Political Theory/Political Philosophy

Ross Douthat responds to a question I threw at him on Bloggingheads a few months ago about what kind of society he wanted to live in. His response to that question seems fine to me (I suspected that he and other Catholic conservatives wouldn’t much have enjoyed living in Ireland when the church had effective hegemony, and he has more or less confirmed this), but I’m pretty sure that he’s wrong when he says that:

I incline away from [left communitarians] on questions of economic policy not out of any delusion that unfettered capitalism hasn’t played a significant role in the cultural trends that I find worrying, but because I think that economic freedom was one of the freedoms that the 1950s order went too far in stifling – and more importantly, because the most likely alternative to Reaganism and Rubinomics wasn’t some low-growth crunchy-communitarian utopia, but rather a steady expansion in government power that would have crowded out the “little platoons” even more quickly than free-market capitalism undercuts them. Traditional forms of social organization are weaker in today’s America than they were fifty years ago, but they’re still much, much stronger than in Europe, where the economic left has held the whip for decades.

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A fine piece by Michael McPherson and Morton Schapiro in the Chronicle of Higher Education (registration and possibly subscription needed). They start by pointing out that for the most part college officials treat ‘values’ as pieties to be brought out when the parents and dignitaries visit, and not very seriously dealt with the rest of the time; and then demonstrate the moral dimension to a a range of management and leadership issues: enrollment management, early admissions, student aid, college rankings, and admissions decisions. It’s an agenda setting piece, not a series of answers. I’d like to see philosophers giving more detailed thought to these issues (so, I know, would McPherson and Schapiro); I hereby encourage bright philosophy PhD students out there to take their agenda and base a dissertation on it. (You might want to look at Levelling the Playing Field before you start). To give a flavour, here’s what M&S say about early admissions:

Early admissions. Last year both Harvard and Princeton Universities made high-profile announcements that they would no longer admit students early. What are the arguments against early decision? You can’t expect a needy student to commit to attend a college or university before knowing the price. Asking a student to decide where to attend college by early November, the typical deadline for early application, increases the frenzy accompanying selective admission. Students admitted in December of their senior year may take the rest of that year less seriously than one might hope. And, given that economists calculate a sizable admissions advantage to applying early, certain students are able to game the system.

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Yesterday evening, at the editorial meeting of the Dutch philosophy journal Filosofie en Praktijk (Philosophy and practice), we had a discussion about what methods are used in political philosophy. One editor mentioned that he is doing quite a bit of refereeing for the National Science Foundation, and that many political philosophy research proposals are quite vague on the methods that they’ll use. There is often some reference to ‘reflective equilibrium’, he said, but is that really all we do? Similarly, I noted that the ECPR's Summer school on Methods and Techniques this year had no courses on offer on methods in political theory. And I know of several political science departments where the traditional ‘methodologies’ course includes all sorts of fancy quantitative and qualitative methods, but no political theory methods.

So do political theorists and philosophers have no methods? Of course not. But perhaps we are not so explicit about them than the empirical sciences or the theoretical disciplines that use methods such as game theory or formal modeling. I don’t doubt that we do use methods, but perhaps they are more implicit in our work. I have to confess that I’ve found it harder than I liked to answer colleagues who asked me what precisely our methods are (in fact – it’s not just colleagues – Last year when I had a 45 minutes interview with the Dutch National Science Foundation for the VIDI-grant competition, the only question I got was about the methods I would use in my political theory research).

So I’d like to ask two questions: What are the methods of political theorists and philosophers? And is there a good book or set of articles on “methods and techniques in political theory and philosophy” ? Or should we simply apply what is written in a good textbook on analytical philosophy?

Stanley Fish:

Back in June, I wrote three columns (”The Three Atheists,” “Atheism and Evidence” and “Is Religion Man-Made?“) about the recent vogue of atheist books, books that accuse religion of being empty of genuine substance, full of malevolent and destructive passion, and without support in evidence, reason or common sense.

The authors of these tracts are characterized by professor Jacques Berlinerblau of Georgetown University as “the soccer hooligans of reasoned discourse.” He asks (rhetorically), “Can an atheist or agnostic commentator discuss any aspect of religion for more than thirty seconds without referring to religious peoples as imbeciles, extremists, mental deficients, fascists, enemies of the public good, crypto-Nazis, conjure men, irrationalists … authoritarian despots and so forth?”

