Political Theory/Political Philosophy

The intertubes and socialnets have been buzzing with news of big changes at the Cato Institute. First up, there was this piece in the New Yorker, about recent moves by the Koch brothers, who pay the bills, to push Cato more firmly into line with the Repubs and Tea Party, and against Obama. This piece marks the mainstreaming of the term “Kochtopus”, used by the Kochs’ opponents in intra-libertarian struggles to describe the network of organizations they fund.

More striking was the simultaneous departure of Brink Lindsey and Will Wilkinson. Lindsey has been the leading proponent of a rapprochement between libertarians and (US-style) liberals, under the unfortunate portmanteau of “liberaltarianism”, and Wilkinson was similarly seen as being on the left of Cato.

These departures presumably spell the end of any possibility that Cato will leave the Republican tent (or even maintain its tenuous claims to being non-partisan). And Cato was by far the best of the self-described libertarian organizations – the others range from shmibertarian fronts for big business to neo-Confederate loonies.

On the other hand, breaks of this kind often lead to interesting intellectual evolution. There is, I think, room for a version of liberalism/social democracy that is appreciative of the virtues of markets (and market-based policy instruments like emissions trading schemes) as social contrivances, and sceptical of top-down planning and regulation, without accepting normative claims about the income distribution generated by markets. Former libertarians like Jim Henley have had some interesting things to say along these lines, and it would be good to have some similar perspectives

(a bit more to come when i have time)

As I was reminded in comments last time, snarking about libertarians is not a very productive substitute for writing well-argued posts about The Way Forward for Social Democracy, or writing my nearly-due examiners report for that PhD thesis, or revising my article on climate change on discounting, or getting the yard under control. But if I was capable of responding to that kind of reasoning, I wouldn’t be a blogger would I. So, in lieu of something useful, here’s a thought that occurred to me.

Among the more plausible candidates for an Actually Existing Libertopia, the US in C19 (with asterisks) is pretty prominent. Also, on the basis of fairly thin historical evidence, the Iceland of the sagas. It seems to me that these examples have one crucial point in common that hasn’t received much attention
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The second part of Stuart White’s excellent interview with Edward Lewis over at The New Left Project is now out, covering basic income, republicanism, equality and liberty. Check it out.

Henry’s post linking to Charlie Stross reminded me of one I was planning to do on the question – why has there never been a serious attempt at a real libertarian utopia? Most other utopian ideologies have inspired at least someone to attempt a practical implementation. On the face of it, libertarianism seems ideally suited to the belief in a fresh start, with no messy pre-existing claims. All sorts of ideas have been floated – island buyouts, sea-steading, co-ordinated moves to New Hampshire and so on, but none has gone anywhere. The only explanation I’ve seen, that libertarians are too independent and ornery to organise a utopia doesn’t convince me.

Thinking about the discussion we had though, it strikes me that there is a simple explanation: Actually Existing Libertarianism (see below) offers a better economic deal for nearly all libertarians than any feasible version of Galt’s Gulch. Once you do the math on going Galt, it’s not hard to see why no self-respecting libertarian would actually do it.

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A recent piece of research by British economist James Rockey into people’s misperception of their place on the political spectrum got a certain amount of gleeful mileage in the right-wing press, and for predictable reasons. The research claimed that many people mislocate themselves – identifying with the “left” even though they hold opinions that are fairly right-wing. Having worried this over for a few weeks now, my considered view is that whilst the research is flawed at a quite fundamental level, the conclusion might contain some truth. Let’s see if I can express that thinking without contradicting myself!
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Part one of a superb interview of Stuart White by Edward Lewis over at the Next Left Project. Meritocracy, luck egalitarianism, status inequality, negative liberty and republican liberty all get some discussion. I particularly liked Stuart’s observation that contemporary politics is keen on the “choice” side of luck egalitarian argument but tends to little or nothing about the correction of brute luck.

I’ve received the below from my former colleague, Joe Carens, responding to the boilerplate letter that has been sent to anyone who has written to University of Toronto officials deploring the proposed closure of the Center for Ethics.

