Books in political theory

Good news: Cambridge is bringing Judith Shklar's Freedom and Independence: A Study of the Political Ideas of Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind back into print. It's been hard to find for a long time.

Other books of interest, either newly released, about to be released, or newly learned about by me:

Fonna Forman Barilai, Adam Smith and the Circles of Sympathy: Cosmopolitanism and Moral Theory, from the Cambridge "Ideas in Context" series;

my colleague Christina Tarnopolsky's Prudes, Perverts, and Tyrants: Plato's Gorgias and the Politics of Shame, Princeton;

Melvin Rogers, The Undiscovered Dewey: Religion, Morality, and the Ethos of Democracy, Columbia;

(The above three books will all be discussed at author-meets-critics roundtables at the CPSA meeting in June)

and Ryan Hanley, Adam Smith and the Character of Virtue, out last year from Cambridge but for some reason I only learned about it last weekend.

I've been known to complain...

I've been known to complain about Phi Beta Cons, the uninteresting National Review blog about higher education. I can easily imagine a place for a website filled with smart and well-informed conservative commentary on the academy, and I think it'd be a useful thing. But it would have to not consist of endless complaints about all forms of affirmative action save for alumni preferences and football admits; whines that Very Serious Studies by National Review freelancers aren't making it onto college curricula; jokes about political correctness that were the state of the comedic are in 1990 or so; and griping that the kids these days are having the sex.

There's lots of talk about the student-loan reform at PBC right now, little of it enlightening in the slightest. But at least it's not PBC, but rather The Corner, that came up with this gem. Republican Senator Lamar Alexander issues a bunch of dull talking points about the reform, and how it turns everything over to the government. He predicts that it will lead to something

more like a Soviet-style, European, and even Asian higher-education model where the government manages everything. In most of those countries, they’ve been falling over themselves to reject their state-controlled authoritarian universities, which are much worse than ours, and move toward the American model which emphasizes choice, competition, and peer-reviewed research. In that sense, we’re now stepping back from our choice-competition culture, which has given us not just some of the best universities in the world, but almost all of them.

So: "Soviet-style" is clearly in there for polemical value. But The Corner headlines the post "Alexander: Obama's 'Soviet-Style' Takeover of Student Loans." Alexander's comparing the predicted system of higher education to the Soviet system. But the headline makes "Soviet-style" into a description of the "takeover"-- i.e. a violent nationalization without compensation.

Notice that banks would be free to continue to make student loans. And they're not having their existing assets taken. All they're losing is the ability to make publicly subsidized student loans in the future. A comparison with Soviet nationalization is just nuts. And it's not even what Alexander said.

Anyway, the headline-post gap wasn't what first struck me about this. Neither was the surrender of National Review to being the microphone handed to current Republican office-holders. Rather, it was this:

Back in the days of the Savings and Loan crisis, and again in the days of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, we saw lots of commentary from the right that the problems couldn't be blamed on the free market. After all, in both cases massive moral hazard had been created by federal guarantees underwriting the debts, eliminating market discipline. Pains were taken to piously distinguish the free market from corporatism and corporate welfare (a distinction I take very seriously, I might add).

In the last two weeks, I haven't seen any Republican official or Republican-leaning intellectual make the slightest reference to the problems with a system in which private lenders make risk-free profits by lending on the back of a federal guarantee. The indictment of corporate welfare has been nowhere to be found. The view that there's something distinctively unproblematic about private lenders with public guarantees has been completely lost. And the (misleading) headline, the reference to a Soviet-style takeover, crystallized this for me. Since there's been no crisis in student lending, no collapse of the system, the status quo ante has been naturalized; there are people on the right who think that the subsidized revenue streams to which lenders had become accustomed were a kind of property that has now been seized. The ex post commentaries on FSLIC and Franny and Freddie have been forgotten.

Update I missed this post from the estimable and independent-minded Reihan Salam.

I'm going to live forever, etc.

I may be a very unreliable blogger these days, but at the very least, I always link to this kind of good news.

Lost thoughts

Spoilers, naturally.

It was deliberately conspicuous that MIB gave Ricardo instructions on how to kill Jacob that mirrored Dogen's instructions to Sayid on how to kill MIB.

But nota bene that Ben did not get the same instructions before actually killing Jacob. Specifically, Ben heard Jacob talk, and killed him anyways, whereas both Sayid and Ricardo are told that if they let their target speak, it'll be too late.

I think this supports seeing Ben as exceptionally free-willed, outside the direct control of either side. He may well have a Gollum-like role to play in the final denouement. He's the only character we've seen who was ever under MIB's sway and then came back to the other side-- this could set up a Gollum-like re-fall from grace (with unpredictable consequences). But my guess is rather that Ben's real proof of the ability to go on choosing.

Ben chose darkness a long time ago, in arranging for the Purge. He lied to the Others for years, claiming to speak for Jacob but never actually meeting the guy. He visited the cabin in the woods that was probably holding MIB prisoner, but on his own telling he never saw anyone in it, so he never spoke with MIB either. (We don't yet know whether Richard knew Ben was lying and let him get away with it, or for some reason was kept in the dark.)

