“Here”:http://bnreview.barnesandnoble.com/t5/Reviews-Essays/Edward-Said-The-Charisma-of-Criticism/ba-p/2721

bq. And so, two or three generations of young radical intellectuals have now had the pleasure of discovering that they are ever so much more radical than Edward Said. It must be very pleasant for them, but none of them has yet amounted to a replacement. With H. Aram Veeser’s _Edward Said: The Charisma of Criticism,_ we have a different sort of Oedipal drama on display. The stakes are less political than personal. It is an insightful book, but also a strange one, charged with an ambivalence towards its subject that is perhaps as intense as Said’s toward the works he discussed in _Orientalism_ or _Culture and Imperialism._

John Gray on the disappearance of utopian dreams of social reform in science fiction “here”:http://www.newstatesman.com/fiction/2010/06/human-life-world-science-city. His taste in SF is excellent and he has several good lines.

bq. The role of science has been to gauge the limits of the species, with new technologies and extra-planetary environments being used as virtual laboratories for an ongoing thought experiment. If the mainstream novel employs the lens of the commonplace career – birth and education, marriage and divorce, ambition and failure – SF has pursued the inquiry by abducting the human animal and placing it in alien environments.

is particularly nice. It captures real (if not universal) differences without fetishizing the one as better than the other.

However, the main argument seems to me to say more about John Gray than it does about the genre he is writing about. [click to continue…]

We’ll be hosting one of our book events on Erik Olin Wright’s new book, Envisioning Real Utopias (UK) in the Fall (probably late September), so I thought I’d let people know that the book is out (and excellent) so you can get hold of it and read it in time, if you want to.

Erik has spent a long time working on the book, and even longer on the ideas (I remember a meeting in 1994, in which he announced his decision to name the broader project of which this is a part the “Real Utopias Project” — predating, I think, Rawls’s use of the phrase “realistic utopianism”). At the core of the RUP (more details here), and of the book, is a recognition that the anti-capitalist left has been strong on critique of capitalism, but weak on the presentation of feasible alternatives, and in particular on providing the kind of detail about those alternatives that demonstrates both how they would realize egalitarian values and makes them open to scrutiny and critique. Envisioning Real Utopias is both a manifesto and a guidebook, if you like: an argument for taking institutional design seriously, and a guide to how to do that. Its a book that sociologists will want to read, but also, frankly, that everyone in political theory and philosophy should be reading too (even if they do not think of themselves as egalitarians). To be honest, I’ve been living close to the book so long that it I realize my endorsement may not be unbiased. Here, then, is what Swift says about it on the back cover:

Hugely rich and stimulating, Envisioning Real Utopias is may books in one: an incisive diagnosis of the harms done by capitalism; a masterful synthesis of the best work in political sociology and political economy over the past thirty years; and innovative theoretical framework for conceptualizing both the goals of progressive change and the strategies for their achievement; and inspiring story of actually existing challenges to capitalism that have arisen within capitalism itself; and a compelling essay on the relation between the desirable, the viable and the achievable. Anyone interested in the future of leftist politics has to read this book.

I agree.

And here is Erik introducing the book:

Envisioning Real Utopias from West Coast Poverty Center on Vimeo.

David Williams writes at The Daily Texan:

bq. On May 22, the State Board of Education voted 9-5 to reform its secondary-school social studies curriculum, emphasizing that the content of these guidelines serves to enable students to “appreciate the basic democratic values of our state and nation.” While these reforms have been broadly condemned by liberals across the country, it is important that both liberals and conservatives together become more broadly familiar with the texts now firmly in the curriculum. Specifically, we should take a closer look at Charles de Montesquieu, Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Thomas Aquinas. …

Read the whole thing, as they say.

