Henry

Today and tomorrow, I’m guestblogging at Steve Clemons’ “Washington Note”:http://www.thewashingtonnote.com/. It seems to be a somewhat different crowd of readers and commenters than here at CT – more policy wonks than academics. Normal service will be resumed shortly (and I may cross-post one or two posts in the meantime).

From the back of a packet of “Hans All-Natural Chicken and Apple Sausages”:http://hansallnatural.com/dir/products/itempage.aspx?ItemID=34, I discover the artistic urge that led to the creation of these distinguished offal tubes.

bq. While touring alluring ocean fronts and majestic alpine passages, an epiphany occurred to Hans: create organic sausages as natural as the glistening of the snow and as genuine as the sunset’s glow.

Not quite up there with the “European bake shop”:http://www.kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/000159.html, but a noble ambition nonetheless.

Another post from a Savage Minds contributor, Tak, on a “different blog”:http://www.froginawell.net/japan/?p=106, talking about the Diamond controversy. Other Savage Minds types have denounced Diamond as “no nothing anti-racist” and “quasi-racist” (they seem to be overlapping categories); Tak says that he’s just plain racist. The basis for this accusation? First: Diamond says “in an article”:http://www.kimsoft.com/2004/japanese_roots.htm that the Japanese are the most distinctive major country in terms of their culture and environment. But Japanese imperialists too say that the Japanese are distinctive in terms of their culture and environment. In Tak’s own words, “Stop right there, mister, because to those who know Japan’s modern history, he has just reproduced the rhetoric of Japanese imperialism!” In addition, there are “frightening parallels” between Diamond’s belief that physical environment is an important causal variable, and the work of a racist Japanese author, who, according to “some Japanese critics” believed that environmental factors were responsible for Japanese racial superiority. _Quod erat demonstrandum_. Or something. Second, Diamond “perpetuates racism by associating a group of people with specific traits,” (i.e. cultivating rice!) and holds to the bizarre thesis that “rice cultivation gives a military advantage over hunter & gatherer people.”

This is beyond sloppy. You don’t fling around accusations of racism in public forums without serious evidence. Tak doesn’t have serious evidence, or, as far as I can see, any evidence whatsoever. Instead he has a selection of egregious misreadings and slurs-by-association (you can judge for yourself whether Tak’s piece is a fair summation of Diamond’s article; the latter is a short, easy read). I simply don’t understand what is going on here with Tak and with the other Savage Minds who have contributed to this debate. It’s fine and good to challenge Diamond’s evidence and arguments with other evidence and counter arguments. That’s what academic debate should be about. It’s also fine to challenge particular styles of thinking if they’re unable to come to grips with certain kinds of phenomena. But if you want to claim that certain kinds of reasoning are inherently racist and repugnant to right thinking people, which is what seems to be going on here, you had better have strong evidence to back up your accusations. So far, all I’ve seen a lot of vaguely worded innuendo. There’s some underlying deformation of thinking here, and I’m not sure what’s driving it.

Update: Kerim at Savage Minds offers a “possible explanation”:http://savageminds.org/2005/07/26/guns-germs-and-steel-links/.

bq. If we anthropologists seem a little to ready to throw around the term “racist” it is not because we are “jealous” of other disciplines … it is because we are all too aware of our own history as a discipline. Anthropologists were the foot-soldiers of colonialism, promoting theories of racial superiority to justify colonial expansion. As a result, we are sensitive to the ways in which specific interests can be served in the name of “objective” science.

This seems to me to be at least part of the story – anthropology’s complex historical relationship with imperialism is indeed one of the mainsprings of the discipline’s identity. But while it helps explain, it doesn’t _give license_ to Ozma and Tak to fling about poorly sourced accusations of racism like confetti (Diamond very clearly is not promoting any sort of theory of racial superiority, or anything like it).

Update 2: See this “post”:http://weblogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/?p=68 by Tim Burke, which does a nice – and careful – job of criticizing Diamond.

