Cosmopolitan Lawyer

Ages ago, at my first-year law school orientation, my classmates were told "If you only know the law, then you do not know the law at all." I took the words to heart as I made my way through law school, through law practice and, now, into law teaching. The Cosmopolitan Lawyer lists readings, many non-law, which are influencing my thinking about law. It is my effort to be, and to encourage others to be, more cosmopolitan--and, thus, less parochial--in thinking about law.

December 31, 2011

December 25, 2011

BOOK OF THE WEEK: WEEK FIFTY-TWO, 2011

Sugata Bose, His Majesty's Opponent: Subhas Chandra Bose and India's Struggle Against Empire (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Belknap/Harvard U. Press, 2011) (" 'In this mortal world, everything perishes and will perish,' Subhas Chandra Bose had written in 1940, 'but ideas, ideals and dreams do not.' As he prepared for a fast unto death, he was confident that the idea for which one individual was prepared to die would incarnate itself in a thousand lives. That, he believed, was how the wheel of evolution turned and how the ideas, ideals, and dreams of one generation were 'bequeathed to the next.' 'No idea has ever fulfilled itself in this world,' he asserted, 'except through an ordeal of suffering and sacrifice.' It is his immense sacrifice--in the the sense of tyag as taught by Ramakrishna and Vivekananda, and kurbani as enshrined on the INA memorial--that has made him the heir to a life immortal." Id. at 327.).

December 18, 2011

BOOK OF THE WEEK: WEEK FIFTY-ONE, 2011

Ian Kershaw, The End: The Defiance and Destruction of Hitler's Germany, 1944-1945 (New York: The Penguin Press, 2011) ("With this recognition, the signs of disintegration within the civilian population and among ordinary soldiers started to mount. The regime responded in characteristic fashion: by hugely stepping up repression at home." "Of course, repression had been an intrinsic part of the Nazi regime from the outset. The legal profession had fully collaborated in the escalating persecution and responded at every stage to the extra-legal violence of the police and the party's organization by intensifying its own repression. But the repression of the pre-war years, omnipresent through it was, had concentrated on 'outsider' groups. The regime's social and political control rested ultimately on the general acknowledgement by Germans that it would act ruthlessly against those who stood in its way or were deemed in some way or another to be its enemies. As long as the repression was aimed at 'outsiders' and 'undesirables', however, it was accepted, even welcomed, by the majority of the population. And as long as individuals who did not belong to a politically or racially targeted group conformed or did not have the misfortune to be deemed an 'inferior' in some way, to be excluded from the 'people's community'. they were not likely to fall into the clutches of the Gestapo." [] "As the losses at the front mounted alarmingly and the pressures on the civilian population within Germany grew commensurately during the course of 1944, the regime became ever more sensitive to signs of dissent Even so, criticism of the regime widened, as the authorities' own monitoring services plainly indicated." Id. at 207-208. "Bormann's guidelines . . . give clear enough indication that the new courts had little to do with conventional justice. They were, in fact, no more than a facade for increasingly arbitrary and wild terror, 'instruments of destruction in legal drapery'. Death sentences were scarcely more than a formality , all the more so since the judges were themselves under pressure to show their loyalty. Around 6,000-7,000 death sentences are known to have been handed out by the summary courts martial, though in countless other cases the executioners did not even wait for the farce of a quasi-judicial sentence. The summary justice became even more arbitrary and unconstrained after 9 March, when their reach was extended by Hitler's decree creating the 'flying court martial' (fliegendes Standericht). The courts travelled around Germany dealing with those accused of undermining the war effort in whatever way, and wasting no time before reaching their verdict -- usually sentence of death, meted out by the senior officer presiding over the court, and without any appeal. By then, all semblance of centralized control over judicial action was visibly disintegrating, and authorized lawlessness and criminality in the name of upholding the struggle of the German people were becoming rampant as the last phrase of the regime was entered." Id. at 225. Also, see James J. Sheehan, "State of Deception," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 10/23/2011,).

December 14, 2011

READ STANLEY FISH ON LAW AS A SUBJECT

OPINION | December 12, 2011

Stanley Fish: Teaching Law

By STANLEY FISH

Law is a subject, not just a practice, and should be treated as such.

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/12/teaching-law/?

December 13, 2011

AN ECONOMIC ANALYSIS OF THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT

Marcellus Andrews, The Political Economy of Hope and Fear: Capitalism and The Black Condition in America (New York: NYU Press, 1999) ("This book uses economic analysis as an intellectual scalpel to conduct an economic audit of the Civil Rights movement which shows that the movement toward racial justice in America was assassinated by free markets and the technological whirlwind driving capitalism worldwide rather than by organized racism per se. Racism is still an important and destructive influence on the economic fortunes of black people in America, but it is no longer the primary reason why black people are poorer than white people. Put bluntly, black Americans are generally poorer than white Americans because capitalism and racism combine to limit their access to education and knowledge, which in turn blocks their access to good jobs, decent health care, safe neighborhoods, and good lives. However, racism only abets the more basic problem: black people are poor now because they were so badly discriminated against by historic American racism that they were unprepared for the sea change in American and world economy that has utterly transformed our lives over the past three decades. Black people were completely unprepared for, and unable to take advantage of, the shift in the structure of the American economy toward knowledge- and technology-driven system that offers huge rewards to brains over brawn, because they remained in an industrial labor force in a post-industrial country. Even if every racist white person in this country had a change of heart or moved abroad, most poor black people would be exactly where they are right now in the absence of major changes in government policy to address issues of poverty and economic inequality across color lines." Id. at 2-3. "Of course, market economies rarely function as smoothly as the rhetoric of free market advocates implies. One of the most basic propositions in economics is that a free market economy, left to its own devises, will tend to undersupply education to its citizens. The reason for this type of market failure is known to every competent undergraduate economics major: the wage differences between skilled and unskilled workers only partially reflect the value of greater levels of schooling to society. Increasing the number of skilled workers raises the overall productive capacity of the economy, reduces the social costs of low wages, unemployment, and inequality--including poor support, the direct and indirect costs of crime to private citizens and criminal justice expenditures--and increases the ability of the work fore to adapt to changes in new technologies and to absorb new scientific and technical information, among other things. The typical student/worker will only consider the direct increase in his or her long-term income associated with schooling, just as the typical private school will only consider the contributions that potential new students bring to the institution (principally the increased value of the endowment and the improved academic reputation of the institution). In turn, banks and other sources of educational loans will only consider their own narrow interests in granting or refusing to lend money to finance education Since private schools and commercial banks pay scant attention to the broader, social benefits of schooling to society as a whole, they will generally fund too small a number of students' education choices, thereby leading to a shortage of students and schooling relative to the socially optimal level. Banks will withhold loans from bright but financially strapped students because these borrowers are high-risk investment opportunities compared to wealthier students with more modest intellectual abilities. These basic considerations are the primary justification for public schools, and even in this conservative era, for the public funding of primary, secondary, and college education." Id. at 36-37.).

