Gateway books discussion thread

Well, my first exposure to philosophy was Quine’s “On What There Is”, given to me in secondary school by my economics teacher who thought I’d find it interesting. The he gave me Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. A few years before, my vicar had introduced me to Berkeley’s ideas (only through discussion not through making me read anything — I figured out it was Berkeley he was talking about after I read Berkeley as an undergrad). Convinced me to study philosophy instead of history at University, on the grounds that I would only learn more about philosophy if someone taught it to me. It was a very accurate representation of what I eventually studied, so I can only thank them both.

I had a similar experience. The two books that inspired me to go into political science (as opposed to history, which I had majored in as an undergraduate) were Hannah Arendt’s *The Origins of Totalitarianism* and Louis Hartz’s *The Liberal Tradition in America*. Two very different books, though both written in the early years of the Cold War, which now seems like the Golden Age of American social science and inquiry. (I might add to this list of great books from that period: Philip Rieff’s *Freud: The Mind of the Moralist*; Richard Hofstadter’s *The American Political Tradition*; Herbert Marcuse’s *Eros and Civilization*, and Lionel Trilling’s *The Liberal Tradition*. Another interesting point about all of these books: each was written by a Jew. Not sure what to make of that.)

Anyway, I thought that political science was the discipline where one could write and read such books — that is to say, books that were theoretically engaged with contemporary events, books that were written with a combination of passion, deep erudition, and skepticism, books that were brutally disabused — and disabusing –about the contemporary scene but offered, by virtue of their relentless and un-sentimental analysis, some hope that the world could be understood and perhaps changed for the better. (I say this despite my deep disagreements, both intellectual and political, with Hartz and Arendt.)

Needless to say, I quickly learned that contemporary political science was not hospitable to such books. What’s odd is that Hartz’s book is still widely read by grad students (and also widely misunderstood, I think). So clearly people find in it something worthwhile. But for some reason we’re not encouraged to write such books ourselves.

Curious to hear other people’s thoughts on this. And thanks to Henry for raising this issue, which is something I too have thought about for some time. I’ve also thought it would be a fun exercise to gather together a group of leading political scientists whose work we admire and ask them to write an essay on the one or two books that inspired them to enter the profession — and to see how the profession did or did not live up to the source of their inspiration. Might make for an interesting collection of essays.

It was ‘Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintainence’ in high school that led me to Plato, then into philosophy at university the following year. The main character is a neglected genius who is stifled by faculty laboring under intellectual biases. That part didn’t really inspire me, but Plato certainly did. Once in grad school, I was surprised to find that in fact the neglected genius syndrome that I now recognize in the main character of that book was not all that uncommon among graduate students. It is perhaps a even professional hazard.

Three philosophers who wrote in something like aphorisms and saw philosophy as in one way or another theraputic got me really seriously interested in philosophy- Epictitus, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein. While all are studied and taken seriously by at least some no one can hope to make a career in philosophy doing anything like that, surely. I don’t suppose I ever though one could, and I read plenty of philosophy in a more or less common modern style (Russel, Reichenbach, Schlick, etc.) but it was this trio that got me really interested in philosophy.

I’m curious about #3 above, though- Waldron, Raz, and Colman are right in the mainstream of legal theory, are they not? It might be hard to do work of that quality, but their style or focus or method are not at all out of the mainstream, I’d think.

Matt,

‘Tis true, they’re in the ‘mainstream,’ but I suspect the scope and ambition (‘focus’) of their work is not something one would want to imitate until one has a track record of publishing things of more modest reach (I could be wrong). For instance, would a young, untenured academic attempt something on the order of of Waldron’s The Dignity of Legislation or his recent work on Locke, or, say, Coleman’s Practice of Principle? Of course I have nothing, in principle, against the attempt, but I suspect the temerity of the enterprise itself is and will be restricted to a relatively few (again, I’d be delighted if I’m mistaken).

It is, incidentally, intriguing to consider how diverse were the genres and styles or forms of philosophical expression and discourse up until the time philosophy was thoroughly professionalized in the modern Anglo-American educational system. Wittgenstein, the Existentialists, and a few others appear to have deliberately resisted the restriction of philosophical analysis and discussion to the sort of ‘analytic’ style that now dominates the academy (it has its virtues, but the Platonic dialogue, for example, amply reveals the virtues of another kind of philosophical discourse).

The point about Waldron, Coleman, Raz and Dworkin has to do with the nature of their theses, the ambition and scope of their arguments, which of course cannot be divorced from how ‘good’ their work is in general (their considerable capabilities, etc.), but even young and very good legal theorists lacking tenure, would be prudent not to emulate them in the above respect. I was not making a claim about their style or form of writing (as I was with regard to philosophy in the second paragraph). I would agree they’re not the keenest of examples when held alongside the likes of a Nussbaum or Lear….

“The Dual Voice” by Roy Pascal and “Unspeakable Sentences” by Ann Banfield. After a year in a graduate English studies program, I realized I should have gone into linguistics.