Ben's spent decades nursing nasty grudges-- killing dozens to get even with his father, overthrowing Widmore and starting a bitter long-term war on that front. He resented Locke for being chosen leader and for getting to talk with Jacob. And he killed Locke out of petty envy-- then was easily manipulated by Flocke into killing Jacob with petty resentments. We'll find out that much of the Survivors-Others conflict of the first few seasons was just what it first appeared to be: Ben's own nastiness, with Jacob just serving as a religious pretext.

But after all that, even Ben could repent-- on his own, with neither Jacob nor any of Jacob's representatives leading him there.

A health-care reform thought

The rightward shift in crime policy and welfare policy of the mid-1990s-- basically, welfare reform plus all the Giuliani-era policing improvements-- ultimately benefited Democrats. They stopped the fearful exodus of whites from the party by undermining the two great pathologizing narratives about blacks.

I wonder whether something similar could happen with health care reform. One important source of working-class and middle-class resistance to creative destruction and freer markers over the past couple of decades has been the terror of losing health insurance along with a job, especially but not only for those whose families include someone with a preexisting condition. If a period of unemployment or self-employment lasted longer than COBRA benefits, it became very frightening regardless of savings in the bank or the profitability of the new self-employment; and any job turnover at all was very problematic for those with pre-existing conditions.

I wonder whether health care reform will take some of that fear away, and so make the prospect of turnover seem less like a potentially-mortal threat. No one's going to welcome losing their jobs! But the intensity of opposition to, say, free trade agreements might diminish.

Notice this is not a story about Republicans benefiting because of a backlash against the bill; rather, it assumes that the bill, like all entitlements, will be untouchable and will therefore fade into the background.

Update: Another, ;largely-unrelated, thought, about the relationship between the new law and the insurance industry's self-interest.

This turns the US health insurance industry into something a lot like the water, gas, phone, and electricity utilities in the US between the Progressive era and 1980. They're private and more or less guaranteed a rate of return to capital, but the terms on which they provide service is much more tightly regulated, and will approximate being universal. This is a somewhat unappealing model for lots of reasons; it manages to be pro-business and pro-capital while also being anti-innovation and anti-entrepreneurship. The moves of the late 70s and early 80s away from this model were largely desirable. But the utility model has its (so to speak) utility; it provides private capital for the industry, provides widespread coverage for consumers, and provides at least a little competition and innovation. Indeed the health insurance version will have somewhat more competition than the post-Progressive Era version, since it will lack the enforced protection of allegedly-"natural" monopolies. Insurance industries will still be in competition with each other, albeit in a more constrained way.

Ten most influential books

See: Tyler Cowen, Will Wilkinson, Russell Arben Fox, Bryan Caplan,Matt Yglesias, and more. Haven't we done this on Facebook at some point?

I'm unsurprised by how alien Russell's and Bryan's lists are to me (in almost-opposite directions, of course). By contrast, even where my list doesn't overlap with Will's, for the most part I can recognize and to some degree share his reactions.

But, man, Rand and Nietzsche are showing up a lot, even on lists where I wouldn't expect them to. Neither's ever had a moment of hold on my mind. A friend in grad school thought that there was something odd and revealing about my complete lack of connection to Nietzsche: "You've never had a Nietzschean moment?" he asked-- a moment when I got it. Nope.

Anyway, I'll take the "formative influences" tack: books I first read before I graduated from college. And I'll arbitrarily stick to nonfiction in my general fields of professional inquiry.

1) Milton and Rose Friedman, Free to Choose. An adult friend gave this to me when I was 11 or so (and when it was very new-- the copy of it, which I still have, is in hardcover). So for me, the exposure to libertarianism and to social science/ social analysis and to serious nonfiction that contained ideas that could really give my brain exercise were simultaneous. It's hard to know what the counterfactual looks like-- how differently I would think if I hadn't read this, then. The friend said that he gave it to me because it was already clear that I would appreciate it-- that it reflected rather than (only) shaping my intellectual tastes. In any case, the ideas of regulatory capture and unintended consequences were among the first serious ideas about social analysis I ever encountered-- and the simplified moral-political philosophy of the introduction to the book genuinely inspired me.

2) John Stuart Mill, On Liberty. Read when I had just turned 16, during slow periods and coffee and lunch breaks at my summer supermarket job. (I think this is the moment when lots of smart teenagers encounter Rand or Nietzsche-- when they're looking for something to read to keep their brains going while they're off school, especially if they're in the kinds of summer jobs working/ lower middle class kids get rather than internships and the like.) It wasn't technically my first primary text in political philosophy; by then I had read Thoreau's "Resistance," a couple of the Federalist Papers, and smatterings of Plato, Smith, and Marx in my Great Books collection. But it was "On Liberty" that really fired me up about great works in political philosophy. I agreed with its conclusions, of course, but I already knew enough to know that there were things to worry about/ argue with; I wasn't excited primarily by the agreement. I was excited by the prose, the power of the arguments, and the sense of what it could be to assemble normative arguments about big questions.