December 11, 2011

BOOK OF THE WEEK: WEEK FIFTY, 2011

Jeffrey D. Sachs, The Price of Civilization: Reawakening American Virtue and Prosperity (New York: Random House, 2011) ("The American economy increasingly serves only a narrow part of society, and America's national politics has failed to put the country back on track through honest, open, and transparent problem solving. Too many of America's elites--among the super-rich, the CEOs, and many of my colleagues in academia--have abandoned a commitment to social responsibility. They chase wealth and power, the rest of society be damned." Id. at 4-5. "I have no quarrel with wealth per se. Many wealthy individuals are highly creative, talented, generous, and philanthropic. My quarrel is with poverty. As long as there is both widespread poverty and booming wealth at the top, and many public investments (in education, child care, training, infrastructure, and other area) that could reduce or end poverty, then tax cuts for the rich are immoral and counterproductive." Id. at 8. "Our greatest national illusion is that a healthy society can be organized around the single-minded pursuit of wealth. The ferocity of the quest for wealth throughout society has left Americans exhausted and deprived of the benefits of social trust, honesty, and compassion. Our society has turned harsh, with the elites of Wall Street, in Big Oil, and in Washington among the most irresponsible and selfish of all. When we understand this reality, we can begin to refashion our economy." Id. at 9. "[A]s economic life becomes more complex, we should expect the role of government to become more extensive. Therefore, expecting to find good twenty-first-century economic answers in a constitution that dates back to 1789 is unrealistic. The Founding Fathers were clever, to be sure, but the cleverest thing they realized is that Thomas Jefferson's famous aphorism that 'the earth belongs to the living' means laws from a premodern age should not blindly bind us today. We need fresh thinking about our circumstances, especially at a time of rapid globalization, environmental threats, and a knowledge-based economy." Id. at 45. "We will need . . . to achieve a new mindfulness regarding our needs as individuals and as a society, to find a more solid path to well-being" Id. at 164. "Mindfulness, I would suggest, is crucial in eight dimensions of our lives: Mindfulness of self: personal moderation to escape mass consumerism[;] Mindfulness of work: the balancing of work and leisure[;] Mindfulness of knowledge: the cultivation of education[;] Mindfulness of others: the exercise of compassion and cooperation[;] Mindfulness of nature: the conservation of the world's ecosystems[;] Mindfulness of the future: the responsibility to save for the future[;] Mindfulness of politics: the cultivation of public deliberation and shared values for collective action through political institutions[;] Mindfulness of the world: the acceptance of diversity as a path to peace". Id. at 165. Read this book along with Friedman & Mandelbaum, That Used To Be Us, and Lessig, Republic, Lost. Also, contrast Sachs, The Price of Civilization, with the the views of libertarian law professor Richard A. Epstein, expressed in his October 26, 2011, interview on The News Hour on PBS.).

December 10, 2011

MEMOIR OF AN EDUCATION

Mary Clearman Blew, This Is Not the Ivy League: A Memoir (Lincoln & London: U. of Nebraska Press, 2011) ("What can be accomplished in this place, wonders the young woman, whose idea of a college is the University of Missouri at Columbia. What can be imagined here, what will the future hold?" "The future: she will often feel as though she though she has exchanged the myth of Ariadne and the labyrinth for the myth of Sisyphus. As teacher education program shrink and vocational programs flourish and the job market continues to worsen, she and other liberal arts faculty will find themselves in a No Exit bastion of curriculum quarrels, campus politics, budget cuts, crises of all kinds. But no! They'll insist they're not rolling a rock uphill. They're fighting for their programs, for the liberal arts, in the face of ridicule from the other side of campus: What do some people thing this college is all about! Where do they get the idea that college is about ideas, when everybody knows it's about jobs skills?" One of her colleagues--the students call his Spiderman, for his strange lunging gait down the corridors of Cowan Hall--has a habit of beginning his sentences with, 'At Yale, we used to . . .' to cries of derision. This is not the Ivy League!" Id. at 14. As a legal academic I cannot help wondering, fearing really, what legal education and law students are going to look like in the future when there is no longer even a modest effort to expose undergraduate students (including prelaw students) to ideas, and, instead, to only provide them with job skills? College as skills school, or college as job faire. Then again, this is not some distant future. Legal education, certainly once one gets pass the elite 10 to 20 law schools, is less interested in ideas and more interested in how-to skills, no longer interested in ideas and skills, just interested in a narrow set of skills which they claim will render their students 'practice ready.' Law schools are devolving into trade schools--and law devolves from a learned profession to a mere trade--; and 'practice ready' is the marching tune sung by those who leading the demise of legal education. That said, the book is not primarily about the state of education. Rather, it is a memoir of one woman's education, one women's life. From the bookjacket: ""Mary Clearman Blew's education began at home, on a remote cattle ranch in Montana. She graduated to a one-room rural school, then escaped, via scholarship, to the University of Montana, where, still in her teens, she met and married her first husband. This Is Not the Ivy League is her account of what it was to be that girl, and then that woman--pressured by husband and parents to be the conventional wife of the 1950s, persisting in her pursuit of an education, trailed by a reluctant husband and small children through graduate school, and finally entering the job market with a PhD in English only to find a whole new set of pressures and prejudices." "This memoir is Blew's behind-the-scenes account of pursuing a career at a time when a woman's place in the world was supposed to have limits. It is a story of both the narrowing perspective of the social norm and the ever-expanding possibilities of a woman who refuses to be told what she can and cannot be.").

December 9, 2011

PLANNING AHEAD FOR WINTER: SUGGESTED READING FOR LAW STUDENTS

Joanna L. Grossman & Lawrence M. Friedman, Inside the Castle: Law and the Family in 20th Century America (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2011) (From the bookjacket: "Inside the Castle is a comprehensive social history of twentieth-century family law in the United States. [The authors] show how vast, oceanic changes in society have reshaped and reconstituted the American family. Women and children have gained rights and powers, and novel forms of family life have emerged. The family has more or less dissolved into a collection of independent individuals with own wants, desires, and goals. Modern family law, as always, reflects the brute social and cultural facts of family life.").