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I want to respond briefly to the standard letter that the Provost, Cheryl Misak, is sending to those who write in support of the Centre for Ethics at the University of Toronto. Her letter was posted previously on this blog. Cheryl is an eminent philosopher and a friend, but I think that her communication on this issue is misleading. One gets the impression from Cheryl’s letter that the Centre for Ethics had been expected to raise funds to sustain its activities and failed to do so, and also that the closure of the Centre is a regrettable necessity due to the financial crisis within the university. Neither is accurate.

The Centre was created five years ago under a university initiative to spark innovation. It was one of a few projects to which the university committed base funding, not “seed” money. It was always the plan that the Centre should raise major endowment over the long term, but the previous Dean who approved the Centre agreed that it would not be expected to do this in the first five years. The Centre has been very successful in raising funds for particular projects.

In the current climate, it may be necessary (if regrettable) for the University to close research centres that cannot pay for themselves, but it seems unreasonable to do so out of the blue, especially with one that has been as successful as the Ethics Centre at doing what it was previously asked to do. It would be far more reasonable to continue to support the Centre with university funding for a few years, perhaps at a reduced level, while expecting it to raise endowment or face closure.

Reading Cheryl’s letter you might think that the University of Toronto cannot afford even this temporary reprieve. I agree that the budget crisis is serious. There is a $50 million deficit in the Faculty of Arts and Science that has to be eliminated. However, the Dean is not proposing to save the Centre’s $308,000 budget. Rather he is proposing to redeploy much or all of it.

The University of Toronto faces a choice about how to use the “significant resources” that it plans to devote “to support the research and teaching of ethics” to use Cheryl’s words. We could, on the one hand, spend those resources to preserve an already existing and thriving research centre, recognized as one of the three or four best in the world in the area of ethics, or we could, on the other hand, spend those resources on whatever “ethics-based educational initiatives” are eventually proposed by the committee that the Dean plans to construct. The Dean does face some hard decisions in balancing his budget but this should not be one of them.

Joe Carens
University of Toronto

The University of Toronto’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences has decided to close down its Center for Ethics for budgetary reasons. This is a _really_ terrible decision. I spent two very happy years at U of T. When I was there, the university had superb faculties in political theory, philosophy and legal theory, but had difficulty in building bridges between them (the university, for a variety of historical and organizational reasons, is quite decentralized). The Center for Ethics opened shortly after I left – I’ve been following its work ever since. It has brought these faculties together and built a genuinely world class institution. I know that other universities view University of Toronto’s Center for Ethics as a model to be emulated. Now, the U of T is proposing to junk it summarily, for entirely short sighted reasons.

If this goes ahead, I can’t help but think that it’s going to seriously hurt the University’s international reputation. When universities face tough budgetary times, they have to make hard decisions. But they should not gut their core strengths and competences. It is indisputable to anyone in the field (and to sympathetic outside observers to me), that the Center gives a body and an organized presence to one of the University’s most important areas of strength. Below the fold, I have a letter that I’m sending to the relevant university officials (President David Naylor [david.naylor@utoronto.ca], Provost Cheryl Misak [cheryl.misak@utoronto.ca], Dean Meric Gertler [meric.gertler@utoronto.ca]). I suggest that other people who are disturbed by this write letters to these officials too (be polite but clear). There’s also a Facebook protest group here, which has gathered nearly 450 members in less than 24 hours.
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Ken Coates, a very significant figure in the history of the British left, has died. The Guardian has an obituary.

Jonah Goldberg points out that there is something sinister, even progressive, about the German phrase, ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ – quite apart from the association with Auschwitz. “The Orwellian undertones to the phrase are real, and the associations with the Holocaust are horrific, but Arbeit Macht Frei was a popular “progressive” slogan on the road to serfdom.” Do you know where the phrase came from?

The Arbeit Macht Frei sign [at Auschwitz] was erected by prisoners with metalwork skills on Nazi orders in June 1940, and was a cynical take on the title of an 1873 work by the lexicographer, linguist and novelist Lorenz Diefenbach in which gamblers and fraudsters discover the path to virtue through hard work.

I appreciate that Republicans are hard-pressed to come up with a positive platform in 2010, but this seems an unpromising trial balloon: we must restore a culture of healthy recklessness and corruption, lest, by treading the perilous path of work and responsibility, we be beguiled into serfdom.

It’s like ‘the Fascist octopus has sung its swan song,’ but with Poor Richard’s Almanack as the libretto.