3) Bernard Bailyn, Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. Read about the same time: the first work of scholarship I ever read, and still one of my favorites.

4) Leonard Levy, Original Intent and the Framers' Constitution. The second work of scholarship I ever read. The overarching argument of the book was a little beyond my reach at the time, but the detailed legal-historical analysis of the various constitutional provisions greatly impressed me, and complemented what I had learned about the era from Bailyn.

5) John Rawls, A Theory of Justice. First read it my first semester of college; it aggravated me and annoyed me and in many ways defined the intellectual world I've lived in ever since.

6) Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice. Spheres annoyed me even more, the first two times I read it, and not in the same "I must engage with and respond to this" way that Rawls did. First two times I read it, I didn't see the point of it; by comparison with Rawls (or Nozick), Walzer never seemed to have any arguments. Eventually, as I followed the path I now understand as leading from political philosophy to political theory, I came to see Spheres of Justice as a wise and profound book, and an important exemplar of how to think normatively but not abstractly. There's still almost no argument in it I find compelling, nothing that I'm brought to agree with by Walzer's reasoning. But I do love to reread from it, when the occasion presents itself.

7) F.A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty and Law, Legislation, and Liberty, vol. 1 (Listed together because I really think they belong together-- I think LLL v1 completes the argument of Constitution and makes the earlier book much more satisfying than it is on its own.) First read Hayek in a freshman seminar taught by by university's president on the history of liberalism. (Also my first exposure to Acton and Tocqueville.) More than any of the books listed so far, Hayek shaped how I think about the basic shape of the social world, and also how I think about the connections among normative, explanatory, and empirical social analysis. Though I'm not an economist, and one of the (minor but real) aims of my next book is to reject the intellectual history offered in Constitution, and to the best of my recollection the phrase "spontaneous order" doesn't appear in anything I've ever published, I still comfortably describe myself as a Hayekian in my intellectual outlook.

8) Gordon Wood, The Creation of the American Republic. I read this in Wood's own class on the American Revolution, from then on I not only had my model of what to try to live up to as a classroom teacher, I also had my real understanding of how research at the highest level and teaching at the highest level enriched, complemented, and completed one another, and why the profession of university professor hung together as a single vocation. (It's also, simply, a great book, but its influence on me was not only intellectual.)

9) Will Kymlicka, Liberalism, Community, and Culture. This book gave me my first actual research agenda-- and was written recently enough before I became a graduate student that I felt like I could be a contributor to a live intellectual debate. Incidentally, this was probably the first dissertation-book I read all the way through. (I couldn't make it through Liberalism and the Limits of Justice on my first attempt; at a certain point I said "I get it, already," and put the book down.) I tell doctoral students in political theory that they should have a couple of dissertation-books on their minds and on their shelves that they think are relevant to their work. This may sound cruel: a dissertation-book is not a dissertation, and students shouldn't be made to think that they need to write an Oxford University Press-quality manuscript in order to have a submittable dissertation. But I found it tremendously useful to have a model for size and scope. Good graduate students often want to propose dissertations that are vastly too big and too ambitious, and then get frustrated when they realize that doing what they want would take decades and thousands of pages. A dissertation-book that you admire can reassure you that something important and worthwhile can be accomplished in something about this big-- and that it's okay not to answer every possible question or master the whole of human knowledge. Kymlicka provided that book for me: a reminder of how much could be accomplished in a project of about that size, and also a reminder that a dissertation can be an impressive accomplishment without doing everything. Kymlicka convincingly opened up a space for more research (others' research as well as his own); he didn't wait until he'd done it all himself before scheduling his defense.

10-11) Tocqueville, The Ancien Regime and the Revolution; Isaiah Berlin, The Crooked Timber of Humanity. You'll have noticed a lot of American Revolution/ American founding material on this list, and I was as prone as anyone to a simple Whiggish sense of the connections among freedom, reason, and the 18th-century revolutions. Tocqueville and Berlin, in their different ways, helped to break me of that.

Encyclopedia of Political Theory

According to Amazon, today is the last day to pre-order Sage's new Encyclopedia of Political Theory for the low, low price of $340. I suspect that about half of my blog's readers contributed enough entries to the volume that they're expecting complimentary copies in the mail, so this is primarily a heads-up that the volumes are apparently finally about to get published.

Fun and games with citation counts

Justin Wolfers at the Freakonomics blog on Hayek's scholarly impact:

Taking social science seriously surely means teaching the insights of the most prominent, most important, or most influential economists. This involves teaching important theories—even those you disagree with. There’s no doubt about the influence of Smith, Marx and Keynes; Friedman also belongs. But does Hayek belong on this list?

Let’s use data to inform this debate. I counted the number of references to each economist in the scholarly literature indexed by JSTOR, finding 30,708 articles mentioning “Adam Smith”; 25,626 articles mentioning “Karl Marx”; and 4,945 mentioning “John Maynard Keynes” (the middle name was required to avoid articles by his father, John Neville Keynes). “Milton Friedman” sits easily with this group, and was mentioned in 8,924 articles.

