John Gray on Martha Nussbaum's latest

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?)

Political Concepts Syllabus

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

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.

How much time should it take?

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?

The State as a Form of Technology, Cont.

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?

The Academic Labor Market

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?

A correction

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?