A few months ago, I wrote about Orlando Patterson’s rave review of Tommie Shelby’s book, We Who Are Dark: The Philosophical Foundations of Black Solidarity. I’ve now read the book myself, and the praise is entirely deserved. Shelby indeed “knows how to ask all the right questions.” And his answers are always thoughtful, clear, insightful, and he shows almost unbelievable patience with his many mistaken rivals. I admit to being pre-disposed to his position, but I learned a lot. My review is below.
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From the category archives:
Political Theory/Political Philosophy
The comment thread to my Schmitt post is perking along nicely. (Good poems about taxes, too.) I’m going to take the liberty of elevating some bits of that thread for discussion in this here fresh post. John Quiggin writes:
So, let me start with the observation that war is inherently a negative-sum activity and the empirical fact that, in practice, aggressive war is almost invariably a negative-return activity for the inhabitants of countries that undertake it, Germany in the first half of C20 being a striking example. Schmitt and similar thinkers manage to construct logical frameworks that insulate them from crucial facts like this.
First, I’d just like to say that this post about Leo Strauss and fascism at Balkinization is interesting. Scott Horton has translated an odd letter, written by Strauss on the occasion of his emigration under anti-semitic pressure: "the fact that the new right-wing Germany does not tolerate us says nothing against the principles of the right. To the contrary: only from the principles of the right, that is from fascist, authoritarian and imperial principles, is it possible with seemliness, that is, without resort to the ludicrous and despicable appeal to the droits imprescriptibles de l’homme to protest against the shabby abomination."
Moving right along, I just read Carl Schmitt, Political Romanticism [amazon]. And now I’m telling you I had the slightly unusual experience of coming to a work by a familiar author, on a (fairly) familiar topic, with really no strong sense whether he would be for or against.
Steven Poole, our guest-blogger from last week, has this to say about “asymmetric warfare”:
bq. Asymmetric warfare’ is the term employed by the US military for fighting people who don’t line up properly to be shot at: on the one side you have battalions of American infantry, marines, tanks and aircraft; and on the other you have terrorists, or guerrillas, or militants, or insurgents. [“Read the whole thing”:http://unspeak.net/C226827506/E20060611135824/index.html , as they say. cb]
Of course the reason people don’t line up to be shot at, wearing proper uniforms, distinguishing themselves from the civilian population, and so on, is that it would be suicidal so to do. And here lies a real difficulty for conventional just war theory. If recourse to war is sometimes just — and just war theory says it is — but it may only be justly fought within the jus in bello restrictions, then it looks as if an important means to pursue justice is open to the strong alone and not to the weak. Faced with a professional army equipped with powerful weaponry, people who want to fight back have no chance unless they melt into the civilian population and adopt unconventional tactics. If those tactics are morally impermissible because of the risks they impose on non-combatants, then it looks as if armed resistance to severe injustice perpetrated by the well-equipped and powerful is also prohibited. And that looks crazy.
Recently I was explaining to a French friend the arguments we have in English over whether to call people “suicide bombers”, or “suicide murderers”, or “martyrdom bombers”, or even (for Fox fans) “homicide bombers”. “What do you call them in French?” I asked. She smiled somewhat apologetically and said: “Oh, we just call them kamikazes.” I was intrigued by the analogy, and recently Freeman Dyson has argued for it explicitly in the New York Review of Books.
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Several commenters on this post about the asymmetry of the case for and against war made the suggestion that, if I applied similar reasoning to domestic policy I would come out with libertarian conclusions. So can I be a libertarian social democrat?
Eve Garrard, has written a comment on this John Gray‘s latest piece in the New Statesman. Since Gray got his new post-JG Ballard prose style it is often quite difficult to work out precisely what he is on about, but in this case, he is making the point that “Enlightenment Values” have historically been associated with a hell of a lot of death and destruction (things like the French revolutionary Terror). Garrard’s point is that when she and the Euston Manifesto crowd use the phrase, they use it only to refer to ” universal human rights, equality (in some sense), religious tolerance, scepticism about received dogmas, freedom of speech, a commitment to the use of reason to improve our condition” rather than blood and the guillotine, and that Gray knows this and is just being silly.
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In “yesterday’s global justice thread”:https://crookedtimber.org/2006/06/19/global-justice-taxing-inherited-social-resources/ , commenter Nicholas Weininger made the following comment, which raises a broader set of issues than were appropriate in that discussion, but which I think are worth responding to. Here’s Nicholas:
bq. Chris, I understand that you are framing your argument within the assumption that your arguers accept liberal egalitarianism, but it is still worth pointing out that some of us anti-egalitarians will see in your argument a rather nice slippery-slopish case for our side. To wit: once you start deciding that some things are “just luck” and that that implies it’s legitimate to forcibly redistribute them, there is nothing, however clearly it may be the product of choice and hard work, which is exempt from the depredations of the robbers with badges and good intentions. If liberal egalitarianism really does imply that “inherited social resources” should be taxed away, so much the worse for liberal egalitarianism!