But searching for “Friedrich von Hayek” only yielded 398 articles; adding “(("Friedrich von Hayek") OR ("Friedrich Hayek"))” raised his total to 1242 mentions; also allowing “FH Hayek” raised his count to 1561.

He later corrected FH Hayek to FA Hayek and got up to 1745. This seemed odd to me.

So I went to JSTOR to replicate the results.

JSTOR, full text search, no restrictions as to years or discipline or kind of publication.

"Friedrich von Hayek"-- 397. Close enough to think I'm conducting the searches the same way Wolfers did.

"Friedrich von Hayek" OR "Friedrich Hayek"-- 1231. The discrepancy grows a little bit, but I'm still in Wolfer's ballpark. So these unrestricted full-text searches are what he was doing.

Next step, to get a ceiling estimate:

full-text search on Hayek . 12088 results. Browsing through these yields very few false positives-- so now I'm suspicious.

I notice a lot of references to "Professor Hayek." This seems to have been the convention in some academic journals at midcentury. "Professor Hayek" by itself yields 582 hits, and a quick browse yielded no false positives.

I also notice that the search engine cares about the difference between "F.A. Hayek" and "F. A. Hayek" (with a space between the first period and the A). This makes a big difference. Simply performing the search as "'F.A. Hayek' OR 'F. A. Hayek'" already yields 2219 results-- more than Wolfers' most complete version of his search.

Adding in F. A. von Hayek and Friedrich Hayek as options gets us to 3342.

Now there are more permutations than JSTOR can readily handle. But stretching out the search to ("Friedrich Hayek") OR ("Friedrich von Hayek") OR ("F.A. Hayek") OR ("F.A. von Hayek") OR ("F. A. Hayek") OR ("F. A. von Hayek") OR ("Friedrich A. Hayek") OR ("Friedrich A. von Hayek") OR ("Professor Hayek") yields 4267.

Proceeding from the other direction: a search just on Hayek restricted to business, economics, finance, law, linguistics, philosophy, political science, psychology, public policy, and sociology eliminated all the false positives I could find. 9385 . Searching for "milton friedman" in those same disciplines (and as far as I know there's no ambiguity in how to refer to him): 8088.

Now, I don't really think that citation counts are going to do the work Wolfers wants them to do here. But on his terms, Hayek is now out of Larry Summers' company, and into Friedman's.

Update:

See Wolfers' reply, and mine a few below his, in comments at Marginal Revolution. There's just a problem here in comparing names that are difficult to compare. "Hayek" almost always refers to the relevant person in academic searches (unlike, say, at Dan Drezner's blog.) You get very few false positives with just the last name. But the false negatives are extremely sensitive to variations in how you specify his given names. Approximately the same is true of Keynes, though as Wolfers notes Keynes' father was also well-known.

Milton Friedman, Adam Smith, and Karl Marx are opposite cases. Last names only will yield a huge number of false positives; the last names are just too common. But there's very little variation in how given names are specified-- I can't think that I've ever seen any of the three referred to by initials or with a middle name. So simply applying "the same" rule to Hayek and Friedman will get incomparable results-- vastly too many false positives or vastly too many false negatives. And so any of these count-comparisons are going to look more precise than they really are. But my strong impression from trying lots of variations: Smith, Marx, and Keynes are in a class by themselves, and Hayek and Friedman are basically comparable.

See also D-squared, who rightly emphasizes that "if something isn't worth doing, it isn't worth doing well".


Further update:
As long as I'm getting so much traffic sent here by Marginal Revolution and other blogs, might as well link to my own most recent engagement with Hayekian themes: Not So Novus an Ordo: Constitutions Without Social Contracts, Political Theory, Vol. 37, No. 2, 191-217 (2009)

CREUM postdocs in ethics for 2010-11

Deadline: April 30.

Two upcoming conferences: "Hegel After Spinoza" and "Basic Income at a Time of Economic Upheaval"

April 9-10, 2010: "Hegel After Spinoza: A Symposium
McGill University, Thomson House

Friday - 4:00 pm
Keynote Address

John McCumber, "Nature vs. Spirit: Hegel’s Reconciliation with Spinoza"

Saturday - 10:00 am

Jason Read, "'Desire is Man’s Very Essence': Spinoza and Hegel as Philosophers of Transindividuality"

Caroline Williams, "Thinking the Subject between Hegel and Spinoza"

2:00 pm

Vittorio Morfino, "Spinoza in the Science of Logic"

Vance Maxwell, "Hegel’s Treatment of Spinoza: Its Scope and Limits"

4:15 pm
Keynote Address

Warren Montag, "Hegel, sive Spinoza: Towards a History of the Problem"


April 15-16, 2010: Basic Income at a Time of Economic Upheaval: A Path to Justice and Stability?
McGill University, Faculty Club

