by Henry Farrell on March 2, 2004
“Kerim Friedman”:http://keywords.oxus.net/archives/000405.html has an interesting idea; rather than inviting guest-bloggers to come on board for a period of a week or so (as we and the Volokhs do) he’s inviting academics to come on board for just one post, a mini-essay on some topical subject. As he says:
bq. Often I’ll see academics post short statements on professional e-mail lists which I feel deserve wider attention, or I’ll see news story on a topic which I know someone else would handle better than myself. Unfortunately, many of my efforts in this direction are in vain, since most academics aren’t yet comfortable with the format of a blog. The idea of rapidly responding to current events, or popularizing a specific idea without the extensive preparation and editing that goes into a published article scares a lot of scholars – not to mention the fact that they are just too busy.
It’s an interesting way of getting academics to dip their toes in the blogosphere, and I imagine it will be attractive to a lot of people. Most professors have more ideas rattling around in their head than they’ll ever be able to write up in articles. As Brian “says”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/tar/Archives/002558.html, blogging is a nice way to play with ideas that you think are interesting, but that you’ll never have time to develop properly, or even just to help flesh out a thought that’s still in its early stages. Even if most academics don’t want to start their own blog, I imagine that a fair few of them wouldn’t mind hiving off their excess ideas by posting occasionally on somebody else’s. It’ll be interesting to see how Kerim’s experiment works out (not that I think we’ll be moving that way ourselves anytime soon).
by Henry Farrell on February 29, 2004
I’ve been re-reading James Scott’s “Seeing Like a State: Why Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0300078153/henryfarrell-20″. It’s a wonderful book; I especially recommend it to libertarians who find it hard to believe that lefties too can be opposed to big government. I hope to blog more about its relationship to Hernando de Soto’s proposals for property rights reform in the developing world (see “here”:http://www.knowledgeproblem.com/archives/000720.html, “here”:http://kenmacleod.blogspot.com/2004_02_01_kenmacleod_archive.html#107713464265821106 and “here”:http://kenmacleod.blogspot.com/2004_02_01_kenmacleod_archive.html#107806635150466815 ) sometime in the next few weeks. For the moment, I just want to highlight one implication of Scott’s argument; that free markets may be flawed from a Hayekian point of view. Scott doesn’t pay as much attention to markets as he perhaps ought to, but it’s quite clear that he sees the process of state-building as going hand-in-hand with the creation of national and transnational markets. In particular, both states and markets need commonly agreed formal standards (of quality, measurement etc), which allow non-local exchange between people who don’t know each other. The historical evidence is emphatic – creating universal standards is an important part of the state-building process, not only in autocratic regimes, but also in more market-oriented societies (see, for example, John Brewer’s exemplary study of the building of the British state, _The Sinews of Power_).
But here’s the rub. Scott very clearly shows that national, written standards are going to be “thin.” By their very nature, they’re unavoidably going to leave out many of the important forms of tacit knowledge that local, consensual, unwritten standards and rules can incorporate. The Hayekian case for free markets, as I understand it, is based less on the ideal of competition, than the ideal of information exchange; i.e. that markets allow the transmission of tacit knowledge more effectively than formal organizations. But Scott’s argument suggests that Hayek on tacit knowledge contradicts Hayek on free markets.[1] If you want to have non-local exchange (i.e. properly competitive impersonal markets), you have to do so on the basis of universal standards. But these standards fail to live up to the Hayekian ideal. Ergo, you can construct a Hayekian case against the creation of competitive impersonal markets, insofar as these markets involve the destruction of the kinds of tacit knowledge that are embedded in informal local standards. I’m not a Hayek expert, so I’ll throw this out to the people who know Hayek better than I do (Dan for one), but I think that there’s a serious argument here to be fleshed out.
fn1. Cass Sunstein, in his review of Scott’s book, seems to “suggest”:http://home.uchicago.edu/~csunstei/moreisless.html that Scott’s use of Hayek is self-contradictory. I suspect that the contradiction is in Hayek rather than in Scott.
