Political Theory/Political Philosophy

One of the interesting things about capitalism is that, if you have money, people seem to just magically appear to meet your needs. When it rains in New York City, vendors materialize to sell me an umbrella. When I was walking to the inauguration, the streets were lined with people selling hats and handwarmers. I certainly didn’t ask anyone to bring me a hat; I didn’t even realize I would want one, or I would have brought it myself — but people predicted that I would and brought it for me.

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In <a href=”http://www.michaelberube.com/index.php/weblog/comments/1269/”>comments to a post</a> over at my newly-renamed Other Place, a person by the handle of FrogProf directed me to <a href=”http://suburbdad.blogspot.com/2009/04/project-based-education-response-to.html”>this discussion</a> of <a href=”http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/27/opinion/27taylor.html?_r=2&ref=opinion”>Mark Taylor’s recent (and very strange) <i>New York Times</i> op-ed</a>.  Taylor’s essay is modestly titled “End the University as We Know It,” and the response, from (as it says on the blog banner) a veteran of cultural studies seminars in the 1990’s who has since moved into academic administration, takes apart Taylor’s proposal for replacing departments with temporary topic-clusters with seven-year sunset clauses:

<blockquote>I’m at a loss to explain where all these interdisciplinary experts will get their disciplinary expertise. Yes, a significant part of grad school involves exploring new questions. But another significant part — the part he skips — involves getting grounding in the history of a given line of inquiry. Call it a canon or a discipline or a tradition, but it’s part of the toolkit scholars bring to bear on new questions. Abandoning the toolkit in favor of, well, ad hoc autodidacticism doesn’t really solve the problem. If anything, it makes existing grads even less employable than they already are. I need to hire someone to teach Intro to Sociology. Is a graduate of a program in “Body” or “Water” capable? How the hell do I know? (And even if I think I do, can I convince an accrediting agency?) Am I taking the chance? In this market? Uh, that would be ‘no.'</blockquote>

I agree that Taylor’s proposal is unworkable, but I have a tangential-but-related point.  Challenging the departmental structure of universities (whatever you might think of that project) isn’t the same thing as doing away with <i>disciplines</i>.

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I know, everyone read the New York Magazine piece with everyone singing Poor, Poor Pitiful Masters of the Universe. That was so a week ago. Thankfully, everything is back to normal. But let’s revisit ancient history. The following bit was especially wondered at (by Kevin Drum, for example): [click to continue…]

Continuing the discussion of G. A. Cohen’s Rescuing Justice and Equality – sorry about the delay – chapter 7 is on “Constructivism.” Cohen argues against the view that fundamental principles of social justice can be identified by considering a selection procedure that addresses the question, “What rules of governance are to be adopted for our common social life?” (p.275) The selection of principles from the original position is his primary target, although the specific features of that choice situation are not at issue. The main objection that he presses is familiar from chapter 6: constructivism mistakenly identifies the principles of justice with all things considered judgment concerning rules of social regulation. This must be a mistake, for Cohen, because the all things considered perspective encompasses considerations other than justice (including other virtues), and asks how best, given certain circumstances, to achieve the optimal balance of these various considerations.
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bq. Particularity by itself, given free rein in every direction to satisfy its needs, accidental caprices, and subjective desires, destroys itself and its substantive concept in this process of gratification. At the same time, the satisfaction of need, necessary and accidental alike, is accidental because it breeds new desires without end, is in thoroughgoing dependence on caprice and external accident, and is held in check by the power of universality. In these contrasts and their complexity, civil society affords a spectacle of extravagance and want as well as of the physical and ethical degeneration common to them both. ( _Philosophy of Right_ sec 185).

Alternatively

… “Everything is amazing; nobody is happy.”

via The Online Photographer .

The set of ideas that has dominated public policy around the world for the last thirty years has been given a variety of names – neoliberalism[1], economic rationalism, the Washington Consensus, Reaganism and Thatcherism being the most prominent. Broadly speaking, this set of ideas combines support for free market (or freer market) economic policies with agnosticism[2] about both political liberalism and the relative merits of democracy and autocracy. Since demands for definition are inevitable, I’ll point to mine here.

