001: 1:30 p.m.-3:15 p.m.
Principal paper (political science): Benjamin Kleinerman, Michigan State University
Commentator (law): Curtis Bradley, Duke University
Commentator (philosophy): Lionel McPherson, Tufts University

III. Building the Rule of Law after Military Interventions: 3:30 p.m. - 5:15 p.m.
Principal paper (law): Jane Stromseth, Georgetown University
Commentator (political science): Tom Ginsburg, University of Chicago
Commentator (philosophy): Larry May, Vanderbilt University

Reception: 6:30 p.m.-8:30 p.m.

--------

In order to join the ASPLP and receive the eventual volume of Nomos on "Getting to the Rule of Law," please e-mail me.

Canada one of the best places to be an expat

according to a study by HSBC Bank.

McGill Prof Wins Grawemeyer in Psychology
Inside Higher Ed reports:

"Ronald Melzack, psychology professor emeritus at McGill University, in Montreal, has been named winner of the 2010 University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award for Psychology. Melzack was honored for his work on how people experience pain. Grawemeyer awards, worth $200,000 each, are awarded each year in in the fields of music, political science, psychology, education and religion."

News that is both terrible and stupid

Swiss voters appear to approve a constitutional amendment banning the construction of minarets.

Reading recommendation

I recommend very highly this Robert Goodin essay on the state and history of political science as a discipline via), from a new supplemetary volume to the Oxford Handbooks in Political Science.

While political theory is the least integrated field with the rest of the discipline (read the chapter for explanation of the measure), I'm struck by Table A1.4, the integrators of the discipline. John Rawls appears in the top category (the only person in that group who was never a member of a political science department). The next rank includes Barry, Elster, Hardin, Shapiro, and Przeworski; the next, Goodin, Habermas, and Sen. Walzer, Taylor, Mansbridge, Berlin, Lukes, Holmes, Adorno, Ackerman, Bordieu, Held, Sunstein... The theorists on the list are, I think, generationally set apart from the others on the list, overall. There are reasons for this, though I'd still wish it were otherwise. But theorists (and part-theorists, which is part of the point) are hardly so absent from the list as the most persecuted-feeling among my colleagues might have predicted.

Anyway: go read the whole thing! (Those charts at the back seem to me like a plausible resource for comps prep, for those who are into that kind of thing....)

Onto the reading list

A new article by my colleague Hasana Sharp:

"The Impersonal Is Political: Spinoza and a Feminist Politics of Imperceptibility", 24(4) Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 84-103 (2009).

Abstract:

This essay examines Elizabeth Grosz's provocative claim that feminist and anti-racist theorists should reject a politics of recognition in favor of "a politics of imperceptibility." She criticizes any humanist politics centered upon a dialectic between self and other. I turn to Spinoza to develop and explore her alternative proposal. I claim that Spinoza offers resources for her promising politics of corporeality, proximity, power, and connection that includes all of nature, which feminists should explore.

Tomorrow: Christopher Hamel, "L'esprit républicain: droits naturels et vertu civique dans la pensée d'Algernon Sidney"

Wednesday November 25 2-4 pm
UQAM Room W-5303

Christopher Hamel (Université de Rouen)
"L'esprit républicain: droits naturels et vertu civique dans la pensée d'Algernon Sidney"

Résumé:

L'objectif de cette conférence sera de donner, à partir de l'exemple d'Alergnon Sidney (1622-1683) un aperçu des raisons pour lesquelles on peut soutenir, contre une interprétation largement répandue dans l'histoire des idées, que le langage du droit naturel et celui de la vertu civique ne sont aucunement incompatibles, mais s'articulent au contraire de manière parfaitement cohérente chez cet auteur incontestablement républicain.
L'esprit républicain est l'expression qu'utilise Sidney lui-même pour décrire ce que son adversaire, Robert Filmer, veut détruire dans son ouvrage Patriarcha. Si les principes de Filmer détruisent l'esprit républicain, prétend Sidney, c'est à la fois parce qu'ils violent le principe de liberté dans lequel tout individu est né, et parce qu'ils rendent impossible la vertu des citoyens, nécessaire au maintien de la liberté.
Plus précisément, il est possible de montrer que Sidney conceptualise les notions de droits et de vertu d'une manière telle que loin d'être en tension, elles apparaissent au contraire comme complémentaires : chez Sidney, le droit individuel n'est pas un simple désir de sûreté juridicisé, mais un droit moral à vivre émancipé de toute domination; et la vertu n'est pas la finalité première de la cité, mais le soutien nécessaire des lois qui protègent la liberté.

