Political Theory/Political Philosophy

Building from Belle’s post on end-state anarcho-libertarianism, a question for the floor. Everyone’s favorite libertarian SF author, Vernor Vinge, makes the case for private ownership of nuclear weapons as an important bulwark of liberty in his short story, “The Ungoverned” (it can be found in his recent Collected Stories). If you’re a serious anarcho-libertarian, do you agree that individuals should be able to have their very own nukes? If you disagree, on what grounds do you justify your disagreement? Discuss.

Belle Waring has a brilliant lampoon of utopian libertarian discourse .

I recently read Nietzsche’s The Genealogy of Morality with a group of colleagues. To the extent to which I understood the book (and despite the book’s brevity I’m feeling somewhat sympathetic to those snakes who have to sit around whilst they digest a large mammal), my comprehension was greatly assisted by Brian Leiter’s excellent Nietzsche on Morality . Reading the reviews and commentary on Mel Gibson’s Passion, I was immediately reminded of a passage from the second essay, where Nietzsche is writing about the genesis of guilt from the sense of indebtedness (at first to ancestors) and remarks on the further excruciating twist that Christianity brings: on the pretext of having their debts forgiven, believers are put in a postition of psychological indebtedness from which they can _never_ recover (He sent his only son, and we _killed_ Him):

bq. …. we confront the paradoxical and horrifying expedient with which a martyred humanity found temporary relief, that stroke of genius of Christianity—God’s sacrifice of himself for the guilt of human beings, God paying himself back with himself, God as the only one who can redeem man from what for human beings has become impossible to redeem—the creditor sacrifices himself for the debtor, out of love (can people believe that?), out of love for his debtor! (sec. 21)

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The New York Times has an article on Dissent Magazine, which is about to hit its 50th anniversary. It’s a publication which is a little to my right, and to the right of some other CT-ites, but has published some really good pieces over the years. The Times refers to Dissent‘s continuing financial difficulties – the journal has always been a labour of love, more aimed at getting ideas into circulation than at breaking even. This leads to an interesting question. There’s always been a lot of guff in the blogosphere about how blogs represent a fundamental threat to traditional media. It’s mostly nonsense – Atrios and Glenn Reynolds aren’t about to eat the NYT’s lunch any time soon, let alone Crooked Timber. Still, the one section of the media that faces a real challenge to adapt is the small opinion journal. There are things that these journals can do that bloggers are bad at – run long and detailed articles for one. But blogs – at least the more successful ones – are arguably starting to catch up (and in certain areas of debate to dominate). And they’re a lot cheaper. _Dissent_ has a circulation of 8-10,000 and loses over $100,000 a year. It costs a few hundred dollars a year to run a blog with the same daily readership.

I don’t think that these magazines are going to disappear – I certainly hope not. According to Chris, _Imprints_, another small journal, seems to have no trouble in covering its costs. However, if blogs continue to feed directly and indirectly into public debate, it’ll be hard for small journals to resist taking advantage of the possibilities (and cost savings) that they offer. I imagine that we’ll see various forms of symbiosis continuing to emerge, from opinion-blogs like Talking Point Memo, through blog-journal hybrids like the TAP and Reason websites, to niche print journals that get smarter about using bloggers to get the word out about good pieces. All sounds good to me.

[via politicaltheory.info

Nice to see the APSA Foundations of Political Theory website has been revised and extended (link via Political Theory Daily Review). Lots of very useful links for anyone interested in the field.

Yesterday, a colleague pointed out to me the following passage in the late Jean Hampton’s Political Philosophy . Professor Hampton, who died in 1996, must have thought it inconceivable that a certain person would achieve high political office:

bq. Now while it is undeniable that some people are smarter or more virtuous or stronger than other people, these differences by themselves do not seem relevant to establishing political domination. Think, for example, of all the ways in which people are different from one another, physically, mentally and temperamentally. If someone has greater muscle strength than another, does that mean that he gets to rule the other? No: Arnold Schwarzenegger is not considered, by virtue of his physical prowess, a political authority. (p. 19)

According to conservative philosopher Roger Scruton, Immanuel Kant would have been a supporter of the Iraq war . I’m posting this as a curiosity, really, since it seems unlikely to me that Kant, who didn’t allow peoples the right to overthrow despots (however much he might rejoice at the consequences) would have allowed the legitimacy of one people overthrowing another people’s regime (however despotic).

While we’re on the subject of anniversaries, I just got an invitation to a conference on the 300th anniversary of the death of John Locke (Southern Hemisphere readers can email j.jones@griffith.edu.au, there are also events at Yale and Oxford.