Leo Katz, Why the Law Is So Perverse (Chicago & London: U. of Chicago Press, 2011) ("In this book I seek to explain why the law is full of perversities . . . : strange and counterintuitive features that one cannot justify but that one would not want to eliminate either. They all have, I will try to show you, a common cause." "The cause turns out to be not, as one might have thought, historical or political or psychological but, rather logical in nature. Creating laws that do not suffer from such problems turns out to be logically impossible. Oliver Wendell Holmes famously said that the life of the law is experience, not logic. He was more wrong than right. Historical experience surely counts. But some of the most fundamental as well as fundamentally strange features of the law are rooted in logic rather than experience." Id. at 2. "The exploitation of loopholes is in fact the lawyer's daily bread, which makes it all the more strange that both lawyers and nonlawyers profess such outrage about it. Actually, the point should probably be put the other way around: what is strange is that, given the contempt in which loophole exploitation is held, it is nevertheless central to legal practice. What can a profession whose main preoccupation consists of this kind of activity say for itself? [] Specifically, I intend to answer three questions about loopholes: First, why is the law so riddled with them? Second, why, once detected, do they usually go uncorrected? And finally, should lawyers be reluctant to exploit them, or should they feel free to?" Id. at 73.).

Forrest McDonald, Novus Ordo Seclorum: The Intellectual Origins of the Constitution (Lawrence: University press of Kansas, 1985).

Annelise Riles, Collateral Knowledge: Legal Reasoning in the Global Financial Markets (Chicago & London: U. of Chicago Press, 2011) ("[T]his book will not address the question of whether swaps are good or bad, or how much regulation of the swap markets there should be. In fact, the premise of the book is that the quantitative metric deployed by all sides in the policy debate--how much government regulation is enough, how much is too much--misses what is most interesting and perhaps most important to understand about regulatory governance, that is its qualitative features, The project of this nook is to ask, what are the qualities of particular aspects of legal knowledge that give it resilience, and legitimacy, in particular contexts? The project makes a case for a more careful understanding o the many unnoticed aspects of the rule of law, This book presents new theory of law and markets, then, but it is purposely "theory close to the ground'--it builds up its analytical categories at close proximity to those of market and regulatory practice and it does so inductively rather than deductively." Id at 14.).

David Robertson, The Judge as Political Theorist: Contemporary Constitutional Review (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2010) ("The theme of this book is that modern constitutional review cannot always be adequately understood if seen through the traditional categories of the separation of powers. Constitutional courts do more than can be fitted into the domain allowed to courts exercising the judicial function. Much of what they do in what I call 'transforming societies' involves spreading the values set out in the constitution throughout their state and society. Indeed, their idea of what a constitution is does not always fit well with the orthodox idea of a liberal constitution. I try to show that constitutional judges often come near to being applied political theorists, carrying out a quite new type of political function." Id at 1. Robertson looks at constitutional review in Germany, Eastern Europe, France, Canada, South Africa and, of course, the United States.).

Robin West, Normative Jurisprudence: An Introduction (Cambridge Introduction to Philosophy and Law) (Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press, 2011) ("Lawyers, judges, legal scholars, and law students--collectively, the legal profession--all, at various times, criticize, pan, praise, or laud laws. Thus, lawyers are inclined to say, in any number of formal and informal context, 'this law is a good law (or a bad law)' or 'this regulation is a godsend (or a calamity)'; 'that piece of legislation is a breach of trust (or an act of food faith)'; t' that legal regime, even, is a boom (or a bust) for mankind.' How do we do that? What is it that lawyers know, if anything, about law, society, or political morality that informs their nonadversarial critical work? . . . Knowledge of the law that exists cannot alone generate the basis of our conclusions regarding the law that ought to be--although it is surely true, as countless scholars have pointed out for the past one hundred years, that our judgments regarding the aw that ought to be influence out understanding of the law that is." Id. at 1. "So what fills the gap from the legal is to the legal ought for the legal critics?. . . What is the justice we rightly demand of law?" Id. at 1-2. "If there is a field of study that could profitably ask questions about our normative framework for evaluating, criticizing, praising or panning law, it should be jurisprudence--both analytic jurisprudence, which might as what we mean by justice, or the good, against which we evaluate law, and critical jurisprudence, which might ask how we should, and how we can, sufficiently distance ourselves fro the profession in which we participate, so as to better criticize our deepest and most defining legal commitments." Id at 2. "The overriding purpose of this book is to explore the reasons that each of the three major jurisprudential traditions of North American legal theory--natural law, legal positivism, and critical legal theory--has abandoned normative inquiry and to urge that we change of course." Id. at 3. Though it is certainly beyond the scope of West's book, a lurking unasked question is why legal education has, with an increasingly rare exception, abandoned teaching (or exposing their) students to jurisprudence. Obviously, in the current fad of the 'practice-ready'-approach to legal education, jurisprudence is increasingly deemed pretty much irrelevant.).

Morton White, The Philosophy of the American Revolution (New York: Oxford U. Press, 1978) (From the bookjacket: "Self-evident truth . . . unalienable rights . . . the pursuit of happiness . . . These terms are familiar to every schoolchild, but what do they really mean? Now for the first time a scholar who is both a philosopher and a historian lucidly analyzes the main ideas that guided the American revolutionaries of 1776. What did they believe, and how did they justify the steps they took? What were the political consequences--actual and possible-- of the Revolutionary philosophy? In answering these questions, this profound work fills a gap in the history of the American Revolution>' "The book illuminates the theory of knowledge (self-evident truth), the metaphysics (the nature or essence of man), the philosophical theology (God's ends for man), and the ethics (natural rights and duties) upon which the Founding Fathers rested their claim to independence. No modern American politician has attempted to apply technical philosophical doctrines, but White shows that Thomas Jefferson Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, and James Wilson certainly did so. Ironically they appealed to self-evident truths which were hardly self-evident to all of the people, and to the essence of man, which was certainly not penetrable by any of the people." 'White notes that they fully acknowledged their failure to invent any new philosophical ideas and that they admitted their dependence on the views of earlier Western philosophers and jurists, For this reason, White carefully describes the ties with other important figures in the history of Western thought. The difficult philosophical statements int he Declaration of Independence and other American writings of the eighteenth century become much more comprehensible when linked with the ideas of philosophers and jurists like Aristotle, Cicero, Aquinas, Hooker, Locke, Pufendorf, and Burlamaqui.").