La conséquence principale de cette hypothèse est double: d'une part, elle permet de montrer, par le biais de la reconstruction rationnelle de la pensée politique et morale de Sidney, que le concept de droits individuels n'est pas un concept exclusivement libéral, puisqu'au moment même où Locke, le père fondateur du libéralisme des droits, écrit ses Traités sur le gouvernement civil, un républicain tel que Sidney inscrit au coeur de sa pensée républicaine l'idée que l'individu est naturelle doté d'un droit naturel inaliénable à la liberté. D'autre part, elle ouvre la voie à une relecture d'un certain nombre d'auteurs du XVIIIe siècle, tant Italiens (Genovesi, Alfieri, Filangieri) que Français (Mably, Diderot) ou Anglais (Price, Priestley, Burgh) qui utilisent conjointement les deux langages de la vertu et des droits. En ce sens, ce travail sur les républicains anglais du XVIIe siècle débouche sur l'hypothèse plus large de l'existence d'une tradition républicaine moderne que l'on pourrait appeler le républicanisme des droits.

The un-abolition of feudalism

Via Tyler Cowen, jobs in an Italian bank being made (conditionally) hereditary.

G.A. Cohen in Memoriam: A Critical Celebration of His Life and Work


This Friday, 27 November 2009, 10am - 4pm
McGill University, Old McGill Room, Faculty Club

[Schedule updated as per Will Roberts' comment below]

10 h - 11 h 30

* Joseph Carens, Toronto
Motivation and Equality in Cohen

* Jurgen De Wispelaere, CRÉUM
Cohen in the Real World ? Equality, Justice and Social Institutions

- 11 h 45 - 13 h 15

* Pablo Gilabert, Concordia
Cohen on Socialism, Equality, and Community

* Jacob T. Levy, McGill
Cohen on the Tasks of Political Philosophy

- 14 h 30 - 16 h

* William Clare Roberts, McGill
Analysis Terminated ? Towards a Post-Analytical Marxism

* Daniel Weinstock, CRÉUM
Cohen and Cohen on Jokes

New on the blogroll

The dean of the Montreal school of political theory, Daniel Weinstock, is now blogging about music.

Hither and yon:

Tomorrow: "Contra politanism: Against the moral teleology of political forms," Nathanson Centre Legal Philosophy Series, Osgoode Hall Law School, Toronto.

The eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month

There's commemorative cannon-fire outside my office right now, and I'm more disgusted than moved. Yet more artillery fire seems to me to miss what should be the point.

A Veteran's/ Armistice/ Remembrance Day observed on November 11 in particular shouldn't just mean a gauzy and somber honoring of live veterans and fallen soldiers. It should be in part a day of anger and horror about the particular war that ended on this day, the stupid brutality of it, and the evil that followed in its wake. Of course, no continuously-existing government (US, UK, Canada) is likely to create a day officially dedicated to pointing out that its predecessor contributed to the deaths of millions for no good cause. But we have the capacity to remember lessons other than the official ones.

John Quiggin strikes the right note here.

No great surprise, but noteworthy:

Senate defeats Coburn amendment on NSF funding of political science.

Remember, remember...

one of the most-read posts ever on this blog: Guy Fawkes Day, V for Vendetta, and American politics.

This week

Tuesday, November 3: Deadline for proposals for the Canadian Political Science Association, June 1-3 in Montreal. Proposals in all areas of political theory welcome; and there's a thematic workshop on "non-ideal and institutional theory."

Wednesday, October 4, 6 pm: Thomas Pogge (Philosophy, Yale) will deliver the Osler Lecture at McGill: "The Health Impact Fund: Pharmaceutical Innovation Also For the Poor?", Palmer Howard Amphitheater, McIntyre Medical Sciences Building

Thursday, October 5 12 pm: Dwight Newman, "Untangling Equality-Based Arguments for Indigenous Rights," CREUM room 309.

Friday, October 6, 2 pm: Andrew March (Political Science, Yale), GRIPP/ Montreal Political Theory Workshop, "Islamic Legal Theory, Secularism and Religious Freedom : Is Modern Religious Freedom Sufficient for the Shari’a ’Purpose’ [Maqsid] of ’Preserving Religion’ ?" UQAM room W 5215

GRIPP Manuscript Workshop Award

THE ANNUAL MONTREAL POLITICAL THEORY MANUSCRIPT WORKSHOP AWARD

Call for applications: The Groupe de recherche interuniversitaire en philosophie politique de Montréal (GRIPP), spanning the departments of political science and philosophy at McGill University, l'Université de Montréal, Concordia University, and l'Université du Québec à Montréal, invites applications for its 2010 manuscript workshop award. The recipient of the award will be invited to Montreal for a day-long workshop in March/April 2010 dedicated to his or her book manuscript. This "author meets critics" workshop will comprise four to five sessions dedicated to critical discussion of the manuscript; each session will begin with a critical commentary on a section of the manuscript by a political theorist or philosopher who is part of Montreal's GRIPP community. The format is designed to maximize feedback for a book-in-progress. The award covers the costs of travel, accommodation, and meals.

