The ABD club

John Gray on Martha Nussbaum's latest

2006-05-26T00:31:00.000-04:00

There's an interesting review in The Nation of Martha Nussbaum's latest work, Frontiers of Justice, by John Gray (via 3 quarks daily). It begins with the following provocation:

It is difficult to think of a time when liberal political thought has been as remote from political practice as it is today. There are many reasons for this situation, including the near-complete rout of liberal forces by the right. But a part of the reason lies in the development of liberal thought itself. Liberal thinkers, in the universities where they have retreated, appear to believe their main task is to specify the basic liberties of individuals and the principles of distribution for other social goods, in the conviction that once these have been identified they can be embodied in law and interpreted by courts. In this now conventional view the principles of justice can be derived from an underlying moral consensus that is embodied in modern democratic societies, and since these will be principles that all reasonable people can accept, there will be no possibility of radical political conflict. No doubt there will still be some need for political activity, but not in order to protect liberal values. Liberal values will not be at risk, since they will be enshrined in law.

and it ends with this:

In a curious convergence liberal theory has given up on politics at a time when liberal values have become marginal in practice. Instead of trying to understand the forces that shape political life--as John Stuart Mill did in his writings on socialism and nationality, for example--contemporary liberal thinkers have constructed a legalistic edifice from which politics has been excluded. Nussbaum is aware that this rickety structure shuts out a great deal that is important, and in Frontiers of Justice she tries to let in some light. If she achieves less than she might it is because the giant shadow of Rawls stands in her way.

Has liberal theory reached a dead end? I don't know enough about current trends in liberal theory to comment confidently, but from what I know I think I'm with Gray on this: it seems much liberal theory has become too distant from the consideration of existing political reality, assuming too uncritically the existence of nations and states in forms that no longer seem plausible and focusing too much on very parochial debates. (Do we need more sociology and comparative politics in political theory?)

Summer Reading in Political Theory

2006-05-25T03:13:00.000-04:00

Crooked Timber had an interesting open question a while back: What are some of the geat articles (not books) in the political theory over the past 20 years for some ambitous young geek who wants to read political theory on the beach? So I'm asking the question. Link

Political Concepts Syllabus

2006-05-12T00:07:00.000-04:00

I've posted the syllabus for my Basic Political Concepts course here, which, enrollment permitting, I will be teaching this Fall. Any comments are greatly appreciated!

Aristotle's Politics: Critical Essays

2006-04-10T22:58:00.000-04:00

There's a BMCR review here of a new book of essays on Aristotle's Politics, edited by Richard Kraut and Thomas Skultety. As it's common with most such edited volumes, the articles seem to be rather disparate in focus and approach. (The authors range from John Cooper to Josiah Ober, Dorothea Frede, and Malcolm Schofield, which, though generally within the mainstream of Ancient Philosophy scholarship, are quite disparate in philosophical and historical orientation). Nevertheless, all the authors try to assess the applicability of Aristotle to contemporary political thought; these are not mere antiquarian articles.

What struck me about this volume (at least judging from the review) was the extreme disparity of judgments about the applicability of Aristotle's thought to modern society, coming from experts that are broadly within the same tradition. Some thought Aristotle was a totalitarian; others, a radical democrat; yet others, that his thought served the narrow interests of a class; some stressed virtue ethics, others a kind of Aristotelian "pluralism;" some asserted that Aristotle had nothing to offer the modern age; others that September 11 makes Aristotle relevant to the dialogue of civilizations that we ought to be having. (No, seriously).

Is this a symptom of the inmense richness of Aristotle's thought, the radical indeterminacy of all interpretation that goes beyond pure textual clarification and minimal historical contextualization, or a problem with the question of "what is Aristotle's thought good for today"? Are we condemned to say that Aristotle's thought can give support to a variety of radically incompatible positions? (Of course, we could also say that some of these positions are radically wrong. My first candidate would be Schofield's vaguely marxist-inflected accusation of Aristotelian "racism" towards the barbarians). And what would be the point, I sometimes wonder, of enlisting Aristotle in one or another cause (or casting him as the enemy of one or another cause)? I do not have much of an answer to these questions, but it seems to me that they sometimes cast some doubt on the enterprise most of us are engaged in.

2006-03-31T09:18:00.000-05:00

Fellow platonists,
I'm looking for support for an argument I'm trying to make, namely, that Plato wrote his dialogues as intellectual exercises for the reader (whether a member of the Academy or any reader). They are written, in other words, not to communicate positive knowledge but to help the reader to come to grips with a particular problem him/herself. Would anyone have suggestions about authors that make this argument? I know of Szlezak, who argues that Plato wrote esoterically for didactic (not political) reasons, Stanley Rosen talks about the dialogues as "educational games", Arieti thinks the dialogues may have been written to advertise the Academy, Sayre argues the dialogues are written for instructional use (in "Plato's Literary Garden"). Am I missing big ones?
Thanks!
Emma

How much time should it take?

2006-03-30T22:12:00.000-05:00

Via The Valve, two posts on the historical trend toward longer and longer periods of graduate training: in the 60s, it used to take 4-5 years past the BA; it now may take up to 11 years. The comments in the post in the Valve are also pretty interesting. Commenters mostly explain this trend as a result of the saturation of the market: since there are few jobs anyway, doctoral students draw the process out, trying to get a very good dissertation in the process, something really publishable. I tend to agree (it fits with my experience); what do you think? And how long is too long?

Linker on the theo-cons

2006-03-28T01:35:00.000-05:00

Damon Linker, a Michigan State PhD political theorist, and onetime editor of First Things, is now coming out with what can only be called his expose of the Christian conservative intelligensia (he was never a part of the gang long enough to call it a defection similar to Fukuyama's recent break with a different movement). A preview article is out now in the current issue of the New Republic. One interesting quote:

All of the participants in the First Things symposium--it was called "The End of Democracy? The Judicial Usurpation of Politics"--permitted themselves radical rhetoric...

