by Ingrid Robeyns on January 26, 2011
“Feminist Philosophers“:http://feministphilosophers.wordpress.com/ has for some years been conducting a “gendered conference campaign”:http://feministphilosophers.wordpress.com/gendered-conference-campaign/, a campaign against conferences where all speakers are men. I support this campaign. A conference in which all speakers are men is undesirable in terms of its outcomes: it gives a biased representation of the field, the likelihoods are that wo/men cover different topics and/or use different methodologies, we don’t want to put off (female) grad students by giving them the implicit message that the field is not welcoming to them, and we want women scholars to be given an opportunity to present their work. A conference with only male speakers is also likely to be the result of a biased process in which the organisors have given free hand to gendered stereotypes that influence us when thinking about who the ‘interesting speakers’ in the respective fields may be; although the evidence on these kind of implicit bias processes is by now vast, I still regularly come across instances where conference organisors have not given this any thought.
Now it seems like we’ll have to extent this campaign to include Summerschools: to my surprise, I received a call for participation for “a Summerschool”:http://www.summer.ceu.hu/02-courses/course-sites/justice/index-justice.php on ‘Justice: Theory and Applications’ yesterday, which includes six teachers, all male. Theories of justice belong to my own area of specialisation, and I thus can say with some confidence that there are plenty of interesting, excellent contributors out there who are female. In fact, in my Research Master Course ‘Contemporary Theories of Justice’, one student remarked that he had never had a philosophy course with so many female authors on the reading list.
Clearly there may be additional hurdles: for example, it may be the case that female scholars are more likely to refuse an invitation. Or there may be areas where it really is much more difficult, bordering at the level of the impossible, to find female teachers. But that’s definitely not the case for theories of justice.
by John Holbo on January 26, 2011
Teaching ‘Philosophy and Film’ this semester, with a focus on sf, I’m amused to read this bit from a Salon piece by Michael Lind:
If there was a moment when the culture of enlightened modernity in the United States gave way to the sickly culture of romantic primitivism, it was when the movie “Star Wars” premiered in 1977. A child of the 1960s, I had grown up with the optimistic vision symbolized by “Star Trek,” according to which planets, as they developed technologically and politically, graduated to membership in the United Federation of Planets, a sort of galactic League of Nations or UN. When I first watched “Star Wars,” I was deeply shocked. The representatives of the advanced, scientific, galaxy-spanning organization were now the bad guys, and the heroes were positively medieval – hereditary princes and princesses, wizards and ape-men. Aristocracy and tribalism were superior to bureaucracy. Technology was bad. Magic was good.
He’s got the film history wrong. Metropolis came before Star Wars. Hell, so did Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times: that’s dystopian sf. Also, it isn’t really right to say that the theme of Star Wars is ‘technology bad’. Star Wars is really more a case of lacking a ‘science good’ message. Also, Star Trek is conspicuously moderate in its pro-science thematizing. Kirk is the captain, exemplifying the properly adventurous equilibrium point between McCoy’s emotionalism and Spock’s rationalism. Hell, that’s the theme of Metropolis, too. You need ‘mediation’ and ‘moderation’ between pure science and … some more human source of meaning.
I think we should distinguish at least six or seven stances. [click to continue…]
by Henry Farrell on January 25, 2011
It appears that the Irish election will take place on “February 25”:http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/breaking/2011/0124/breaking8.html. It should be an interesting one. Some basic briefing notes below: commenters should feel free to add stuff/disagree as appropriate.
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by Chris Bertram on January 25, 2011
In the UK we are being treated to “a rich and enjoyable series of programmes on Justice featuring Michael Sandel”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/tv/seasons/justiceseason/ . No doubt there will be quibblers, but I think he’s done a great job so far. Last night’s episode discussed Bentham, Kant and Aristotle and, for my money, both utilitarians (in the shape of Peter Singer) and various German Kant-fans came across as slightly unhinged. The moment that most summed this up, however, was discussion of the German Constitutional Court’s Kant-inspired dismissal of a law that would allow the federal authorities to shoot down a hijacked airliner destined to crash into a city with catastrophic loss of life. “Judgement here”:http://www.bundesverfassungsgericht.de/entscheidungen/rs20060215_1bvr035705en.html . According to these Kantians, even if the passengers are doomed to die in the next few minutes and shooting-down the plane will save many lives on the ground, to attack the airliner would show a lack of respect for their human diginity, purposiveness, endiness etc. and so is forbidden. For me, that looks like a reductio.
by Kieran Healy on January 24, 2011
Erik over at The Monkey Cage points me towards the excellent Better Book Titles, where you can find numerous contemporary and classic works slightly altered in a way that the title is more informative about their actual content. In closing he says,
If you can do anything like this with a political science book, I’d consider putting it on the Cage.