Marty Lederman has an “extraordinary post”:http://balkin.blogspot.com/2005/07/heroes-of-pentagons-interrogation.html at _Balkinization_ detailing “six memos”:http://balkin.blogspot.com/2005/07/jag-memos-on-military-interrogation.html from Judge Advocate Generals in the armed forces that have just been declassified. The memos make it quite clear that the decision to provide a legal opinion that whitewashed “extreme interrogation techniques” encountered considerable resistance from the armed forces legal services, who saw it as overturning longstanding US armed forces policies which committed the US to take the “high road.” The armed services’ opinions were sidelined, in favour of John Yoo’s memo, which seems to have closed the debate and cleared the way for the later abuses which did indeed take place.

There’s a strong case to be made that what happened at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, along with other abuses (the outsourcing of torture through “extraordinary rendition” and other legal dodges; the probable use of even more extreme techniques by the CIA) are war crimes. Under current political circumstances, there is no likelihood that they will be prosecuted as such. But one could also argue that administration lawyers who provided dubious legal opinions that were then predictably used to provide a spurious patina of legitimacy to illegal acts, were engaged in unethical activity. There was a kerfuffle a few months ago about lawyers who provided legal opinions that gave cover to dodgy tax-avoidance schemes; giving legal cover to torture seems in principle to be rather more problematic. Here’s my question (and I don’t know the answer to it). Does this kind of activity constitute the kind of ethical malpractice that can and should be sanctioned by relevant professional associations (i.e. bar associations)? My guess is that there’s a grey area here, but I would be interested to hear from those who have direct knowledge of how disciplinary sanctioning works in the law.

Update: A reader reminds me that Scott Horton of Columbia University Law School has argued that the relevant disciplinary authorities should investigate the authors of these memos.

In a June 8, 2004 “article”:http://texscience.org/reform/torture/ (scroll down), Neil A. Lewis and Eric Schmitt of the _New York Times_ reported that,

bq. Scott Horton, the former head of the human rights committee of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York, said Monday that he believed that the March memorandum on avoiding responsibility for torture was what caused a delegation of military lawyers to visit him and complain privately about the administration’s confidential legal arguments. That visit, he said, resulted in the association undertaking a study and issuing of a report criticizing the administration. He added that the lawyers who drafted the torture memo in March could face professional sanctions.

My reader, who wishes to remain anonymous, said that he consulted experts on legal ethics last year about the prospects for disciplinary sanctions. While there is mixed opinion on the scope of the relevant rules, and some doubt over whether the disciplinary authorities would take up a case of this kind in practice, there does seem to be at least a reasonable argument that the rules _could_ be interpreted to sanction this kind or behavior.

“Brad DeLong”:http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2005/07/a_better_class_.html has a go at the anthropologists at “Savage Minds” for “two”:http://savageminds.org/2005/07/25/whats-wrong-with-yalis-question/ “posts”:http://savageminds.org/2005/07/24/anthropology%u2019s-guns-germs-and-steel-problem/ which in turn attack Jared Diamond’s “Guns, Germs and Steel”:http://www.powells.com/search/DTSearch/search?partner_id=29956&cgi=search/search/&searchtype=kw&searchfor=Jared%20Diamond%20Guns%20Germs%20Steel. I’m mostly in agreement with Brad, but think that there’s a more interesting question lurking in the background; the Savage Minds critiques seem to me to be less motivated by professional jealousy than by a wrongheaded understanding of levels of causation. Ozma, one of the Savage Minds bloggers suggests “in comments”:http://savageminds.org/2005/07/24/anthropology%e2%80%99s-guns-germs-and-steel-problem/#comment-824 that while she thinks that Diamond is wrong on the facts, her more fundamental objection to his work is that it’s _the wrong kind of anti-racism._ [click to continue…]

Simonetta Agnello Hornby’s “article”:http://news.ft.com/cms/s/04a67d56-f8da-11d9-8fc8-00000e2511c8.html on the Italian mafia in today’s _FT_ is a little impressionistic for my tastes. Its final paragraphs, however, have a nugget of insight about the pervasiveness of the Mafia in modern Sicily.

bq. “Mafiosita” lurks within me, and it came out powerfully last summer. I was at our family estate in Sicily. My grandchild cut his hand; while I was holding him in my arms, blood flowed copiously. I rushed to the telephone and called a friend: “Whom do you know at A&E?”, I asked. Had I been in London, I would have gone straight to the local hospital. I thought long and hard on that episode, and was shamed. Distrustful of the ability of the local health service to deliver services without an “introduction”, I had resorted to the “known ways”: personal contact. My friend is just a friend, but for people less privileged than I, the Mafia is always ready – at a price – to be the “best of all friends”, and it has friends in all places.