All of the participants in the First Things symposium--it was called "The End of Democracy? The Judicial Usurpation of Politics"--permitted themselves radical rhetoric. Robert H. Bork denounced the nation's "judicial oligarchy" for spreading "moral chaos" throughout the land. The Catholic theologian Russell Hittinger asserted that the country now lived "under an altered constitutional regime" whose laws were "unworthy of loyalty." Charles W. Colson maintained that America may have reached the point where "the only political action believers can take is some kind of direct, extra-political confrontation" with the "judicially controlled regime." And in a contribution titled "The Tyrant State," Robert P. George asserted that "the courts ... have imposed upon the nation immoral policies that pro-life Americans cannot, in conscience, accept."

But it was Neuhaus himself who did more than anyone else to push the tone of the symposium beyond the limits of responsible discourse. In the unsigned editorial with which he introduced the special issue of the magazine, Neuhaus adopted the revolutionary language of the Declaration of Independence to lament the judiciary's "long train of abuses and usurpations" and to warn darkly about "the prospect--some might say the present reality--of despotism" in America. In Neuhaus's view, what was happening in the United States could only be described as "the displacement of a constitutional order by a regime that does not have, will not obtain, and cannot command the consent of the people." Hence the stark and radical options confronting the country, ranging "from noncompliance to resistance to civil disobedience to morally justified revolution."

Thoughts about the Pangles?

2006-03-25T22:17:00.000-05:00

Though I wasn't able to attend either event, I understand that both of the Pangles gave very interesting presentations, followed by a lively discussion in each case. Comments? (Is the West really doomed?)

John Rawls' Letters

2006-03-17T23:38:00.000-05:00

I didn't know that John Rawls went by "Jack". I was also interested to read, in a series of letters recently published in the Revue philosophie economique (vol. 7, 2003: 7-20), some criticisms of globalization and capitalism, which are quite sharp, and more explicit than I have read elsewhere from Rawls (hat tip to Crooked Timber). The money quote (no pun intended):

Isn't there a conflict between a large free and open market, comprising all of the Europe and the individual nation-states, each with its separate social and political institutions, historical memories and forms, and social policy? Surely these are great value to the citizens of these countries and give meaning to their life. The large open market including all of Europe is the aim of the large banks and capitalist buisness class whose main goal is simply larger profit. The idea of economic growth, onwards and upwards, with no specific end in sight, fits this class perfectly. If they speak about distribution, it is [al]most always in terms of trickle-down. The long-term result of this--which we already have in the United States--is a civil society awash in a meaningless consumerism of some kind. I can't believe that is what you want.

So you see I am not happy about globalization as the banks and business class are pushing it. I accept Mill's idea of the stationary state as described in Ch. 6 of his Principles of Political Economy (1848). (I am adding a footnote in P15 to say this, in case the reader hadn't noticed it.) I am under no illusion that its time will ever come--certainly not soon--but it is possible, and it has a place in what I call the idea of realistic utopia.

The State as a Form of Technology, Cont.

2006-03-14T23:03:00.000-05:00

A while ago, I mentioned that I was working on a proyect on the state as a form of technology. I've now completed a second full draft of a paper for this proyect and posted it to my website [Link(PDF) - now it works!], thinking it might well be of some interest to readers of this blog (I'll be presenting it at the MPSA meeting). It's still a pretty rough draft, especially in the final sections; I'd love to hear your thoughts on it (the first section greatly benefitted from the comments to my earlier post on the subject). There's a section on the law which might especially benefit from some criticism from this group. Here's a selection (more after the break):

We may conceptualize the law for our purposes as constituting a network of authority and authorizations: one node in the network (a person) authorizes another node in it (another person) in some regular, speech-based way (via “legal speech”) until we reach an actual human being who is thereby empowered to act in the physical world, that is, to stamp a piece of paper, to move a physical object, to arrest another person, to speak some words out loud, and so on, or the reverse (prevents someone from stamping a piece of paper, moving a physical object, and so on). Authority and authorization thus “travel” from node to node, person to person, authorizing some and prohibiting others to act. The law is thus a kind of network technology: it ties together different individuals through relatively stable “protocols” (the language of the law) and systems of interpretation of these protocols (e.g., law courts) so as to regulate the basic pattern of their interactions.

“Legitimacy,” from this point of view, is simply membership in one such network of authorizations. To those who are nodes in the network, the network itself is legitimate, that is, they in principle (though not always in practice) accept the assignments of authority coming from properly placed people in the network and in turn properly authorize others to do or omit doing particular things. By the same token, legitimacy breaks down when a substantial part of this network of authorizations ceases to be properly connected to the rest of the network, that is, it ceases to accept assignments of authority or to properly authorize others to do or omit doing particular things.

Note that such a network, if we consider it to be law (or the result of law) strictu sensu, is coextensive with a political community, at least as long as legitimacy has not broken down. No one in the community is outside the law, that is, every one is a node in the network of authority and authorizations constituted by it. It is also only weakly tied to other such networks: these may be nested inside each other, but at the highest level they are only weakly laterally connected to other networks of authorization. There is thus always a plurality of such networks, though in principle a single one could eventually comprise the entire population of the planet. Hence the relative weakness of “international” law (whose strength nevertheless waxes and wanes), and the well-grounded idea of the legal sovereignty of distinct political communities: the laws of one place are not the laws of another, and those authorized to act in some ways in a given political community may not be so authorized to act in another. (Indeed, the distinctiveness of individual political communities is partly rooted in the finitude and relative isolation of “top-level” networks of authorization: this is what distinguishes one political community from another, irrespective of ethnicity, religion, or any other cultural markers that may also separate one community from another).

If the law is or constitutes such a network, then it may be characterized according to the kinds of connections among nodes it displays. From this point of view, we may say that customary law (at its most “customary”) is de-centered: there is no single point from which authority flows “downwards” or to which authorization flows “upwards,” but only changing “attractors” – sets of people that temporarily exercise authority or authorize others to act according to relatively stable linguistic conventions. The nearly stateless world of Western feudalism, in contrast, had some stable nodes of authority: church, cities, kings; and the modern state (with some qualifications) stands at the center of the particular network of authorization we now call the law. In this latter case, authorization, ideally, flows “upward” from individuals to the state and “downwards” from the state to them, and the state can be said to (almost) monopolize legitimacy. Such a state would thus be (in the ideal case) also fully “autonomous” from society as well as “strong” in that social life would be necessarily mediated through it but not vice-versa. Of course, the “state” here is just the particular node that stands at the center of this network: it is the center of gravity of the network, not a single, fixed place.