In a similar vein, Tom Krattenmaker, who studies religion in public life, wonders why, given their celebration of open-mindedness and critical thinking, secularists “so frequently leave their critical thinking at the door” when it “comes to matters of religion?” Why are they closed-minded on this one subject?

But my question for you is: why can’t the likes of Stanley Fish go three paragraphs without insulting his opponents and adding injury in the form of the worst sort of brazen ‘why are they still beating their wives’ question? Riddle me that.

I would also like to request a moratorium on critiques of liberalism that consist entirely of a flourish for effect – with accompanying air of discovery – of the familiar consideration that liberalism is inconsistent with blanket, categorical tolerance of absolutely every possible act and attitude. That is, liberalism is incompatible, in practice, with any form of illiberalism that destroys liberalism. If something is inconsistent with liberalism, it is inconsistent with liberalism. Yes. Quite. We noticed.

Also, it might not be a half-bad idea to notice that liberalism is not incompatible with religion, merely with illiberal forms of religion. Just as liberalism is incompatible with illiberal forms of secularism. Which suggests that there may be a need to revisit Fish’s title: “Liberalism and Secularism: One and the Same”.

(Also, the sentence, “in liberal thought, ‘reasonable’ is a partisan, not a normative notion,” is conspicuously confused.)

I’m not a big fan of the academic interview, perhaps having been put off it by attending “A conversation with Jacques Derrida” while I was in graduate school (better, perhaps, than the “Rudolph Bahro interviews Himself” that’s in one of the Socialist Registers in our downstairs loo). So I only read Political Questions: Five Questions in Political Philosophy (UK) because Adam Swift twice told me to do so (three times including his enthusiastic blurb on the back of the book). It’s really very interesting: 18 political theorists and philosophers of varying eminence give their answers to 5 questions:

Why were you initially drawn to political philosophy?

What do you consider your most important contribution to political philosophy and why?

What is the proper role of political philosophy in relation to real, political action? Can there ever be a fruitful relation between political philosophy and political practice?

What do you consider the most neglected topics in late 20th century political philosophy?

What are the most important unsolved questions in political philosophy and/or related disciplines, and what are the prospects for progress?

Obviously the responses vary in their level of interest. There are no shocking revelations – William Galston doesn’t renege on his pluralism; Amy Gutmann doesn’t come out in favour of dictatorship. And there is an unevenness in how fully people answer the questions; some are too lengthy and others, frankly, too terse (I’d have liked to hear more from Allen Buchanan and Phillippe Van Parjis in particular). And there are missing characters – I’m not going to propose anyone for elimination, but it would have been nice to hear from Elizabeth Anderson, Loren Lomasky, and Norman Daniels. (I presume that some people refused to be interviewed — how else to explain the absence of G.A. Cohen, for example?).

I was most interested in what people had to say about question 3.

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Megan McArdle has a new blog over at the Atlantic, and, browsing through it I notice that she comments on John Q.'s recent remarks about Drezner, foreign policy etc. The following caught my eye:

bq. Many economists (not all) might agree that it would be lovely if we lived in an Edenic utopia in which everyone did the best for society without thought of themselves. But almost all economists recognize that self-interest is a powerful force that must be dealt with, and therefore that economic policy must be designed on the assumption that people will try to maximise their own good, rather than society’s. Similarly, foreign policy assumes that states will act in their own interest, and try to design a foreign policy that works within that constraint.

I have three reactions to this. The first is that McArdle’s description of the possible motivations for individuals is just absurdly simplistic: people either maximise their own good, or society’s, and since the latter suggestion is silly, we must work on the basis that of the former. Huh? How about intermediate possibilities, such as that people have a good that they try to realize, but that they also recognize constraints on the reasonable pursuit of that good (such as that other people have lives to live, have rights etc.). The second is that her justification for the self-interest assumption for states isn’t a simple consequence of her self-interest assumption for individuals. If individuals were straightforward maximizers of their own good then states would act in ways that reflect the self-interested action of the most powerful individuals within them rather than the (long term? short term?) interest of the state itself. Maybe there would be convergence, and maybe not, but McCardle isn’t entitled to the conclusion that states act self-interestedly on the basis that individuals do (if they do). My third reaction is that, as Bruno Frey and others have argued, the self-interest assumption turns out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Design a system on the assumption that people will act to maximize their individual good and they will act on that assumption. They’d be crazy not to: why hold back from the trough when the rules of the game assume that everyone will be pushing their own snout forward? But this proves nothing fundamental. A system designed on the basis of a certain level of solidaristic or community spirit may well foster such attitudes, especially if we have effective mechanisms for punishing those who act greedily or selfishly.