It isn’t entirely clear to me what the central point of Nicholas’s objection is, but there seem to be three components (1) a complaint about “forcible redistribution”, (2) a worry about the indeterminacy of liberal egalitarian theories of distributive justice, and (3) a worry that literally everything might be up for redistribution if we press a radical line about what results from luck.
I want to flag an issue which I seem to have noticed in a variety of liberal egalitarian writings on global justice, namely the cut that philosophers and theorists often make between entitlement to land and natural resources on the one hand, and entitlement to socially created stuff on the other.[1] Liberal egalitarians usually reject any kind of libertarian finders-keepers principle with respect to the first category of goods. But in relation to the second, they often argue for the right of insiders to exclude outsiders from access to those goods that are the collective historical creation of the insiders’ political entity.[2] What follows is just a bit of thinking aloud: there are a lot of uncrossed ts and undotted is. I’d welcome both constructive comments and pointers to relevant papers.
This natural/social cut looks wrong and insufficiently motivated to me. With respect to natural resources and land, I guess the background thought might be that these resources come as manna from heaven, as it were, so that all of the worlds people and peoples have an original equal claim to them. We can then argue about the right way of progressing from that claim to operational property rights, but it is easy to see how arguments for (e.g.) something like a global resources dividend can go: those who actually use the resources need to compensate the others who share their original equal entitlement for that use.[3] The difficulty I see is this: that social resources also come as unequally distributed manna from heaven to each new generation. Those who inherit stable institutions, a culture conducive to economic growth etc., look to be just as arbitrarily lucky with respect to those resources as those (Norwegians for example) who are lucky with respect to the discovery of natural resources on their territory. So why not deal with the two kinds of resources in the same way: that is, initially posit an equal original right of all to ownership, and sanction transfers to those who have been comparatively unlucky in the initial distribution?
I vaguely recall an anecdote about Reagan (?) meeting with Brezhnev/Gorbachev (?) and amiably suggesting that the US and USSR would easily set aside their differences, fighting shoulder to shoulder if aliens invaded the earth. Can anyone give me a cite? I’m writing something about Carl Schmitt, friend/enemy, you understand.
A couple weeks ago Matt Yglesias noted the peculiarity of ‘unapologetic liberal‘. (File under ‘catechism of cliche’, ‘what sort of liberal is he?’) I thought I’d dredge up something from the files:
The words “social justice” appear in a glossary of terms that the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education uses as an example of what programs might consider using when evaluating a teaching candidate’s “disposition” and classroom readiness.
Supporters of a traditional curriculum have argued that evaluating students based on their commitment to social justice is an inherently subjective practice with ideological undertones. Late last year, the National Association of Scholars filed a complaint with the Education Department saying the accreditor encourages standards that violate students’ First Amendment rights.
The main union representing academics in the UK is “in dispute with university employers at the moment”:http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/01/world/europe/01cnd-britain.html?hp&ex=1149220800&en=a1097c439ced02b9&ei=5094&partner=homepage, a dispute that is getting nastier all the time. Academics are refusing to assess students’ work, leading to the worry that many of them will be unable to get classified degrees this summer, and universities are now threatening to withhold a proportion of salaries (30 per cent in my institutions, up to 100 per cent in some other) as a penalty for partial breach of contract. I’m supporting the action as a loyal union member, but also because there is something right about the union case. However, as an egalitarian liberal, I can’t feel other that unhappy about some of the arguments put for higher academic salaries.
Ezra Klein has a nice explanation of the problems with the health insurance proposal in Murray’s In Our Hands
Give me a plan that’s $10,000, plus universal health care, funded through transparent means, and ratchets back in a more intelligent way, and we’ll talk.
I’ll follow up next week (there’s a promise) with references to left-wing versions of the idea that everyone should already know about but apparently doesn’t, in the hope of prompting Ezra into talking.
So, are you ready for a rave review of Charles Murray’s latest book, In Our Hands
So here goes. Before writing about it I did a quick google search, and was glad to see it being attacked by some of his colleagues on the right; it confirmed my sense that there’s a lot of good stuff in it, and that the wool is not being pulled over my eyes. More than that, I found that some of the criticisms seemed dead on as comments, but not as criticisms. One blogger points out that whereas “flat tax” reform builds in a constituency that will always press to keep taxes as low as possible, a universal basic income grant of the kind Murray proposes builds in a constituency that will always pressure to make the benefit as large as possible. That sounds right, and good, to me. Liberals also attack it, but my sense of all those criticisms is that they are simply ad hominem. I’ll suggest a way to avoid ad hominem responses later. But, I’m running ahead of myself.
The central proposal is for a basic income grant of $10,000 per year for every citizen aged 21 and above.