by Henry Farrell on February 27, 2004
Has anyone else come across the new ads on the NYT’s website with both animation _and_ sound (I hit one reading “this piece”:http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/27/movies/oscars/27OSCA.html)? It’s offensive and obtrusive; when you’re trying to read an article, the last thing you want to deal with is some bloke yelling inanities about the latest box-office stinkeroo. We’ve moved from static banners to animated banners, to popunders, to popovers, to popthroughs, to flyovers to this. Mozilla Firefox doesn’t seem to block it. If this sort of thing becomes standard on the Times, it’ll be enough to stop me reading the paper (I use my computer as my sound system, so don’t want to have to disconnect my speakers).
by Henry Farrell on February 27, 2004
More and more, when I come across academic blogs that I’ve never read before, they have links to Crooked Timber. This is all very nice and gratifying – but it also suggests that there are bloggers out there who are aware of CT, qualify for the academic blogroll, but aren’t there for the simple reason that I don’t know about them. If you meet the “criteria”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/000273.html email me, and I’ll put you up.
by Henry Farrell on February 26, 2004
John Q. “talks about”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001403.html Britain’s addiction to Official Secrets. This reminds me of a bit from Margaret Levi’s _Consent, Dissent and Patriotism_, where she discusses the politics of military archives.
bq. More arcane is the account of a small fire that destroyed relevant materials from World Wars I and II in the Australian War Memorial. The representatives of the British government operate under strict rules of secrecy concerning a very large amount of military-related material, and they uphold those rules rigorously. The Australian government operates with a greater openness. The problem arose because in the Australian War Memorial were records that the British deemed secret and the Australians did not. The problem was resolved by the British, or so my reliable source tells me, by planting a mole archivist in the War Memorial. This mole lit a small fire in the relevant stacks and then disappeared.
On a more personal note, John also namechecks the novelist and politician Erskine Childers, who was executed under dubious circumstances in 1922 by the Irish Free State government, with only my and Maria’s great-grandfather, Eoin MacNeill, “dissenting”:http://www.findarticles.com/cf_dls/m0FQP/n4297_v125/18629541/p1/article.jhtml from the decision. Today seems to be the “day”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001400.html for office-holding ancestors on CT.
by Henry Farrell on February 26, 2004
Like Chris and Daniel, I’ve been nonplussed at the nastiness of much rightwing US commentary on Europeans. If we’re not a clatter of cowardly Saddam fancying invertebrates, we’re a sinister cabal of jackbooted anti-Semites. While France’s behaviour over Iraq was unimpressive, and there are quite real problems of anti-Semitism, many of Europe’s critics have a rather transparent agenda. They seek to imply that any European criticism of the war or of Israel is automatically suspect, by virtue of its source. It’s the mirror image of Adbusters’ “insinuations”:http://www.adbusters.org/magazine/52/articles/jewish.html about rightwing Jews’ support for Israel, and not very much more intellectually respectable.
_Mirabile dictu_ a right wing pundit devotes a column today in the Washington Post to praising Europe. You might expect that I’d be pleased. Not on your life.
[click to continue…]
by Henry Farrell on February 25, 2004
bq. Greenspan Urges Congress to Reign in Deficit
Says the “NYT”:http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/business/AP-Greenspan-Budget.html?hp (though I’m sure the typo won’t last long).
by Henry Farrell on February 24, 2004
Keynes famously “quipped”:http://www.economist.com/research/Economics/alphabetic.cfm?LETTER=K “When the facts change, I change my mind – what do you do, sir?” G.W. Bush’s riposte – Why sir, I “change the facts”:http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2004_02_22.html#002598.