We’ll be hosting one of our book events on Erik Olin Wright’s new book, Envisioning Real Utopias (UK) in the Fall (probably late September), so I thought I’d let people know that the book is out (and excellent) so you can get hold of it and read it in time, if you want to.

Erik has spent a long time working on the book, and even longer on the ideas (I remember a meeting in 1994, in which he announced his decision to name the broader project of which this is a part the “Real Utopias Project” — predating, I think, Rawls’s use of the phrase “realistic utopianism”). At the core of the RUP (more details here), and of the book, is a recognition that the anti-capitalist left has been strong on critique of capitalism, but weak on the presentation of feasible alternatives, and in particular on providing the kind of detail about those alternatives that demonstrates both how they would realize egalitarian values and makes them open to scrutiny and critique. Envisioning Real Utopias is both a manifesto and a guidebook, if you like: an argument for taking institutional design seriously, and a guide to how to do that. Its a book that sociologists will want to read, but also, frankly, that everyone in political theory and philosophy should be reading too (even if they do not think of themselves as egalitarians). To be honest, I’ve been living close to the book so long that it I realize my endorsement may not be unbiased. Here, then, is what Swift says about it on the back cover:

Hugely rich and stimulating, Envisioning Real Utopias is may books in one: an incisive diagnosis of the harms done by capitalism; a masterful synthesis of the best work in political sociology and political economy over the past thirty years; and innovative theoretical framework for conceptualizing both the goals of progressive change and the strategies for their achievement; and inspiring story of actually existing challenges to capitalism that have arisen within capitalism itself; and a compelling essay on the relation between the desirable, the viable and the achievable. Anyone interested in the future of leftist politics has to read this book.

I agree.

And here is Erik introducing the book:

Envisioning Real Utopias from West Coast Poverty Center on Vimeo.

David Williams writes at The Daily Texan:

bq. On May 22, the State Board of Education voted 9-5 to reform its secondary-school social studies curriculum, emphasizing that the content of these guidelines serves to enable students to “appreciate the basic democratic values of our state and nation.” While these reforms have been broadly condemned by liberals across the country, it is important that both liberals and conservatives together become more broadly familiar with the texts now firmly in the curriculum. Specifically, we should take a closer look at Charles de Montesquieu, Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Thomas Aquinas. …

Read the whole thing, as they say.

Andrew McCarthy’s book is apparently selling well! We’ll get to that.

But first: a couple weeks ago Jonah Goldberg did one of those diavlog thingies with David Frum. The occasion was Frum making accusations of ‘epistemic closure’ and Goldberg protesting that it’s all nonsense. The Jim Manzi/Mark Levin thing. The section we will be concerned with is this one. Only 9 minutes long, so you can watch it yourself. I’ve transcribed some highlights. (If anyone listens and notices I’ve mistranscribed or misleadingly paraphrased, please say so in comments.) [click to continue…]

I know, a second successive post linking to Stuart White at Next Left, but his analysis of “Orange Book” liberalism and its distance from egalitarian liberalism is deadly accurate, especially regarding David Laws (Chief Secretary to the Treasury and former VP at JP Morgan). Laws may not be a libertarian, but he may be the closest thing to it in the British political mainstream: certainly more Hayek than Hobhouse:

bq. Reading someone like David Laws, for example, there is at times a clear sense that the free market produces a distribution of income and wealth which is a kind of natural or moral baseline. It is departures from the baseline that have to be justified. Laws and other Orange Bookers are of course not libertarians, so they are prepared to allow that some departures – some tax-transfers/tax-service arrangements – can be justified. (This is the sense in which they remain social liberals, albeit not egalitarian ones.) But the presumption, for Laws, is clearly for ‘leaving money in people’s pockets’. This presumption runs completely counter to one of the basic claims of contemporary liberalism as developed in the work of such as Rawls, Dworkin and Ackerman.

White is quite right to say, of course, that egalitarian liberals also have serious difficulties with Labour on account of its dreadful record on civil liberties. But my sense is that quite a lot (though not all) of that record was the result of channeling the permanent agenda of the Home Office (note the way in which the Tories, in power advocated ID cards with Labour opposed, with the position reversing some time after 1997).