9.30: coffee & registration

9.45: welcome: Jurgen De Wispelaere, CRÉUM

10.00 – 11.00: Opening Lecture

Louise Haagh, University of York & BIEN

“Basic Income and Public Finance”

Chair: Almaz Zelleke, The New School & USBIG

11.00 – 12.45: Panel A – Basic Income Models in Canada and the US

Sally Lerner, University of Waterloo

“Education for a Canadian BIG Society”

Jim Mulvale, University of Regina

Rob Rainer, Canada Without Poverty

“Mapping out a Pragmatic Guaranteed Income Architecture for Canada”

Karl Widerquist, Georgetown University School of Foreign Service, Qatar

“Exporting the Alaska Model: A Model for Reform Around the World”

Chair: Peter Dietsch, CRÉUM

12.45 – 14.00: lunch

14.00 – 15.45: Panel B – Basic Income at the Margins of Employment

Andrea Vick, University of Toronto

Ernie Lightman, University of Toronto

“Precarious Jobs, Precarious Workers: Income Security for Canadians with Episodic Disabilities”

Matt Stahl, University of Western Ontario

“Copyright, Creative Work and the Basic Income Grant”

William DiFazio, St. John’s University

Stanley Aronowitz, City University of New York

“The Jobless Future and Democracy: Wither Agency?”

Chair: John Rook, National Council for Welfare

15.45 – 16.00: coffee

16.00 – 17.45: Panel C – The Ecological Imperative

Anita Vaillancourt, University of Toronto

“Reconnecting Basic Income in Canada with Indigenous and Ecological Roots”

Michael Howard, University of Maine

“A Cap on Carbon and a Floor on Income: A Defensible Combination in the US?”

Gianne Broughton, Canadian Friends Service Committee

“Outline of an Ecological Argument for BIG”

Chair: Pat Evans, University of Carleton & BIEN Canada

17.45 – 18.45: Keynote

Guy Standing, University of Bath & BIEN

“Basic Income for the Precariat”

Chair: Jim Mulvale, University of Regina & BIEN Canada

FRIDAY 16 APRIL, Hall B 3325

9.00 – 10.45: Panel D – Economic Crisis and Income Security

Chandra Pasma, Citizens for Public Justice

“The Great Recession: What Happened to Economic Security in 2009?”

James Bryant, Manhattanville College

“The Basic Income Guarantee as an Automatic Stabilizer”

Philip Harvey, Rutgers University

“More for Less: The Job Guarantee Strategy”

Chair: Pierre-Yves Néron, CRÉUM

10.45 – 11.00: coffee

11.00 – 12.45: Panel E – Funding a Basic Income

Gary Flomenhoft, University of Vermont

“Progress on Basic Income from Common Assets In Vermont”

André Presse, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology

Götz Werner, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology

“Stimulating the Economy: Basic Income and the Consumption Tax”

Jeffrey Smith, Forum on Genomics

“Are Geonomies Both Imperturbable and Bountiful”

Chair: David Casassas, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona & BIEN

12.45 – 14.00: lunch

14.00 – 15.45: Political Forum “The Politics of a Universal Basic Income Grant”

Senator Art Eggleton, Chair Standing Committee Social Affairs, Science & Technology

Amélie Chateauneuf, spokesperson FCPASQ

Tony Martin MP

Rob Rainer, Executive Director Canada Without Poverty

Al Sheahen, Committee Member USBIG

Senator Hugh Segal, Deputy Chair of the Subcommittee on Cities

Chair: Sheila Regehr, Director National Council for Welfare

15.45 – 16.30: Closing Lecture

Senator Eduardo Suplicy, São Paulo, Brazil & BIEN

“Steps Towards a Citizen’s Basic Income”

Chair: Steve Shafarman, Income Security for All & USBIG

16.30: Closing & Thanks: Mike Howard, USBIG & Jim Mulvale, BIEN Canada

Grad school

Those trying to decide among graduate schools should read this Brian Leiter post and follow its advice: talk to current students.

I'd add as secondary advice: beware of thinking that you can avoid the problems in a problematic department. Academia is in many ways a very solitary life, but grad students and faculty alike really are very enmeshed in the worlds made up by their departments and universities. All the problems he lists out there can poison a whole department. Be worried and careful if you find yourself explaining to yourself that the problematic professors/factions aren't in your part of the department and so won't affect your life as a grad student. It ain't necessarily so.

The Plural States of Recognition

Now available: Michel Seymour, ed., The Plural States of Recognition

Table of contents

Introduction--M.Seymour
Aristotle and Hegel on Recognition and Friendship--R.R.Williams
Hegel, Taylor and the Phenomenology of Broken Spirits--R.Bhargava
Respect as Recognition: Some Political Implications--A.E.Galeotti
Esteem for Contributions to the Common Good: The Role of Personifying Attitudes and Instrumental Value--H.Ikheimo &--A.Laitinen
Models of Democracy and the Politics of Recognition: Respect for Reasonable Cultural Diversity as a Principle of Political Morality--S.Thompson
Difference, Multi and Equality--J.Maclure
Political Liberalism and the Recognition of Peoples--T.Modood
Multicultural Manners--J.T.Levy
The Public Assessment of Indigenous Identity-- Avigail Eisenberg
Conclusion--M.Seymour

I'm going to live forever, part 1,754: Elixir of Olympians

I was sent this delightful piece by Canadian Olympian Clara Hughes about the real home field advantage: access to one's own espresso machine the morning of a race.