William M. Wiecek, The Sources of Antislavery Constitutionalism in America, 1760-1848 (Ithaca and London: Cornell U. Press, 1977).

December 6, 2011

CONNING OURSELVES: PERSONAL PHILOSOPHY AS RATIONALIZATION

Arthur Phillips, The Tragedy of Arthur: A Novel (New York: Random House, 2011) ("What was I stealing? That day, twenty-eight years old, I would have self-righteously said, 'Happiness,' snatched from corporate dullardry . . . Later, thirty-seven years old, I would, self-glorifying, have said I was stealing my 'better self' away, becoming a novelist, chasing destiny . . . Now, forty-six, I would, slightly more self-aware, say that I was stealing away from adult responsibility because it hadn't yet proven to me its superiority over youthful irresponsibility . . . Over the years, I have pulled out all these meanings as needed to garb my naked actions. Philosophy is inclination dressed in a toga." Id. at 102-103.).

December 4, 2011

BOOK OF THE WEEK: WEEK FORTY-NINE, 2011

Lawrence Lessig, Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress--and a Plan to Stop It (New York & Boston: Twelve, 2011) ("The aim of this book . . . is to convince you that a much more virulent, if much less crude, corruption does indeed wreck our democracy. Not a corruption caused by a gaggle of evil souls. On the contrary, a corruption practiced by decent people, people we should respect, people working extremely hard to do what they believe is right, yet decent people working with a system that has evolved the most elaborate and costly bending of democratic government in our history. There are good people here, yet extraordinary bad gets done." "This corruption has two elements, each of which feeds the other. The first element is bad governance, which means simply that our government doesn't track the expressed will of the people whether on the Left or on the Right. Instead, the government tracks a different interest, one not directly affected by votes or voters. Democracy, on this account, seems a show or a ruse; power rests elsewhere." "The second element is lost trust: when democracy seems a charade, we lose faith in its process. That doesn't matter to some of us--we will vote and participate regardless. But to more rational souls, the charade is signal: spend your time elsewhere, because this game is not for real. Participation thus declines, especially among the sensible middle. Policy gets driven by the extremists at both ends." Id at 8-9. "As a former young Republican--indeed, Pennsylvania's state chairman of the Teen Age Republicans--I don't mean to rally anyone against the rich. But I do mean to rally Republicans and Democrats alike against a certain kind of rich that no theorist on the Right or the Left has ever sought seriously to defend: The rich whose power comes not from hard work, creativity, innovation, or the creation of wealth. The rich who instead secure their wealth through the manipulation of government and politicians. The great evil that we as Americans face is the banal evil of second-rate minds who can't make it in the4 private sector and who therefore turn to the massive wealth directed by our government as the means to securing wealth for themselves. The enemy is not evil. The enemy is well dressed." Id. at 7. " 'There is only one issue in this country,' former MSNBC commentator Cenk Uygur told Netroots Nations, in June 2011, 'Campaign finance reform.' " "For the vast majority of America, Uygur's comment is obscure. For a small minority, it is obvious. This book is written for that vast majority, drawn from the insights of that small minority." "As I have struggled to craft it, I have become driven by the view that practically every important issue in American politics today is tied to this 'one issue in this country,' and that we must find a way to show the connections. For both the Left and the Right, until this 'one issue' gets fixed, there won't be progress on a wide range of critically important public policy issues. Until it gets fixed, governance will remained stalled." Id. at xi. After reading this, go back a re-read Friedman & Mandelbaum, That Used To Be Us (2011), last week's 'BOOK OF THE WEEK'. The issues discusses there and here are intimately connected.).

December 3, 2011

WATER POLITICS, LESSONS TO BE LEARNED

Donald Worster, Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity and The Growth of The American West (New York: Pantheon, 1985) ("Interestingly, free-market liberals like Fuller and anticommunist ideologues like Wittfogel, along with some technocratically inclined radicals, have all refused to acknowledge how the fate of humans is inextricably linked to that of nature--in the present and in the past. However, like many of the most important facts of our lives, this cannot be easily proved or dismissed in the way we would handle a scientific proposition--one which says, for instance, that heating a candle will cause it to melt. Instead, we must strive to find and test a historical truth that has consistent, observable, and demonstrable expressions. When that very wise Englishman C. S. Lewis wrote, 'What we call Man's power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument,' he had that kind of truth in mind. And when the contemporary French social theorist Andre Gorz declares, 'The total domination of nature inevitably entails a domination of people by the the techniques of domination,' he too is talking truth about a general historical truth, not a chemical reaction. A historical truth cannot be nicely calibrated or made exactly predictive without being reduced to triviality. In the case of the human implications of intensified water control, it is not possible to argue that this particular dam or that aqueduct will have precisely and in every place the same social impact. Establishing historical truths involves a looser, though still demanding, kind of analysis. It is not a strict determinism of cause-and-effect but rather an imaginative grasp of subtly interacting relationships. Only by that higher approach to historical explanation can we determine, Wifffogel and Fuller to the contrary notwithstanding, where the fate of the hydraulic cycle in the ancient desert regimes has any modern echoes." Id. at 50. "Legitimation involves the transforming of what might be regarded with skeptics or hostility into something acceptable, even honorific. Max Weber defines it as a process of establishing that something is right and proper, or that it is rational to do, when there is no custom or tradition behind it. A bastard child becomes a rightful heir. An unsigned painting becomes the acknowledged work of a master artist. The bourgeoisie take their place in the highest echelons of power, viewed no longer as ignoble upstarts but as leaders and benefactor. A revolutionary government gains support by arguing that it is the genuine voice of the people. In all such cases of legitimation there is at once an appeal to reason--or it may be an effort to redefine what is reasonable--and an appeal to tradition, demonstrating that the new is in fact organically linked to the old and established. When the claimant is a class, government, culture, or mode of production, legitimation usually involves the creation of an ideology, a set of ideas that will justify the claim. To create that authenticating ideology requires the recruiting of a group of persuasive ideologues, whose skill with words and reasoning can overcome opposing ideas, make the outlandish familiar, and motivate people to act in desired ways. Irrigation, as a new technological and social system introduced into American agriculture, went through such a legitimation process, as its ideologues attempted to establish that it was the genuine article--at once the perfection of reason and the fulfillment of tradition." Id. at 114. "Society is like that sky full of sounds, where the unique and the common weave in and out of the ether. Much of social thought has to do with deciding how much attention to give to the individual sound and how much to give the general blur, or with whether there is any virtue in listening at all. In America, we proclaim that the people's voices must be heard. Our air is a continual buzzing, louder and more cacophonous as years go by, and it is anybody's guess what the voices have to say in concert. How tempting, if you are a politician, to heed only the voices that have the sound of money in them. Yet it is also an old American belief that the individual can speak more clearly here than anywhere else in the world--and not just one with a warning to make or an ego to express. Any individual in this society is allowed, the official theory goes, to have an important, self-contained voice. Indeed, some say we pay so much attention to those private sounds that we ignore larger collective cries of anguish and protest. That we are too much a nation of discrete transmitters. That we turn a deaf ear to the common good." Id, at 129. And now we have entered the sovereign, but pretty mindless, state of Twitter-dom.).

