I’ll be participating in a live Q&A session for the Guardian on this topic next Thursday (23rd) 1-4pm (UK time). Philosophers, philosophy graduates (and anyone else) with good ideas for what to say are welcome to email me with suggestions or advice at C-dot-Bertram-at- bristol-dot-ac-dot-uk . And if you’re interested, perhaps a current philosophy student or an intending one, then please tune in.

Available from “Amazon”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1416588698?ie=UTF8&tag=henryfarrell-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=1416588698 “Powells”:http://www.powells.com/partner/29956/biblio/9781416588696 .

This is a transformative book. It’s the best book on American politics that I’ve read since _Before the Storm._ Not all of it is original (the authors seek to synthesize others’ work as well as present their own, but provide due credit where credit is due). Not all of its arguments are fully supported (the authors provide a strong circumstantial case to support their argument, but don’t have smoking gun evidence on many of the relevant causal relations). But it should transform the ways in which we think about and debate the political economy of the US.

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For your postmodern entertainment, a few stories about the social construction of reality on the political right
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Felix Salmon has a great piece responding to a WSJ puff piece on the American trademark troll company that has stolen the name “Ugg boot” then used “intellectual property” laws to impose the absurd claim that the only genuine Uggs are those made in China.

The world would be better off if intellectual property were abolished, or at least scaled back to the more modest claims of the 19th century. The attempts of the US government to defend IP monopoly rights in their most extreme form are one of the many reasons American “soft power” is such a perishable commodity.

The Australian election three weeks ago turned out about as close as possible. The two main parties (Labour and the permanent Liberal-National-Liberal National coalition) each ended up with 72 seats (out of 150) and almost exactly 50 per cent of the two-party preferred vote, the relevant measure of support in our preferential (=IRV/AV) system. That left six remaining seats: one Green, one non-coalition National, one leftish independent and three country independents, all formerly associated with the conservative National party). Because the Parliament has a Speaker, 76 supporters are required for a stable government.

Unsurprisingly, things took a while to sort themselves out. Because of postal voting and the need for recounts, the final determination of seats took more than a week. Then there was another week of haggling and jockeying. The Green MP declared for Labor first, followed by the leftish independent (Labor) and the dissident National (Coalition). No surprises there. That left the three country independents. It was expected they would move as a bloc, but in the end, one announced support for the Coalition, and the other two for Labor (the last of them spending half an our of explanation before finally stating what had been obvious from the moment his ally went that way). So, after 17 days, it was 76-74, and Julia Gillard retained the office she had snatched from Kevin Rudd only weeks before the election.

Overall, it was a startlingly good outcome. Any democratic system is going to have trouble when the vote is as close as this, but compared to the US in 2000, or Belgium/Holland right now, things went relatively smoothly. And, startlingly, to get the independents on board, Labor actually had to promise better government, rather than pork-barreling for those electorates fortunate enough to have a pivotal vote. By contrast, the Liberal leader Tony Abbott, came with an open chequebook and was rebuffed. It’s true that the effect will be to give much more favorable treatment to rural and regional areas in general, but the independents have a fair enough basis for the claim that these areas have been neglected (complex and competing calculations of the relative treatment of urban and rural areas are a staple of Australian policywonkery).

Even better, when the newly elected Senate takes its place (not until July 2011 thanks to the marvels of our electoral system) Labor’s dependence on the Greens will be enhanced by the existence of a Labor-Green majority in the Upper House. Going into the election, Labor had dumped the commitment to action on climate change that gave it victory in 2007 (how this happened is too depressing to relate. I think George Monbiot covered it a while back). But now, with the government dependent on Greens and greenish independents, the issue is back on the agenda.

It’s often said that a country gets the government it deserved. Going into the election, with two competing leaders who had seized power without any real popular support, and policy platforms derived entirely from particularly dimwitted focus groups, I wondered what we Australians had done to deserve this. Now, I wonder how we merited such good fortune. I only hope it will last.

