Political Theory/Political Philosophy

I mentioned last week that I’m reading Nancy Rosenblum’s On the Side of the Angels: An Appreciation of Parties and Partisanship (Powells, Amazon). The final chapter, “Banning Parties,” has a valuable discussion of the normative implications of party bans, which speaks extensively to the Israeli example.

First, contra arguments such as those contained in this typically disingenuous post by Jamie Kirchick, it draws a clear distinction between banning hate parties (which Rosenblum argues is, within certain limits, a reasonable form of democratic self-defence) and banning parties that are threats to national identity (which Rosenblum argues is not a form of democratic self-defense). Rosenblum speaks to the rationale for Israel’s ban on the Kach party, which called for the forced ‘transfer’ of Arab ‘cockroaches’ from Israel, and sought to ban Arab-Jewish intermarriage. [click to continue…]

One of the safer predictions I’ve made in recent years is “this”:http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=can_partisanship_save_citizenship (in _The American Prospect_):

[O]nline activists are unlikely to follow Obama if he moves toward a post-ideological politics of citizenship and may even use Obama’s own machine to organize against him (as they did within MyBarackObama.com when Obama announced his support for controversial wiretapping legislation). By rebuilding the Democratic Party around a model that is friendlier to decentralized online participation, Obama is … making it easier for Democratic activists to organize in protest against overly “moderate” decisions

But I didn’t expect it to start happening _quite_ so soon.
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I was in touch with Astra Taylor about her documentary Žižek! quite a long time ago, or so it seems. She has a new film called Examined Life consisting of what might be called philosopher-in-the-street interviews. The talking heads include (to reshuffle the list alphabetically) Kwarne Anthony Appiah, Judith Butler, Michael Hardt, Martha Nussbaum, Avital Ronell, Peter Singer, Sunaura Taylor, Cornel West, and Slavoj Žižek.

Here’s the trailer:

I haven’t seen the film yet — it’s only showing in NYC now, it seems — but would welcome a screener DVD. It’s not like I’m going to bootleg it out of the trunk of my car or anything. I don’t even have a car, if that makes the folks at Zeitgeist Films feel any better.

(crossposted)

Anyone who’s going to be at the Eastern Division APA meetings this year shouldn’t miss the Society for Applied Philosophy session “Applying Philosophy” with Virginia Held and Adam Swift. It’s on the Monday morning at 11.15 am. Any session at the APA faces a lot of competition (as you can see from the full program here). But questions about what it means to apply philosophy, especially normative philosophy often arise around here, and I think there is still enough uncertainty about, for example, what non-ideal theorising amounts to and how it relates to ideal theorising, that the session should be excellent, not just for the presentations, but for the ensuing discussion, if enough people attend.

[UPDATE: An email from Director of Strategic Communication at Amazon, Craig Berman states the following (quoted with permission), which I thought was important to note here: “Amazon is a marketplace of many sellers, and while sellers are free to set their own prices for items they list, every customer pays the same for every individual offer.” I’m happy to hear that there is no price discrimination per se. Prime Shipping is a shady product though and I don’t recommend enrolling in it.]

Amazon is quoting me a higher price than it’s quoting my friend, on the same product. I knew this was theoretically possible, of course, but I didn’t realize online stores engaged in these practices much these days. After all, is it really worth annoying customers when they find out? After a bit of experimentation, it seems to me that what’s going on here is that those with a Prime membership are being quoted a higher price. Ouch. So the thanks I get for paying for the Prime membership and shopping at Amazon a lot is higher prices. No thank you. [click to continue…]

Samuel Freeman “has replied in comments to my post about his response to cosmopolitan critics of Rawls”:https://crookedtimber.org/2008/12/10/language-requires-what/#comment-260984 . It is a genuinely helpful and clarifying response, for which I’m grateful. I could quibble about the semantics of “invariably”, but I won’t. Rather, I’d highlight just two points in Freeman’s remarks. The first concerns the non-identity of “state” with “people” and “society”. Of course, I agree with Freeman that they on sensible construals of either term they would be non-identical, but I’d argue that Rawlsian fastidiousness in this respect merely highlights something rather evasive about their view. For what is it that picks out a Rawlsian “people” as distinct from other “peoples”, as a distinctive cooperative unit? Usually, it is their legal and institutional unity. In fact, this is normally the only thing, since state boundaries are rarely congruent with ethnic, religious or linguistic boundaries. Rawlsians may want, given the morally dubious history of nationalisms, to promote this as a feature rather than a bug. But it is questionable, then, whether Rawlsian peoples are really distinct from the states that organize them as such. (And, somewhat counterintuitively, lots of peoples fail to be “peoples” – the Kurds, for example.) (I hereby promise a proper post about Rawlsian “peoples” soon: Rawlsians want to be neither “statist” nor “nationalist”, but I’m sceptical about the existence of the middle ground.)

