Political Theory/Political Philosophy

Quite a few people have now posted about Jerry Cohen on the web. Notable amongst them are Colin Farrelly , Thom Brooks , Ben Saunders, Chris Brooke , Matthew Kramer and Norman Geras . I was also sent, by Maris Kopcke Tinture, a link to a private recording she made of Jerry's valedictory lecture from May 2008. The recording is imperfect and there is a chunk missing in the middle, but it is the only such recording to have surfaced.

(I also need to post a short note about use of my photos of the valedictory, since people have been taking them from my Flickr stream and using them without permission: they are not public domain. 1. Seek permission, which I will normally grant to any not-for-profit site unless I find the content objectionable. 2. Please attribute (this can be in as miniscule a text as you like). 3. If you are a commercial organization then we will need to come to an arrangement about a fee, which will be donated to an appropriate charity.)

I got a call this morning to tell me that Jerry (G.A.) Cohen has died suddenly and unexpectedly of a massive stroke. I want to write an appreciation of him as a friend, mentor and philosopher in due course, but I’m too numb to do it at the moment. I know that his other friends, colleagues and fellow students of his feel the same acute sense of loss.

My contribution to the Open Left Debate at Demos is here. I offered them a long and a short version, and am rather relieved that they went with the short version, mainly because it contained something that on reflection I wish I hadn’t said (but, since its not published I’m under no obligation to divulge it!). For what its worth, the long, and more didactic (but also more tentative) version of my answer to the first question, “What is it about your political beliefs that put you on the Left rather than the Right?” is below the fold; but please go to Open Left to join that debate.

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Demos’s Open Left project is unveiled today, first with a series of essays on the Demos blog by the likes of Billy Bragg, Alan Simpson, Polly Toynbee, Phillip Collins and Jon Cruddas [1], and second with an event tonight at the Commonwealth Club. The essays were written in response to a series of questions, including “What is it about your political beliefs that put you on the Left rather than the Right?”, “How would you describe the sort of society you want Britain to be?” and “What one or two changes would make the biggest difference to bringing that about?” It’s headed up by James Purnell (whose own answers to the questions are here), who characterizes it as a three year project “to revive the ideas and direction of the Left at a time of economic and political upheaval”. More essays will be added throughout this week (I’ll link to mine when it goes up). Although one of the commenters correctly observes that the cast of characters is almost exclusively Labour, rather than more broadly left, it is nevertheless a reasonably eclectic group within Labour so far, and I think it’ll be interesting to see Purnell and Collins, for example, in dialogue with Simpson, Cruddas and Toynbee, and more interesting still if the project reaches beyond Labour ranks (I’m not Labour, but I don’t count). Thoughtful CT readers, commenters, and contributors might help further the discussion by going there and commenting.

[1] His wikipedia page suggests that Cruddas visited my department for a while in the 1980’s, in which case he is probably the second most eminent former visitor we’ve had — according to department legend, this guy once shared an office for a whole semester with my retired but excellent colleague Dennis Stampe.

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 . (The lecture is included as part of the “Philosophy at Bristol” series which you can access via its blog or at “iTunes”:itpc://eis.bris.ac.uk/~plajb/blog/atom.xml .)

I asked this question over at the Monkey Cage, a political science blog that I also contribute to, and was greeted with a resounding silence (political theorists perhaps being disinclined to read heavily pol-sci oriented blogs). So I’m asking it here. What exactly is happening at the journal, Political Theory? I understand that the editor, Mary Dietz, has been asked to step down, and that Mark Bevir has been asked to step in, but beyond that I know nothing – all sorts of rumours and claims of coups, decisions-by-fiat etc are swirling around at the Political Theory Rumor Mill but there isn’t much in the way of solid information. Anyone know what’s happening?