CPSA and NEPSA schedules released

Two theory-heavy political science conferences released their schedules today: the Canadian Political Science Association , June 1-3, Montreal (with the theory section organized by Jennifer Rubenstein and myself, and including a dedicated workhop on "Non-ideal and institutional theory") and the New England Political Science Association (theory panels organized by Sharon Krause).



For those who just want to see the theory listings for CPSA instead of browsing through the unwieldy 86-page pdf, I've separated them out here.

Ah, France

Fast-food chain Quick triggers an uproar and is accused of acting "contrary to the principles and spirit of the republic" when it makes the business decision to serve only halal beef at some restaurants. (Mind you, it's not as though this means only serving Muslim customers-- Christians and non-believers can eat halal beef without getting cooties.)

Compare, of course, the Quebec sugar shack case.

Contra Fuller

See Eugene Volokh on a proposed Arizona abolition of freedom of contract and choice of law.

Conference: "Le multiculturalisme a-t-il un avenir ?"

Le multiculturalisme a-t-il un avenir ?

26-27 FÉVRIER 2010 : COLLOQUE (UNIVERSITÉ PARIS I - PANTHÉON-SORBONNE)

vendredi 26 février

Salle 1 (Centre Panthéon, 12, place du Panthéon 75005 Paris)

Président de séance : Patrick Savidan (Université de Poitiers)

8h45-9h00 : Catherine Larrère (Université Sorbonne-Paris 1) Mot de bienvenue

9h00-9h40 : Will Kymlicka (Université Queen’s) The Essentialist Critique of Multiculturalism

9h40-10h20 : Cécile Laborde (University College London) Pour un républicanisme critique

10h20-10h50 : Questions

10h50-11h10 : Pause café

11h10-11h50 : Michel Wieviorka (EHESS) Le multiculturalisme : un concept à reconstruire ?

11h50-12h10 : Répondante : Catherine Audard (London School of Economics)

12h10-12h30 : Questions

Après-midi : Deux ateliers en sessions parallèles

Atelier 1 : L’institutionnalisation du multiculturalisme : enjeux juridiques, éthiques et identitaires

Salle 1 (Centre Panthéon, 12, place du Panthéon 75005 Paris)

Président de séance : Vincent Geisser (CNRS)

14h30-14h50 : Serge Guimond (Université Blaise Pascal) Les normes nationales d’intégration au Canada anglais, en France, en Angleterre, en Allemagne et aux USA

14h50-15h10 : Daniel Kofman (Université d’Ottawa) Multiculturalism as a demarcation between rights of majorities and minorities

15h10-15h40 : Questions

15h40-16h00 : Pause café

16h00-16h20 : Pieter Dronkers (Université d’Utrecht) Loyal to the tricolor

16h20-16h40 : Elke Winter (Université d’Ottawa) Nous, les autres et eux : la constitution discursive des identités collectives multiculturelles 16h40-17h00 : Dimitrios Karmis (Université d’Ottawa) Quelle hospitalité pour le multiculturalisme de demain ?

17h00-17h45 : Questions

Atelier 2 : Revisiter le modèle de la tolérance religieuse

Salle 216 (Centre Panthéon, 12, place du Panthéon 75005 Paris)

Président de séance : Christophe Bertossi (IFRI)

14h30-14h50 : François Boucher (Université Queen’s) Le fondement égalitariste des pratiques d’accommodement de la diversité religieuse

14h50-15h10 : Paul May (EHESS et UQAM) La laïcité selon Charles Taylor : une perspective critique

15h10-15h40 : Questions

15h40-16h00 : Pause café

16h00-16h20 : Roberto Merrill (CEHUM, Université de Minho) Minorités illibérales, droits de sortie et neutralité de l’Etat : entre tolérance et autonomie

16h20-16h40 : Laurent de Briey (Université de Namur) Le foulard de la parlementaire. Construction d’une interculturalité ou régression démocratique ?