For the past week I’ve been crouching behind a bush, metaphorically speaking, waiting to ambush Oliver Kamm who was unwise enough to announce his intention to defend the use of the A-bomb at Hiroshima against its moral critics. Of course, I spent some of that time anticipating what Kamm might say and, it turns out, I anticipated wrongly. I had expected Kamm to concede, against people like Elizabeth Anscombe, that Hiroshima involved the murder of innocents, but then to argue that such murder was necessary. I’d then intended to invoke Orwell’s critique of Auden from _Inside the Whale_, a passage that contains _inter alia_, some acute comments on the Kamm mentality.

But I was wrong. It turns out that Kamm denies the claim that it was murder . The trouble is, he can’t bring himself to face the issue directly, and, despite quoting Anscombe _in extenso_, gives a seriously inaccurate account of her view.

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Late, I know. But I thought I’d wish it, and provide a link to my recent radio appearance (with Daniel Schor, no less) on Here on Earth (July 4th show here). They asked me to talk about patriotism, in the light of the recent (and very surprising — I was shocked anyway) revelations that the CIA has sometimes engaged in nefarious activities in pursuit of the national interest. The question was “how can one be patriotic if one’s country has done such terrible things?” I have written abut the impropriety of promoting patriotism and national sentiment generally, so it was curious to be talking about the conditions on a morally clean patriotism, and in fact I drew extensively on Eamonn Callan’s recent paper “Love, Idolatory, and Patriotism” (PDF) (obviously in the vernacular). I was caught off guard by the presenter starting me off by asking me to respond to a caller who had said something especially irritating, and I was excessively harsh in response, but hope that I pulled back enough to seem more reasonable.

You can help! I’m giving a brownbag talk at UW Madison’s Center for the Humanities in December, and the administrator, despite knowing me well enough to know that I have no aesthetic or design sense at all, has asked me for an image to go on the poster for my talk. The title is “What so great about the family anyway?”, and the description is as follows:

The phrase “family values” is often associated with a conservative political agenda, and liberals, committed as they are to ideals of personal freedom, have tended to shy away from being judgmental about the different familial arrangements people choose. Recent work in egalitarian political philosophy has focussed on the moral justification of the family; what “family values” are actually justified? Harry Brighouse will talk about this work, showing that there is interesting common ground between some conservatives and some egalitarians, and will discuss the significance of abstract theorising about values for family policy.

So far, we have between us come up only with three flippant ideas, based on very quick googling, but worth sharing: the Reagans; the Bushes; and these guys. Any better ideas? In deference to my lack of good sense, it would be kind to flag flippancy.

Jacob Levy’s beginnings-of-a-response to Linda Hirshman’s piece on Rawlsianism as the root of all evil seems to me to be a fair bit off-target (this, from Matt Yglesias, is much better).

I recommend and second Marty Peretz’ reflections on the replacement of the word “liberal” with the word “progressive” over at The Spine. … At a somewhat different level of abstraction: “progressive” as a concept is tied up with a partly-inchoate philosophy of history that I’d have thought long since discredited. It doesn’t share in Marxism’s rigid determinism; but it does always tell a story in which one’s own side in political disputes happens to be the side of the future and the march of events. That tied together the racist imperialism of the Progressive Era, its anti-constitutionalism, and its technocracy: we enlightened white Americans with university degrees and a sense of good order and planning will drag non-white people, the uneducated, the messy chaos of the economy, and an archaic governing structure based on archaic ideas on the limits of state action into the future. Liberalism as such doesn’t believe it will necessarily win. Liberalism a la Isaiah Berlin and Judith Shklar, and behind them figures like Montesquieu and Tocqueville, is deeply inflected with a sense that freedom might be precarious, and the humane and human accomplishments of liberal politics might be precarious. The liberal sense of history is not necessarily pessimistic, but it shares none of progressivism’s certainty.