December 2, 2011

A POLEMIC AGAINST THE MEDICAL/PHARMACEUTICAL ESTABLISHMENT

Brad Case, Thugs, Drugs and the War on Bugs: How the Natural Healthcare Revolution Will Lead Us past Greed, Ego, and Scary Germs Prunedale, CA: New Renaissance Books, 2010) (From the book jacket: "The medical/pharmaceutical establishment's historical preoccupation with symptom suppression and disease management is a major factor in why we're so unhealthy. . . ." "Rather than spending all our money treating symptoms and thus creating new diseases, or fighting against the final stages of disease, a rational system of healthcare would focus first on preventing disease, second on identifying the cause of a person's ill health, and third on using safe, non-toxic methods to induce healing. Only after these methods have been employed should drugs or surgery even been considered." Interesting food for thought!).

December 1, 2011

IT"S NOT EASY BEING GREEN, or A POLEMIC ON YOUR UNWITTING CONSUMPTION OF CHEMICALS

Will Allen, The War on Bugs (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2008) ("[W]ell before the start of the twentieth century, advertising space in rural magazines became an essential platform for chemical corporations. By 1900, the ads were producing more revenues for these farm periodicals than their subscriptions ever could. By that point, the concerns of the reader had become secondary to the concerns of the advertisers. Because of this, the views of the chemical advertisers, not the needs of the farmers, have dominated farm magazines for more than a century, and continue to do so today." Id. at xviii. "The War on Bugs is really the story of two wars, one intended, the other a by-product of chemical use. The intended war using pesticides has been directed against insects, bugs, spiders, disease, and fungus and is designed to KILL. The unintended war comes from the use of chemical fertilizers and pesticide that inadvertently kill highly important soil life, such as microorganisms and earthworms, and their drift that contaminates areas next door and thousands of miles away. Both of these wars have had devastating effects on America's water, farmland soil, wildlife, an rural population. Id. at xxvii. "Based on historical and modern evidence, we know who will suffer from false advertising, resistance problems, and the low yields, crop failures, and lawsuits that result from genetic manipulation. In all the debacles of chemical agriculture since the mid-1800s, it was the farmers who went bankrupt from using defective and worthless fertilizers and pesticides--not the chemical corporations." Id. at 202. In the word of Joni Mitchell, "Give me spores on my apples . . . .").

November 30, 2011

MAN'S ENORMOUS CONCEIT REGARDING ANIMALS, PLANTS AND MINERALS

John Muir, Nature Writings: The Story of My Boyhood and Youth; My First Summer in the Sierra; The Mountains of California; Stickeen; Selected Essays, edited by William Cronon (New York: Library of America, 1997) (From "Wild Wool": "No dogma taught by the present civilization seems to form so insuperable an obstacle in the way of a right understanding of the relation which culture sustains to wildness, as that which declares that the world was made especially for the uses of men. Every animal, plant, and crystal controverts it in the plainest terms. Yet it is taught from century to century as something ever new and precious, and in the resulting darkness the enormous conceit is allowed to go unchallenged." "I have never yet happened upon a trace of evidence that seemed to show that any one animal was ever made for another as much as it was made for itself. . . ." Id. at 598, 602-603. From The Story of My Boyhood and Youth: "The muskrat is one of the most notable and widely distributed of American animals, and millions of the gentle, industrious, beaver-like creatures are shot and trapped and speared every season for their skins, worth a dime of so,--like shooting boys and girls for their garments." Id. at 1, 88.).

November 29, 2011

EATING SERIOUSLY, AND BEING MINDFUL REGARDING ONE'S CHOICE OF FOODS

Anand M. Saxena, The Vegetarian Imperative (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U. Press, 2011) ("We have not learned to take food seriously. A person living in the developed world seems to have an endless variety of food choices, from breakfast cereals and lunch meats to snack items. We munch all through the day. However, there are vitally important reasons for taking food seriously. Put simply, if we do not change our ways, we humans will eventually run out of food because our planet will not be able to produce what we need. We need to take food seriously to save the environment (or at least not despoil It to the extent that our children have to suffer deprivations), to provide sufficient food for people living right now and in the future, and to protect our own health." Id. at 3. "The global demand for food for the present population is already very large, and it is on an upward spiral, increasing with each passing year. There are to main reasons for this situation. First, the population of the world is growing by 76 million every year and is projected to reach 9.1 billion by the year 2050. Second, and at least as important, a nutritionally transition is taking place in most regions of the world, with a greater demand for foods of animal origins--meats, milk products, and eggs. The consumption of these items in the developed world, while already very high, is still increasing at a slow rate, while in the developing world the demand for animal-based foods is increasing rapidly." Id. at 4. "Eating the primary agricultural products--grain, fruits, vegetables, and nuts--is called eating closer to the sun because there are no intermediary steps. Feeding agricultural products to farm animals and then consuming animals as food is a secondary process, with a large concomitant loss of energy; thus producing these foods increases the burden on the ecosphere. Our choice of food is important because it determines the quantity of primary agricultural products used to fuel our activities." Id. at 6.).

November 28, 2011

LET US NOT "SOUR ON THE IDEA OF THE LITERARY LIFE"

Adam Kirsch, Why Trilling Matters (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 2011) (From the bookjacket: Why Trilling Matters is more than a study of Trilling's work: Kirsch argues that, at a time when serious readers are fearful about the decline of literature, reading, even the book itself, Trilling has more to teach us than ever before.").

