Academia

I received the email about Sandy on early on Saturday morning in the middle of a five hour visit to the Emergency Room, at a point at which it was not clear everything was going to be ok (don’t worry, it was). Still, and although his friends have all been preparing themselves for this, it was devastating. I didn’t think I’d talk about it here. But, although The NYT obit is very straightforward and accurate, it misses something that everyone who knew him will wish it had mentioned.

Sandy was already an intellectual hero of mine when I met him at a Spencer Foundation Board retreat in 2007. It’s not just that he wrote the best philosophy paper about equality in education, which as a sociologist he had no right to do, but because I had started reading his work when I committed myself to doing empirically informed political philosophy, and realised immediately that he was a sort of mirror of what I wanted to be: a normatively committed and informed social scientist who would never allow his values to guide him to empirically convenient results. We had a two hour break on the first afternoon and Sandy, who had never seen (or, I am sure, heard of) me in his life casually asked if I was busy, and would I like to take a walk with him. I managed to overcome my awe, and, well, Sandy was totally brilliant, and its not that he didn’t know that, but he seemed to be able to find whatever was most interesting in whatever you said to him so that the gap between you was irrelevant to the matter at hand. He didn’t seem to care what you status was — he talked as enthusiastically and openly with college presidents, other scholars, students, staff people, receptionists, interns. He could, and did, put anyone at their ease. I quickly saw that he was either determined not to observe, or, quite possibly, completely oblivious to, the iniquitous status hierarchies in academia: his democratic outlook was entirely authentic to him. (Now, reading what that sentence, I realise it’s exactly what I might just as well have written about my dad).

I’m an intellectual outlier in the worlds I inhabited with Sandy. Usually if we were at a workshop, conference, or meeting together (and we often were) I was the only philosopher in a room full of social scientists. But over the years I gradually observed the vast informal network of scholars who were specifically indebted to Sandy for his seemingly-effortless but vast kindness and support. You meet people and gradually realise they are connected to Sandy and when you reveal that you know him too their faces light up and they tell you some story about him that is always delightful and different. The NYT obit doesn’t really capture this. To match his intellectual brilliance and reach is unachievable for most of us. But to leave this world so aptly loved by so many is something we could all aspire to.

If one had to choose one reason for why things are not going well in academic life, the managerial, top-down style of governance that reigns in many universities would be a top candidate (with budget cuts as a close competitor). But what is a better way of running universities? For me, this is a question in which theoretical and practical-professional interests intersect.* I’ve long been a defender of workplace democracy, and since 2023, I’m on the board of a small faculty – so the question became: What does it mean for a faculty to be a democratic workplace? Especially if the official rules do not allow for, say, an election of the faculty board by the faculty members…

But the internal structures of small units are only one dimension of the problem. Another is how a university as a whole are governed. In my various jobs, and in conversations with many colleagues, I’ve seen and heard of many bad examples – but I’m looking for good ones! So, I’ll share some thoughts about university governance, to invite a discussion about what works and what doesn’t! Here is a list of ideas, loosely building on each other.

• At their core, universities should be self-governing bodies. This is how they have historically been run, and how some universities still function today. Of course, historically these self-governing bodies had most of the time been exclusionary along the usual lines of gender, class, nationality, religious affiliation, etc. But that need not be the case, and the principle of self-governance should not be thrown overboard but rather be made inclusive.

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This is a follow-up to my previous post on the end of US democracy and its implications. I argued that there is no choice but to dispense with the idea of the US as the central actor in a democratic and stable world system [1]Here I will discuss how what’s left of the democratic world can respond.
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Around a decade ago when I was fairly new to my academic job, I made an uncharacteristically politic decision to attend the annual Politics Dinner, which each year featured a lecture from an Australian politician.

That year it was my (then) least favourite politician. Christopher Pyne was then the government minister responsible for higher education under what we thought was surely the worst Prime Minister we would ever see (oh, the innocence).

