Political Theory/Political Philosophy

I’ve been using Adam Swift’s Political Philosophy: An Beginner’s Guide for Students and Politicians (UK) in my Political Philosophy course this semester, and, having now had several students thank me for assigning it, I should probably recommend it more widely. The book is written at an angle to my course. The course goes through the main ideas of various important contemporary theorists of justice: Rawls, Sen, Nozick, Milton Friedman (ok, he’s the odd-one-out, but my view is that nobody should leave college without reading chapters 1,2 and 6 of Capitalism and Freedom, and I abuse my position as a professor to do my bit), Kymlicka, Okin, Fraser, and G.A. Cohen. The book is more conceptual; it consists of chapters on Social Justice, Equality, Freedom, Community and (in the new, second, edition) Democracy, which go through various distinctions and problems in thinking about those concepts, and it only refers to the work of particular philosophers insofar as it is relevant to the problem at hand. The book also includes a lovely discussion of the division of labour between political philosophers on the one hand and political activists and politicians on the other, and offers a semi-sympathetic diagnosis of the reasons that politicians often seem to be such uncareful thinkers about matters of value. It really is a superb piece of writing, accessible to anyone with an interest in these matters, but somehow achieving the accessibility without compromising the complexity of the issues in question.

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In many (most? all?) Universities, the research output of the staff is evaluated every couple of years (every 4 or 5 years, for example). This is also done at a more aggregate level, for example in country-wide Research Assessment Excercises. For such evaluations, an unavoidable question is: what determines quality, and how should we weigh publications of different quality levels? In order to simplify matters a little, let us just look at journal articles and not at books. One possibility is to make three categories of journals, A, B, and C, where A would give you double points compared with B, and B double of C. The difficult question then becomes: how should one decide which journals to classify in which group?
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Education Week is currently hosting an open house; well worth visiting for anyone interested in ed policy issues in the US. It also gives me a chance to link directly to an essay of mine they published a few weeks ago, concerning the role of value considerations in evaluating educational reforms. The essay is a distillation of some of the points I made in a much longer talk I recently gave at the Spencer Foundation conference on Values and Evidence in School Reform, and I’m very interested in what other political and moral philosophers and applied ethicists (whom I’d like to encouage to do more work on education issues) think, especially about the analogy I make with the philosophy of health policy. When I talk to education scholars I often encounter a fair amount of resistance to the project of justifying objective moral values (as I do, with specific reference to education, in On Education). Some low-level variant of moral relativism or, perhaps to put it more fairly, a deep suspicion of moral realism, is quite entrenched among some education scholars, so my guess is there is a bit more resistance to the bigger project I suggest in the essay than philosophers would encounter in medical ethics and health policy.

In her 2002 Locke Lectures, Christine Korsgaard suggests readings of Plato and of Kant that try to make sense of the relationship between “inward justice” and “outward justice”. She asks, for example, “What is the relationship between maintaining unity in your soul, and doing things like telling the truth, keeping your promises, and respecting rights?” In the course of exploring the connection, she observes, “It’s hard to have a free press and lie to the world.” Her point is not limited to freedom of the press. Rather, she thinks that it is hard to have a democratic society that engages in free public deliberation if it lies to the world.

In its recent effort to prevent victims of “alternative interrogation methods” from telling even their own lawyers – let alone the general public – what they endured, the Bush administration seems to agree with Korsgaard.

Actually, they offered two defenses of the prohibition. First:

“Many terrorist operatives are specifically trained in counter-interrogation techniques,” says a declaration by Marilyn A. Dorn, an official at the National Clandestine Service, a part of the C.IA. “If specific alternative techniques were disclosed, it would permit terrorist organizations to adapt their training to counter the tactics that C.I.A. can employ in interrogations.”

It’s hard to take this seriously. What do they imagine they’ll do – practice holding their breath while being waterboarded dunked in water?

Here’s the other defense:

revealing the countries where the prisoners were held could undermine intelligence relationships with those governments. Such disclosures “would put our allies at risk of terrorist retaliation and betray relationships that are built on trust and are vital to our efforts against terrorism,” Ms. Dorn wrote.

The connection seems plausible – only the conclusion is absurd. We need to undermine the rule of law at home so that we can continue to lie to our allies. Not exactly what Korsgaard had in mind, I think. As a lawyer for several Guantanamo detainees observed, the prisoners “can’t even say what our government did to these guys to elicit the statements that are the basis for them being held. Kafka-esque doesn’t do it justice. This is ‘Alice in Wonderland.’”

