Congratulations to our own Jon Mandle on the publication of his new book Global Justice
(UK
). It’s part of Polity’s Key Concepts series, which is aimed at the textbook market, and presents contemporary debates about concepts in the social sciences in a widely accessible way. It’s remarkably difficult to write such books (as I know only too well) especially, I think, for philosophers whose disciplinary training does not include such things as literature reviews, but focusses immediately on assessing the quality of arguments and offering one’s own. Jon’s book is a terrific success. He manages to render all the main positions in the various philosophical debates about global justice; to relate them to the public political debates about aid and trade; and to develop a distinctive argument of his own, elaborating and defending a moderate cosmopolitanism that conditions redistributive obligations on the fact that there is a global basic structure. The prose is careful but sparse; none of our regular readers will find it inaccessible, but even the most expert in the field will learn something from it quite apart from finding it an excellent text book, perhaps accompanied by The Political Philosophy of Cosmopolitanism.
The book reinforces the impression I got at a conference Jon and I recently attended together that part (but only part) of the explanation of the contemporary interest in global justice and cosmopolitianism is that almost all the interesting issues in political theory come together in this topic. The book covers questions of obligation and legitimacy, identity, distributive justice, the subject of justice, rights, and the foundations of political principles, as well as addressing some essential questions in meta-ethics. Buy it now!
One thing might surprise some readers, though probably not the political philosophers/theorists. In his final chapter Jon offers a qualifiedly positive evaluation of the economic globalisation we have been experiencing over the past couple of decades, and many of his qualifications are anti-protectionist rather than anti-trade. My impression is that Jon’s judgments are part of something not far from being a consensus left-liberal political theorists working on global justice; a consensus which departs from the views of free-market ideologues, but is very far from the anti-globalisation position that I think some of our more conservative and libertarian readers sometimes assume that strongly egalitarian theorists hold.
by Chris Bertram on May 2, 2006
I was in Paris over the past few days and happened on “the shrine to Auguste Comte and Positivism that Maria blogged about a couple of years back”:https://crookedtimber.org/2003/10/27/were-only-human-after-all/ . Unfortunately it was closed, even though the notice on the door said it shouldn’t have been. Anyway, this post is just an illustration to (and reminder of) Maria’s one.
by Henry Farrell on May 1, 2006
Interesting post from Dave Sifry at Technorati: according to Technorati’s (admittedly imperfect) data set, English is no longer the number one language in the blogosphere. “Japanese is”:http://www.sifry.com/alerts/archives/000433.html.
bq. Something that may come as a surprise (at least to the English-speaking world) is that English isn’t the biggest language of the blogosphere. In fact, English isn’t even the primary language of one third of all posts that Technorati tracks anymore. Another interesting finding is that the Chinese blogosphere, which grew significantly in 2004 and 2005 (launches of MSN Spaces in Chinese, Bokee.com saw a peak of 25% of all posts in Chinese in November 2005) seems to be slowing down somewhat this year.
!http://www.henryfarrell.net/sifry.png!
I know absolutely nothing about the Japanese blogosphere apart from occasional bits and pieces from “Joi Ito’s blog”:http://joi.ito.com/. Any readers able to enlighten me?
by John Holbo on May 1, 2006
I finally got around to reading the Euston Manifesto. Something of the sort used to be me. Here I am, back in Feb 2004, recollecting 2002-2003: “I did a Hitchens, basically. But I’m better now. Really, I feel fine.” Well, I was never worse than a sort of nail-biting queasyhawk, squawking about threatening storms. But good thing that Belle has been upholding the family honor with her ongoing ‘why I was wrong’ series. Apart from the fact that Belle accidentally logged in as me to make the first post, I never openly endorsed them. Usually I do that at dinner. But maybe a few words now about this Euston thing. [click to continue…]
Jason Stanley has an interesting and thoughtful post contrasting his father’s generation of academics with his own (which is, I think, roughly mine). His observation is that his father and his father’s colleagues exhibited much more rootedness in their institution and the communities surrounding them than he feels our generation does, and he also thinks that his father’s generation were more detached from or at odds with the mainstream culture. Peter Levine (who grew up with Jason, apparently, what a small world this is, especially given that they are 2 of the handful of people I ever link to) has an equally thoughtful follow up post, claiming that these changes are rooted in changes in the society as a whole, and wisely warning against the status competition which they both think is unhealthily present in academic life. I’m still not sure what I make of Jason’s original claim; the first post made me realise that most of what I know about Jason’s father’s generation of American academics is drawn from early Alison Lurie and Philip Roth novels, consumed before I moved to the States, and anyway not necessarily reliable sociology. But I suspect the contrast is overdrawn, and that academics have always been more in tune with the mainstream culture than they would like to think they are.
Update: on the grounds that you can discuss it over at Peter’s or Leiter’s blogs and that any further comments could only spoil the aesthetic delight below, I’ve closed comments.