History of Ideas

I have been remiss in my posting duties! Ah well. Moving house (very nice, thank you.) Latest exciting event: the 8-year old brought home the class pet for the weekend. Class pets are not, I’ll wage, especially long-lived entities on average. Still, I can’t help feeling extremely guilty. Smallspice, our cat, is apparently an efficient disposer of turtles. We have not found the body. I suppose it could be an alien abuction. All evidence at the crime scene (there is surprisingly little) points to the cat. I have seen fit to pen a confession on her behalf. (No, I don’t think Photoshopping suspects into the crime scene constitutes evidence either. That’s not the point.) [click to continue…]

I’ve decided to take the Great Cultural Studies Debate (Round CXLVIII) over to CT in the hopes of running it by a more international and interdisciplinary readership.  Hi, more international and interdisciplinary readers!  Here’s what’s been going on in my little world lately.

I recently published an <a href=”http://chronicle.com/article/Whats-the-Matter-With/48334/”>essay</a> in the <i>Chronicle of Higher Education</i>.   People responded.  The brief recap is <a href=”http://www.thevalve.org/go/valve/article/cultural_studies_fandango/”>here</a>, though you should also check out <a href=”http://www.thevalve.org/go/valve/article/the_lo/”>this post</a> from Andrew Seal, <a href=”http://www.pmgentry.net/blog/2009/09/whither-cultural-studies.html”>this one</a> from Philip Gentry, and <a href=”http://rsa.cwrl.utexas.edu/node/3128#comment-3986″>this comment</a> by Josh Gunn, who helpfully kicks things off by explaining that my essay is “bullshit.”

My general reaction to the response is: good.  I wanted to provoke discussion, and I got it.  And, begging your indulgence, I’d like to carry on that discussion here, by picking up where <a href=”http://www.michaelberube.com/index.php/weblog/comments/1342/”>my blog’s last comment thread</a> leaves off.

<i>Warning: Clicking “click to continue” will lead you to a two-part, Internets-straining essay.</i>
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From Jim Livesey comes an interesting-looking book on the origins of civil society. If I were Tyler Cowen I would say it was self-recommending, but in fact Jim recommended it to me directly. (Although we’ve never met, Jim represents the vanguard of the Blackrock Road school of history, philosophy, social science, science, and public policy — an admittedly hazy entity constituted mostly by him and his brothers.) The concept of “civil society” was in the ascendancy after 1989 and was everywhere in the social sciences and political talk by the late 1990s. Livesey’s book argues that the idea has roots in the defeated provincial elites of Scotland and Ireland, as a way for them “to enjoy liberty without directly participating in the empire’s governance”. I could probably have done with reading this two weeks ago, before I kicked off my social theory seminar with a quick and cheery survey of the situation of social theory prior to the nineteenth century, the sort of thing that gives real historians heart failure.

On the whole, a great book. A real pleasure to read. I’ve never read Scialabba’s stuff before (or I haven’t noticed his byline, to remember it). My loss. But better late than never.

What’s so great about Scialabba? Temperamentally, there is his gratifyingly steady exhibition of generous severity to his subjects. (I can’t imagine anyone could object to being drubbed so fairly. With the possible exception of Christopher Hitchens.) Stylistically, there is his facility for cramming breadth into small literary packets, without recourse to cheap space-saving devices. Intellectually, there is his forthright evenhandedness—his awareness of what other people think—that never forgets, or neglects to mention, what he thinks. (Everyone else is praising George as well, so I won’t lay it on thick. But no kidding. Good stuff.)

Full disclosure: I left my copy of his book in Maryland – but only after reading it completely – then wrote this post in New York, from stuff on his website, with the TV blaring in the background. And now I’m in Singapore, polishing up a little.

What are intellectuals good for?