November 27, 2011

BOOK OF THE WEEK: WEEK FORTY-EIGHT, 2011

Thomas L. Friedman & Michael Mandebaum, That Used To Be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2011) ("When America failed to see what a profound challenge the end of the Cold War posed, this could be chalked up to ignorance or inattention. We simply didn't understand the world in which we were living. But when we decided to go to war on math and physics, we did so with eyes wide open. And when we did all these things at once, we made a radical departure from the norms of American history. That is why we call this initial decade of the twenty-first century the 'Terrible Twos'." "This term comes originally from child psychology. It refers to the developmental stage, beginning sometime after the child turns two, when the child becomes cranky, moody, and willful about almost everything. Pediatricians reassure anxious parents of such cantankerous toddlers that the behavior pattern is normal. They'll grow out of it. American behavior in the Terrible Twos, by contrast, was anything but normal, and we have not yet grown out of it." "As a country, we lost the plot. We forgot who we were, how we had become the richest and most powerful country in the history of the world, where we wanted to go and what we needed to do to get there. We failed to update our five-part formula for greatness--education, infrastructure, immigration, research and development, and appropriate regulation--just at a time when changes in the world, especially the expansion of globalization and the IT revolution, made adapting that formula to new circumstances as important as it had ever been, Then we fell into the pit of the Great Rescission, while fighting two wars in the Middle East and being the first generation of Americans not only to fail to raise taxes to pay for a war but actually to cut them." "In short, we were the generation of Americans that threw out its umbrella just before the storm. . . ." Id. at 217-218. Friedman and Mandlebaum do not really say anything new here, nothing that one could not come to know by simply opening one's eyes, ears, and paying attention. Unfortunately, we Americans are very adept at only seeing and hearing what we want to see and hear, and of simply not paying attention. As someone both involved in education (legal education) and an interest in corporate (or organizational) governance, I wish Friedman's and Mandelbaum's discussion of innovation. You would think that educational institutions would be hotbeds of innovation. Yet very few are--especially those that have become more corporate in their governance structure, moving governance away from the faculty to administrative staff and adopting more a more top down authoritative decision-making structure. This may fuel the decreasing innovation in even the area of education. From the top will come dumb innovation, stifling out smart innovation from below. "Given the rising innovative power and knowledge that can so easily more from the bottom up now--the power to invent, design, manufacture, improve, and sell products--and not just from the top down, Carlson sees the following mega-trend barrelling down the highway: 'More and more, innovation that happens from the top down tends to be orderly but dumb. Innovation that happens from the bottom up tends to be chaotic but smart.' Therefore, 'the sweet spot for innovation today is moving down.' " "We call this Carlson's Law: Innovation that happens from the top down tends to be orderly but dumb. Innovation that happens from the bottom up tends to be chaotic but smart. This makes it all more important for every worker to be a creative creator or creative server and for every boss to understand that the boss's job is to take advantage of Carlson's Law--to find ways to inspire, enable, and unleash innovation from the bottom up, and then to edit, manage, and merge that innovation from the top down to produce goods, services, and concepts." Id. at 97-98. Anyway, I do not share whatever optimism Friedman and Mandelbaum have about America's future. The American Century is over, and the American people need to get over themselves and thinking of themselves and the country as being exceptional. We have read our own press releases and slef-advertisements so long that we have forgotten that we made it up and that it has little basis in reality.).

November 26, 2011

RESTING ON A "FIRM ENOUGH" SWAMP

Karl R. Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (New York: Basic Books, 1959) ("Thee empirical basis of objective science has thus nothing 'absolute' about it. Science does not rest upon rock-bottom. The bold structure of its theories rises, as it were, above a swamp. It is like a building erected on piles. The piles are driven down from above into the swamp, but not down to any natural or 'given' base; and when we cease our attempts to drive our piles into a deeper layer, it is not because we have reached firm ground. We simply stop when we are satisfied that they are firm enough to carry the structure, at least for the time being." Id. at 111.).

November 25, 2011

KARL POPPER, EXPERIENCE and COSMOPOLITANISM

Malachi Haim Hacohen, Karl Popper, The Formative years, 1902-1945: Politics and Philosophy in Interwar Vienna (Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press, 2000) (" 'Experiences can motivate a decision, and hence an acceptance or a rejection of a statement, but a basic statement cannot be justified by them - no more than by thumping the table.' " "Popper used jury trials to demonstrate his point. Courts present juries with a case and a question formulated according to legal rules. Guided by procedures, the jury reaches a verdict, 'a true statement of fact.' No doubt convictions motive the decision to accept a particular story as 'fact,' but convictions do not justify the decision. Indeed, the verdict may be wrong. In contrast, judges justify their judgment. They determine punishment by 'deducing' the judgment from the laws. Scientific parallels are close. Basic statements can no more be justified by scientists' convictions than a jury's verdict. Questions posed to, and decisions reached by, both juries and scientists represent application of a system, legal or theoretical, not unadulterated facts, or experience. Only 'arbitrary' acceptance of a basic statement makes further application of the system - one that can be justified - possible. Theory informs all action and decision. Decision can not be justified." Id. at 246. "The historian has the right, however, to interrogate Popper's claim to have overcome the conditions of an 'assimilated Jew.' In an open society, those declining to belong to any nationality might be recognized as Weltburger. Popper did not live in such a society. From childhood to death, his closest friends were assimilated Jews. He grew up in an assimilated Jewish family. Progressive Viennese circles were essential to his intellectual formulation and Central European networks to his intellectual growth. Both were preponderantly Jewish, His cosmopolitanism emerged from Jewish marginality and reflected the assimilated Jews' dilemmas. Anti-Semitism drove him to exile. He retained a special relationship to Jewish nationality, condemning it, yet feeling responsible for it. Using the category of 'assimilated Jew' to describe and analyze Popper, I neither follow in 'the Fuhrer's steps nor deny cosmopolitanism's emergence, demise, and constraints. To do so simply recognizes that Central Europe set limits to cosmopolitanism. I hope with Popper for a world where such limits will no longer exists." Id. at 308-309.).

November 24, 2011

"PROTECTIVE CUSTODY"

Samuel Hynes, Anne Matthews, Nancy Caldwell Sorel, & Roger J. Spiller, Reporting World War II: Part Two: American Journalism 1944-1946 (New York: Library of America, 1995) (From: The Editors of Fortune, "Issei, Nisei, Kibei": "The longer the Army permits California and the rest of the Pacific Coast to be closed to everyone of Japanese descent the more time is given to the Hearst papers and their allies to convince Californians that they will indeed yield to lawlessness if the unwanted minority is permitted to return. By continuing to keep American citizens in 'protective custody,' the U.S. is holding to a policy as ominous as it is new. The American custom in the past has been to lock up the citizen who commits violence, not the victim of his threats and blows. The doctrine of 'protective custody' could prove altogether too convenient a weapon in many situations. In California, a state with a long history of race hatred and vigilanteism, antagonism is already building against the Negroes who have come in for war jobs. What is to prevent their removal to jails, to 'protect them' from riots? Or Negroes in Detroit, Jews in Boston, Mexicans in Texas? The possibilities of 'protective custody' are endless, as the Nazis have amply proved." Id. at 47, 69-70.).