by Henry Farrell on February 23, 2004
We’re going to have two new guestbloggers with us over the next week; John Holbo and Belle Waring from “John and Belle Have a Blog”:http://examinedlife.typepad.com/johnbelle/. Most CT readers will know them well already; I reckon that JABHAB and the Volokhs are the two main contenders for the coveted blog-most-linked-to-by-Timberites award. John is a philosopher at the National University of Singapore; he also blogs about literature, politics and academia. Belle covers all of the above, as well as cooking (including tasty “rat anecdotes”:http://examinedlife.typepad.com/johnbelle/2004/02/dangerous_but_w.html) and popular culture. She’s ABD (or AWOL) at the Classics Department at Berkeley, and is currently writing a rather good detective novel with surreal elements. Enjoy …
by Henry Farrell on February 23, 2004
The “New York Times”:http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/21/arts/21DISS.html?ex=1392786000&en=afaf726e7ed23f35&ei=5007&partner=USERLAND has an article on “Dissent”:http://www.dissentmagazine.org/ Magazine, which is about to hit its 50th anniversary. It’s a publication which is a little to my right, and to the right of some other CT-ites, but has published some really good pieces over the years. The Times refers to Dissent‘s continuing financial difficulties – the journal has always been a labour of love, more aimed at getting ideas into circulation than at breaking even. This leads to an interesting question. There’s always been a lot of guff in the blogosphere about how blogs represent a fundamental threat to traditional media. It’s mostly nonsense – Atrios and Glenn Reynolds aren’t about to eat the NYT’s lunch any time soon, let alone Crooked Timber. Still, the one section of the media that faces a real challenge to adapt is the small opinion journal. There are things that these journals can do that bloggers are bad at – run long and detailed articles for one. But blogs – at least the more successful ones – are arguably starting to catch up (and in certain areas of debate to dominate). And they’re a lot cheaper. _Dissent_ has a circulation of 8-10,000 and loses over $100,000 a year. It costs a few hundred dollars a year to run a blog with the same daily readership.
I don’t think that these magazines are going to disappear – I certainly hope not. According to Chris, _Imprints_, another small journal, seems to have no trouble in covering its costs. However, if blogs continue to feed directly and indirectly into public debate, it’ll be hard for small journals to resist taking advantage of the possibilities (and cost savings) that they offer. I imagine that we’ll see various forms of symbiosis continuing to emerge, from opinion-blogs like Talking Point Memo, through blog-journal hybrids like the TAP and Reason websites, to niche print journals that get smarter about using bloggers to get the word out about good pieces. All sounds good to me.
[via “politicaltheory.info”:http://www.politicaltheory.info/]
by Henry Farrell on February 20, 2004
“Timothy Burke”:http://www.swarthmore.edu/socsci/tburke1/perma22004.html has a fascinating short post on Neal Stephenson’s _Quicksilver_ as a Foucauldian genealogy. As Burke says, Stephenson succeeds in looking at history from a skew angle, making the familiar strange, and the strange familiar. Read the piece – it’s an example of the very best kind of academic blogging. All that I can add is to point out one of the ways in which Stephenson (and Thomas Pynchon in _Mason and Dixon_) tries to defamiliarize the past; the use of anachronism. At various points in the narrative, Stephenson introduces modern ideas or inventions into the margins of his historical narrative (he can get away with this more easily, because _Quicksilver_ is an alternative history of the world, a history that never happened). He does this so as to make a tiger’s leap into the past.
Stephenson uses anachronisms to jar our sense of the seventeenth century as a fixed stage along the progression that has led ineluctably to the modern world. He wants to bring home to us how the past was, like the modern age, a ferment of possibilities. It could have developed in many different directions. In _Quicksilver_, the past and the present are related not because the one has led to the other, but because they are both the same thing at different stages; vortices of possibility. Even if _Quicksilver_ isn’t really a historical novel, it’s a novel of history, which to my mind is a much rarer and more interesting thing.
by Henry Farrell on February 20, 2004
“Corey Robin”:http://bostonreview.net/BR29.1/robin.html has an interesting article in this month’s _Boston Review_, arguing that prior to September 11, the intellectual wing of the US conservative movement had been in the doldrums because there weren’t any new battles to fight.