What she’s saying here is very reminiscent of Diego Gambetta’s “classic essay”:http://www.sociology.ox.ac.uk/papers/gambetta158-175.pdf on the Mafia and trust. Gambetta argues that Mafia members have come to play a key role as interlocutors, purveyors of introductions and guarantors of relationships in a society, such as Sicily’s, where people don’t trust strangers readily. But mafiosi have a strong interest too in ensuring that individuals don’t come to trust each other independently of their contacts through the Mafia. Hence, they act not only to guarantee relationships, but to reinforce the social belief that unless you deal with the Mafia and are under their protection, you are liable to be rooked. The Mafia and the culture of _raccomandazioni_ (personal introductions and recommendations as an alternative to impersonal transactions) are intimately intertwined with each other. As Hornby notes in passing, there also appear to be close linkages between the Mafia and Silvio Berlusconi’s _Forza Italia_; one of the reasons why publications such as the _Economist_, which might otherwise have been expected to support a right-of-center party with a purported interest in liberalization, have such distaste for Berlusconi and his doings.

I’ve just finished reading Paul Park’s “A Princess of Roumania”:http://www.powells.com/search/DTSearch/search?partner_id=29956&cgi=search/search/&searchtype=kw&searchfor=Paul%20Park%20Princess%20Roumania (warning: mild spoilers ahead). The book deserves to become a modern classic; it’s as good and as serious as the first two books of Philip Pullman’s “His Dark Materials.” I’ve been an admirer of Park’s novels for a long time. His previous books are wonderful, but there’s a clear progression from the gorgeous, baroque, but slightly undisciplined prose of his first book, _Soldiers of Paradise_ and its somewhat inferior sequels, through _Celestis_ to _Three Marys_ which is written in language as plain and lovely as a stone. “A Princess of Roumania” is better again – strange images rendered more striking by the very matter-of-factness with which they are described. His first novel for young adults, it takes a standard plot – a girl and her companions catapulted into a strange new world of magic and enchantment – and does unexpected things with it. John Holbo has just written a “post”:http://www.thevalve.org/go/valve/article/if_we_must_have_fish/ on the Valve about novels in which the characters come to realize that they are inhabiting a fictional world, in which “the laws of the universe are the laws of genre.” Much of the power of _A Princess_ comes from its _refusal_ of the cosiness that this all too often implies.

bq. “We’re not going home,” she said. The flatness, the sureness in her own voice surprised her. And it wasn’t true – she’d read a lot of books like this, where the girl wakes up and she’s a beautiful princess in another world. But she always goes back again. She always goes home. “We’re not going home,” she heard herself repeat.

I’ve a theory, which I suspect is hardly original to me, that the magic in really good children’s fantasy draws its resonance from a child’s perception of what it must be like to be grown up. When you’re a child or a pre-adolescent, the adult world seems an attractive and terrifying place. Adults have power, but are driven by forces and desires that a child can only dimly understand; wild magic. Thus, for example, when Susan rides with the daughters of the moon and the Wild Hunt in Alan Garner’s _The Moon of Gomrath_, she’s glimpsing for a moment what it will be like to be a woman. In contrast, the magic in mediocre children’s fantasy is all too often domesticated, rationalized, and stripped of its real force. _A Princess of Roumania_ seems to me to be an oblique rejoinder to the kind of children’s fantasy in which magic is under control, in which the child goes home. There’s no returning for Miranda Popescu; her entire world (our world) turns out to be an elaborate fiction, a shelter from reality that quite literally disappears in a puff of smoke. She and her friends are propelled, only half grown-up into the world of adulthood, of complex responsibilities and obligations. A world where magic exists, but isn’t really understood, where adults lay complicated plans, but don’t know what they’re doing most of the time. In most fantasy, the hero or heroine is fulfilling a plot, a prophecy, a pre-ordained destiny – at the pivotal moment in _A Princess_, Miranda refuses the path that has been laid out for her, and the power of adults to decide what to do with her life, instead deciding herself. All this, and the Baroness Nicola Ceausescu, perhaps the most wonderfully described, and _sympathetic_ villainess that I’ve ever seen in a YA book. I can’t say more than to reiterate that the book is a delight.