November 22, 2011

"THE FRIGHTENING POVERTY OF CHARACTER"

Samuel Hynes, Anne Matthews, Nancy Caldwell Sorel & Roger J. Spiller, eds., Reporting World War II: Part One: American Journalism 1938-1944 (New York: Library of America, 1995) (From Ernie Pyle, "Life Without Redemption": "Since the first night I have seen too much of it. I no longer feel that way about the shelters in mass. Repetition makes the unusual become commonplace. Enough of anything dulls the emotions." "But I still think my first impression was a valid one. I still think it speaks the frightening poverty of character in this world more forcibly than do the bombs that cause it." "A bombed building looks like something you have seen before--it looks as though a hurricane had struck. But the sight of thousands of poor, opportunityless people lying in weird position against cold steel with all their clothes on, hunched up in blankets, lights shinning in their eyes, breathing fetid air--lying there far underground like rabbits not fighting, not even mad, just helpless scourged, weakly, waiting for the release of another dawn--that, I tell you, is life without redemption." Id. at 150, 152.).

November 20, 2011

BOOK OF THE WEEK: FORTY-SEVEN, 2011

Keith Wailoo, How Cancer Crossed the Color Line (Oxford & New York: Oxford U. Press, 2011) (From the bookjacket: "In the course of the 20th century, cancer went from being perceived as a white woman's nemesis to a 'democratic disease' to a fearsome threat in communities of color. Drawing on film and fiction, on medical and epidemiological evidence, and on patients' accounts, Keith Wailoo tracks this transformation in cancer awareness, revealing how not only awareness, but also cancer prevention, treatment, and survival, have been refracted through the lens of race." [] "A pioneering study, How Cancer Crossed the Color Line gracefully documents how race and gender became central motifs in the birth of cancer awareness, how patterns and perceptions changed over time, and how the 'war on cancer' continues to be waged along the color line.").

November 19, 2011

"ALL MEN ARE CREATED EQUAL"

Jaffa, Harry V., A New Birth of Freedom: Abraham Lincoln and The Coming of the Civil War (Lanham, Maryland, & Oxford, England: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000) ("The present work is intended to be what, in medieval literature, would be called a Great Commentary. Its text, as the title indicates, is the Gettysburg Address. The Gettysburg Address, as we know, has been read and recited countless times by Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, by schoolchildren of all ages, by visitors to the Lincoln Memorial, by politicians, citizens, and scholars. As Soviet tanks were crushing the Hungarian revolution of 1956, the final message the Hungarian freedom fighters, broadcast on the Free Hungarian Radio, was a reading of the Gettysburg Address. The reading was not completed when it was cut off to the sound of gunfire. Some forty years later, however, the Soviet tanks were gone, and the reading of the Gettysburg Address will have resumed. We can say once again that Lincoln's work, and Jefferson's, have proved more powerful than tyranny and despotism." Id. at 78. "A commentary on the Gettysburg Address is necessarily, and above all, a commentary on what is meant by dedication to 'the proposition that all men are created equal.' The idea compressed withing this proposition is called, by Lincoln, 'an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times.' It is also said, by Lincoln, to be the central idea, from which all minor thoughts radiate, of the public opinion upon which the nation was founded. I have found it necessary . . . to lead the argument again and again from the periphery back to the center, to illuminate the geometrical necessity that, in Lincoln's mind, governed the struggle memorialized at Gettysburg. In doing so, I have no hesitated to repeat either the proposition, abstractly considered, or he structure of reasoning into which it is incorporated. This structure comprehends precisely what James Madison meant in his oft repeated dictum that 'compact is the essence of all free government.' That maxim of Madison unites his thought and Jefferson's, as it unites the principles of the Declaration [of Independence] and the Constitution, The compact theory and the doctrine of human equality are identical, and I found that the repetition of that identity was essential to compel us to think, as Lincoln thought, that the cause of union was no less metaphysical than moral and political." Id. at xiii. "Lincoln, in his speech on the Dred Scott decision in 1857, confronted the argument of Chief Justice Roger B. Taney and Senator Stephen A. Douglas tat the authors of the Declaration of Independence has not meant to include Negroes in the proposition of universal human equality, on the evidence that 'they did not at once actually place them on an equality with the whites.' 'This grave argument,' said Lincoln, 'comes to just nothing at all, by the other fact, that they did not at once, or ever afterwards, actually place all white people on an equality with one another.' Lincoln did not then say who were the whites excluded form the privileges of equality. However, in one of the earliest announcements of his political views, in the Sangamo Journal on June 13, 1836, Lincoln had said, 'I go for admitting all whites to the right of suffrage, who pay taxes or bear arms, (by no means excluding females).' Certainly the largest class of excluded 'equals' were women, and Lincoln at the age of twenty-seven is on record as favoring female suffrage. Speaking in 1957, however, he said he understood that the authors of the Declaration 'meant simply to declare the right, so that the enforcement of it might follow as fast as circumstances should permit.' Jefferson himself, in his famous diatribe against slavery in Notes on Virginia, speaks of the 'execration' with which a statesman would be loaded, 'who, permitting one half of the citizens thus to trample on the rights of the other, transforms those into despots, and these into enemies, destroys the moral of the one part, and the amor patriae of the other.' For Jefferson to write in the 1780s of slaves as 'one half citizens' of Virginia--that is to say, citizens by natural right, if not by positive law--is certainly extraordinary. But It is consistent with his reference in 1774 [in Summary View] to the whole population of America as the equals, by right of nature, to the electors of Great Britain." Id. at 21.).