(I've omitted several footnotes). Any thoughts on this conception of law?

Dennett's _Breaking the Spell_

2006-03-14T13:53:00.000-05:00

Here is an interview with Daniel Dennett on his new book. I haven't read the book, only excerpts from it and reviews about it, as well as Dennetts' own comments on it. Dennett's stuff on the philosophy of mind is obviously very good, but if reports (his own and those of sympathetic others) are to be believed, he makes a very bizarre claim in it, and an equally questionable assumption:

1) That there is a "taboo" against the scientific study of religion, itself based on a "belief in belief" (a widespread conviction of the salutary effects of religion and an expectation that studying religion scientifically will harm belief), and 2) that the scientific study of religion is equivalent to the study of religion in sociobiological terms.

The Academic Labor Market

2006-03-12T19:16:00.000-05:00

This post by Steven Teles at The Reality-Based Community has some interesting ideas about the way the academic labor market operates. Here's the gist (more after the break):

the sorting processes of the academy are characterized by substantially incomplete information. The information that hiring committees have available to them varies in predictive quality, from the dissertation (could be more a function of the good ideas of the candidate's advisor than the candidate), to the job interview (could be more a measure of slickness of presentation than underlying intelligence or productivity) to recommendations (which may simply operate as a proxy for the candidate's PhD granting institution, since their substance is often remarkably similar). Furthermore, academic hiring committees are committees--because of the need to put together majorities, committees may converge on non-offensiveness, not predicted productivity. So, while the job market for freshly minted PhDs is probably a less than perfect predictor of future academic productivity.

The initial sorting of PhDs to institutions would be self-correcting if mistakes at this first stage were corrected in the “secondary” market for job candidates. But—and this is the key to the argument—there are reasons to believe that this will not occur. First, initial allocations are sticky, because PhDs are less mobile in the secondary market than they were in the initial job market. Once they have settled in to an institution, and their spouses have made a life wherever they initially landed, there may be limits on reallocation.

Second, and most important, quality (as measured by scholarly productivity) is to a significant degree endogenously produced by initial allocation to institutions. Rick Hess has published an interesting article in PS that shows that it is almost impossible to “write your way out” of low-ranked institutions. The reasons for this are obvious to anyone who has spent time in a variety of different university settings. In lower ranked institutions, a great deal of scholarly time is taken up by grading, and opportunities to teach courses that closely track with research interests are limited. Resources for research are more limited the further down the pecking order one goes (funding and time off of teaching in particular). As one goes down the pecking order, the average quality of research assistance one can obtain from graduate and undergraduate students declines. Institutions further up the pecking order have a constant flow of visiting speakers that help stimulate ideas for research and expand scholarly networks. Funding sources are also more willing to support research at higher-ranked institutions. For all these reasons, PhDs at higher ranked institutions will find it considerably easier to produce a stream of high-quality work than their counterparts at lower-ranked institutions.

The consequence of this is that initial allocations of individuals to institutions will tend to be highly sticky—high potential PhDs who end up at the “wrong” institutions in the original sort will have a hard time producing the scholarship that shows that they “deserve” to be at the higher ranked institutions (that is, that shows that at the higher ranked institutions they would produce more quality scholarship than incumbents). At the same time, those who have the good luck to end up at the “right” institutions will produce significantly more quality work than they would if they had been sorted into the institutions that matched their inherent potential.

As a consequence of this, those at the higher-ranked institutions will, as a consequence, appear as if they really do have more intrinsic “merit” than those at lower-ranked institutions. And on average, given that the original sort is not random, they will. The point, however, is that the endogenous production of academic quality will make it look like the original sort was more efficient than it actually was.

If true, this is a bit depressing, since it seems that your first job closes off a lot of options. But are there any strategies to prevent this from happening if by chance you happen to land a job at a less than perfect institution, for whatever reason, and want to "move up" eventually, or simply want to produce good quality research? My first thought is that there must be some way to increase the productivity of say, grading and other non-research-related activities - by designing better courses and tests, relying more on peer evaluation, and so on - so that they do not detract as much from one's research and so on. This might entail some significant upfornt investment, but it might (just might) pay off. Technology (e.g., blogs, e-mail exchanges, etc.) might also compensate (to some limited degree) for the lack of first-class scholarly networks. (All this assumes that one wants to move up to a more prestigious institution - which of course one may not want to, for any number of reasons, both personal and professional. Lots of people are perfectly happy where they end up). Thoughts?

Bad bad student

2006-03-08T17:21:00.000-05:00

After our many discussions about measuring teacher preformance, I thought it might be nice to hear someone wag their fingers at those lazy American students. This article mainly talks about primary and secondary education, but much of it applies to higher education as well.

MacIntyre on Geuss

2006-03-07T23:41:00.000-05:00

NDPR just posted a review, by Alastair MacIntyre, of Raymond Geuss's new book, _Outside Ethics_. It's a nice review-- reviewer and author being two of the more interesting intellectuals around today in the larger orbit of the Frankfurt School.

A correction

2006-03-06T19:08:00.000-05:00

In my previous post I confused the idea of a "best" state of society with the idea of a state of society that ought to exist - typical confusion of right and good. These aren't clearly distinguished in classical political thought (where the good clearly has priority anyway) but it may modify the presentation of the puzzle, since the "best" state of society may serve only as an unatainable guide for improvement, not as a required state of society in some normative sense.

Still, the idea is that, generally, tyranny ought not to exist; it is unjust, not right. If this is so, it would seem to make sense that there must exist actions and activities that can be done to prevent or end it; yet sociologically speaking, in some circumstances, such actions have a vanishingly small probability of occurring. Can we still speak of ought implying can?

Ought implies can: A puzzle

2006-03-04T21:44:00.000-05:00

Here's a possibly stupid question, which has been bothering me in trying to think about the causes of tyranny. It is a commonplace of ethical thinking that "ought implies can." That is, obligations properly (not so much supererogatory acts of virtue) must be such that they would be possible for a "normal" human being. The puzzle is: does this apply to societies? Or perhaps: can this apply to societies?