The second concerns Freeman’s concession (though “concession” is unfair of me) that what is key to the notion of social-cooperation is not coercive enforcement, but rather the inescapability, for individuals, of compliance with social rules. This seems to me to open up two difficulties for Freeman. The first, which I won’t develop here, is the blurring of the distinction between a society’s “basic structure” and its “ethos”, a distinction that Freeman needs be sharper for another dispute (that with G.A. Cohen). The second is brought out by the following statement:

bq. compliance with the rules of basic social institutions, even if generally voluntary, is unavoidable for the members of a society, since these rules are inescapable and structure their daily lives in innumerable ways (unlike members of other societies, whose lives are structured by their own system of basic institutions).

Perhaps something special is meant here by “structured”, since if it means that people’s lives are shaped in systematic ways that open some opportunites and deny others, then it can hardly be denied that, for example, Malian cotton producers are subject to a good deal of structuring by the US government. And, of course, one can make a similar point with respect to the lives of would-be economic migrants from poor countries to rich ones. Systematic structuring, then, doesn’t do the job of dividing insiders from outsiders in the way Freeman needs it to.

I rarely read bestsellers. I’d like to think that it is because I’m a snob, but the truth is that it is mainly because I lack the sense of urgency needed to trigger the purchase/acquisition. They’re bestsellers for goodness sake, which means there are tens of thousands of them around and they’ll be widely reviewed, so if, in a few years time, they still seem good and relevant I can get hold of them then and see what I think. I read two this year. I’ll write about Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us), which I loved, later; for now I’ll recommend Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers: The Story of Success (UK) (one of my dad’s Christmas presents this year; I’m also getting him Austerity Britain, 1945-1951 and The Complete Ivor The Engine, lucky man — you can tell how confident I am that he never reads anything I write; I’m pretty sure he hasn’t even read my draft of the pamphlet we’re writing together).

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Chris Hayes has a “nice piece”:http://www.thenation.com/doc/20081229/hayes/single in _The Nation_ about how the term ‘pragmatism’ is used in US public debate.
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Samuel Freeman’s _Rawls_ has received considerable praise on this blog. Indeed Harry “described it”:https://crookedtimber.org/2007/12/10/rawls-by-samuel-freeman/#more-6491 exactly a year ago as “A brilliantly careful, utterly transparent, account of Rawls’s thought and an admirable presentation of the state of the debates around Rawls’s work.” Well Harry may well be right about the book as a whole, but I’m afraid I found the pages where Freeman states his and Rawls’s objections to “liberal cosmopolitanism” somewhat objectionably arresting. Details are below the fold, but I was taken aback by the linked claims that “language itself” would not be possible without “social co-operation” which, in turn, would not be possible without the enforcement of social rules by a coercive power. From which it follows, of course, that language itself is not possible in the absence of such a coercive power. That just seems rather obviously historically and ethnographically false unless Freeman intends by “social cooperation” and “coercive power” rather looser arrangements for coooperation and constraint than he needs for the conclusion he wants to reach, namely, that there is a qualitative difference between the domestic order and the international one, such as would justify restricting strong distributive justice duties to co-members of societies. Given that he has to reject, then, a looser conception of those terms, it looks like he’s committed to the claim that “language itself” would not be possible without the state. Which is nuts.
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I’ve suggested to some of the other CTers that we should have an online reading group on G.A. Cohen’s _Rescuing Justice and Equality_ (“Amazon”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0674030761/junius-20 , “Amazon.uk”:http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0674030761/junius-21). They can’t do it until January, so this is a heads-up. When we get started we’ll cover a chapter a week, with maybe different people taking the lead (Harry, Ingrid, Jon? …) and then comments will be open. But a condition of commenting is that you’ve actually read the text under discussion (violators will be deleted). So if you want to take part you need to get the book, and you need to get reading and thinking.