16h40-17h00 : Denise Helly (INRS, Université de Montréal) Les juges de droit familial et les causes « musulmanes » au Québec et en Ontario

17h00-17h45 : Questions

20h30 : Dîner

Samedi 27 février

Matinée : Deux ateliers en sessions parallèles

Atelier 3 : Le modèle multiculturaliste : réappropriations et résistances

Salle 419B (Centre Panthéon, 12, place du Panthéon 75005 Paris)

Président de séance : Pap Ndiaye (EHESS)

9h00-9h20 : Patrick Imbert (Université d’Ottawa) Une lecture de Charles Taylor, Will Kymlicka et du multiculturalisme canadien par Daniel Bonilla Maldonado en fonction de la Colombie et de La constitucíon multicultural

9h20-9h40 : Magali Bessone (Université de Rennes 1) Multiculturalisme et construction nationale : le cas de la Bosnie-Herzégovine

9h40-10h10 : Questions

10h10-10h30 : Pause café

10h30-10h50 : Jessica Franklin et Karen Bird (Université de McMaster) From colour-blindness to recognition : Political paths to new identity practices in Brazil and France

10h50-11h10 : Milena Doytcheva (Université de Lille 3) Lutte contre les discriminations et “promotion de la diversité” : la difficile émergence d’une question minoritaire en France

11h10-11h30 : Sophie Guérard de Latour (Université de Bordeaux 3) La France perd-elle la mémoire ? Républicanisme, histoire nationale et reconnaissance des minorités

11h30-12h15 : Questions

Atelier 4 : Jeunesse et éducation dans les sociétés multiculturelles

Salle 420B (Centre Panthéon, 12, place du Panthéon 75005 Paris)

Présidente de séance : Gabrielle Radica (Université de Picardie)

9h00-9h20 : Tine Brouckaert et Karima Guezzou (Universités de Ghent et de Saint-Etienne) Comment négocier que les enfants de sans papiers, deviennent de futurs citoyens acceptés tout en laissant une place à leurs droits à la différence ?Entre valeurs et construction d’identités à l’école, une comparaison des modèles entre la France et la Belgique.

9h20-9h40 : Laury Bacro (Universités de Montréal et de Poitiers) Quid du multiculturalisme en France ? Le cas des troisièmes générations en France et leur difficulté à formuler leurs demandes de reconnaissance dans le cadre de l’idéologie républicaine

9h40-10h10 : Questions

10h10-10h30 : Pause café

10h30-10h50 : Janie Pélabay (Université du Luxembourg) L’Europe des « valeurs communes » et le recul du multiculturalisme : la diversité supplantée par l’unité ? 10h50-11h10 : Marcello Ostinelli (SUPSI, Locarno) L’éducation à la citoyenneté démocratique entre libéralisme politique et républicanisme critique

11h10-11h30 : Gunther Dietz (Universidad Veracruzana) Multiculturalism and Interculturality in Mexican Public Policy : the discourse and praxis of indigenous rights in a intercultural university

11h30-12h15 : Questions

Après-midi : séance plénière

Amphithéâtre Bachelard (17 rue de la Sorbonne 75005 Paris)

Président de séance : Emmanuel Picavet (Université de Franche-Comté)

14h30-15h10 : Catherine Larrère (Université Sorbonne-Paris 1) Multiculturalisme et protection de la nature

15h10-15h50 : Daniel Weinstock (CREUM, Université de Montréal) Est-ce que le multiculturalisme canadien est en crise ? 15h50-16h20 : Questions

16h20-16h40 : Pause café

16h40-17h20 : João Cardoso Rosas (Université de Minho) From Human Rights to Multiculturalism and Back

17h20-17h40 : Répondante : Justine Lacroix (Université Libre de Bruxelles)

17h40-18h00 : Questions

Institute for Liberal Studies seminar at McGill

On facebook and on the ILS website:

Politics & Society Seminar
(co-hosted with the Montreal Economic Institute and the McGill International Student Network)
March 6, 2010 | 10am - 4pm
McGill University, Location TBA
Join us on Saturday, March 6 at McGill University to hear from leading thinkers about the ideas that shape our society.
Students and faculty from all disciplines are encouraged to attend. Click here to register.
The seminar will begin at 10:00am and conclude at 4:00pm. Each talk will be followed by time for questions and discussion by the participants. The seminar is free for students and faculty, general admission is $20. Lunch will be provided.
The agenda for this seminar is as follows:
10:00am – Registration
10:30am – Welcome
10:45am – Tom Palmer (Atlas Economic Research Foundation) - A Brief, 4,500 Year History of Liberty
12:00pm – Lunch
1:00pm – Jacob Levy (McGill University) - Freedom, Culture and Multiculturalism
2:15pm - Break
2:30pm – Jason Brennan (Brown University) - Civic Virtue Without Politics
3:45pm - Wrap-up and adjournment

Christina Tarnopolsky, Prudes, Perverts, and Tyrants:
Plato's Gorgias and the Politics of Shame

Forthcoming soon from Princeton University Press:

In recent years, most political theorists have agreed that shame shouldn't play any role in democratic politics because it threatens the mutual respect necessary for participation and deliberation. But Christina Tarnopolsky argues that not every kind of shame hurts democracy. In fact, she makes a powerful case that there is a form of shame essential to any critical, moderate, and self-reflexive democratic practice.

Through a careful study of Plato's Gorgias, Tarnopolsky shows that contemporary conceptions of shame are far too narrow. For Plato, three kinds of shame and shaming practices were possible in democracies, and only one of these is similar to the form condemned by contemporary thinkers. Following Plato, Tarnopolsky develops an account of a different kind of shame, which she calls "respectful shame." This practice involves the painful but beneficial shaming of one's fellow citizens as part of the ongoing process of collective deliberation. And, as Tarnopolsky argues, this type of shame is just as important to contemporary democracy as it was to its ancient form.

