Shameless self-promotion

My piece on the section on measure in Plato's Statesman is finally out in Plato: The Internet Journal of the International Plato Society (link takes you to the table of contents). Not the most earth-shattering of arguments, perhaps: basically an attempt to show that the obscure "measure of the mean" discussed at Statesman 283bff is not as weird as it looks, and even that it provides a good basis for a serious understanding of measurement in all human know-how ("technical" knowledge). But mostly a technical matter of interpretation, if a somewhat unorthodox one.

The whole business of measurement in modern technology comes up in a book I've been reading, Joel Mokyr's The Gifts of Athena: The Historical Origins of the Knowledge Economy. Mokyr argues in chapter 2 that part of what created the conditions for modern economic growth was an increased emphasis on measurability by engineers and other people with technical knowledge. I wonder if, taking the long view (wild speculation warning), (what I take to be) the historical misunderstanding of the Stranger's theory of measure as a theory of purely qualitative measurement hindered the possibility of a similar phenomenon taking place in the ancient world. (Not that there weren't many other more important factors for this, but...). Then again, the Statesman was never very popular in the Platonic canon.

On an entirely different note, I recently found out about Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews (http://ndpr.nd.edu); you can subscribe to a mailing list and get a review of a philosophical book more or less every day of the year. Most of these probably would not be interesting to you, but it's kind of interesting to see what philosophers are publishing these days. (Does anybody else in this group subscribe to it?)

The Metaphor of Sickness in Political Theory and its Consequences

I'm teaching a course on the subject of Political Pathologies this semester . (You can view my students' blog at http://politicalpathologies.blogspot.com; they've already have a lively conversation going on. And yes, I'm going a bit crazy on the new technologies - it's all a big experiment). So allow me to post occasional thoughts on the subject.

One of the theoretical puzzles that motivated me to think about this topic is the question of what happened to the metaphor of health and sickness in political theory. The metaphor is robustly developed, among other places, in Plato's Republic, books VIII and IX - which my class is reading for tomorrow. Socrates explicitly relates the various regimes not just to different kinds of people, but to the medical theory of his day, with the consequence that the different sorts of defective regimes - timocracy, oligarchy, democracy, and tyranny - appear as stages in a sickness, or even as different illnesses, of increasing degrees of severity.

As far as I can tell (i.e., not that much), the metaphor of health and sickness in political life is used frequently, but not very deeply, by later classical and medieval political theory. I do not recall Aristotle deploying it, though it would not surprise me if he had done so; I'm pretty sure Cicero does use it; and I think many medieval thinkers did speak of healthy and diseased communities, though without pressing the metaphor very deeply. I am unsure whether Hobbes uses it, though his analogy to the human body in Leviathan would seem ideal for its deployment. (It would be interesting to know if he does).

Modern political theory, however, as far as I can tell (again, probably not that much),
seems not to use the metaphor of sickness and health very much. I have a theory - not, perhaps, a very good theory - that this has something to do with the traditional focus of political theory on the just, rather than the unjust, community. Not that political philosophers have had nothing to say about unjust societies; on the contrary. But I have a sense that the unjust regimes tend to be viewed through the lens of the just regimes, and thus as merely the non-just regimes; direct engagement with their varieties seems rare. It is perhaps no accident that it was Hannah Arendt's engagement with Soviet and Nazi tyranny that produced the category of totalitarianism not just as a name for another non-democratic regime but as an especially vicious pathology of political life - worse than run-of-the mill tyranny.

But other than that, there's very little effort on the part of political theorists to classify non-ideal regimes according to the degrees of their badness, much less to think of them through the metaphor of sickness and health. Indeed, there is very little conceptual work even within political science properly speaking regarding the varieties of non-democratic (in modern terms, non-ideal) regimes; the best work I know of that classifies non-democratic regimes is Juan Linz' Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes, and it is practically an isolated case, and also entirely within the value-free tradition of Weberian sociology (though of course Linz himself has clear ideas as to which regimes are better and which are worse).