A striking feature of all of these terms is that they are currently used almost exclusively by opponents of the viewpoint being described, to the point where any use of such terms invariably provokes protests about unfair labelling (this is true even of the most neutral term I can find, “economic liberalism”). Even more striking is the fact that these terms were originally used in a broadly positive sense by supporters of the ideas concerned. I’ve done the story on economic rationalism, Don Arthur covers neoliberalism (with links to more from Taylor Boas and Jordan Gans-Morse (pdf) and you can check Wikipedia for the others.

Why is it that neoliberalism seems to be subject to a political version of the euphemism treadmill? A look at the history will help a bit.

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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 on how to explain Karl Marx to newbies. Each to their own, I suppose.

In Spring 2002, _Dissent_ published Michael Walzer’s essay, “Can There Be A Decent Left?,” which played as big a part as any piece of writing in generating the fractures among lefty intellectuals over the Iraq war. Although Walzer was later to come out in (mildly expressed) opposition to the Iraq war, he calumniated the left for its persistent failure to wake up to the reality of global terrorism.

The radical failure of the left’s response to the events of last fall raises a disturbing question: can there be a decent left in a superpower? Or more accurately, in the only superpower? Maybe the guilt produced by living in such a country and enjoying its privileges makes it impossible to sustain a decent (intelligent, responsible, morally nuanced) politics. Maybe festering resentment, ingrown anger, and self-hate are the inevitable result of the long years spent in fruitless opposition to the global reach of American power. Certainly, all those emotions were plain to see in the left’s reaction to September 11, in the failure to register the horror of the attack or to acknowledge the human pain it caused, in the schadenfreude of so many of the first responses, the barely concealed glee that the imperial state had finally gotten what it deserved. Many people on the left recovered their moral balance in the weeks that followed; there is at least the beginning of what should be a long process of self-examination. But many more have still not brought themselves to think about what really happened.

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Jonah Goldberg responding to a paragraph by Will Wilkinson:

As it happens, American drug prohibition and sentencing policies hit poor black men the hardest, devastating already disadvantaged black families and communities—a tragic, mocking contrast to the achievement of Obama’s election. Militarized police departments across the nation month after month kick down the wrong doors, terrify innocent families, shoot lawful citizens, and often kill the family dog.

I’m not casting doubt on the statistics they cite or the sincerity of the arguments (I’ve argued with too many liberatarians and legalizers about drugs to doubt their sincerity on the issue, statistics are another matter). But something has always bothered me about the drug war is racist argument which, in fairness, Will only suggests above.

It seems so, well, unlibertarian — at least in one respect. Sure, as an argument against the unintended consequences of what they consider to be a bad policy, the disproportionate affect on blacks works just fine.

But as an argument from proud individualists it seems a bit off. It seems to me that the classical liberal is supposed to see people as autonomous and sovereign moral actors, not identity politics groups.

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There’s an obituary of Brian Barry in today’s Times,

Lots of schools these days have “equity and diversity” committees My guess is that no-one wonders much what diversity is in “equity and diversity” because we all have a pretty good sense of what it is – acceptance, toleration, and perhaps celebration of the various ethnic, racial, national, gender and sexual orientations in our midst. But what on earth is equity?

People (teachers, education students, other scholars in education) ask me this reasonably often, because they think that, as a professional philosopher who thinks a lot about education I ought to have an answer. I used to shrink from the question because the term “equity” is on that I never use, but recently I have become bolder. A School of Education recently asked me to prepare a lecture on “Equity, Equality, and Social Justice in Education”, and in the talk I just talked about equality and social justice, and said, bluntly, that I don’t understand “equity” and wish people would stop using the term.

After saying that, I thought I should do a couple of bits of research. The first was to run a search in amazon for books with the words “equity” and “education” in the title. 7,235 results. Fortunately, most of them seem not actually to have equity in the title, and when I looked at the 107 books published in the last 90 days I found that many only use “equity” somewhere in the text, and a few of those (including Hidden Markets by my colleague Patricia Burch) use “equity” in the way that is standard in finance circles, to mean capital. But there’s enough to confirm that equity in education is a standard phrase that ought to be easy to understand. The second thing I did was to read a bunch of books by scholars concerned with school improvement and the internal life of schools whose work I admire, to see how they use the term “equity” and figure out whether there was some obvious meaning that I was missing (Ronald Ferguson’s excellent Toward Excellence with Equity: An Emerging Vision for Closing the Achievement Gap, which I promise to review in the “Books Every Teacher Should Read” category when I get a chance, is the only one with “equity” in the title, but all the school reform improvement/reform books I’ve read recently use the term, and most of them prefer it to equality).