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Anyone that has read chunks of Marx’s Capital will know that he often explicitly and not trivially implicitly draws on data and evidence gathered and published in reports by select committees of the British Parliament. Most of these reports he draws on were written before the great expansions of the franchise, and so are effectively produced by the propertied representatives of the propertied classes in what can be fairly called an oligarchic government. Despite the (let’s stipulate) non-trivial class biases built into this reporting structure, the ‘blue books’ or ‘parliamentary papers’ (as they were known) were sufficiently objective and informative to be useful to the great enemy of oligarchy and property.

These nineteenth century oligarchs knew what they were doing. They needed objective information to help structure their internal debates about empire and national governance, and also to shape policy. (Elite bargaining is, of course, still an important function for the publication of public statistics and forecasting.) These reports also shaped the development of the administrative state. For example, the predecessor to the UK’s national statistics office, General Register Office for England and Wales, itself was born from such a select committee report in the first half of the nineteenth century.

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One good side-effect of contemporary politics is that a more sober look at the merits and demerits of the US Founders’ legacy is possible again. (Of course, here at CrookedTimber we pride ourselves on our sobriety in such matters; it helps many of us reside in distant shores.) The current US President has contempt for reverence toward the past; and his opponents have no time for reflection.

One defect in the US Founders’ constitution is that while they are very concerned with developing mechanisms against what Machiavelli and his followers called ‘corruption’ — a word frequently used in the Federalist Papers —, but that it leaves too little room for what Machiavelli and his followers would have called ‘renewal’ (or ‘renovation’)—a word almost wholly absent from the Federalist Papers. In the Machiavellian sense, corruption is not just about illegal and legalized bribery, but also and even more about the bending of the rules such that when they function properly the public good is structurally undermined. There is a glimpse of awareness of this lacuna to be found in the historiographic debate(s) over the status of Lincoln as a so-called ‘refounder’ of the constitution, despite the fact that the US civil war conclusively indicates its failure.

Yet, as Machiavelli notes, “those [republics and religions] are best organized and have longest life that through their institutions can often renew themselves or that by some accident outside their organization come to such renewal.” Discourses on Livy (hereafter Discourses; 3.1), translated by Allan Gilbert (Chief Works, Vol. 1) p. 419. So, if you take what one may call, ‘Machiavellian social theory,’ seriously it is not an irrelevant topic.

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The other day I received an email from what might be one the few colleagues still checking into Twitter (most seem to have moved to Bluesky, as have I). The email was just a link with the subject title Did you see? I hadn’t.

Gosh, I wrote in response (which I gather they found a little understated).

My colleague was pointing to this tweet, where Adam Tooze described my fairly recently published book, Virtue Capitalists: The Rise and Fall of the Professional Class in the Anglophone World 1870-2008 as ‘the sort of book that changes how you see the world’.

I mean. Well. Gosh.

https://x.com/adam_tooze/status/1864041896005267954 The link is to Chartbook where Adam quotes from Claire EF Wright’s review of Virtue Capitalists in The Economic History Review.

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“The cemeteries are full of indispensable people.” In one form or another, this observation has been made many times over the last century or more.

What is true of people is true of nations. In the past 25 years or so it was often claimed (and , admittedly, often denied) that, in the modern world, the United States was the “indispensable nation”. Whatever the rights and wrong of this claim, it has become obvious that, whether we like it or not, the rest of the world will now have to dispense with the US as a defender of democracy, guarantor of global order, or even (as in Margaret Thatcher’s words about Gorbachev) a state we can do business with.

Anyone whose experience of the US began in the last eleven days would have no trouble recognising an archetypal kleptocracy, like Putin’s Russia or Mobutu’s Zaire (with a touch of Mao madness). The boss rakes off billions in tribute while his cronies scramble to please him, put each other down and collect their share of the loot. Regime supporters commit all sorts of crimes with impunity, while opponents are subject to both legal victimisation and threats of extra-legal terror against which they can expect no protection.