BoingBoing has an interview with John Robb, a security consultant whose book, ‘Brave New War; the Next Stage of Terrorism and the End of Globalization’, is about the idea of open-source warfare. Robb comes across as a classic, Washington idea-salesman, tarting up what may still be sharp insights into the kind of gee-whizz, tech-determinist hyperbole that might result from a drunken gene-merge of Wired and Jane’s:

“Back in 2004, the US military was getting trounced in guerrillas in Iraq. Worse, the US military establishment didn’t know why. Didn’t have a clue. To correct this, I began to write about how 21st Century warfare actually worked on my blog, Global Guerrillas. Essentially, I concluded that guerrilla groups could use open source organizational models (drawn from the software industry), networked super-empowerment (freely available high tech tools, network information access, connections to a globalized economy), and systems disruption (the targeting of critical points on infrastructure networks that cause cascading failures) to defeat even the most powerful of opponents, even a global superpower.”

Call me parochial, but isn’t this just the sort of thing Michael Collins was doing 90 years ago?

Apart from lower coordination and communication costs and bigger, juicier systems to disrupt, is there a substantive difference between the ability of a small, clever and determined group of people to humble a global super-power today as compared to 1919? Or, as we might say in the language of my current employer, are the modern and forward-looking insurgents of today “utilizing south-south networks to share best practice and enable technology transfer and empowerment at the grassroots to forge alternative development pathways”? [click to continue…]

I was thirteen at the time of Bloody Sunday, so I can remember it just about. It is hard to know what to think about today’s report. On the one hand, it is a kind of justice, however inadequate, for the relatives; on the other, it has taken nearly forty years. And the British government has spent £200 million to tell us what we all knew anyway: that British paratroopers murdered fourteen civilians in cold blood and that a subsequent “inquiry” (Widgery) was a whitewash. Still, it is one thing knowing the truth (as we already did) and it is another to have it publicly acknowledged. Will there be prosecutions? Doubtful.

Those who have followed CT from before its inception will know about the important role of Ladybird Books in our intellectual formation. Here, via Jacob C and via the Guardian’s NZ-Slovakia commentary, is “Naranjito: World Cup Final in Danger”:http://www.pointlessmuseum.com/museum/blog/index.php/2010/06/06/naranjito-world-cup-final-in-danger/ from 1982, featuring an Adolf Hitler lookalike.

More at “The Pointless Weblog”:http://www.pointlessmuseum.com/museum/blog/index.php/2010/06/06/naranjito-world-cup-final-in-danger/ .

After a disastrous poll last week that showed people in Ireland think little of the Taoiseach and less of opposition leader Enda Kenny, Richard Bruton has made a bid for leadership of Fine Gael. I hope he wins.

Bruton is the brains of the operation and an able and articulate politician. He has singlehandedly carried the almost forgotten social democrat mantle in a party long over-run by Christian Democrats who wouldn’t be out of place in North Rhine Westphalia. He has a social conscience and mastery of policy detail almost unknown in Irish politicians, but he seems able to get his ideas across in a straightforward and compelling way. Bruton offers a fully thought-through alternative economic and political vision to the crony capitalism that has dominated Ireland for almost two decades. And, in an era where cutbacks and ‘tough decisions’ are inevitable, he has shown today a willingness to wield the knife. [click to continue…]

The charter school debate has been conducted in public (in the US) almost entirely in terms of whether charter schools do better than regular public schools in terms of the performance of their students on standardized tests (reading and math). Its looking very much that, taken as a whole, they don’t have much effect one way or the other on test scores. This doesn’t mean, of course, that some charter schools mightn’t have considerable effects. It is entirely plausible that, even if charters as a whole do not improve student outcomes, some particular kinds of charters do, and we could, presumably, find out which ones and promote them (and promote their magical qualities, perhaps, even among non-charter schools). For example, Roland Fryer’s much discussed study (to which I’ll return later) indicates that the Promise Academy schools in the Harlem Children’s Zone has had significant effects on math scores in particular, and attributes that gain (plausibly) to the school itself. The Obama administration is so taken with the “high commitment” schools of the kind found in the Harlem Children’s Zone that it required applicants for Race to The Top money to remove barriers to the formation of charters, and has included expansion of charters in its plans for the re-authorization of ESEA.