I decided to study law after watching Ally McBeal and The Practice. Does that count?

Well, you might have read sci-fi and gone into English or literature… that might have been worse.

My interest (no graduate work, just a life long interest) in economics was sparked by Galbraith’s The Affluent Society. I enjoyed it hugely but over the years have become somewhat disappointed at how little of it actually is economics as opposed to elegantly constructed polemic.

Hi Henry. I’m glad you ask this question — how does one do work that is both scholarly and engaged — because I hear it a lot, and I think it’s an important issue for all of us who want to write for more public audiences to think about.

I should say at the outset that there are some external reasons for why I’ve been able to do what I’ve done. First, I had a topic — fear — that people got quite interested in after 9/11. I remember in grad school proposing this topic for my dissertation and lots of folks were quite discouraging. That was back in the early to mid 90s, when no one was talking about this. But post-9/11, things changed. Second, I had an academic publisher — and editor — that was quite adept at marketing scholarly books to a mass audience. Third, since I write a lot for newspapers and magazines, I had a lot of contacts with media people, so that helped in getting the book reviewed and marketed. And finally I teach at a university — CUNY — that isn’t too caught up in how many times you publish in the APSR or Political Theory. So all that has helped and freed me up to do what I wanted to do.

Having said that, I think one of the hardest challenges younger scholars like us face comes from the nay-saying among ourselves. I can’t tell you how many times friends and colleagues in my cohort have warned me to keep my head down, observe academic protocols, be careful, etc. I remember one conversation in particular with a young political theorist who’s at a top 10 poli sci department. He warned me against doing the work I’m doing and said I should wait till tenure. I said I didn’t have the stomach or the stamina to wait that long. I pointed to other political theorists in the field who’ve gotten kudos, from an early point in their careers, for doing more engaged writing. Michael Walzer comes immediately to mind. My friend said in response that even Walzer gets occasionally dissed by other political theorists for not consistently doing serious work! I remember thinking that if Michael Walzer was not a sufficiently inspiring model for younger theorists, nothing short of tenure at Harvard would convince them that they could do what they wanted to do and still be successful. I just never had that kind of time to waste — that is, if I had to wait till tenure at Harvard to write what I wanted to write, well, the whole thing didn’t seem really worth it to me.

And that’s the problem with being so careful and strategic: you hide what you want to say in order, first, to get a job, then tenure, then a better job at a better university, then Harvard. Beyond the obvious fact that very few people will ever get that far, the problem with this kind of thinking is that professional success is an ever elusive goal. So long as you ignore what it is that you really want to do, the external marks of success will never be really good enough for you. You’ll always want something more, and never do what you really want to do.

I bring this up because I think we really do psych ourselves out a lot of the time. As I said, I recognize that I’ve been lucky and had external things going for me. But pretty early on I resolved to write what I wanted to write, how I wanted to write it. I had my own models in mind — Arendt and Hartz, as I mentioned in my earlier post, among them — and I just ignored what most people said.

Grad students and younger faculty in particular are all too vulnerable to what passes for wisdom from our elders. I remember in grad school one professor in particular constantly telling grad students what they should write about — all of it based on what the market would bear. Beyond terrorizing students into writing what they didn’t want to write about, the silly thing about this kind of advice was that it was so present-minded in the stupidest way. What seems hot and faddish in one year, when you’re writing a proposal, will probably earn you nothing but a yawn by the time you finish the dissertation and will probably not get you a contract by the time you’re ready to publish your first book.

So without ignoring the real constraints we face as younger scholars — pressure for tenure, getting a job, and the like — I think the best advice I can give is to write what you care about, and to write it without paying too much attention to scholarly conventions and jargon. And whatever you do: don’t listen to the nay-sayers among your cohort. Everyone at this stage is just afraid, and in the guise of well meaning advice, they just make you afraid. The end result is you plummeting down the rabbit hole.

I should say, Henry, that you yourself are also a model for doing things differently. This blog is fantastic, and from what I can tell, it has in no way detracted from your scholarly work. So perhaps I don’t need to say all that I’ve said here; you seem to have figured it out yourself.

Since you ask.

Pretty much every scholarly book I ever liked had been marginalized by the time I read it. Thus, no academic career at all.

My theory is that a cold wind swept through the humanities starting about 1950, and that the present landscape has been irrevocably diminished. Mirowski and McCumber have given partial descriptions of these events from the woints of view of econ and phil.

Kernighan and Ritchie’s The C Programming Language persuaded me that artistic achievement isn’t totally foreign to technical writing. There’s been a lot more drudgery than art in my subsequent career as a tech writer, but I’ve had some pretty satisfying moments.

Lordy. I became interested in economics after reading Michael Harrington’s The Other America. After 40+ years, that book still resonates for me, although it has little relevance for modern economic theory/research.thought. It still influences how I think, though.