So what he’s looking for are titles that better convey the core of the argument of academic monographs. Like this.
Of course, we shouldn’t just pick on the famous. So, below the fold, one a bit closer to home.
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by John Q on January 22, 2011
Much recent discussion of the future of the euro, most notably that of Paul Krugman, has started from the idea that Europe is not an optimal currency area, and that a ‘one-size fits all’ monetary policy is therefore bound to lead to the kinds of problems we are now observing. At any given time, some countries would benefit from a more expansionary policy and others from a more contractionary policy, so the effect of monetary union is an unsatisfactory splitting of the difference.
Without resolving that issue in general terms, I want to argue that this is not an accurate description of the current state of the eurozone. It’s true that Germany is doing a lot better than the eurozone as a whole, and the peripheral countries a lot worse. So, the optimal policy for Germany alone would be tighter than for the rest of the eurozone. The peripheral countries might benefit from an even more expansionary policy (though that’s not as clear to me as it seems to be to others. A heavily indebted country that undertakes monetary expansion is likely to find it hard to sell bonds denominated in its own currency).
But when you look at the actual policies of the ECB, including Trichet’s recent threat to raise interest rates, it’s hard to see that this policy is optimal for any EU country, even Germany.
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by Tobias Schulze-Cleven on January 20, 2011
As the Euro crisis deepened, the German government’s crisis management became the object of increasingly intense criticism. Being perceived to have “fallen out of love with Europe,” the country seemed to be “making a huge profit at the expense of the other Europeans, while simultaneously, at the political level, relinquishing its European responsibility.” 1 Many of the individual charges directed at Germany were right on the mark, particularly those about the one-sidedness and self-serving nature of German discourse about the country’s economic renaissance, which largely failed to acknowledge the strongly positive impact of the Euro on the economy. But other accusations were remarkable for their own biases. With the often clearly defined drawbacks of German actions, it has been relatively easy to criticize them. However, given the complexity of the challenges facing the Euroarea, it is far harder to say what German positions should actually be.
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by Sheri Berman on January 20, 2011
During the global economic crisis, Germany has received more attention than probably most scholars and observers would have predicted. Early on, much attention was paid to the country’s purported decision to go the “austerity” rather than the “Keynesian” route; more recently scrutiny has been focused on its purportedly obstructionist role in the European Union’s meltdown. While both of these claims have some truth on the surface, neither really captures fully what is going on.
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by Henry Farrell on January 20, 2011
Most of the contributions to this seminar begin with Germany’s internal politics and work outwards. This short piece instead emphasizes the external consequences, asking what they mean for European Union politics, taking Ireland as a test case. Ireland is the only ‘Anglo-Saxon’ member of an economic and monetary union which was built largely in order to match German preferences. Both its current crisis, and the ways in which Germany (and other EU member states) are seeking to respond to it, provide evidence about German preferences, and their intellectual and material limitations when they become generalized as policy prescriptions at the European level. Because Economic and Monetary Union only provides fiscal restraints, and no very useful means of intervening in private markets, Germany and other member states face stark limits in their ability to prevent, and even to respond to crises that originate in the private sector. Moreover, when they do, they are likely to find their interventions politicized, and strongly resented by the populations of the countries that are intervened in.
