Chris Bertram pointed me to the Chronicle piece which Brian discusses below on the difference between US and UK Philosophy. One passage that struck me was the following
There are two broad models of how such engagement might best be achieved: what I call the participatory and the contributory. In the participatory model, academics engage in real-world problems by becoming members of the institutions that are directly involved with those problems. In the contributory model, academics remain in academe, but issue documents, books, and papers that are supposed to contribute to public life
Baggini claims that the ‘participatory’ model is in the ascendance in Britain, whereas in the US philosophers just write wise things as pieces of advice. This is very misleading, although I can see why it might look that way. One reason that it looks that way is that whereas philosophers can enter the British upper house as a result of patronage, the US upper house is reserved for multi-millionnaires who are willing to devote their fortunes and lives to running for office — not a mechanism likely to suit academic philosophers, even successful ones.
But if, as Baggini suggests, sitting on government bodies counts as participation, US philosophers are at it all the time. Norman Daniels and Dan Brock were on the famous Hillary commission on health care reform; my former colleagues Dan Wikler and Allen Buchanan both served time in the Federal Department of Health (and Wikler has spent a good deal of time at the WHO). Wierdly enough, the aestheticist Myles Brand is now head of the NCAA. There are more numerous examples at less exalted levels of government on advisory bodies. And, more shamefully, Bill Bennett (of gambling fame) and Irwin Silber (candidate for Governer of Massachussets, and fervent supporter of the Contras)are both trained and formerly mediocre academic philosophers. I suspect it is ignorance of the situation in the US that drives the distinction.
But there is another fact that makes US philosophers look less participatory than the Brits. The kind of political outlook found in the mainstream of analytical philosophy is left-of-center, and so far off the American political map that it is hard to engage. Baggini cites the famous ‘Philosopher’s Brief’ on assisted suicide as an example of the contributory model. But in other times, and certainly in other countries, Ronald Dworkin would have been a likely Supreme Court candidate, and hence a participant — he has been ineligible because his political outlook is completely out of the mainstream of politics. By contrast those very same views are though of as part and parcel of political debate in the UK, so that people with them have potential access to political processes.
Just to add to the list, Bill Galston worked in the Clinton administration as a domestic policy advisor. I think Benjamin Barber was also involved in some minor capacity—though maybe someone else will know more about him.
Irwin Silber (candidate for Governer of Massachussets, and fervent supporter of the Contras)
Isn’t it, rather, John Silber?
http://www.bu.edu/philo/faculty/silber.html
http://www.forerunner.com/forerunner/X0112_Silbers_Gubernatoria.html
Sorry, that was an awful slip. Immense apologies to Irwin Silber, who couldn’t be farther from John, and has my greatest esteem. That was my first Blog, I shall be much more careful in future.
What do you mean when you say that “[t]he kind of political outlook found in the mainstream of analytical philosophy is left-of-center”?
Is it that those who do mainstream analytical philosophy in our universities are left-of-center?
Or is it a claim that there is some political content to maintream analytical philosophy?
BTW: Baggini’s citation of Dworkin’s so-called “Philosphers’ Brief” demonstrates the difficulty in separating the participatory from the contributory. The brief filed by Dworkin was, it seems to me, clearly participatory. It wasn’t published in an academic journal, it was filed with a court. And the arguments were not moral and ethical but were legal in nature.
“The kind of political outlook found in the mainstream of analytical philosophy [in Britain] is left-of-center, and so far off the American political map that it is hard to engage.”
This may be true of scholars in the humanities at large. I doubt it is true of analytic philosophers.
“[Dworkin] has been ineligible [as a Supreme Court candidate] because his political outlook is completely out of the mainstream of [US] politics.”
If all Supreme Court justices are (as a matter of ideological-institutional necessity) within the US political mainstream, what views of Dworkin’s place him outside the ‘mainstream’ so conceived?
What views of Dworkin’s place him out of the US political mainstream, in the sense in which all Supreme Court justices are
Dammit forgot to delete last bit
Heh. Bill Galston was a domestic policy advisor, and in that capacity, one of the things he did was to organize regular saylong intellectual roundtables for Clinton. Left and center-left philosophers, political scientists, sociologists, and lawprofs were invited to spend (IIRC) roughly a day every six months at sitting around with Clinton in full former-Rhodes-scholar policy-wonk dorm-room-bull-session mode— pitching him their ideas. (“The communitarian movement!” “Deliberative democracy!” “Civil society!” “The third way!” “The politics of meaning!”)
Barber was one of these. He was not an official— elected, appointed, or otherwise. He was just a participant in these seminars, along with many other academics. Nonetheless, he wrote a book about the experience of being seduced and betrayed by a Democratic president who he had thought was listening carefully to what he had to say, but who ended up being a centrist. The book is mainly noteworthy for the fact that it has lots of catty commentary about the other intellectuals, and for the sheer brazenness of the thing. He’d spent a total of maybe six or seven days in Bill Clinton’s company, and he capitalized on it by writing a book.
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