I suppose it could be argued that political sickness is a barren category - devoid of intellectual fruitulness - and that the classification of "bad" regimes, whether or not one uses the category of sickness, is theoretically and practically pointless beyond a certain point. In our everyday political speech we do not even distinguish fully between authoritarian and totalitarian regimes (the debasement of "totalitarian" is so great that I've heard political commentators apply the term with a straight face to the decrepit regime of Fidel Castro and the theatrical populism of Chavez); and influential traditions of political science (that led by Przeworski's work on democracy, for example) are quite content to operate within a simple democracy/non-democracy dichotomy.

But I would argue that a more nuanced understanding of political "badness" - similar to our own nuanced understanding of bodily sickness - would have many theoretical advantages. In particular, we do not at present seem to have (and I am happy to be corrected on this point) any good theory of politics that really tells us how to go from a less bad to a better conditio (which is not ideal), or, equivalently, a theory of politics that can (morally, ethically?) rank the many varieties of actually existing regimes. (Though we do have hunches that it would be better to live in Singapore than in Burma or North Korea, for example, it is not clear that we have theoretically sound reasons for this hunch, not to speak of a good theory of how to get from North Korea to something else a little less bad; witness Iraq).

Any thoughts on the idea of political pathology and its place in political theory?

More on Online Scholarship

To continue with my previous post, there's an interesting article in the NYT magazine on "open source" peer reviewing (Trial and Error). The article focuses on scientific papers - but the idea that instead of anonymous peer reviewing we should have open, blog-style peer review, non-anonymous - rather appeals to me for humanistic disciplines as well. At any rate, at least in some topics the number of people writing is so small that anonymity is a poor veil, and it allows people to write needlesly nasty stuff (though anonymity might still have a place for some purposes). Take a look at the article for the details of how it works in the few journals that have tried it.

What do you think? How would open source peer review, or something similar, work in political theory or the humanities more generally?

Online Scholarship

This post and comment thread at The Valve is a very interesting look at issues of publication in academia (especially for those of us who are starting to feel the pressure to put things out on paper). Though the post is not focused on political theory (The Valve caters to literary scholarship), many of the issues raised in the post and the comments are nevertheless relevant to the humanities more generally. (More after the break).

One interesting question raised in the post concerns how are scholarly books to be used, i.e., what are they really for. The author (Kathleen Fitzpatrick) relays a suggestion she overheard that scholarly books are "not meant to be read but rather consulted" - which suggests that the actual physical book is not the best medium for relaying (and constructing) scholarly knowledge.

How do you use scholarly books? When I look at the reading I do for my research, I find that the "consultation" model describes quite well how I use them: I don't really relish reading them, but use the arguments that directly relate to my work. Of course, there are always exceptions - books that are exceptionally well written, or that relay arguments that are not easily synthesized in one or two chapters, or perhaps books whose entire bulk is relevant to the work I'm doing. This seems natural, yet at the same time seems like a bit of a waste. It's like I'm not quite doing justice to the author. (But can you imagine, with all the good stuff that's out there just itching to be read, to slog through all that German scholarship on Plato in the 19th century just for the sake of completeness and a misguided sense of justice towards their authors?).

Are monographs really the best way of communicating scholarly knowledge in political theory (and thus do they deserve the important place they have been given in promotion decisions)? The answer is of course going to be different in different fields, and perhaps even for different projects: but would it not make sense to have a greater degree of flexibility in the way in which the results of inquiry are created, communicated, and evaluated, including a greater degree of freedom regarding the kinds of publication venues that "count"? (I suppose I have a vested interest in this, as an article I wrote will be appearing in February in the Internet Journal of the Plato Society).

I think my dissertation, for example, which is basically a commentary on Plato's STATESMAN, would be much better served as an online commentary keyed to Perseus or some other place (something like this fantastic commentary on Augustine's confessions. Really, click the link, it's amazing. Much better than my dissertation, that's for sure.) And I think a wide variety of scholarly work would be better served if it were entirely online - and perhaps connected to some kind of threading or commenting mechanism, so that the work and its commentaries would be permanetly linked (kind of like the trackback mechanism, as Fitzpatrick's post mentions).

As the commenters on the post at the Valve point out, there's also a lot to be said for tools that allow for collaboration, commentary, and versioning. (As the members of this blog know, I have argued for this; and now that I'm contemplating moving to New Zealand I think this has become even more important to me). But more on those later. What do you think?