Toward a Humanist Justice, a collection of critical essays on the work of Susan Moller Okin edited by my friends Debra Satz and Rob Reich, has just been published. The essays were first presented at a conference in honour of Okin organized at Stanford shortly after her death (which we reported here), and the book includes essays by Alison Jaggar, Joshua Cohen, Cass Sunstein, Mary Lyndon Shanley, the late Iris Young, David Miller, and others. One of the big problems with collections like this, focused on a single person’s work and deriving from a conference, is that they can be very disparate. Unlike a volume conceived around a single theme or problem, it is very hard to discipline contributors, and the contributors themselves are invited to the conference for a variety of reasons which include deep personal connections to the subject of the conference, a consideration which is sometimes, and not wrongly, given more weight than consistent engagement with the themes of that person’s work. The difficulty arises when it comes to the volume, and the editors don’t dare to dis-include those papers which don’t really belong in a unitary collection (I hereby request any editors who ever feel awkwardness about dis-inviting me in such a situation – which I can envisage arising – to be frank with me without any fear of me being even mildly irritated). So it really is a delight to find no such problem with the volume – not only are the essays all on central themes in Okin’s work, but they are well written (or well edited, you can never be sure) and all that I have read are very good indeed.

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Thanks for those podcast links to the talks from the Cohen conference, Harry. Very interesting. Let me talk briefly about one. David Estlund’s paper on “Utopophobia” – which, I see, is also available as a PDF download in draft form. The title gives you the right general idea about the topic: why are people hostile to utopian thinking – to ‘ideal theory’ in political theory and philosophy? To what degree is such hostility justified; to what degree unjustified?

It’s a good paper.

Let me begin with a mild expression of total difference of opinion. Estlund naturally addresses the concern that ideal theory is a waste of time because it’s useless. ‘It’s never gonna happen.’ He makes a comparison to higher mathematics, which is also generally acknowledged to be pretty inapplicable to anything that might be empirically real. He doesn’t push this analogy, so it’s not like weight is resting on it. Still, it seems to me so much more natural to say that ‘ideal theory’, if useless, is probably useless in the way a painstakingly-constructed model train system in your basement is useless – or that writing Mary Sue-style fanfic about the Form of the Good is useless. That is, it’s a rather indulgent, mostly harmless private make-believe sort of affair, but really not much like higher mathematics, honestly. I guess I’m impressed that you could be enough of a Platonist about it to presume the higher maths angle, in passing, with all the attendant implications of precision and purity and truth. (As someone who just wrote a book about Plato, part of me is happy that the old ways never die. But the part of me that is a die-hard later Wittgensteinian can only shake its head in wonder that the old ways never die. Back to the rough ground!)

Right. That’s out of the way. (You can’t refute an incredulous stare, nor does one count as an objection. We’re done.) Overall, it seems to me that Estlund says a lot of smart stuff that is relatively small-bore – stuff about how certain applications of ‘ought implies can’ can be fallacious. I found myself nodding and saying: ‘yes, I never noticed that before. It seems right.’ So: good. But these generally good points don’t feel large enough, in the aggregate, to cover the grand area staked out by the title: “Utopophobia”.

Estlund makes one good point that might be grand enough. But I think it needs amplification. And he leaves a really big point out. I’m going to use that as an excuse to tell jokes. [click to continue…]

The criticism of philosophers in the discussion of Michele’s post, specifically from our own Daniel that not much of the discussion was about how philosophers might listen to people from other disciplines, reminded me that I have been meaning to say something about one of my favourite books that I didn’t read in graduate school, Neil Postman’s The Disappearance of Childhood. Like another of my favourite books I would notice it in piles of textbooks for other departments in the university bookstore while I was in grad school, and spurned it mainly for its title. About 6 years ago, my wife read it for a class on children’s literature, and her rendering of the thesis that childhood was socially constructed made it sound so preposterous that I was compelled to read the book.

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Those who enjoyed our reading group on Rescuing Justice and Equality can now listen to the Center for the Study of Social Justice conference honouring G.A. Cohen on your ipods, courtesy of Oxford University podcasts (scroll about half way down the page to the Department of Politics and International Relations — if someone can find a handier way to link to them, please tell me). Speakers include John Roemer, Seana Shiffrin, Michael Otsuka, Cecile Fabre, Paula Casal, David Miller, David Estlund and Andrew Williams. The audio quality is a bit rough in places, but mostly good, and always good enough. (You can also get there on iTunes, but I can’t figure out how to link to that. In the iTunes store just search for CSSJ. As a bonus, if you search for Hartry Field, you get to his 2008 John Locke Lectures). As a bonus, you can hear Roemer explain why he came to believe that all philosophers are idiots.