Jacob’s jibes about racist imperialism aside (it wouldn’t exactly take much effort to drag up some of the more sordid bits from the history of classical liberalism), his argument seems to me to rest on a false comparison. When Jacob talks about progressivism, he talks about it as a political movement; when he talks about liberalism, he talks about it as a tradition within political theory. This rather predetermines his conclusions; if your political ideals are thoughtfulness, recognition of limits etc, it’s … unsurprising that political theorists are going to come out looking better than politicians and political commentators. If you set up a fairer comparison, say by contrasting whatever tendencies there are towards overweening triumphalism among progressive political commentators with whatever tendencies there are among soi-disant liberal commentators, I suspect you’d arrive at a quite different set of conclusions (there seemed to me to be _rather a lot_ of liberal triumphalism about the march of history and dragging non-white people and archaic governing structures into the future going around a few years ago; I’m not hearing so much of it now for all the obvious reasons).

A little while ago, when Harry discussed the latest addition to the Real Utopias Project on basic income and stakeholding, some commentators raised the issue of the gender effects. I promised at that time that I would write a post about it. Well, finallly the time has come — thanks to a workshop on this topic that the Heinrich Boell Foundation organised last Thursday in Berlin. They are the think-thank of the Green German Party, which is currently seriously debating whether they should advocate a basic income as (part of) a welfare state reform strategy. The workshop addressed the question whether a basic income would have different implications for women and men, and whether, all things considered, it would be a policy reform that feminists may want to support. [click to continue…]

Liberal Fascism, the forthcoming opus by Jonah Goldberg, has undergone a subtitle change, as perhaps you have heard. Formerly it warned of “The Totalitarian Temptation From Mussolini to Hillary Clinton.” Said temptation will now run “…From Hegel to Whole Foods.”

The delays in publication must have been necessary given the burdens of fresh scholarship demanded by this broadening of scope.

The pub date at Amazon is December 26, which is not the part of the season when trade publishers bring out books they are going to push very hard. Somebody at Doubleday probably had the same thought recently expressed elsewhere:

I assume Frederick Kagan, Bradley Schlotzman, and Jonah’s mom are already getting complementary copies; Dinesh von Souza will probably do his patriotic duty; which leaves – ? A mule train a half-mile long will have to be rounded up to ship the remainder of the edition to the respectively vice-presidential and presidential libraries of Dan Quayle and George W Bush, where they will serve to fill out the echoing bookshelves and glut the hungry silverfish.

Hint to Goldberg: Make it a little more “campaign friendly.” That’s where dropping Hillary from the subtitle is probably going to hurt you some. How about “The Totalitarian Temptation from Dialectics to the Democratic Candidates”? Plus you’d get that extra alliteration — a real bonus, catchiness-wise.

Ezra Klein asks

This is one of my perennial bafflements, but the lack of suggestions on my request for political science blogs reminds me how odd the robust representation of economists in the blogosphere really is. Between Tyler Cowen, Mark Thoma, Brad DeLong, Max Sawicky, Dani Rodrick, Greg Mankiw, Kash Monsori, the folks at Angry Bear, and all the other econobloggers out there, a fairly broad channel has arisen for publicizing and popularizing relevant economic research in the political sphere. Not so with relevant political science research, even as it it would seem, if anything, more relevant. Why have economists taken to the blogosphere in so much greater numbers, and with so much more apparent success, than practitioners of other disciplines that also intersect with contemporary politics?

and the blogosphere delivers, sort of. I’ve set up a blog to link to new political science papers that are likely to be of interest to a general audience (where ‘general audience’ denotes the kinds of people who read Ezra, CT, Dan Drezner’s blog etc). At the moment, it consists of nothing more than abstracts of interesting papers and links to them. I hope over time to do a bit more than that (but not for a couple of months; I also have a book to finish over the summer). This is intended to be somewhat more specifically pol-sci focused than _Political Theory Daily Review_ (now at Bookforum) but also to appeal to people who aren’t cardcarrying political scientists. Please feel free to email me suggestions for papers to link (I know that there are a fair few political scientists who read CT, including a couple of journal editors; send me stuff and if it’s appropriate, I’ll happily link to it). Such suggestions should include the abstract or other relevant info for the paper, the bibliographical details, and, of course, the URL. Feel free also to make suggestions as to how the site can be improved (it’s rather barebones at the moment, but will get a little prettier over time).

I like Richard Rorty, but will say a bit in defense of the negative line taken by Damon Linker in his TNR piece. Well, actually, I don’t have access, so I haven’t read it. I’ll respond to the bits available at Matthew Yglesias site, which dovetail nicely with thoughts I’ve had about Rorty’s liberal politics, quite independently of anything Linker says or thinks. [click to continue…]