“Jonathan Cohn”:http://www.tpmcafe.com/story/2005/7/18/114013/338 asks whether there’s any good reason to believe that nice guys do indeed finish first in the business world.

bq. I’d love nothing more to believe that treating employees well is actually better business than treating them shabbily. But at the moment, anyway, count me as skeptical.

As I think I’ve mentioned before, Gary Miller has used economic theory to make exactly this argument, in a series of publications over the last fifteen years (this “piece”:http://www.isnie.org/ISNIE99/Papers/millerg.pdf co-written with Dino Falaschetti, gives a good flavour of his work). Miller uses social choice theory and game theory to argue that managers, if they are to get workers to deliver their full effort, need to be able to make credible commitments to them that their efforts will be rewarded over the longer term. It’s thus a good idea to keep a strict separation between management and owners. Efforts to make the interests of stockholders and managers coincide with each other are going to weaken management’s ability to credibly commit to workers that they will continue to be employed, as managers become more interested in chasing short term stock market gains than in ensuring the long term health of the company. Long term success, for Miller, is produced through “gift exchange” in which managers credibly commit to insulate workers from the pressure for short term profits, and workers reciprocate by giving additional effort. One of Miller’s examples of a firm that used to do this very well is rather timely. From Miller’s 1992 book, “Managerial Dilemmas”:http://www.powells.com/search/DTSearch/search?partner_id=%2029956&cgi=search/search/&searchtype=kw&searchfor=gary%20miller%20managerial%20dilemmas :

bq. Another condition for the achievement of cooperative equilibria in a repeated game is the mutual expectation that the relationship will go on long enough to justify the investment in cooperation. This was achieved at Hewlett-Packard by an early decision by the two founders not to be a “hire and fire company,” but one in which employees would have the security of employment commitment. In the 1980 recession, this policy was tested severely, but everyone in the organization took a 10 percent cut in pay and worked 10% fewer hours so that no one would be fired (Peters and Waterman 1982: 44). This confirmed everyone’s subjective belief that the relationship was long-lasting and that employee efforts were not going to be exploited for short-term gain by Hewlett-Packard.

How “things have changed”:http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2005_07/006756.php.

Over at the Volokhs, Jim Lindgren gets “upset”:http://www.volokh.com/archives/archive_2005_07_17-2005_07_23.shtml#1121820182 “twice”:http://www.volokh.com/archives/archive_2005_07_17-2005_07_23.shtml#1121843543 at co-blogger Orin Kerr for “claiming”:http://www.volokh.com/archives/archive_2005_07_17-2005_07_23.shtml#1121819891 and “repeating the claim”:http://www.volokh.com/archives/archive_2005_07_17-2005_07_23.shtml#1121843543 that prediction markets did a bad job of prediction the Roberts nomination. For Jim, the issue is whether markets are in general better than experts at aggregating publicly available information; he believes that “markets (however “good” or bad they are in absolute terms) should be better than experts on balance, or at least better than experts who lack actual first-hand knowledge of the forthcoming decision.” For Orin, Tradesports seems to be no more than a “way of monitoring what a few newspapers and blogs are saying,” and, on the whole, it “seems easier to just scan the headlines at How Appealing.”There’s an obvious alternative hypothesis which neither considers. Roberts futures shot up in value from 1% to near-certainty in the few hours before the decision was “officially” leaked. One highly plausible interpretation of this is that word had already leaked to a privileged few with good contacts in the Administration. Then, some of those people with insider knowledge took advantage of their privileged position by betting Roberts and fleecing the rubes. As Steve Bainbridge has “noted”:http://www.professorbainbridge.com/2005/07/inside_informat.html, Tradesports doesn’t seem to have any rules against insider trading. On this interpretation, Lindgren is right in saying that markets like Tradesports can provide more information on executive decisions than scanning the blogs – but only because they’re being used by those who have insider information to take advantage of the less-informed (who naively assume that they’re playing a fair game). In other words, there’s strong reason to suspect that this case doesn’t support Lindgren’s more general claims about the superiority of prediction markets vis-a-vis experts; in this case the markets are arguably being manipulated by people with insider knowledge that isn’t available to the experts. The reason that markets are doing better than experts “without first-hand knowledge” is most likely that they’re being used by experts _with_ first hand knowledge to make money from those who don’t have such knowledge. This is a very bad case to test the efficacy (or lack of same) of prediction markets in aggregating dispersed public knowledge into a usable metric; it seems to me rather unlikely that this sort of aggregation is what is in fact happening here.