Makes it into the “New York Times Magazine”:http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/12/magazine/12FOB-IdeaLab-t.html

bq. in the ranks of captured and confessed terrorists, engineers and engineering students are significantly overrepresented. Maybe that’s a numerological accident. The sociologist Diego Gambetta and the political scientist Steffen Hertog don’t think so.

bq. Each month, Gambetta and Hertog’s database grows. Last December, Abdulmutallab’s attempt over Detroit. In February, Joseph Andrew Stack, a software engineer, crashed his plane into I.R.S. offices in Austin, Tex. In March, John Patrick Bedell, an engineering grad student, opened fire at an entrance to the Pentagon. In early May, Faisal Shahzad (bachelor of science in computer science and engineering) was arrested at Kennedy Airport for a failed attempt to set off a bomb in Times Square. Also in May, Faiz Mohammad, a civil engineer, was caught at Karachi’s airport with batteries and an electrical circuit hidden in his shoes. And going back, of the 9/11 conspirators who had been educated beyond high school, eight studied engineering. As this list suggests, the phenomenon isn’t confined to Muslims or Middle Easterners.

Nine years after the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, we’ve all had plenty of time to think about war and its justifications. My own views have moved me steadily towards the viewpoint that war is hardly ever justified either morally or in terms of the rational self-interest of those involved. The obvious problem is that, if no one else is willing to fight, an aggressor could benefit by making demands backed by force. It seems to me, however, that this problem can be overcome by admitting that self-defense (including collective self-defense) is justified only to the extent of restoring the status quo ante bellum. That is, having defeated an aggressor, a country is not justified in seizing territory, unilaterally exacting reparations or imposing a new government on its opponent. Conversely, and regardless of the alleged starting point, countries not directly involved should never recognise a forcibly imposed transfer of territory or similar attempt to achieve advantages through war.

This isn’t a novel idea by any means, but I haven’t found an adequate discussion, and the discourse of International Relations theory seems to me worse than useless, being dominated by unrealities like ‘international realism’ , opposed to the strawman of ‘idealism’. Just war theory seems a bit more satisfactory, but I haven’t found it helpful in relation to the hard cases. [1]

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James Scott is at “Cato Unbound”:http://www.cato-unbound.org/2010/09/08/james-c-scott/the-trouble-with-the-view-from-above/ this month, talking about problems with the state. I’d have _much preferred_ to have seen him stirring it up a little bit, by arguing against markets along the lines that he does in a recent interview elsewhere on the internets.1

bq. It seems to me that large-scale exchange and trade in any commodities at all require a certain level of standardization. Cronon’s book _Nature’s metropolis,_ which is a kind of ecological history of Chicago, has a chapter on the futures market for grain. There exists a tremendous natural variety in the kind of corn, soya and wheat that were grown, but they all have to be sorted into two or three grades in the great granaries, and to be shipped abroad in huge cargo ships–the impetus to standardize in the granaries found its way back to the landscape and diversity of the surroundings of Chicago, reducing the entire region to monocropping.

bq. It’s the same principle at work as I describe in _Seeing like a State_ with regards to the _Normalbaum_ in German scientific forestry. Agricultural commodities become standardized as they move and bulk in international trade. If you build a McDonalds or Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise, they tell you architecturally exactly how to construct it, you have to buy the equipment that is standardized, it all has to be placed in the same relationship to the other things in the floor plan, so it’s all worked out in detail, and it is worked out in such detail to produce a standardized burger or standardized fried chicken. And because it is standardized, the person who comes from the corporate headquarters can come with a kind of checklist in which every place is more or less the same, and they can check on cleanliness, quality, productivity and conformity to the corporate standard. This is the kind of control over distance that is required for industrial purposes. In the end, what is the assembly line? It is an effort to standardize the unit of labor power. The processes are not so different for grain production, burgers, or cars—as are the effects on diversity. Contract farming is then an instance to adapt agriculture to post-Fordist conditions with a higher emphasis on demand.
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(as an analytic approach mind you, not as a way to behave).

“Chris”:https://crookedtimber.org/2010/09/08/getting-the-microfoundations-right-some-comments-and-a-bleg/ and “Lenin”:http://leninology.blogspot.com/2010/09/rational-choice-marxism.html argue back against my defense of rational choice theory for lefties (and John Quiggin has some criticisms scattered through comments too). Below the fold is my clarification of my argument, at Holbovian length, with some responses folded in.

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Scott “reluctantly capitulates”:http://www.insidehighered.com/views/mclemee/mclemee305 to the e-reader revolution.