Let’s go back to Perry Pre-School for a moment. The main lesson people have drawn from Perry Pre-School is that it is worth investing in high quality early childhood programs, not just for what they do for the children, but because they are a relatively high yield economic investment. In fact, new work by David Deming (pdf) concludes that it is even worth investing in lower quality early childhood programs, for the same reason.

But there’s another lesson, which bears in a rather unnerving way on the charter school debate.

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According to “Kenneth Anderson”:http://volokh.com/2010/06/12/habermas-on-the-euro-crisis-and-the-necessity-of-doubling-down-on-the-europe-project/

bq. It is impossible within Habermas’ account — faithfully reflecting German and European history — to disentangle patriotism from nationalism, a fundamental difference of political experience that is one of the chief reasons why American intellectual elite attempts to ape their presumed European betters are so far-fetched, ill-suited, and ultimately ugly.

A very considerable part of Habermas’ intellectual project over the last few years has been _exactly_ to come up with a form of patriotism which is distinct from nationalism. Habermas dubs this “constitutional patriotism” – and while it is not intended to overcome existing forms of nationalism, it is intended to temper them, and to make them non-exclusive. As it happens, one of the sources that Habermas draws on for this is US constitutional politics (he is also interested in the Swiss model). I suspect Anderson hasn’t actually read much Habermas, or he wouldn’t be mischaracterizing Habermas’ work so badly in a failed effort to score a cheap debating point against ‘American intellectual elites.’ It is entirely possible that Habermas’ ideas won’t work – but it is emphatically clear that Habermas _does_ disentangle patriotism and nationalism from each other as intellectual concepts, and that this distinction is at the heart of the broader project on which this essay draws. You might expect someone making grand claims about European intellectuals and their slavish American sycophants to actually know this. You’d be wrong.

This said, I don’t actually agree with Habermas here. Partly this is because I am a pragmatist rather than an idealist. But also, in large part, because I’m pretty skeptical about the potential for deliberative exchange to produce wide-reaching political agreement. Habermas “seems to be hankering”:http://www.thenation.com/article/germany-and-euro-crisis?page=0,0 for a political party (and associated deliberative process) that would lead people to reach a consensus that we are all Europeans now.

bq. Our lame political elites, who prefer to read the headlines in the tabloids, must not use as an excuse that the populations are the obstacle to a deeper European unification. For they know best that popular opinion established by opinion polls is not the same thing as the outcome of a public deliberative process leading to the formation of a democratic will. To date there has not been a single European election or referendum in any country that wasn’t ultimately about national issues and tickets. We are still waiting for a single political party to undertake a constructive campaign to inform public opinion, to say nothing of the blinkered nationalistic vision of the left (by which I do not just mean the German party The Left).

I just don’t think that this is how democratic politics works – or should work. Democracy is about contention rather than reaching a happy-clappy consensus. My best guess (which is to say that I _think_ this is right, but to make a plausible case I would have to make serious arguments rather than just wave my hands around) is that the moment when (if) an actual European polity will be created, will not be the moment when European publics, led by their elites, realize that they are actually Europeans. It will be the moment at which self-interested political parties, rather than arguing and picking petty squabbles about whether ‘we’ should all be Europeans or not, start arguing and picking petty squabbles about what _kind_ of Europeans ‘we’ should be. In other words, Europe is never going to work as a broad consensus underpinned by processes of debate leading to the construction of a ‘democratic will.’ But it might possibly work as a space for faction, conflict and infighting – just the way that national processes work. How you get to this point, I don’t know. But I don’t think deliberation will have much to do with it.

