Political Theory/Political Philosophy

There’s been a serious debate at the other place where I blog over whether academia in general, and political science in particular is a sexy profession. I’m glad to say that we actually have Real Social Scientific Data¹ that we can bring to bear on this topic. In 2006, James Felton, Peter T. Koper, John Mitchell and Michael Stinson conducted research that sought to establish, _inter alia_ how perceived hotness of professors affected their RateMyProfessors evaluations for teaching quality. As part of this exercise, Felton et al. ranked (Table 2 in their paper) the relative hotness quotients of 36 different academic disciplines. My estimable colleague John Sides prepared a nice graph of the Felton et al. data (see below).

Three important research findings leap out from this picture.

First – that academic disciplines are, without exception, more ‘not’ than ‘hot.’ When adjusted positive and negative hotness scores are totted up against each other, no discipline does better than – 0.062 (Languages). Thus, the main hypothesis of Careerbuilder et al. 2009 is decisively refuted.

Second, the above proviso aside, political scientists are pretty damn hot in comparative terms. We rank as number 5, trailing only languages, law, religion and criminal justice. From eyeballing the data, it looks as though there is a minor discontinuity right after political science, where the hotness lurches down a notch, and another, more significant one between psychology (at number 10) and finance (at number 11).

Third, economists are, without any jot, tittle, scintilla or iota of doubt or ambiguity, the notties rather than the hotties of the social sciences (coming 30th out of 36). Tough luck, John. Sociologists are sixth (heh), philosophers come in at number 9 (which is a perfectly respectable score, I suppose), and English professors are middlin’, at number 12 in the ranking.

(An earlier version of this post appeared at The Monkey Cage)

¹ Real Social Scientific Data is a term of art here, meaning ‘statistics that are sufficiently entertaining and gratifying² that I really don’t want to look at them too hard.’ This understanding of data is very commonly applied in the public sphere of learned debate although it is, perhaps surprisingly, rarely spelled out in explicit terms. I note in passing that some commenter at the Monkey Cage wants to control for differences in sex ratios between professors and students and similar irrelevant persnickets. All I want to say to this pedant (whom I suspect to be a jealous chemistry professor or denizen of a similarly low-ranked discipline) is _political science is number 5! Suck on it._

² In a collective rather than individual sense (I don’t imagine that I’m pulling my discipline’s score up).

Disclaimer: oddly, given my interests, I’ve never read much G.A. Cohen before picking up Rescuing Justice and Equality for this little event. (I understand his friends call him ‘Gerry’, but I won’t presume, on such slight acquaintance.) This matters only because my reading of the book is still preliminary and a bit scattershot. I’m not sure I get it. Also, I typed this post out like a maniac, just for the exercise of it. Also, I’m writing this post without access to my Rawls books, which I forgot to bring home, so I can’t quote. Well, I’m sorry about that. So stuff I say that is just plain wrong should be corrected in comments, without anger if you please. And we’ll just do our best, shall we? Also, I’m about to go on vacation for a few days, but I promised to participate. Also, I’m about to embark on an internet-free weekend getaway. Hence will not be very helpful in comments myself. Best I can do.) [click to continue…]

Melissa Schwartzberg at Columbia and I have an essay in the new issue of Ethics and International Affairs on the ways in which norms structure majority-minority relations on Wikipedia and the Daily Kos. The journal has made it freely available online here.

Building on case studies of Wikipedia and the Daily Kos, we make three basic claims. First, we argue that different kinds of rules shape relations between members of the majority and of the minority in these communities in important and consequential ways. Second, we argue that the normative implications of these consequences differ between online communities that seek to generate knowledge, and which should be tolerant of diversity in points of view, and online communities that seek to generate political action, which need less diversity in order to be politically efficacious. Third, we note that an analysis of the normative desirability of this or that degree of tolerance needs to be tempered with an awareness that the actual rules through which minority relations are structured are likely the consequence of power relations rather than normative considerations.

The other lead essay is Michael Walzer on democracy promotion, which should keep Daniel entertained …

A month ago I proposed an online reading group for G.A. Cohen’s _Rescuing Justice and Equality_. (US Amazon , UK Amazon ) It is time to get started. I’ll kick-off a week from today with a post covering the introduction and chapter 1, “Rescuing Equality from ….The Incentives Argument”. We’ll then cover a chapter a week (plus the general appendix) with, I hope, other people sometimes taking the lead. Remember the rules: a condition of commenting is that you’ve actually read the text under discussion (violators will be deleted).

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 (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 . 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 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 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 , Amazon.uk). 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.