That is, if we say that a given ordering of society ought to be a certain way, does this imply that it can be that way? Certainly classical political philosophy seems to have thought that the answer to this question was negative (I have argued this for Plato).

Here's a complication. Suppose a certain ordering of society is "possible" (in the abstract sense that some sequence of human actions could be imagined that brings it about) but vanishingly unlikely in an empirical sense (e.g., the actions required are not available to normal human beings, only perhaps to people at the extremes - and yet more than the extremes need to do them). Can one still speak of "can" in a relevant sense here (certainly "ought implies can" in the individual does not seem to imply "even if the can is a vanishingly small possibility").

Or let's put the point in a different way. Social transformation - of a lasting, not superficial kind - unless it happens through impersonal processes, often requires heroism (which is highly unlikely). Does that mean that ought does not necessarily imply can at the social level? Or should we get rid of the principle "ought implies can" at the individual level too?

(The puzzle comes to mind as I was using a game derived from Carles Boix's Democracy and Redistribution in my class to think about causes of authoritarianism. It turns out that, according to the model, if the conditions aren't right [and for most of human history, they simply weren't right], it's almost impossible to have anything other than authoritarianism of various kinds. Of course, this need not imply bad government - though it makes it very much more likely).

Thinking of teaching and research

2006-03-02T21:40:00.000-05:00

Sorry for the neglect of the blog over the past month; it's been a bit more hectic than anticipated, and I've done more than enough blogging for my class. At any rate, sometimes heated conversations with members of this group over the past two days on teaching have made me think about the purpose of research and teaching at a University. Here are some somewhat random thoughts and links I've found of interest (after the break).

First, "assessment." (An unlovely word - Catherine got upset about my using it to think about the evaluation of teaching today. It bespeaks a narrow, crabbed conception of education, full of metrics and numbers). Here's some context. There was a recent story in the NYTimes recently about a proposal floating around in the Bush administration to examine

whether standardized testing should be expanded into universities and colleges to prove that students are learning and to allow easier comparisons on quality.

Needless to say, the idea is to some extent absurd - for one thing, college education is specialized, not general (unlike high school education), so it would make little sense to have a single lowest common denominator test. But, as NYU Philosophy Professor David Velleman comments over at Left2Right (see related posts here and here),

The last time I wrote about accountability in higher education, I said that universities "will have to develop better methods of evaluating instruction." And then I punted: "But that's a topic for another day." I guess that "other day" has arrived.

The failure of colleges and universities to assess the effectiveness of their instruction is manifested most clearly in grade inflation, which has accelerated since 1990, after two decades of relative dormancy in the 70s and 80s. (Statistics here.) At the University of Michigan, where I have seen the statistics broken down by department, the trend is largely confined to the humanties and social sciences, and indeed to particular discplines within those divisions. Faculty in math and science believe that they have lost enrollments to the other divisions largely because they have held the line on grades.

One cause of grade inflation is the reliance of administrators on "consumer satisfaction" measures to evaluate teaching. Courses that get high scores from students on exit surveys are assumed to have been well taught, and faculty are regularly held to the standard that falling below the average or median score counts as a failure: instructors must be above average in order to be considered any good at all. Faculty cannot help believing that giving their students lower grades during the semester will result in their getting worse evaluations from the students in the end. And there is some evidence that they are right.

So, somebody is going to do assessment, and it better be you who is in control. Moreover, are we so sure that we are doing things right when we teach in the humanities that grades have gone up accross the board? (Not that grades elsewhere are always a good indicator of learning, mind you).

There is also the ethical point: what is the extent of our responsibility for student learning? Some part of the responsibility belongs to the student; but there is a sense in which the learning relationship has a contractual aspect. Ideally, the student who does everything in the syllabus, fo example, with the appropriate degree of effort should "learn" something if s/he is teachable. But this is manifestly not the case except in the most superficial of senses, and part of the problem here is not the student but the teaching. To the extent that there is some truth in this contractualist view, moreover, I would argue that we have to figure out how to measure this learning (measure it in a broad sense, not just by means of numbers: figure out what works) and incorporate the results in our own practice.

There was also another story in the Times on a more obscure topic: online colleges (I mentioned this today at our talk). Here's the new reality:

It took just a few paragraphs in a budget bill for Congress to open a new frontier in education: Colleges will no longer be required to deliver at least half their courses on a campus instead of online to qualify for federal student aid.

That change is expected to be of enormous value to the commercial education industry. Although both for-profit colleges and traditional ones have expanded their Internet and online offerings in recent years, only a few dozen universities are fully Internet-based, and most of them are for-profit ones.

Velleman again, in a different post:

The Times article cites opposition from traditional academics "saying there was no proof that online education was effective." The director of Columbia University's Center for the Study of Privatization in Education is quoted as saying, "We have not found a single rigorous study comparing online with conventional forms of instruction."

This strikes me as an unwise approach for academics to take.

As I noted in a recent post, traditional colleges and universities are generally lax about measuring the effectiveness of their instruction, relying instead on consumer-satisfaction surveys. Internet colleges are in a position — and have an incentive — to collect far better consumer-satisfaction data for purposes of market research. And there is some reason to worry that their consumers may be more satisfied than ours. The operations that are seriously trying to teach (rather than sell diplomas) cater to highly motivated clientele, quite unlike the 18-year-olds for whom college is just the next stop on the main route to adulthood. Internet courses require their students to log on regularly, participate in online activities, and complete assignments on time. These students are likely to be more engaged, on average, than traditional college students, many of whom skip class and just cram for the final. We shouldn't be too confident that we will fare better than Internet colleges on our own chosen measure of quality.

More importantly, we need to avail ourselves of distance learning where we can, even if the distance involved is only that between the professor's office and the dorm. For some courses, online instruction may be successful, freeing faculty for courses where personal interaction is essential. We need to explore those possibilities with open minds, not rule them out from fear of commercial competition. We should also be exploring the use of online instruction for outreach to high-school students preparing for college, especially those from underserved populations attending sub-standard schools. Here again, a public posture of skepticism about online instruction will be counterproductive.