Update: Orin Kerr says in comments. “You claim in your post that “Roberts futures shot up in value from 1% to near-certainty in the few hours before the decision was “officially” leaked.” That is incorrect. As best I can tell, Roberts futures shot up to near certainty only after every news website started posting that Bush had picked Roberts.” In which case, it seems to me that Kerr is right on this, and Lindgren and I are wrong, for different reasons.

Update 2: “Brayden King”:http://pubsociology.typepad.com/pub/2005/07/bad_versus_good.html has a very good post on the topic.

I see that Avner Greif has made his forthcoming book on economic history “available for download”:http://www-econ.stanford.edu/faculty/Greif_Instutions/GreifBook.html. It tackles the transition from a mediaeval economy in which people traded with identifiable others whom they knew well to a modern economy based on impersonal exchange. A considerable nuisance for me, as I’m trying to write a book that talks to some more-or-less related themes, and now have a few hundred more pages of weighty ideas to ingest (which isn’t to say that the ingestion won’t be beneficial). I’ll be especially interested to see how the book is received both by Greif’s fellow economists and by economic sociologists. Greif argues that the two ought to be talking to each other much more than they do, and the book seems to be at least in part intended as an object lesson in how the two approaches can inform each other. On the one hand, I have the impression that most economists refuse on principle to believe that economic sociologists could have anything useful to tell them. On the other, when economic sociologists see game theorists and rational choice types writing about sociological themes, their first reaction is often to “man the barricades”:http://econsoc.mpifg.de/current/6-3art2.asp against the imperial oppressor. However, there’s a very interesting literature building up in the no-mans-land between the trenches – economists who are beginning to realize that they need a stronger theory of cognition and of the kinds of informal order that sociologists have been exploring for decades, and sociologists who are interested in the kinds of action-oriented theories of human behaviour that more thoughtful rational choice types have been trying to develop. Greif’s book is likely to attract attention from both sides and from those in between; with a bit of luck it’ll help push on the process of dialogue a little.

I’ve been reading Wolfgang Streeck and Kathy Thelen’s edited volume, “Beyond Continuity”:http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/Economics/Political/?view=usa&ci=0199280460 over the last several days – Jacob Hacker’s chapter, “Policy Drift: The Hidden Politics of US Welfare State Retrenchment” is particularly good (a draft version is available “here”:http://www.staatlichkeit.uni-bremen.de/download/de/ueber/gast_hacker.pdf ; a closely related article appeared in the _American Political Science Review_ last year). Leftwingers are sometimes entirely too sanguine about the durability of entitlement programs like Social Security; Hacker lays out reasons why this confidence is misplaced. In a political system like the US, it’s extremely difficult to get large scale changes through, such as abolishing programs, because there are so many veto points in the decision making process. It’s even more difficult when the program has an active constituency, which will be unhappy at any changes that disadvantage them. This helps explain, for example, the problems that Bush’s proposed Social Security reforms have run into. But there are still ways in which a program can be dismantled piecemeal. First is what Hacker (and the others writing in this edited volume) call “drift.” As society changes over time, programs are likely to become increasingly badly calibrated to the needs that inspired their creation. But updating these programs may be difficult, especially given that conservatives can use the many veto points to block change. Thus, one may expect to see social programs becoming increasingly unmoored from society’s needs over time – and hence less politically defensible – as attempts to reform them and make them more relevant are blocked. Second is “layering.” When faced with highly popular programs such as Social Security, conservatives have had difficulties in making head-on attacks, so that they have instead sought to create an alternative institutional framework that will attract defection and undermine these programs’ rationale over time. As Hacker concludes:

bq. in a context where social risks are changing and policy drift is ubiquitous and consequential, _conservatives have not had to enact major policy reforms to move toward many of their favored ends_ (emphasis in original). Merely by delegitimizing and blocking compensatory interventions designed to correct policy drift or ameliorate intensified risks, opponents of the welfare state in the United States have gradually transformed the orientation of social policy. The struggle over the welfare state has not simply been concerned [with] whether programs will be cut or scrapped; it has also concerned the degree to which social policies will uphold long-standing goals and adapt to the world around them. We vastly underestimate the strength of the welfare state’s opponents if we do not see the extent to which they have succeeded in this latter debate.