Having done that research I think I was wrong to wish that people stop using it, even though I’ve been right to resist using the term myself. It is a vague concept, but the best authors who use it do so knowing that it is very vague, and feeling, rightly, quite comfortable with that. I’ll explain.

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One of the effects of the Global Financial Crisis is that the window of ideas now regarded as thinkable has expanded greatly. Willem Buiter typically works close to the edge of the window, but even so, I doubt that he would have written this in the Financial Times a year ago:

[Tax havens] should be closed down.

The easiest way to achieve this is to make it illegal for any natural or legal person from a non-tax haven country to do business with or enter into transactions with any natural or legal person in a tax haven. That ought to do it. Tax haven, again, is defined not with respect to tax rates or tax bases, but with respect to bank secrecy, that is, with respect to the information shared by the country’s financial institutions with foreign tax authorities. That information sharing should be automatic and comprehensive.

As regards regulatory havens, once common G20 standards for regulatory norms, rules and regulations has been set, countries that violate these standards would be black-listed. The obvious sanction is non-recognition of contracts drawn up in the regulatory haven jurisdiction and non-recognition of court decisions in these regulatory havens. That ought to do it.

The logic hasn’t changed in the last year, but the idea that the OECD could simply cut off economic interactions with places like the Cayman Islands and Liechtenstein (let alone, say, Switzerland) wasn’t thinkable then. It is now.

Update Marshall McLuhan moment: In comments, Willem Buiter points to this piece, written a year ago, and taking an equally strong line. Despite getting this example wrong, I still think the window has shifted.

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Brad DeLong links to Matthew Yglesias linking to Damon Linker linking to my old Dead Right post. How gratifying! I was thinking of writing it all out again, in response to Charles Murray’s rather odd AEI dinner talk. But they’ve saved me the trouble. (I would like to say, however, that I prefer the term ‘Dark Satanic Millian Liberalism’ for what Linker calls ‘Donner Party Conservatism’.)

Let me make a few somewhat fresh points about stuff in the general vicinity of the Murray speech (which was well received by conservatives. Goldberg loved it, and Douthat thought it was pretty good.)

As you’ve probably noticed, conservatives tend to argue against liberalism/progressivism by asserting (plausibly) that Robespierre, or Stalin, or Hitler did bad things; then asserting (considerably less plausibly) that liberalism/progressivism somehow equals, or naturally tends to slide into, bad authoritarianism of a distinctively modern sort. Ever since Burke wrote his book about the French Revolution, some such slippery slope argument is the Ur-argument of conservatism as political philosophy.

Suppose we sketch out that thing that it is feared liberalism/progressivism will slipperily slide into. See if you don’t agree that the one thing every conservative swears up and down that he hates in all its many works and deeds, is anything resembling the following: [click to continue…]

When the Bush administration advocated abstinence and the like on the international stage, it was seen as an example of Bush pushing a parochial agenda. But when Western cosmopolitanism is championed on the world stage, it’s progress. What am I missing? (link)

Goldberg is missing the possibility that liberals might believe that Bush was pushing a parochial agenda while at the same time believing that their own proposals would constitute progress. In short, liberals believe Bush was heading in the wrong direction, whereas a liberal proposal would head us in a better direction. In shorter: liberals think Bush was wrong, they are right. In shortest: liberals believe their beliefs. This is what Goldberg is missing.

To put it another way, when he says “it just seems to me that there’s no real standard here,” he’s missing the possibility of classical liberalism, broadly speaking. (Given that Goldberg claims to believe in classical liberalism, his failure to consider that any standard could possibly occupy the intellectual space occupied by the standards of classical liberalism is … an impressive feat of doxastic auto-evacuation. It doesn’t occur to him to believe what he believes, apparently.)

Goldberg is missing that it is possible to believe things without necessarily wanting to impose those beliefs on others (for reasons of prudence, or principle, or a bit of both). He also misses that one can take tolerance (non-coercion) to be a virtue (in principle, and as pragmatically warranted by circumstances) without believing that, in fact, no beliefs are better, more warranted than others. Finally, he seems to be missing the possibility that one might believe that coercion is warranted in some cases, but impermissible (or imprudent) in other sorts of cases.

If Goldberg is not missing absolutely all of this, then I fail to see what other thing he could be missing, leading to his sincere puzzlement. I am at a total and complete loss. Really. I’m drawing a blank.