[click to continue…]
by Henry Farrell on February 16, 2004
Has either Flack Central Station or Junkscience.com thought about commissioning a few articles from David Icke and friends? It sounds to me as though there might be a real “meeting of minds”:http://www.davidicke.com/icke/articles2002/greensgovern.html (although they might have to get the Icke crowd to soft-pedal the “shapeshifting reptilians from outer space angle”:http://www.davidicke.com/icke/articles3/obsessed.html).
by Henry Farrell on February 16, 2004
The incomparable “Michael Dirda”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A38093-2004Feb12.html does a full-page review of Gene Wolfe’s The Knight in this week’s Washington Post. Dirda says that Wolfe “should enjoy the same rapt attention we afford to Thomas Pynchon, Toni Morrison and Cormac McCarthy” and he’s not blowing smoke. I’ve “blogged before”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/000700.html on Wolfe, who’s perhaps my favourite living writer. _The Knight_ isn’t quite as wonderful as Wolfe’s “New Sun” books, which together constitute his masterpiece, but is still quite wonderful indeed. Its setting most closely resembles that of his juvenile novel, _The Devil in a Forest_, but its story is rather more complex; as Dirda says, the surface smoothness of Wolfe’s language is “that of quicksand.” The prose-style of _The Knight_ is plain, plainer by far than the archaisms and loanwords of the _New Sun_ books, but it is possessed of the same gravity and music. Wolfe is staunchly conservative, and the book shows it. _The Knight_ presents a vision of chivalry and fealty in the Dark Ages that borrows from “Tolkien”:http://home.clara.net/andywrobertson/wolfemountains.html, and that is likely to be signally unsympathetic to most lefties. But there’s something important there; like other good writers on both left and right, Wolfe’s understanding of human nature and society runs deeper than his immediate political sympathies. His depiction of life in a society on the margins of civilization (caught between the depredations of barbarism and the efforts of the monarchy to impose order) is note-perfect; Wolfe not only has an ear for the music of language, but for the rhythms of society. If you haven’t read Wolfe before, I still recommend that you start with the New Sun books (Shadow and Claw, and Sword and Citadel); but _The Knight_ is a worthy companion.
by Henry Farrell on February 16, 2004
The “NYT”:http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/14/technology/14AMAZ.html?ex=1392094800&en=183dc1d16a0c7b4c&ei=5007&partner=USERLAND has an article on anonymous reviews on Amazon, and how they’re manipulated in different ways by authors, authors’ friends, and authors’ most bitter enemies. It’s a real problem with a system that allows uncontrolled anonymity or pseudonymity – the information content of the average review quickly drops to zero, unless (like “Tyler Cowen”:http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2004/01/how_do_consumer.html you’re interested in the degree of controversy that surrounds the book, rather than the ratio of positive to negative reviews). For an academic, the obvious point of comparison is peer review. Most halfway decent scholarly journals[1] get anonymous scholars to review any articles that are submitted to them so as to assess publishability. Although the editor of the journal usually has the final say, the anonymous reviewers’ findings count for a lot. There’s a lot of bitching and griping about this in the particular, especially because it’s sometimes not too difficult for the paper’s author to guess the identity of the ‘anonymous’ reviewer who did a hatchet-job on their cherished piece. The identity of particularly venomous reviewers is the subject of (frequently lurid) speculation and gossip.
Still, the system works reasonably well in the general, for three reasons. First, even if the reviewers are anonymous from the point of view of the article’s author, the journal’s editor knows who they are. This encourages at least some degree of responsibility on the part of the reviewer; even those with malice in their hearts may prefer not to run the risk of becoming known as a partisan hack by a journal editor, who may be receiving their own pieces in the future. Second, most journals will solicit at least two, and very likely three or four reviews, which ideally will be written by people from a variety of backgrounds, so that neither the author’s friends nor foes determine the article’s fate. This doesn’t always work as well as it should – but most journals at least make good-faith efforts to ensure that a piece receives a fair hearing. Finally, anonymity does provide some protection for fair criticism. Even in contexts where the disgruntled author of a rejected article can make a fair guess at who the reviewers were, they can’t be entirely sure; thus, it’s hard for them to retaliate, even when they’re powerful figures in the field. Anonymous peer review isn’t perfect – but by and large the articles that get published in the better known journals in the social sciences are reasonably good, interesting pieces (I don’t know other disciplines well enough to comment properly on their journals).
fn1. Legal journals are the most obvious exception.