Tarnopolsky also challenges the view that the Gorgias inaugurates the problematic oppositions between emotion and reason, and rhetoric and philosophy. Instead, she shows that, for Plato, rationality and emotion belong together, and she argues that political science and democratic theory are impoverished when they relegate the study of emotions such as shame to other disciplines.

An open letter to students

Some space on campus, like your dorm, can be safely assumed to be student-only. Other space, like the library, cannot. The old guy next to you in line at the library cafe just might be, say, a professor. Might even be the professor of the friend whose fraudulent excuse for skipping a scheduled exam you were describing in detail (though in this case wasn't that particular professor); in any case, might be a professor, who won't be entertained by such stories, or by the tales of your own past similar fraudulent feats of derring-do.

Now you know. And knowing is half the battle. (That's an in-joke aimed at other old people; don't worry about it.)

Fair and balanced blogging

I really don't think funny comics with such a pernicious and false message should be allowed. I may form one of those groups like the one that defends hamburgers against Oprah's slander or that tries to get X- ratings on movies that have cigarettes in them.

But since I routinely give the other side of the story, here's the entertaining latest installment of "Multiplex"'s odd anti-caffeine story arc.

Lostblogging

A few thoughts, to be expanded upon as time permits. Spoilers.

I was nervous about the premiere beforehand and very enthusiastic afterward. I don't know why I didn't see the alternate timelines coming-- it's very Abrams, and we've always had parallel narrative tracks on the show. But I didn't, and it perfectly solves the problem I was most nervous about--that neither post-Jughead option could be satisfying.

I was really, really right to think that this season theology would take center stage, crowding out political theory, philosophy of time, free will and causality, and so on. (For that reason, I didn't reprise my "Lost and political theory" talk last night; I have little to say about the theology.) And that's OK. But still...

There were a lot of Jesuses-- Jessuses? Jesi?-- running around last night.

-Sayid, who came out of the baptismal pool in a groan-inducingly-Godspell-like crucification pose, telegraphing the final moment of the episode (which was further telegraphed by Miles' listening to Sayid a few minutes later)

-Christian (ahem) Shepherd (ahem), whose body went missing sometime before they rolled the stone away opened the cargo bay doors.

-Jack Shepherd, who hasn't really done much Christ-standing-in to justify his name up until now, but now seems set to make the crippled walk

-and Jacob, already an established healer, whose power raises Sayid from the dead, who is sacrificed by someone who knew not what he did, who appears to one follower after his death, and whose body (again) disappears.

This isn't really a complaint, but it's a new worry, since all of these seem to be in for long-term Jesussy plotlines. Part of what was so interesting about the political theory and time/ causality references was that different characters and different viewpoints and different symbols were in play for each. I hope they figure out a way to do something similar for this season's theology.

Study at Quebec universities to offer fast-track to Canadian citizenship

The lead story in the Chronicle this afternoon:

Quebec Offers Fast-Tracked Canadian Citizenship to Foreign Students
By Karen Birchard
Quebec is playing the citizenship card in a bid to recruit to Canada foreign students who might otherwise be tempted to study in Australia, Britain, or the United States.

The province's premier, Jean Charest, who is leading a delegation of university heads on a visit to India, told a packed meeting at the University of Mumbai on Monday that, starting on February 14, foreign students who graduated from universities in Quebec would get "a certificate of selection" that would put them on a fast track to Canadian citizenship.

"Any student who secures a bachelor's, master's, or doctoral degree from any university in Quebec will obtain a certificate of selection to become a citizen of Canada ," said Mr. Charest, according to The Times of India. "We have the right to select our own citizens. We are doing this because we have a shortage of skilled labor."

Mr. Charest said that once foreign students had the certificate, the federal government would then carry out security and health checks before awarding citizenship.

CREUM - 2010-2011 Postdoctoral fellowship program

The University of Montreal’s Centre de recherche en éthique (CREUM) is inviting applications of postdoctoral researchers in ethics, for residential fellowships which can vary in length according to individual circumstances (maximum 27 000 $ CAN). Applicants are expected to have at least a working knowledge of French.

The CREUM will offer to its fellows: a postdoctoral grant of 3 000$ per month, an individual workstation, access to the services of the University of Montreal (libraries, sports center, etc.), and assistance for material organisation of the stay. In return, the fellows are expected to pursue the research project submitted in their application, to participate in the Center's activities (conferences, seminars, lectures), and to present their work in progress in the context of Center's seminars and workshops. Application deadline: April 30th, 2010. For more information, please visit www.creum.umontreal.ca

Graduate Conference in Political Theory - Submission deadline extended to January 18th

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 18th 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.

For more information, please visit the conference website at https://politicaltheory.princeton.edu/

Questions and comments can be directed to: polthry@princeton.edu .

Last year’s program is available here: https://politicaltheory.princeton.edu/program.php .