I’m glad to see that Ed Whelan has apologized, for having outed Publius. Bad that he did what he did – good that he apologized for it, and very straightforwardly too. Good also that so many conservatives came out swinging on the right side of this issue. But I actually think that Michael Krauss, professor at GMU’s law school and sometime blogger, was arguably worse behaved than Whelan over this. Whelan perhaps didn’t think through the possible consequences of outing an untenured legal academic. Krauss very clearly did think it through – and apparently wanted the worst to happen. At least, this seems to me to be the most reasonable reading of his expressed hope that “the South Texas tenure committee is watching and taking note.” To hope that a tenure committee will take note of a behaviour you are condemning is to hope that they will deny the responsible individual tenure for doing this (if there is a plausible alternative reading, I am not seeing it). Given that Krauss is himself a senior legal academic, whose opinion of aspiring professors may genuinely affect their chances of doing well, this is nasty and vindictive bullying, which has (to use his own words against him) “no redeeming argument.” Krauss should think through what he has said, take it back and publicly apologize.

Update: I see that Brian Leiter, whose many contributions to intellectual life include his occasional interventions in this blog's comment section, is still disinclined to apologize for his aborted effort to out ‘Juan non-Volokh’ a few years back. The comparison is instructive.

A colleague (in Philosophy) just sent me this interview with Michele Lamont about How Professors Think (which just arrived in my mailbox but I still haven’t read). The book is based on interviews of academics who serve on funding panels, and teases out the differences between several disciplines in how they think of their standards and apply them, among other things.

It’s all worth reading. I was particularly struck by this:

Philosophy is a problem discipline, and it’s defined as such by program officers. Philosophers do not believe that nonphilosophers are qualified to evaluate their work. Perhaps that comes out of the dominance of analytic philosophy, with its stress on logic and rigor. Philosophers think their discipline is more demanding than other fields. Even its practitioners define the discipline as contentious. They don’t see that as a problem; argument and dispute are the discipline’s defining characteristics.

All that conflict makes it difficult to get consensus on the value of a philosophy proposal — or to convince people from other disciplines of its merits. The panels I studied are multidisciplinary. Nonphilosophers are often frustrated with the philosophers. They often discounted what philosophers had to say as misplaced intellectual superiority.

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In January 1995 I published a little essay that almost nobody liked.  Eh, that happens sometimes.  It was a review essay on the then-recently-published work of a couple of African-American public intellectuals, and I wrote it quite simply because the <i>New Yorker</i> asked me to.  I was a newly-tenured associate professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and I was surprised by the request; to this day it’s the only time I’ve written for the <i>New Yorker</i>.  And then, within about three months of the thing’s appearance, a whole mess of people decided to weigh in on the work of a couple of African-American public intellectuals.  Many of those people came to the conclusion that I had done a pretty piss-poor job of writing about the recently-published work of a couple of African-American public intellectuals; the general verdict was that I had basically written a press release, a puff piece on a bunch of lightweights and/or sellouts.  But some of those people weren’t responding to me at all; they had much more important figures to go after, like Cornel West.  And it wasn’t just my little essay they were responding to; my essay was bad enough, sure, but it was compounded by the appearance, in the March 1995 <i>Atlantic</i>, of a much longer essay by Robert Boynton.  That essay was about the work of a couple of <i>other</i> African-American intellectuals, and, like my essay, it drew a loose analogy between contemporary African-American intellectuals and the New York intellectuals of yesteryear, so clearly there was some kind of conspiracy afoot.

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A brief note on the crisis that is currently shaking public confidence in the British government and its MPs: some MPs are making the point that they merely did what they were entitled to under the rules. Much of the public reaction to their behaviour is predicated on the view that, whatever the rules said, strictly speaking, they acted unjustly in milking the public purse for private advantage. An interesting echo, there, of Jerry Cohen’s view that justice should not just govern institutional design, but also private attitudes and actions. Thomas Nagel observed,

bq. it is difficult to combine, in a morally coherent outlook, the attitude toward inequalities due to talent which generates support for an egalitarian system with the attitude toward the employment of their own talent appropriate for individuals operating within it. The first attitude is that such inequalities are unfair and morally suspect, whereas the second attitude is that one is entitled to try to get as much out of the system as one can. [_Equality and Partiality_, p. 117]

Nagel, thinks (on broadly Rawlsian lines) that the “personal perspective” is entirely defensible and that the difficulty can be overcome. The British electorate may take a different view.