Finally, we need to broaden public understanding of what is valuable in a traditional college education, by dissolving the perceived conflict between research and teaching, not only in the public's mind but also in our own. A traditional student learns where knowledge is being created, from the people who are creating it, in a community dedicated to unfettered inquiry — a kind of frontier community, whose ethos is infused with a spirit of intellectual adventure and risk. We should explain why the value of a sojourn on this frontier cannot be measured with standardized tests.

We are entitled to make this argument, of course, only so long as we keep the relevant academic values alive, by infusing our instruction with the spirit of our research and by resisting the forces of mediocrity and conformism. So if competition from Internet colleges forces us to reaffirm these academic values, then I say: Bring it on.

The problem is that often traditionally educated college students don't seem to learn all that much better than students educated in some other way. Again, the point is: how do we know that we are making any kind of difference? I can keep my students engaged, or bored, sometimes both in the same period; I can give them tests and papers to write, make them play interesting games, but can I teach them? Or even help them learn, if the word "teaching" is too pretentious here?

I could quote from a more exalted source: Pierre Bourdieu's Academic Discourse, but I have to say that I don't have the energy to find a relevant quote and type it here. Bourdieu approaches the problem from the sociological standpoint and says it's the social structure of the university that makes it (university teaching) all hopeless. But I summarize much too simplistically, and anyway Bourdieu is thinking too much of the French system.

At a personal level, this is something I think about all the time as I'm teaching: is what I'm doing working at all? Of course, I've barely started, so this is to some degree unwarranted angst. I'll figure something out, I suppose. But it's a nagging thought as I go on day by day.

Then there is the more general question: is what I'm teaching really all that important to be taught? Who cares? Here's Timothy Burke, a Professor of History at Swarthmore college (whose weblog is well worth reading):

What I was thinking about is the extent to which even in a teaching-centered institution that promotes a pretty healthy degree of connection between the faculty, we mostly teach courses that narrowly service departmental curricula deriving from a state-of-the-art sense of what a given specific discipline entails. Broader, connective, integrative courses, or material that doesn’t belong to a conventional discipline, often falls out of view.

This has been on my mind a lot this academic year for various reasons. I spoke along with a colleague to our Alumni Council early this year on this problem, that the faculty don’t ask ourselves enough what it is that 18-22 year olds who are not going to be academics themselves really need to learn or would benefit from knowing, preferring instead to ask, “What’s the proper sequence of courses for this discipline”, or “what’s in the scholarly literature on this topic?” as if the discipline or literature’s benefits are self-evident. We review interdisciplinary minors here every five years, and sometimes do external reviews of departments, but we don’t really expect departments and disciplines to provide an ongoing, renewable and contestable sense of their relevance to the students, the college, the curriculum.

We have many ready justifications to the "so what" question, but unfortunately they are not always all that credible. I am borrowing other people's thoughts for this somewhat rambling and incoherent post; perhaps you might want to consider it an exercise in venting frustrations. (The part on research, following on the conversation with Jeremy, will have to wait a bit).

Rosen on the Republic

2006-03-02T21:37:00.000-05:00

Here is the NDPR review of Rosen's study of the Republic, by Lloyd Gerson. It's an admiring, though somewhat negative on key points, review. Anybody read Rosen's book?

Are there too many of us?

2006-02-05T12:53:00.000-05:00

By "us" I mean graduate students in political theory. Here's your "gloomy reading of the week" link, to an article arguing that there is a "glut" of PhDs, especially in disciplines which produce graduates without many skills marketable to industry (reading ancient Greek, writing papers on Hegel, you get the picture). (More discussion after the break).

Of course, taking our cue from Plato (self-promoting link(PDF) to my reading of the section on measure), to say that there is "too much" of anything one needs to ask: too much for what?

The economist's answer to that question says: too much (or too many) at some price X for the current structure of desires of society. Given that price, there are unsold products, or unemployment or underemployment, or the equivalent term in other markets. So, an economist might say that there are too many PhD students for the number of positions available at the salaries currently paid and given the kind of investment it takes to get a PhD, since many PhDs end up unemployed or underemployed.

There is something to that. As those of us who are currently in the labor market can attest, the number of people applying to even obscure positions is huge. One position I applied to had 400 applications; another had 630 (needless to say, it is very hard to reach "rational" decisions when choosing the "best" candidate out of 630). These are numbers one would expect to find for unskilled labor, not for positions requiring highly specialized knowledge that requires lots of time and money (in the form of foregone income opportunities) to attain. We may all eventually find a position (though perhaps not at the level we wanted to, and perhaps at a much lower income than we expected to), but it certainly does not seem a very "rational" economic decision on our part to spend so much time and energy preparing to become professors.

True, most of us did not go to graduate school for the money - we did it to follow our intellectual passions, or because we had nothing else to do, or whatever; but the economic point would still hold, and the article I linked to details some of possible perverse incentives that universities have to train as many PhD students as they can. (Why, exactly, did I go into political theory? Sometimes I can't remember).

But the economist's viewpoint is not the only possible one. Are there too many students of political theory from another point of view? Does society need - as a matter of some conception of he common good - the number of political theorists-in-training that currently exist? E.g., from the point of view of the production of knowledge, or of teaching young people? Can one justify not one's own work, but the work of a group of heterogeneous individuals in anything other than economic terms? (The market values your work at X).

[Update: I've changed this post a bit after putting it up, February 5, 2006]

Shameless self-promotion

2006-01-29T21:51:00.000-05:00

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

2006-01-23T21:35:00.000-05:00

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

2006-01-15T13:46:00.000-05:00

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

2006-01-06T23:23:00.000-05:00

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?

Template changes

2005-12-29T20:49:00.000-05:00

I've updated the template so that if you want to post something long but only want the first paragraph or so to show, you can use the handy "expandable post summaries" feature, as Jeremy wanted.

Using it requires a little extra work after you write your post: basically, you have to go to the "Edit Html" tab in the editor and use the following html tags to separate the beginning from the main body of your post:

Here is the beginning of my post. <span class="fullpost">And here is the rest of it.</span>

Of course, for "Here is the beginning..." substitute the actual beginning of your post and so on.

[Update, Jan 26 2006: This procedure is no longer necessary. I changed the code, so that now all you need to do is use the nifty little post template and everything will be done for you automatically. Besides, now the "Read more" link does not appear automatically. Thanks to the code from ChuBlogga!]