I recently had the pleasure of attending the “European Society for Philosophy and Psychology conference in Bochum, Germany”:http://www.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/philosophy/espp2010/index.html . The highlight for me was attending a talk by “Michael Tomasello”:http://email.eva.mpg.de/~tomas/ of the Max Planck Institute, Leipzig on pre-linguistic communication. Getting home, I ordered a copy of Tomasello’s “Why We Cooperate”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0262013592/junius-20 in which he argues, on the basis of detailed empirical work with young children and other primates, that humans are hard-wired with certain pro-social dispositions to inform, help, share etc and to engage in norm-guided behaviour of various kinds. Many of the details of Tomasello’s work are controversial (the book is essentially his Tanner Lectures and contains replies by Silk, Dweck, Skyrms and Spelke) and I lack the competence to begin to adjudicate some of the disputes. But this much is, I think, clear: that work in empirical psychology and evolutionary anthropolgy (and related fields) doesn’t – quelle surprise! – support anything like the Hobbesian picture of human nature that lurks at the foundations of microeconomics, rational choice theory and, indeed, in much contemporary and historical political philosophy.
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Not only is Christian nationalist libertarianism a problematic philosophy, but old DC Romance comics have issues as well.

From Heart Throbs: The Best of DC Romance Comics. Tragically out of print but I snagged an old copy cheap – ‘for Belle’ – as I like to say. (Damn, I wouldn’t buy the hardback at that price.)

I was going to snark about a week-old Jonah Goldberg column. “I confess, if Beck wasn’t a libertarian, I would find his populism terrifying.” But I see Will Wilkinson already said it: “If Mr Beck’s libertarian streak, such as it is, is all that keeps his demos-whispering puppetmastery from reducing Mr Goldberg to a quivering heap, it seems to me this weekend’s pageant of platitudes should not have been reassuring at all.” Cato’s loss.

The problem for Beck – and Goldberg – is obvious: it doesn’t make sense just to join Christian nationalism with libertarianism at the hip, and leave it at that. Conservatism as secular-theocratic/communitarian-individualistic/tribal-cosmopolitan philosophy. Conservatives will respond that it is the genius of conservatism to nurture a ‘fruitful tension’ hereabouts. My complaint against ‘fusionism’ is standard, and so is the stock ‘hobgoblin of little minds’ brush-off of my complaint. But let me try to say something brief about this that I haven’t seen said briefly in quite this way.

The rhetorical advantage of having a set of ‘principles’ that is, in effect, massively over-productive of permissions and prohibitions, is that you can take a ‘principled’ stand for pretty much anything, or against it, in roughly one step. You can call for vast individual sacrifices for the greater good. You can denounce any and all such calls for sacrifice. You can come out in favor of heavy-handed statism and paternalism. You can denounce everything except the minimal, night-watchman state. So it goes.

Your ‘principles’ are functioning as a volume knob on your preferences. If you like something, turn it up to 10. If you don’t like it, mute it out. You don’t have anything doing the job principles are generally thought to do: namely, acting as any sort of critical check.

Is this unfair to Beck – or Goldberg? After all, it’s probably true that political wisdom consists in judiciously balancing incommensurable values. Edmund Burke meets Isaiah Berlin-ish stuff. Yes, but the paradigm of respecting the crooked timber of humanity shouldn’t be treating your principles as servants that get you what you want, then melt discretely into the woodwork. You have to see, at a minimum, why Hayek wrote “Why I Am Not A Conservative”. If you don’t acknowledge that this makes serious trouble for Christian nationalist libertarianism, you simply aren’t a libertarian. Or a Christian nationalist. You’re just self-indulgent and/or a professional facilitator of self-indulgence in others.

(I am reminded of a post from a few years back in which Goldberg solved the riddle of how Hayek could fail to be a conservative by claiming he wasn’t talking about American conservatives. Which is, to put it mildly, a misreading.)

UPDATE: Yes, I know the rhetoric was rather blandly interfaith. But this is an example of what I am talking about, not a counter-example to it. If you think about it.

Last time I looked at a proposal to spend $50 billion on infrastructure to stimulate the economy, I thought it was a great idea. This time, I think it’s scarcely worth the bother. Why have I changed my mind?

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