I’ve been involved with Imprints — once subtitled “A Journal of Analytical Socialism” but now “Egalitarian Theory and Practice” — for about ten years now. And a very friendly venture it is too with regular meetings up and down the UK, long sessions in the pub or in various Indian restaurants, and short but businesslike meetings. And, on the whole it has been a pretty successful project too. I don’t think there’s any other journal of its type with a similar bank of interviews with leading left thinkers. But as we smugly enjoyed our combination of conviviality and intellectual excitement we forgot to renew our web address which was poached from us within days of its lapsing. I sought Maria’s advice on the problem and contacted the friendly UK cyber-police at nominet. Perhaps we had a case against the poacher, perhaps not. Either way it would cost time and money to fight. So I went ahead and registered a new address www.imprintsjournal.com . So adjust your links … and subscribe if you don’t already (generous terms on back-issues available on request).

spiked (my favourite) is sponsoring the Battle of Ideas conference next weekend at the Royal College of the Arts. My friend Adam Swift will be a panelist in the session on home-school relationships, Sending Parents Back to the Classroom (11-12.30 on Sunday morning). In the opening document Kevin Rooney says:

a profound change is taking place in the relationships between families, pupils and schools. What was once a relationship largely based on trust and informality is now being increasingly formalised into carefully regulated contracts and transactions. Parent-school contracts and homework contracts on the one side and inspection and auditing of teachers on the other are now the norm. At the extreme end of this spectrum are truanting orders, fines and the jailing of parents as well as a rise in litigation, with parents suing both schools and teachers.

Rooney’s piece is nicely provocative, and he raises most of the important issues. But I take issue with one thing he says in passing:

Most people over 40 struggle to remember their own parents spending any time helping them with homework.

Maybe, but perhaps that’s because most people over 40 think og helping the kids with their homework as doing it for them. My parents never, as far as I can remember, looked over my homework before I submitted it, or helped in any substantial way with the content. But they were helping me all the time. They made me go to bed early and get up in time for school, they encouraged me to listen to Radio 4 until I was addicted (at about age 6), they forbad homework in front of the TV, and provided space to do it without interruptions. They showed an interest in the work I did at school which resembled the interest my daughter now has in what I do at work — casual conversational interest, indicating that though it was no great concern of theirs they were genuinely interested. And, of course, at the limit I always knew that I could seek help. I can’t remember seeking substantive help from them, but the day I screwed up my first A/O Level paper in Additional Maths I called in a favour from the bloke down the street whom I trained in the nets for his annual work cricket match, and got him to run through how to do calculus with me. (Update — I should have added that he was bloody brilliant at it, and I salvaged a B, thanks to his incredibly clear explanations, in case anyone is considering taking a class from him, although the data is now 27 years old)

The difficulty with home/school agreements is not that they prevent parents from parenting, or encroach on their rights; by and large they don’t. The difficulty is, instead, the fact that this is a very blunt instrument for conveying to parents what really counts as helping kids with homework and giving them the means to do so. Basically, the help I needed was reinforcement of the message that this stuff was really really interesting and important for its own sake. That’s a very hard thing to get parents who don’t already know it, and feel that way, to do.

I’ve not been blogging much of late, partly because I’ve been making the transition between being on leave and getting back to teaching, a transition that involves desperately trying to get one lot of stuff finished whilst hurriedly updating the things that you last had to think about nearly two years ago. One such is my final-year global justice course , which is the usual compromise between things I really think they ought to know about and things that I want to talk about. The main changes have been the inclusion of a lot more material on territory, borders, immigration and the like (weeks 9 and 10), at the expense of things that they should know about already (TJ). (The lecture/seminar distinction, btw, is a little bit artificial on this course and basically distinguishes between teaching hours where I introduce the discussion and ones where students do.) Anyway, it isn’t set in concrete, and I suddenly realized at the last moment that I don’t really know the secession literature at all. So those of you out there that do, or think there’s something else I’m neglecting, feel free to comment.

Because all the Uk bloggers have linked to it, I tried out the webcameron. Cameron’s introduction is very nice. He might want to read this paper by Erik Wright: it’ll provide some nice theoretical underpinnings. Oh, and everyone else might want to look at the draft manuscript for Wright’s book, Envisioning Real Utopias. (I don’t mean to suggest that Cameron won’t want to read the whole book, I’m just helpfully pointing him to the central ideas, so he can decide whether its worth his while to read the whole thing, presuming that he’s busier than the rest of us).