The New Cognitive Sciences and Political Theory

2005-12-17T20:14:00.000-05:00

I just recently finished reading Daniel Dennett's Consciousness Explained (1991). If you click on the link to the book on Amazon, you may find that some of the reviews are quite hostile (and some, in my opinion, miss the point entirely, but that's another story); but I found the book enjoyable and nicely written for a general audience (with the occasional very bad joke thrown in; there are some disturbing similarities between Dennett's style and Thomas Friedman's).

Dennett's purpose, as the title says quite explicitly, is to explain consciousness (or "explain it away," as some of his critics would argue), or rather, to provide a philosophical framework for such an explanation; and he is conscious (pun intended) that in the process he will likely arouse much hotility, both from regular readers (as some of the Amazon reviews show) and philosophers alike. I came to it with a midly hostile attitude myself ("mildly" because I enjoyed very much Dennett's Darwin's Dangerous Idea, so I thought this earlier work could be worth reading even as I was skeptical of its premises), since I had been persuaded by the types of arguments presented by people like John Searle (of "Chinese Room" fame) and Colin McGinn, (and from a different perspective, Hans Jonas) who argue or would argue that Dennett's project is on its face preposterous since consciousness could not be explained by the kind of "third person" perspective that Dennett takes. But I came away from it, if not convinced, at least far more open to the kind of argument that purports to explain consciousness as a specific effect of the self-organization of human brains attained via evolution, and less convinced of the cogency of Searle's and McGinn's arguments. (It is an interesting fact in itself that this debate over the "explanability" of consciousness has become so polarized - perhaps a sign of a hidden antinomy of reason, in Kantian terms? But that's another story. So many stories, so little time.)

Dennett draws on a wide variety of research in neuroscience, computer science, and other disciplines to make his argument, though this is perhaps not the book to read if you are interested in the "state of the art" in those sciences (it was published in 1991; for the state of the art in neuroscience, you probably have to read something like Christopher Koch's The Quest for Consciousness, which I'd love to read but have not been able to). But the book's strength is as a philosophical argument - ultimately drawing on Darwin, Wittgenstein and Nietzsche, as Dennett makes explicit here and there - to shift the metaphors by which we think about "consciousness," or more generally, "the soul," a program which Dennett continues in his later work, Freedom Evolves (which I am currently reading).

Dennett is not always at his best on the political implications of thinking of consciousness from this new perspective - informed by what I would call, broadly speaking, the "new cognitive sciences" - though that there are such implications seems to me clear. I am less interested in the ultimate correctness of Dennett's theory - there are many competing models of consciousness that draw on these new sciences - than in what they mean for thinking about politics and political theory. I am less clear as to what these implications could be. (So here we come to the point, you say, and then you find out that there is no point).

Dennett, in some ways, is like a more cheerful, more empirically grounded Nietzsche: the new sciences are relentless in the destruction of god, the soul, and all such metaphysical fancies (there are holdouts, to be sure). He does not delight in destroying (unlike Nietzsche), and he does not shy away from erecting new "sacreds" - the tree of life at the end of Darwin's Dangerous Ideas, for example; his good humor can be infectious, and there is a real delight in discovery in his work (I sure learned a lot of weird stuff about human consciousness that really jolted some pre-conceived ideas I had). But after you read him, it's hard to think (speaking as the unreconstructed Platonist I play at being in my work) of the "soul" in the same way as before. What point is there, for example, to the tripartite psychology of book IV of the Republic? One might say that there are political points, but what if that sort of phenomenology used by Socrates there is all wrong - deceives you, in fact? What can it mean to speak of "self-control" or "reason mastering the appetites" if our brains are the way these new sciences say they are, a kind of loosely structured "pandaemonium" shaped by natural selection? There are some answers to these questions - indeed, I could come up with some myself - but I wonder: should we, as political theorists interested in mostly historical approaches, pay any mind to the astounding revolution occurring around us? Do the new cognitive sciences have something to tell us about politics?

Anyway, just thinking out loud and wondering whether others share my perplexities. (A loooong thinking out loud, you might complain. But bloggy things are perhaps useful for this sort of stuff).

Unideal Observers

2005-12-13T10:16:00.000-05:00

A blog by graduate students in philosophy at Bowling Green University: Unideal Observers. They seem much more official than this blog.

Foucault on Plato's STATESMAN

2005-12-11T19:47:00.000-05:00

Rummaging for information on Foucault (connected to the idea of the state as a form of technology, something that Foucauldians are associated with) I came accross a lecture by Foucault - Omnes et Singulatim (1979) - where he discusses Plato's STATESMAN.

His reading and use of the dialogue are pretty interesting. He clearly sees that the idea of the statesman as the "shepherd of man" is rejected by the Stranger - though also partially incorporated in the idea of the statesman as a kind of weaver. According to him, however, the specific difference between the shepherd and the statesman is that the former cares for human beings one by one - each individual person - whereas the latter is only concerned with the city as a whole. This seems to me not quite right: the shepherd is explicitly said to care for human beings as a herd, i.e., in groups (261d-e), but the ultimate point Foucault is making is similar to one I would actually make, namely, that the shepherd's knowledge gathers all the knowledge of the care of human beings into one person, whereas the statesman's knowledge does not. The shepherd thus cares for every aspect of the human person, while the statesman does not.

Foucault uses this argument to make a distinction between the "pastoral" and the "political" forms of power (the distinction is also grounded historically in other uses of the shepherd metaphor, but Foucault spends comparatively more time on Plato). The pastoral form of power is individualising - its oriented to the whole individual; the political is oriented to the unity of a community. He then traces the development of "pastoral" forms of power through Christianity all the way to the modern era. Interestingly, however, his argument is that the modern state represents a kind of convergence of these two modalities of power - the pastoral and the political. Though I take it that this distorts a bit the meaning of the Platonic claim that statesmanship cannot be a kind of shepherding - it does seem to suggest something important about the modern state and its reach into the whole lives of individuals - through the incorporation of the various forms of human knowledge into the state, perhaps. I can't quite put my finger on it. Perhaps if I read more Foucault. I don't suppose there are a lot of readers of Foucault in this group?