In dealing with such a regime, the only strategy is to buy off the boss, or a powerful underling, and hope that they stay bought long enough to deliver on their side of the bargain This approach is politely described as “transactional”, but without the implication that the transaction will necessarily be honoured. Dealing with kleptocrats can be highly profitable, as long as you get in and out quickly enough, but there’s no possibility of “doing business”, either commercial or political, in the ordinary sense of the word.

The problem is that for nearly everyone who matters, the last eleven days seem like an aberration. For decades, the US has been seen as the central pillar of a “rules-based order”, on which assumptions about the world were largely based. That’as true even for critics who pointed out that the rules were drawn up to favor the US, and that the US often breached them without any real consequences. And it’s true even though you can point to precedents for everything Trump had done.

But all that is over, and can’t be restored.

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Politics has returned to Europe’s wealthy protectorates, which, after the phone-call on Jan. 20, 2025, between the then-President-elect and the Danish prime minister, suddenly find themselves faced with an open-ended era of shakedowns by its guardians and an unreliable big neighbor to the East. Neither its political class nor its aging, nostalgic population is prepared for this.

Qua democratic politician, it’s one thing to have skill at facilitating distributional bargaining among competing and shifting interest groups; it’s quite another to do so while simultaneously having to think through geopolitical alliances while relying on undermanned and underfunded militaries. Interestingly enough, with a shift toward new populist leaders Europe’s political class is also quite inexperienced in politics. It seems all but certain that during next month’s federal election, the most important European country and the only one that can provide political leadership, Germany, is itself facing a massive shift toward a political class inexperienced playing intra-European and global political chess at the same time.*

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Europeans have been behaving in defiance of Machiavellian classical social theory, which teaches that “The chief foundations of all states, new as well as old or composite, are good laws and good arms; and as there cannot be good laws where the state is not well armed, it follows that where they are well armed they have good laws.” (The Prince, Ch. 12) More bluntly (and more unpopular): a regime oriented toward protecting human rights presuppose good arms, too. The Europeans assumed that in an age of soft-power, a giant internal market, and win-win international/trade rules, they didn’t need good arms and could perfect their laws—even extend those through intra-European/EU expansion.

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Crooked Timber has survived more than 20 years by continuously refreshing our group. Members have left because they have said what they want to say, or just because life happens, and others have joined to add to the conversation. Today, we are welcoming Hannah Forsyth and Lisa Herzog.

Hannah is an Australian historian of capitalism, work and education. Her Substack newsletter, F*cking Capitalism covers these topics and more. She describes herself as a recovering work ethic junkie, but that hasn’t stopped her signing up to join the crew here at Crooked Timber.

Lisa is a German philosopher who works as a professor in political philosophy at the Faculty of Philosophy of Groningen University. She writes in particular on topics at the intersection of political philosophy and economic thought. Her most recent book is Citizen Knowledge: Markets, Experts, and the Infrastructure of Democracy. She has previously been on the team of the Justice-Everywhere blog, and is interested in all things related to workplace democracy and economic democracy.

We are all looking forward to the new perspectives Hannah and Lisa will bring.

The Australian parliament has legislated what’s commonly described as as “social media ban” for people under 16. More precisely, it will require selected social media platforms to implement (unspecified) age verification technology for people wishing to create accounts. This measure was rushed through at the end of last year, at the expense of proposed legislation to limit advertising for online gambling.

I wrote a series of posts on my Substack blog looking at various aspects of the “ban” (TL;DR I don’t like it).

There’s too much for a CT post, so I’ll link to the posts instead
Part 1 dealt with the feasibility of a ban
Part 2 dealt with the evidence for and against
Part 3 pointed out the ban will do little or nothing to fix most of the harms attributed to social media
Part 4 suggested better responses to the problems young people are facing
Part 5 offered broader responses to the harm being done by platforms like X and Facebook

Feel free to comment here or there.