I see that Adam Swift is giving an interesting-looking paper on “Parents’ Rights and the Value of the Family” at the UCL political theory seminar next month. All right, I’m being coy, we co-authored it, but since I never directly post anything on my own non-existent web page, I wanted to encourage people who might be interested to read it.

The other day, a sociologist I know slightly asked me (and another political philosopher) whether there were any important recent books in political philosophy he should read. We were stumped, and eventually suggested that he read Annette Lareau’s _Unequal Childhoods_ … which is a work in sociology (and not that recent any more). I’ve just used the amazon.com books “power search” feature to look for books in political philosophy published in 2005 and 2005. There are some interesting collections of papers here and there – both on topics and collecting someone’s previously published papers – and there are some goodish introductory books, but there was nothing listed (not a single book) of which it could truly be said that a political philosopher who had not read that book (within a reasonable time) would have neglected to do something that they should have done.

I have a short list of books that nearly made it (none of which I’ve read). The “nearly” books are Matthew Clayton’s _Justice and Legitimacy in Upbringing_ (which I’ve bought but not started), Brian Barry’s _Why Social Justice Matters_, Martha Nussbaum’s _Frontiers of Justice_ and David Schmidtz’s _Elements of Justice_. I’m sure it would be a good thing to read any of those four, but _essential_? I don’t think so. Can commenters make a case for some book published since the beginning of 2005.

Over the weekend, Political Theory Daily Review linked to a recent essay on the Gang of Four. (The band, that is. Not the group in power in China thirty years ago this month, and in jail thirty years ago next month.) The title indicated it would treat the band’s work as Marxist cultural theory. Not in terms of, mind you, but as. Good call: The Gang’s lyrics were always very explicit about reification, class consciousness, and whatnot. No ex post facto Zizekian-epigone hijinks necessary, thank you very much. Makes its own gravy! A critic who understood that from the start might go far.

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David Velleman has a riveting paper on his website called Family History (via an independently interesting post about the influence of genes on identity formation). The paper is an extended argument for the wrongness of having a child by an anonymous donor (including by an anonymous surrogate mothers). The argument goes something like this (sorry David, I’m trying to be terse): children have an extremely powerful interest in knowing who their genetic forebears were, because that knowledge plays a vital role in their identity formation (not, interestingly, because it plays the more mundane role of giving you information about your probabilities with respect to health prospects, etc). People who deliberately have children via anonymous donors thus deliberately have children for whom a vital interest cannot be met. So they do a wrong. He does not explicitly call for the prohibition of anonymous donation of various kinds (and rightly not; establishing that some behaviour is wrong falls short of establishing that it is appropriate to prohibit it), and it is not clear what the public policy consequences are of his argument. He dispatches various objections rather well – you should read the whole thing. But I’m interested here in the central premise – that having acquaintance with one’s biological forbears plays a vital role in identity formation and maintenance.

What evidence does Velleman marshall for this claim? It seems to me that he has 2 main reasons for believing it.

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This review is a year late – the delay is thanks to the birth of our first-born, the urgency of getting my own book into a fit state to be submitted to publishers, and repeated and extended fits of procrastination. I hope to be starting to review political science books more regularly from here on in, with a particular focus on books that touch upon areas that I do academic work on (EU politics, the politics of the Internet and e-commerce, institutional theory, trust), or that are topical for one reason or another. Some of these books are likely to be of interest to the general CT reader, some not.

Glyn Morgan, _The Idea of a European Superstate: Public Justification and European Integration_ (Princeton University Press 2005), review beneath fold. Powells. Amazon.
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When I was at the ALSP conference in Dublin a while back, one of the more interesting papers was “Sanctioning Liberal Democracies” by Avia Pasternak of Nuffield College Oxford. Pasternak’s paper addresses the question of when it is appropriate to take action against liberal democracies for human rights violations. After all, as we are often being reminded, there are far worse violations of human rights going on elsewhere in the world. It might be thought that there are “double standards” here and that there is something wrong about giving special emphasis to, say, Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib. Pasternak argues that we should hold democracies to higher standards. Central to her account is an idea of a community of democratic nations and the notion that they are, in some sense, involved in a collective project to promote democracy and human rights. When one member of such a community lets the side down, so to speak, by failing to live up to its commitments, it thereby undermines that collective project and can justifiably be the object of sanctions by the other members.

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