Man, Citizen, and "Intermediate" in Rousseau

2005-12-08T20:28:00.000-05:00

I know quite a few of you know quite a lot about Rousseau, so I hope to get some help here with a current project:

Jonathan Marks' new book Perfection and Disharmony in the Thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau shakes up the current Rousseau literature a lot, making, it seems to me, two negative and two positive claims about Rousseau's views:

Negative:
1. Nature is not identical with the original state of man (pace Strauss, Starobinski, Strong, etc, etc).
2. Nature does not aim at simplicity or unity (pace Melzer).

The parallel, positive claims:
3. Nature is to be identified with the END, the telos of man, the completed natural-man-in-society that Rousseau discusses in the Emile.
4. Nature's end is essentially DISHARMONIOUS-- it consists of conflicting human goods which necessitates conflicting human projects.

What this amounts to is a denial of the either/or Rousseau seems to posit at the beginning of the Emile. EITHER we have a private education in which man remains solitary, removed from all other fellow men, and thus is a whole unto himself, OR we have public education in which we have the Spartan woman who does not lament over the loss of her children, but rather the loss of the battle (man is thus a part of a whole). The alternative of these two is the bourgeois, who is "nothing" because he attempts to be both private AND public.

Marks seems to think that Rousseau doesn't just reject this either/or, he rather PREFERS the intermediary states. He seems to rely most heavily on Emile here, who seems to combine both sides of the individualistic-communitarian binary. Other examples: the happy savage state in the Second Discourse; the individual "liberal" rights reserved in the Social Contract.

What do you make of the argument? What IS Rousseau getting at with his view of nature and man's "perfectibility?" Is perfectibiliity to be taken ironically, or seriously, as Marks argues?

Wednesday morning procrastination

2005-12-07T09:33:00.000-05:00

Via Crooked Timber, a funny little essay on how procrastination can help you be more productive by philosopher John Perry and some thoughts in Nature about how blogging might or might not help science. I tend to think it will.

Politics and Technology Course

2005-11-30T18:40:00.000-05:00

I'm designing a course on politics and technology - from a political theory perspective, but also including study of specific cases (biotechnology and global warming come to mind). Do any of you have any suggestions for books, articles, etc., or links to syllabi by other people who are currently teaching something similar? I am currently considering Hans Jonas' The Imperative of Responsibility and Rousseau's Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts as main theory texts; does anything else come to mind?

Changing the template of the blog

2005-11-30T18:35:00.000-05:00

Jeremy wants to change the template of this blog. I am not especially attached to it right now, but it would be good to hear some other voices. Take a look at the templates available and comment below. (Not sure if the link will work; if not, just post a link to an example you like).

Technique, Techne, Technology

2005-11-20T22:36:00.000-05:00

As part of a longer project about the state I've been working on, I have become interested in understanding the concept of technology. The question of the bigger project is whether the modern state can be understood as a technology - or at least as a specific deployment of techniques and technologies - of "rule" (let's leave that unspecified for a minute). But in order to get there, it is necessary to reach some clarity about this "technology" thing.

Two concepts appear to be important to understanding "technology": the concept of a technique and the concept of a techne or know-how.

A “technique” seems to me to be simply an algorithm or recipe for doing something. As such, it “exploits” some (possibly quite local and limited) regularity of the world to provide a relatively reliable way of achieving some end in some unspecified (but possibly quite limited) set of circumstances. Techniques do not need to be (and hardly ever are) foolproof: it just suffices that they do better than random muddling through (or than any other available recipe or algorithm) at achieving some end given the circumstances, and that they do so time and again, though perhaps not forever. (A technique that is so sensitive to changes in circumstances that it only works once or twice is no technique at all but rather a kind of “magic”).

This recipe or algorithm may be available in a variety of media (paper, memory, digital storage) with greater or lesser degrees of specificity and completeness, depending on the kind and amount of tacit knowledge that the prospective user of the technique brings in advance; so, for example, a cookbook intended for the expert cook will spend far less time explaining how to scale and fillet a fish or make sauce béarnaise than a cookbook intended for the novice cook. But they need not be polished recipes, unambiguous and shorn of any superfluous steps. A single recipe may, for example, have different uses, in which some steps that are superfluous for some purpose turn out to be essential for others; or the “superfluous” steps may not be known to be superfluous; or they may be relatively “inexpensive” in terms of energy or money, and prized for their aesthetic or otherwise social value. A technique is thus a kind of tool, related to some social network of purposes, some of which it serves more or less well, and depending for its successful utilization on the availability of more general forms of know-how that are able to “fill in the gaps” left in every recipe. We may thus speak of a techne or art (the classical unit of human know-how) as a set of techniques related to the achievement of some general end and undergirded by a great deal of poorly or un- articulated “tacit” knowledge.

Now, it seems to me that if a technique is merely an algorithm or recipe (and hence, in a certain sense, independent of its material embodiment), a technology, by contrast, is always a kind of embodied technique, a “machine.” A machine is an “implementation” – to use the terminology of computer science – in a material being or beings of an algorithmic recipe for achieving some end. The term “machine” here should be understood quite broadly: a book, a hammer, the power grid, are all examples of machines, and thus of technologies. In the process of implementation in a material being, however, the very nature of the technique is transformed.

It seems to me that two points of this transformation are worth noting. First, the kind of tacit (or explicit) knowledge required of a user of a machine is usually quite different, and often less demanding, than the kind of knowledge required of the user of a technique (you need to know very little about the algorithm of division to use a calculator, for example, though you do need to know other things). A technology thus may make a technique available to those who do not possess knowledge (but possess other things, such as for example money). Second, because technology is implemented in material beings, it normally harnesses the energies of the physical universe for human purposes, extending the power - in the broadest sense - of the naked human being, especially in the physical world.

Given these understandings of technique, techne and technology, I think one could conceive of the state as a kind of materialization of a wide variety of techniques of rule. But this would be something for another day. Do these understandings of technique, techne, and technology make sense?

Strategies for successful dissertation completion

2005-11-18T08:40:00.000-05:00

Strategies for successful dissertation completion is a useful list of suggestions for people writing a dissertation - or indeed, any sort of long research project, I would say.