Update: Kenneth Anderson updates his post to respond. I’m happy to withdraw the suggestion that he hasn’t read much Habermas and to apologize for it. I read his text as saying that Habermas couldn’t make any distinction between patriotism rather than that Anderson found his distinction unsatisfactory – but I should have refrained from the snark. That said, I still don’t think that the comment does justice to Habermas here (and I write this as someone who doesn’t buy into the Habermasian project). There is a quite clear and intellectually sustainable difference between constitutional patriotism as Habermas conceives of it and nationalism. It may very likely be that constitutional patriotism is too weak a reed to build a thick political identity around. But that seems to me to be a different question to whether one can sustain a difference between nationalism and patriotism in Habermas’ thought at all.

“First results are in”:http://www.deredactie.be/cm/vrtnieuws/verkiezingen2010/uitslagen, and the victory of NVA is even bigger than expected: They are the biggest party in Belgium, with about 20.8%. In the Flemish region of Belgium they have about 29% of the votes (these are partial results, the latest updates can be found by following the link, and I will post an update tomorrow).

It is difficult to describe the NVA – they are undoubtedly a nationalist party with a seperatist ideal (Flemish independence), but they need to be distinguished from the extreem-right racist Vlaams Belang (which, by the way, has lost considerably). NVA is often qualified as democratic, sometimes even ‘moderate’ – but I guess how one qualifies them depends on one’s own position on the political spectrum. In any case, the first thing Bart De Wever, the political leader, will say in interviews, is that he doesn’t dislike Francophone Belgians, but that he strongly believes that the structures of the Belgian state are rotten and need to be drastically reformed. A remarkable fact is that the ideal of NVA is a strong independent Flanders in a strong Europe – so they are not at all anti-European (in contrast to other conservative/right wing parties in Europe).
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I don’t think I’ve seen this on CT yet: the Guardian’s replay of Twitter posts during various World Cup games. Pick a game by clicking on one of the colorful dots – as opposed to the gray ones that signal games not yet played – and not only see the changing relative popularity of related tweet themes, but also see when things happened during the game. (In addition to these showing up on the side next to players’ names as time goes by, you can also see the entire game time line below the figure and move to any specific point by dragging the blue arrow.) Very cool. (Tx: Gilad)

A week or so ago, I received an email from an old friend – the redoubtable Bridget Hourican – asking for some family background about a great-great uncle who was made a character of in Ulysses. It should have clicked with me that 12 16 June was coming up.

Alluding to the other Timberteer who also rejoices in this ancestry, Bridget wrote:

“… when a friend of mine was asked in Germany what he thought of Ulysses – as all Irish abroad are asked at some point – he admitted that he hadn’t read it yet, but saved his reputation and astounded his questioner by adding that his great-uncle was in it. This great-uncle was Hugh MacNeill (the more disreputable brother of the revolutionary Eoin MacNeill) who appears, with his name cannibalised, as professor McHugh, murmuring “biscuitfully”.

Prof. McHugh is apparently a quite funny character who wanders around Dublin lecturing in Greek and Latin. Bridget’s written a gorgeous Bloomsday essay about the real people immortalised in Ulysses. It makes me want to give the book another go.

Fascinating interview with Jurgen Habermas in today’s Irish Times. Talking about Merkel and how she has burnt Germany’s reputation for putting its longer term interests as the greatest beneficiary of an effective European Union ahead of short-term, domestic politics, he notes a generational difference:

“Over the past four weeks Angela Merkel has squandered much of the capital of trust accumulated by her predecessors over four decades. … After Helmut Kohl, our political elites underwent a sweeping change in mentalities. With the exception of a too-quickly exhausted Joschka Fisher, since Gerhard Schröder took office a normatively unambitious generation has been in power. It seems to enjoy Germany’s return of Germany to normality as a nation-state – and just wants be “like the others”. Conscious of the diminishing room for political manoeuvre, these people shy away from farsighted goals and constructive political projects, let alone an undertaking like European unification. I detect a certain indifference towards this project. On the other hand, the politicians can no longer deceive themselves concerning the fact that the Federal Republic is the greatest beneficiary of the single currency. Self-interest dictates that they support the preservation of the euro zone.

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