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by Henry Farrell on January 20, 2011
I’m about to post the final contributions to the seminar on Germany. Many thanks to the participants and to the Center for German and European Studies and Mortara Center for International Affairs at Georgetown, who hosted the original meeting. The URL for the entire seminar is “https://crookedtimber.org/category/germany-seminar/”:https://crookedtimber.org/category/germany-seminar/. Those who would prefer to read the seminar on paper, or using your PDF-compatible portable reader of choice, can find the complete seminar “here”:https://crookedtimber.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/germany.pdf.
by Matthias Matthijs on January 19, 2011
_The German question never dies. Instead, like a flu virus, it mutates. (The Economist, 21 October 2010)_
In late September 2010, Brazil’s Finance Minister Guido Mantega commented in Sao Paulo that the world was “in the midst of an international currency war.” His comments effectively ended all the premature praise for the G-20’s efforts at international cooperation with regard to the global financial crisis. In vogue came the assessment of the actual lack of cooperation as evidenced by the growing tensions and fault lines between the new global institution’s main protagonists, China and the United States, who disagree so starkly on the origin of the global macroeconomic imbalances. Those systemic imbalances – a large US current account deficit balanced by large current account surpluses in China, Japan, and Germany – have been identified as one of the main causes of the credit crunch of 2007-8 which led to the Great Recession. The central issue preventing a unified solution to the current crisis is whether the main cause of those imbalances is a global savings glut in Europe and Asia, or deficient savings and too loose monetary policy in the United States. This disagreement has risen to the forefront of the existing crisis debate as evidenced by Mantega’s remarks. No one point of view, or ”narrative,” so far seems to have won the day and allowed cooperative steps forward.
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by Wade Jacoby on January 19, 2011
Two popular views of Germany have dominated the current debate about the European financial crisis. Both are wrong. The first view sees Germany as an economically virtuous island in a sea of European profligacy. This is the view of most German voters and of their chancellor, Angela Merkel. In this view, Germany was industrious and prudent while others (Greece, Ireland, Hungary) were profligate. Therefore, these countries should rebalance their accounts without a “bailout” from Germany. This view conveniently ignores that German firms and banks financed these imbalances and that absent external demand for German goods and capital, Germans would be poorer. To put it bluntly, Germany can profitably do what it does only if most others do not.
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by Mark Vail on January 19, 2011
In the aftermath of the current economic downturn, German policy makers turned to Keynesianism with ambivalence, hesitation, and no small amount of bad faith. Notoriously fearful of debt, government spending, and state power, the German government was among the last in the G-20 to adopt a stimulus package, as one might well have expected. And yet, German stimulus measures were actually more than met the eye and represented one of the more extensive efforts in Europe, though the rhetoric surrounding the debate over the package hewed closely to traditional German narratives about fiscal probity, debt, and inflation. This inconsistency between rhetoric and reality also characterized the German turn to austerity in summer 2009. While excoriating the Greeks for fiscal profligacy and egged on by an unsavory public discourse about southern European work habits, Chancellor Angela Merkel announced plans to cut euro 80 billion from the German federal budget over the next four years. And yet, these cuts amounted to less than they appeared and spared politically powerful groups.
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by Aaron Boesenecker on January 19, 2011
As Mark Twain once observed, “The trouble with the world is not that people know too little, but that they know so many things that aren’t so.'” The aphorism is appropriate in light of the current confusion concerning Germany’s role within Europe. According to German public and political discourse, Germany is experiencing a second economic miracle (look no farther than the FT Deutschland’s “Wirtschaftwunder blog”:http://www.ftd.de/wirtschaftswunder ) thanks to balanced social and economic policies, fiscal responsibility, and respect for the rules and institutions of the European Union. Although much attention has been paid to this “new” German model, little has been focused on how this reading of events was constructed or, to use Twain’s formulation, how and why many among the German public and elite are convinced of so many “things that aren’t so.” Doing so not only helps clarify the seemingly contradictory or ad hoc nature of contemporary German politics. It also sheds light on how problematic the current German approach is as a perceived solution to Europe’s woes.
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by Mark Blyth on January 18, 2011
bq. _Things Continue, `Till they Don’t …_
The end game for the Germans, and the rest of Europe, in terms of resolving the current Eurozone crisis is pretty straightforward. There are four ways to deal with a financial crisis: devalue, default, inflate, or deflate. For any country in the Eurozone who transferred private debt from the banking sector to their public balance sheets, and thus blew a hole in their debts and deficits, neither inflation nor devaluation were options. That leaves default, which pushes the costs onto bondholders, or deflation, through domestic wages and prices via the public balance sheet, which places the costs onto taxpayers. For a host of reasons, as guardians of the Eurozone, as an inflation-averse savings-culture, we would expect the Germans to prefer austerity to expediency, and force deflation, but there are real and obvious limits to any such strategy, which is what I have found puzzling since the crisis began just over a year ago.
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