Blogging and academia

2005-11-16T10:11:00.000-05:00

This is a good introduction to the issues.

Reinventing Higher Education at Slate

2005-11-16T09:56:00.000-05:00

The whole series
Reform School, Contd. - How to reinvent higher education. is worth reading if you are interested in teaching.

College Makeover - Let them solve problems. By Alison Gopnik

2005-11-16T09:54:00.000-05:00

This article at Slate, "College Makeover - Let them solve problems. By Alison Gopnik," is pretty interesting, I thought. It's a wild idea (and won't come to pass), but she's right: the way we teach in the classroom is rather medieval, and not usually in a good sense.

Plato's STATESMAN and Torture

2005-11-13T02:53:00.000-05:00

Longish post. Bear with me - I'm working on this for part of a job talk.

One of the questions I've been concerned in my work on the STATESMAN is the question of the conceptual function of the statesman. It seems to me quite clear that the statesman of the dialogue is a logical construction: it answers the question concerning the shape of the kind of knowledge that would actually be able to care properly for human beings, but the dialogue resolutely refuses to say whether such knowledge is actually achievable by any form of education, and indeed strongly suggests that it is not. The figure of the statesman who rules without law thus appears as a standard by which to evaluate practice, and in particular the law, not as a plausible alternative to the rule of law. It is a normative, not a positive concept, to put the point in modern terminology.

This point comes to mind in part because of the recent debates on torture. As the Eleatic Stranger tells young Socrates (293dff), somebody who ruled a city with this kind of complete wisdom could kill and maim anybody, without regard for any written rules, so long as the act was for the good of the city. The Stranger of course abstracts from the idea that the good of the parts and the good of the whole may differ, and in comparing the city to a swarm of bees points to the fact that this person would have to be as superior to the ruled as a queen bee is in respect to the other bees (cf. also 301d-e, where the comparison to the bees is even more explicit), but we may assume for the sake of argument that the point holds, i.e., that there is some unique way of measuring the good of the whole such that violence against particular people appears as necessary and justified.

This argument would thus clearly justify torture - which in the dialogue is clearly one of those forms of violence that would disgust young Socrates and the Athenians- under some unspecified circumstances for the sake of the good of the city, assuming the statesman possesses this special knowledge. If this assumption is not met, the Stranger suggests, there can be no justification for the kind of violence he described (a violence that would eo ipso be against the law, which is conceived as the repository of those practices that have worked well for our own care as human beings). In fact, the point goes deeper: it's not so much that there would be no "justification" (a word which brings with it the idea of law, which does not apply to the statesman, who is above all law), but that it is only when such violence is applied with complete knowledge that it would be objectively good. And any sort of violence is otherwise impious (except in very narrowly defined cases), as Plato (or some near contemporary follower) says explicitly in the SEVENTH LETTER (331cff).

One interesting thing about the debate on torture now is that it is (in part) about what necessity authorizes people in positions of authority to do. The question is not so much, or at least not very explicitly, what kind of knowledge they have (though there is of course debate on whether there is a real techne of interrogation that includes the use of physical violence as a way to reliably obtain true information, a question whose answer seems to be negative, for reasons Hobbes pointed out), but what kind of thing are they authorized to do. The debate thus has roots in modern political philosophy - in Locke's discussion of prerogative, or, as Scott Horton points out in an interesting post over at Balkinization, in Carl Schmitt. While Locke and Schmitt are very different - I don't think there's an idea of a social contract in Schmitt, though perhaps Jeremy can help me here - both argue about authorization rather than knowledge, and in this respect their idea of an unconstrained executive acting for the good (or merely the self-preservation) of the community is strikingly different from the Platonic argument. It illustrates the divide between ancient and modern political philosophy quite nicely, it seems to me.

Necessity, in the STATESMAN, does not appear to authorize anything (only knowledge does); it is better for the city to perish than for its rulers to break the law without true knowledge. The point, indeed, is not about authorization but about the objective good of the polis; and since this objective good cannot be reliably determined without an impossible sort of knowledge, then no one in effect can really be authorized to contravene the laws, which are the closest the city gets to knowledge. The city is simply not made to be flexible; but its inflexibility is part of its dignity.

best web resources for political theory

2005-11-10T14:26:00.000-05:00

I'm sure many of us have some of our favorite political-theory-related things on the web. Perhaps we could collect them, discuss them, and put the best ones on the sidebar of the blog. Put suggestions in the comments to this post.

Some thoughts on the naturalness of the polis in Aristotle

2005-11-10T01:02:00.000-05:00

Thinking of Kevin's arguments today on the naturalness of the polis in Aristotle, it occurred to me that we were not fully clear on the distinctions we were using.

When Aristotle says that the polis comes into being "by" nature he means that nature is casually involved in the emergence of the polis, though "casually" in a teleological, not a mechanistic, sense. Nature is involved as setting (or being?) the end (1252b30), i.e., the completion of the sequence of natural partnerships leading to ever greater degrees of self-sufficiency. For the polis to be by nature is thus simply to be the only complete community. This leads Aristotle to suggest that the city is the nature of the lesser partnerships, just as the adult horse is or exhibits the nature of the newborn horse and the oak tree is or exhibits the nature of the acorn.

The sequence of partnerships exhibits a certain progression in time and necessity: there are daily needs (met by the household: their daily character means that in the household necessity rules supreme), nondaily needs (met by the village: their more sporadic character means that in the village there is some space for freedom from necessity), and then there is whatever the city fulfills which is evidently not a need properly speaking: "living well" (implying something you could do not well and still exist) rather than "living."

If this is so, however, what then is the contrast that Aristotle is drawing on? What is the polar term here? The contrast to nature cannot be freedom, for the city seems to be the fulfillment of freedom - the space where "need" as such is no longer supreme, either on a daily or on a non-daily basis. Is it convention? What would it mean to say, in Aristotle's terms, that the city comes into being by convention (per impossibile, since Aristotle does not say that)?

Some resources

2005-11-10T00:53:00.000-05:00

The website www.politicaltheory.info is a constantly updated and somewhat idiosyncratic list of political theory resources on the web (the editor tends to link to some weird communist commentary on Chavez every so often). Anyone know of any good ones?