I was first introduced to Locke through his demolition of Sir Robert Filmer’s Patriarchia in which the divine right of kings is derived from the supposed natural rights of fathers, beginning with Adam. Locke has great fun with this, pointing out that if Filmer is right, there is a single rightful monarch for the entire planet, namely the man most directly descended from Adam under the rules of primogeniture – by implication, all existing monarchs (except perhaps one) are usurpers who can justly be overthrown.

I was very disappointed then, to discover that Locke’s own analysis of property rights was no better than Filmer’s theory of divine right; in fact worse. Rights to property are supposed to be obtained by the first productive user and then passed on by inheritance and voluntary transfer. So, if we could locate the Garden of Eden, where Adam delved, his lineal descendent, if not king of the world, would be the rightful owner of Eden. To determine a rightful allocation of property, we would need to repeat the same exercise for every hectare on the planet. The Domesday Book wouldn’t even get you started on this task.

That was thirty years ago or so, and science has advanced a lot since then, to the point where we can award victory to (a modified version of) Filmer. By careful analysis of DNA, we can now postulate a mitochondrial Eve and Y-chromosomal Adam from whom we are all descended (of course, there’s no reason to suppose the two were contemporaneous). Suppose, following the practice of various hereditary monarchies, we identify the rightful heir of Y-chromosomal Adam as the man with the smallest number of accumulated mutations (defects from the point of view of a strongly hereditary principle). In principle, this man could be identified uniquely. In practice, I imagine it would be possible to identify the ethnic group to which this man belongs, probably somewhere in Africa, and crown some prominent member of that group. A feminist version, with descent on matriarchal lines, is equally reasonable and, on the current state of scientific knowledge, a litte more practical.

Of course, for those of us who don’t buy patriarchal/matriarchal arguments in the first place, this isn’t at all compelling. But I don’t find Locke’s theory of property any more compelling and, unlike Filmer, his theory is no closer to implementability than it was 300 years ago.
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A friend emails with details of a Flash presentation (full screen version here ) explaining why libertarianism is the most appropriate political philosophy for matchstick people who have swallowed a collection of bizarre objects and like listening to Tubular Bells (TB on smaller version only).

I just came across the following interesting quote from Harvey Mansfield:

bq. Procreation is considered to be part of a perfect or complete human life

He is quoted in the course of Stephen Macedo’s absolute blinder of an essay, “Homosexuality and the Conservative Mind” (Georgetown Law Journal, 1995, no internet access, I’m afraid). Although Mansfield distances himself from the view (‘is considered to be’), its fair to assume that he is committing himself to it, given that he is using it to oppose homosexuality in general and gay marriage in particular. Macedo deals well — no, brilliantly — with Mansfield and his ilk, but part of the brilliance of his essay is that he concedes so much to the conservatives, yet still comes up with homosexuality defended as morally innocent, and homosexual marriage defended as a positive good. So part of his strategy is to concede the vital importance of procreation to human flourishing.

An alternative strategy, common among liberals, would be to deny the relevance of the claim to formulating policy.

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The Colloquium in Legal and Social Philosophy at University College London’s School of Public Policy looks very interesting this spring, with papers from Frances Kamm, G. A. Cohen, Jo Wolff, Cass Sunstein and others. (And the papers are downloadable too). First up is Frances Kamm (NYU) on ‘Failures of Just War Theory and Terrorism’.

Via A Fistful of Euros, I see that Norberto Bobbio has died at the age of 94. Like all the best Italian intellectuals, he played an important role in public life; unlike some of them, his contribution to political debate was marked by an extraordinary level of personal integrity and decency. His approach to political theory was difficult to categorize in the usual terms – while he drew both on liberal and social democratic ideas, there was a more radical and subversive tinge to his thought than is usually associated with either of those schools. The Guardian obit has it about right; “to his credit, he founded no school, while influencing many.” He’ll be missed.

I quoted from the now notorious Benny Morris interview yesterday. Norman Geras has now posted some of his thoughts on the matters raised by the interview.

I see that Chris Brooke is guest-blogging over at a Fistful of Euros. He’s sure to say much of interest at what is becoming one of the best blogs around. His first post there alerted me to something I’d missed, namely Scott Martens's excellent exposition of Marx's On The Jewish Question (in comments – you have to scroll down), which connects with some of the issues discussed in my post below about Clermont-Tonnerre and the 1789 debates about the rights of man in the French National Assembly.