The cover seems to suggest the answer might be: nothing. Nothing good. ‘We fool you,’ announce the symbol-manipulating professionals, snug between those who rule and those who shoot. But no. The correct answer is: several things, surely. Two, for starters. [click to continue…]

Lemme horn in on Quiggin territory here. I just flew home to Singapore from New York and read about a third of Justin Fox’s The Myth of the Rational Market: A History of Risk, Reward, and Delusion on Wall Street [amazon] on the flight. (You can view my takeoff here.) Verdict: it’s good! Chapter 1 contains a lively portrait of Irving Fisher. He was, I have learned, a boldly quantitative economic pioneer who pronounced in print just before the crash of ’29 “stock prices have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau.” He lost his personal fortune in the Great Depression. (So he’s a nice emblem for Fox’s book – quants come to practical grief when reality neglects to live up to ideal model standards.)

For his doctoral thesis [completed in 1893] he devised the most sophisticated mathematical treatment yet of economic equilibrium, and he also designed and built a contraption of interconnected water-filled cisterns that he described as “the physical analogue of the ideal economic market.” Many decades later, economist Paul Samuelson judged this work to be “the greatest doctoral dissertation in economics ever writter.” It launched Fisher into a leading role among the world’s still-sparse ranks of mathematical economists. (10)

I want to hear more about his bold, pre-20th Century design for a compucistern system. [click to continue…]

Hey look! Our book (Belle’s and mine) – Reason & Persuasion: Three Dialogues by Plato – is available for pre-order from Amazon! And I’ve uploaded the final version for free viewing on Issuu. Yes! You can just click the image below read the whole book online in a full-screen flash-based thingy. It works quite well, I find.

A couple of weeks ago, I gave a public lecture in Bristol on the subject of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and his continued relevance to modern society and political philosophy. Undoubtedly mileages will vary on that question, but anyone who wants to hear my take on it can “listen to a podcast”:http://www.bris.ac.uk/philosophy/podcasts_html/WhyRousseauMatters.mp3 . (The lecture is included as part of the “Philosophy at Bristol” series which you can access “via its blog”:http://eis.bris.ac.uk/~plajb/blog/ or at “iTunes”:itpc://eis.bris.ac.uk/~plajb/blog/atom.xml .)

I’m just back from an excellent Rousseau Association conference at UCLA to find, now I’ve tuned back in to CT, that we’ve been discussing sociology v economics as theories of society. Funny, because one of the the things that came up in LA was the old Robert Nisbet thesis about the conservative origins of sociology. The idea is that sociology has its origins in the counter-enlightenment attempts of Burke, de Maistre, Saint Simon etc to theorize about social order in the light of the Revolution. It turns out that I’ve long since lost or given away my copy of _The Sociological Tradition_, so I haven’t been back to the original, but I’m curious as to what the thinking is on the Nisbet thesis today. I’m perfectly fine with the use of methods drawn from economics in the social sciences (and with other approaches too) but it is worth noting that most economics involves a straighforwardly rationalistic and enlightenement attitude to the social world, one that the Burkean tradition disputes as being inadequate to social understanding.

Hey, you know those psychedelic bio text images I posted about? Well, someone took an interest in the post and the images and went and did a bit of research on the textbook itself: [click to continue…]

I was at a conference in Italy last week, where I read as much as I can about last Saturday’s meeting, brokered by Giorgio Napolitano, Italy’s President, between the widows of Giuseppe Pinelli (who, after three days of interrogation without food or sleep, either fell to his death from a window in the Milan magistracy or was pushed) and Luigi Calabresi (the magistrate who was interrogating Pinelli, and who was himself murdered a couple of years later). This hasn’t gotten any attention in the English speaking press that I can see. Still, it was a very significant event in Italian politics – an attempt by some of the parties at least to draw a close to Italy’s ‘years of lead,’ in which leftist unrest, kidnappings and murders went together with brutal state repression and tacit state help for fascists who organized large scale terrorist bombings to create the enabling conditions for a coup.¹ And it is particularly interesting to me because I’ve just finished reading Phil Edwards‘s fascinating account of one very poorly understood aspect of this period – “the birth of the Autonomist left”:http://www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/catalogue/book.asp?id=1204381, and its relationship both with terrorist groups (my term, not Phil’s) and the Italian Communist Party. This is, to say the least, a very well timed publication (although Manchester University Press’s decision to print it only in an expensive and difficult-to-find hardback edition, is arguably rather less well judged). [click to continue…]