Eligibility:

A. Topic: The manuscript topic is open within political theory and political philosophy, but we are especially interested in manuscripts related to at least one of these GRIPP research themes: 1) the history of liberal and democratic thought, especially early modern thought; 2) moral psychology and political agency, or politics and affect or emotions or rhetoric; 3) democracy, diversity, and pluralism. 4) democracy, justice, and transnational institutions.

B. Manuscript: Unpublished book manuscripts in English or French, by applicants with PhD in hand by 1 September 2009, are eligible. Applicants must have a complete or nearly complete draft (at least 4/5 of final draft) ready to present at the workshop. In the case of co-authored manuscripts, only one of the co-authors is eligible to apply.

C. Application: Please submit the following materials: 1) a curriculum vitae; 2) a table of contents; 3) a short abstract of the book project, up to 200 words; 4) a longer book abstract up to 2500 words; and, in the case of applicants with previous book publication(s), (5) three reviews, from established journals in the field, of the applicant's most recently published monograph. Candidates are not required to, but may if they wish, submit two letters of recommendation speaking to the merits of the book project. Please do not send writing samples. Send materials to GRIPP Manuscript Workshop Award, Department of Political Science, McGill University, 855 Sherbrooke St W, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, H3A 2T7. Review of applications begins 10 January 2010. Contact Arash Abizadeh with questions.

Previous GRIPP Manuscript Workshops:
Kinch Hoekstra (UC Berkeley), Thomas Hobbes and the Creation of Order, March 2009
Alan Patten (Princeton), Equal Recognition: The Moral Foundations of Minority Cultural Rights, April 2009

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

LE PRIX ANNUEL DE L’ATELIER DE MANUSCRIT DE PHILOSOPHIE POLITIQUE DE MONTRÉAL

Appel à candidature: Le groupe de recherche interuniversitaire en philosophie politique de Montréal (GRIPP), qui réunit des chercheurs des départements de science politique et de philosophie de l’Université McGill, de l’Université de Montréal, de l’Université Concordia et de l’Université du Québec à Montréal, fait un appel à candidature pour son prix 2010 de l’atelier de manuscrit. Le lauréat sera invité à Montréal en mars/avril 2010 pour un atelier d’une journée complète consacré au manuscrit de son livre. Cet atelier du type « l’auteur rencontre ses critiques » comprendra quatre ou cinq séances de discussions critiques sur le manuscrit ; pour chacune d’entre elles, un spécialiste de théorie politique ou un philosophe membre de la communauté montréalaise du GRIPP lancera la discussion par un commentaire critique d’une des sections du manuscrit. Ceci a pour but de faciliter les échanges sur un livre en chantier. Le prix couvre les dépenses de voyage, d’hébergement et de repas.

Éligibilité :

A- Sujet : De façon générale, le manuscrit doit traiter de théorie politique ou de philosophie politique, mais nous sommes tout particulièrement intéressés aux manuscrits qui correspondent à l’une des thématiques de recherche du GRIPP : 1) l’histoire de la pensée libérale et démocratique, et notamment du début de la pensée moderne; 2) la psychologie morale du sujet (ou encore de l’agent) politique, ainsi que la politique et les affects, les émotions ou la rhétorique; 3) la démocratie, la diversité et le pluralisme; 4) la démocratie, la justice et les institutions transnationales.

B- Manuscrit : Sont éligibles tous les manuscrits de livres en français ou en anglais, non encore publiés, et dont l’auteur a reçu un doctorat avant le 1er septembre 2009. Les candidats devront avoir une version complète, ou presque (au moins 4/5e de la version finale), à présenter à l’atelier. Pour ce qui concerne les manuscrits coécrits, seul l’un des coauteurs est éligible.

C- Soumission : Vous voudrez bien fournir les documents suivants : 1) un curriculum vitae; 2) une table des matières; 3) un court résumé du projet du livre de moins de 200 mots; 4) un résumé plus long, de moins de 2 500 mots; et, dans le cas de candidats ayant déjà publié, 5) trois recensions parues dans des revues spécialisées et reconnues dans le domaine de la plus récente monographie publiée. Les candidats peuvent, s’ils le souhaitent, joindre deux lettres de recommandation présentant l’intérêt de leur projet de livre. Nous vous prions de ne pas envoyer d’extraits de manuscrit. Envoyez ces documents à : GRIPP Manuscript Workshop Award, Département de science politique, Université de McGill, 855, rue Sherbrooke ouest, Montréal, Québec, Canada, H3A 2T7. L’examen des candidatures commencera le 10 janvier 2010. Pour toute information supplémentaire, veuillez contacter Dominique Leydet

Les précédents lauréats des ateliers de manuscrit du GRIPP furent :

Kinch Hoekstra (UC Berkeley), Thomas Hobbes and the Creation of Order, mars 2009

Alan Patten (Princeton), Equal Recognition: The Moral Foundations of Minority Cultural Rights, avril 2009