On all of this, see also “Mark Schmitt”:http://markschmitt.typepad.com/decembrist/2005/02/auh20_again.html. If Hacker is right, and I’m pretty sure that he is, the implications are clear. Turning back the right-wing assault on Social Security isn’t enough. What’s needed is a comprehensive program that seeks to update the welfare state to address the massively increased burden of risk that ordinary individuals are expected to bear today. There’s also a strong rationale for increasing the role of the state substantially in such a program – as Hacker notes, programs which seek to deliver the welfare state indirectly, through tax incentives and the like, are substantially more vulnerable to drift than directly administered programs (health insurance being the obvious test case). I presume that the chapter is a taster for Hacker’s forthcoming book on the politics of risk and insecurity; I’m looking forward to seeing how he links his analysis of the parameters of institutional change to the prospect of introducing substantial new reforms.

Two addenda to posts I wrote last week.

First, the “New York Times”:http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/16/politics/16immigrants.html?ei=5094&en=ed9000bb0979f7ff&hp=&ex=1121572800&adxnnl=1&partner=homepage&pagewanted=print&adxnnlx=1121702930-H0vhXu9rNu0DeaqhsRIh8A picks up on the “OSHA sting”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/07/12/impersonating-osha/ story; it appears that the immigration officials responsible are getting a lot of flak, as they should be. Thanks to Matthew Lister for the tip.

Second, Sean Carroll provides contact details for WBEZ, the radio station which “cancelled Odyssey”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/07/14/odyssey-cancellation/ last week. Anyone who wants to suggest politely that they reconsider this decision should contact:

Torey Malatia
General Manager, WBEZ
848 E. Grand
Chicago IL 60611
312-832-3312
tmalatia@wbez.org

Sean and a group of other physicists have just started a new group-blog, “Cosmic Variance”:http://cosmicvariance.com/. Looks good.

“Chris Muir”:http://www.redstate.org/story/2005/6/17/121922/392, meet “Aristotle”:http://www.fightingwordscomics.com/Toons/csnav050620.jpg. Aristotle, meet Chris Muir.

(via “PNH”:http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/ )

Scott McLemee has a good “article”:http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2005/07/14/mclemee on Francis M. Cornford’s _Microcosmographia Academica_, a sort of Lifemanship for the young academic. Some of Cornford’s Edwardianisms have a faint odour of fustian, but in the main his skewering of academic politics is as sharp and relevant as ever. He’s especially fine on the combination of high sounding perorations, low self interest and relentless tedium that marks politics in the self-governing university, and on the ruthlessness of “young men in a hurry,” whose professed radicalism only imperfectly conceals their desire to accommodate their own bottoms comfortably to the seats of power. Cornford’s analysis of academic publishing rings true today (except for the bit about government subsidy):

bq. The Principle of Sound Learning is that the noise of vulgar fame should never trouble the cloistered calm of academic existence. Hence, learning is called sound when no one has ever heard of it; and ‘sound scholar’ is a term of praise applied to one another by learned men who have no reputation outside the University, and a rather queer one inside it. If you should write a book (you had better not), be sure that it is unreadable; otherwise you will be called ‘brilliant’ and forfeit all respect. University printing presses exist, and are subsidised by the Government for the purpose of producing books which no one can read; and they are true to their high calling.

Scott points to an “online version”:http://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/people/staff/iau/cornford/cornford.html of _MA_ (slightly dodgy scan, but still perfectly readable), which inspired me to do a Google search on the first book by Cornford that I ever read, _Thucydides Mythistoricus_ , only to discover that it’s “online too”:http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/Thucydides/Cornford/CTOC.html. It’s a quite brilliantly written Marxisant account of the Peloponnesian war, which blames the outbreak of hostilities on the desire of the Athenian commercial classes to maintain a stranglehold on trade. I’ve no idea how well Cornford’s analysis has held up among classical historians, but he’s still read by international relations scholars.

Addendum: I’ve been meaning to mention for a while that _Inside Higher Ed_ now has an “XML feed”:http://www.insidehighered.com/frontpagerss2 and that Scott’s columns are collected “here”:http://insidehighered.com/views/intellectual_affairs.