I’m lecturing on Hobbes this week. Since it is a first year lecture, I’m not going to get too deep into any of the controversies, but I will try to give the students a sense of who Hobbes was, why he remains important and how his ideas connect to other topics they may come across. I’ll probably say something about Hobbes’s time resembling ours as a period of acute religious conflict.

Suppose I were lecturing about Karl Marx: I’d do the same thing. I’d probably start by discussing some of the ideas in the _Manifesto_ about the revolutionary nature of the bourgeoisie, about their transformation of technology, social relations, and their creation of a global economy. Then I’d say something about Marx’s belief that, despite the appearance of freedom and equality, we live in a society where some people end up living off the toil of other people. How some people have little choice but to spend their whole lives working for the benefit of others, and how this compulsion stops them from living truly truly human lives. And then I’d talk about Marx’s belief that a capitalist society would eventually be replaced by a classless society run by all for the benefit of all. Naturally, I’d say something about the difficulties of that idea. I don’t think I’d go on about Pol Pot or Stalin, I don’t think I’d recycle the odd _bon mot_ by Paul Samuelson, I don’t think I’d dismiss Hegel out of hand, and I don’t think I’d contrast modes of production with Weberian modes of domination (unless I was confident, as I wouldn’t be, that my audience already had some sense of those concepts). It seems that Brad De Long “has different views to mine”:http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2009/04/delong-understanding-marx-lecture-for-april-20-2009.html on how to explain Karl Marx to newbies. Each to their own, I suppose.

Last Thursday I took part in a plenary session of the <a href=”http://www.csaus.pitt.edu/frame_home.htm”>US Cultural Studies Association</a>.  The session was called “the university after cultural studies,”  and the participants were (besides myself) Marc Bousquet, Michele Janette, Cary Nelson, Sangeeta Ray, and Jeff Williams.  We were each given eight minutes to speak, and we were admirably (I might say anomalously) disciplined, coming in at 50 minutes altogether.  For those who might be interested, I’ll post my remarks below, with this brief explanation/ introduction:  my talk assumes that everybody in the ballroom, at a cultural studies conference, can speak to the impact of cultural studies on their own research and/or teaching and/or program and/or department, so that <i>somebody</i> has to get up and say that whole entire huge sectors of the university are not “after” cultural studies at all: they didn’t have any cultural studies to begin with, so they’re not “after” cultural studies in a temporal sense, and they’re not interested in doing any now, so they’re not “after” cultural studies in that sense either.

And without further ado:
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While we’re waiting for Jonah to pronounce, Sheri Berman, whose arguments about 1930s social democrats and fascists is the issue of debate, has a “piece”:http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=1332 in _Dissent_ that I’d like to respond to. Sheri argues that the current crisis is a major opportunity for the left, but that it is hampered in its ability to respond because of internecine arguments over whether we should try to reform capitalism, or get rid of it altogether. She singles out Michael Harrington as her main exemplar of a leftist whose failure to appreciate the benefits of capitalism led him to irrelevance and political near-incoherence.
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A correspondent tells me that Jonah Goldberg is preparing a very serious, thoughtful, rebuttal that has never been made in such detail or with such care to some of the impolite things that I have said about his magnum opus, _Liberal Fascism._ I just want to make a public note of this, as a class of a general spur and reminder to reinforce Jonah’s good intentions. I would be _very disappointed indeed_ if his refutation were to be postponed until the never-never …