Larry Solum has just posted an update of his Legal Theory Lexicon entry on Distributive Justice. I keep telling (graduate and undergraduate) students that they need to look at the Legal Theory Lexicon as their first stop for just about any concept that Solum covers. Its really an amazing resource. A decade ago you’d have needed access to a very good library to get hold of something half as good; now, anyone might come across it just by browsing.

Recently Aaron S. Edlin, Andrew Gelman and Noah Kaplan wrote “an article in The Economists’ Voice”:http://www.bepress.com/ev/vol5/iss6/art6/?sending=10393 setting out their argument that rational altruists should vote. A more careful version of the argument is “here”:http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/research/published/rational_final6.pdf, and if you like there is also a “mocking response by Andrew Leonard in Salon”:http://www.salon.com/tech/htww/2008/10/31/voting_for_charity/index.html, and a more sensible “counter-mock by Gelman on his blog”:http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/archives/2008/11/rationality_of.html.

There’s something right about the argument Edlin et al are making; it being rational for you to vote does require a degree of altruism. But I think their model (a) makes some fairly heroic assumptions, and more importantly (b) doesn’t explain why so many people in America should go vote today. Below the fold I give a slightly different reason for voting, one that applies in all 50 American states. The short version is that you should vote today because it increases your chances of getting a good outcome next time.
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The Times “has a story”:http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/us_elections/article5063279.ece that “Peter Millican”:http://philosophy.hertford.ox.ac.uk/peter.htm , an Oxford philosopher, was offered $10,000 to help some Republicans “prove” that Obama’s memoirs were ghost-written by Bill Ayers. On a bizarreness scale of 1 to 10, that gets close to the Obama-was-Malcolm-X’s-lovechild story.

In “Maria’s thread below”:https://crookedtimber.org/2008/10/27/liberte-egalite-celebrite/, commenter Iain Coleman writes:

bq. My hopes about Obama are limited to my expectation that he will be much like Bill Clinton, but with a bit more political capital and fewer illicit blowjobs. If Obama can just achieve that much, I will be delighted.

Much concurring and Clintonista apologetics followed, from the likes of commenter MQ.

Well like Coleman, I’m not an American, nor an American resident. But, of course, I have lived under the Blair government, which overlapped with Clinton’s and shared some of its (non-blowjob) characteristics. And I’m inclined to say, “not good enough, people”. It is an exaggeration to say that every child can recite the achievements of the Attlee government in Britain or the New Deal in America, but if we had decent education systems, it wouldn’t be. It is hard to imagine even a well-educated child in a social-democratic future being able to tell us what Clinton or Blair managed in their time (except, of course, the bad stuff, in each of their cases).

There’s also a good deal of “in the circumstances” excusing in that thread. Well the circumstances included the post-Cold War dividend, with which they did almost exactly nothing. Clinton managed capitalism a bit better than the Republicans; Blair cemented the post-Thatcher consensus, spent some extra money in public services rather ineffectively, tried to micro-social-engineer using a confusing system of tax credits that no-one understands, and increased the independence of the Bank of England. Well, terrific.

There is a criterion that any progressive government ought to meet. It is one that I might quibble with in a seminar but not in life. A progressive (left, liberal, social-democratic government) ought to alter social arrangements so that they work significantly more to the benefit of the the least-advantaged members of society that they did when that government came to power. Well, The Wire is fiction, and I’ve never visited the West Side of Baltimore, but did Clinton make a difference in places like that? And are the Valleys of South Wales less (or more) hopeless places than they were ten years ago?

Clinton’s eight years and New Labour’s eleven were disappointing. They led (or will lead) to cynicism and demoralization and to renewed periods of conservative government. People can thrash around and find this or that good thing that they did (and no doubt will in comments) – but on the criterion I just gave their achievements were nugatory.

So I don’t think it is too much to hope that Obama will do better. Because doing better wouldn’t be doing much. And if Obama can’t do just a bit better, then we had better just stop all those seminars on theories of justice and “realistic utopias” and so forth, because it will be hard to imagine the possibility of any government making significant progress toward the goals we pointy-headed liberal academics discuss in seminars.