THE GETTYSBURG ADDRESS

Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth
on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and
dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing
whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so
dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-
field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of
that field as a final resting-place for those who here gave
their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether
fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate…we cannot
consecrate…we cannot hallow…this ground. The brave men,
living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it
far above our poor power to add or detract. The world
will little note nor long remember what we say here, but
it can never forget what they did here. It is for us, the
living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished
work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly
advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the
great task remaining before us…that from these honored
dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which
they gave the last full measure of devotion; that we here
highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain;
that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of
freedom; and that government of the people, by the people,
for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

November 19, 1863

November 17, 2011

LOOKING BACK ON A CONFLICT STILL IN PROGRESS

Jason Burke, The 9/11 Wars (London: Allen Lane, 2011) ("A broader mistake which also proved tragically expensive in lives and resources was the insistence that the violence suddenly sweeping two, even three, continents was the product of a single, unitary conflict pitting good against evil, the West against Islam, the modern against the retrograde. For the last decade has not seen one conflict but many. Inevitably, a multi-polar, multifaceted, chaotic world without overarching ideological narratives generates conflicts in its own image. The events described in this book can only be understood as part of matrix of ongoing, overlaid, interlinked and overlapping conflicts, some of which ended during the ten years since 9/11 and some of which started; some of which worsened and some of which died away; some of which have roots going back decades if not centuries and some of which are relatively recent in origins." "This is not a unique characteristic of the current crisis but is certainly one of its essentially distinguishing qualities. The wars that make up this most recent conflict spans the globe geographically--from Indonesia in the east to the Atlantic-Mediterranean coastline in the west, from south-west China to south-west Spain, from small-town America to small-town Pakistan--as well as culturally, politically and ideologically. With no obvious starting point and no obvious end, with no sense of what might constitute victory or defeat, their chronological span is impossible to determine. No soldier at the battle of Castillon in 1453 knew they were fighting the last major engagement of the Hundred Years War. No one fighting at Waterloo could have known they were taking part in what turned out to be the ultimate confrontation of the Napoleonic Wars. The First World War was the Great War until the Second World War came along. Inevitably perhaps, this present conflict is currently without a name. In decades or centuries to come historians will no doubt find one--or several, as is usually the case. In the interim, given the one event that, in the Western public consciousness at least, saw hostilities commence, 'the 9/11 Wars' seems an apt working title for a conflict in progress. Id. at xviii-xix. An excellent read for those who actually care about what we have done to others these last ten years, what others have been done to, and what we and others will do in the future. One on the implicit themes is that the United States may be a large player, but it is not necessarily the central player, the controlling player, etc., and may very well be the one ultimately played. That unshaken belief in so-called American Exceptionalism may be our biggest blind spot.).

November 15, 2011

WHAT IS AMERICAN NEOCONSERVATISM REALLY?

Jean-Francois Drolet, American Neoconservatism: The Politics and Culture of A Reactionary Idealism (New York: Columbia U. Press, 2011) ("This book seeks to come to terms with the politics and theory of American neoconservatism. It exposes and interrogates the ideational substance of this 'new' conservatism and offers a critical assessment of the implications for American democracy and American foreign policy. Thee aim is to generate a better understanding of neoconservative ides and political sociology, in light of the historical events and changing social compacts that have created a demand for them over the past decades. The motivation for this enterprise is simply. As Michael C. Williams noted in the aftermath of the Iraq War, despite the important role that neoconservatism has played in American political life since the 1960s, theoretically-oriented literature with the field of politics and International Relations (IR) has remained remarkably scarce, This study seeks to fill this important gap in the literature. It moves beyond recent debates over the implications and political intrigues of the Bush presidency to offer a deeper look at the intellectual preemies of neoconservative political sociology, While animated by progressive politics, it seeks to understand the gaps that neoconservative politics appear to fill in American society so as [to] encourage engagement and a more effective response." Id. at 3. "Neoconservatives . . . see themselves as the guardians of a 'liberalism betrayed' by the events of the 1960s." Id. at 5. "In the pages that follow, I examine this 'new kind of politics; and set out to demonstrate that American neoconservatism is not the mainstream 'liberal conservatism' that it pretends to be (and that many analysts have diagnosed). I argue that neoconservatism in fact owes a lot more to the counter-Enlightenment than to the liberal tradition that its protagonists allegedly want to reform and protect against its enemies." Id. at 6. "My contention is that to the extent that neoconservatism is committed to this discourse, these commitments are subordinated to an authoritarian form of cultural conservatism that is in fact ferociously predatory on liberal values--both in domestic and global politics. Over the years, analysts of all persuasions (including many neoconservatives) have used a variety of evocative Wilsonian slogans to describe the neoconservative approach to foreign affairs: 'Wilsonianism in boots'. 'hard Wilsonianism'. 'closet Wilsonianism', 'Realistic Wilsonianism'. 'Wolfish Wilsonians', 'Hobbes meets Kant', etc. I argue here that these Wilsonian tropes are misleading. For they suggest that neoconservatism resorts to realist power politics to pursue a liberal vision and deepen the normative fabric of the global liberal order. This is simply not the case. Whether in domestic or in international politics, neoconservative attachments to liberalism are predicated on an atavistic conservative philosophy which is at the service of values--authority, hierarchy, elitism, nationalism, community, sacrifice--that are inimical to the transformative mechanisms of liberal governance and the progressive discourse of democracy and human rights." Id. at 7.).

November 13, 2011

BOOK OF THE WEEK: FORTY-SIX, 2011

Ludwig von Mises, Omnipotent Government: The Rise of the Total State and Total War, edited and with a Foreword by Bettina Bien Greaves (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, , 1944, 1974, 2011) (On the "Dictatorship Complex": "Man is born an asocial and antisocial being. The newborn child is a savage. Egoism is his nature. Only the experience of life and the teaching of his parents, his brothers, sisters, playmates, and later of other people force him to acknowledge the advantages of social cooperation and accordingly to change his behavior. The savage thus turns toward civilization and citizenship. He learns that his will is not almighty, that he has to accommodate himself to others and adjust his actions to his social environment, and that the aims and the actions of other people are facts with which he must reckon." "The neurotic lacks this ability to adapt himself to his environment. He is asocial; he never arrives at an adjustment with the facts. But whether he likes it or not, reality has its own way. It is beyond the neurotic's power to eliminate the will and the actions of his fellowmen and to sweep everything before him. Thus he escapes into daydreams. The weakling, lacking the strength to get on with his life and reality, indulges in reveries on dictatorship and on the power to subdue everybody else. The land of his dreams is the land in which his will alone decides; it is the realm in which he alone gives orders and all other obey. In this paradise only that happens which he wants to happen. Everything is sound and reasonable, i.e., everything corresponds exactly to his ideas and wishes, is reasonable from the viewpoint of his reason." "In the secrecy of these daydreams the neurotic assigns to himself the role of the dictator; he himself is Caesar. When addressing his fellow citizens he must be more modest, He depicts a dictatorship operated by somebody else. But this dictator is only his substitute and handyman; he acts only as the neurotic wants him to act, A daydreamer who refrained from this cautious restriction and proposed himself for the post of dictator, would risk being considered and treated as a lunatic. The psychiatrists would call his insanity egomania." "Nobody ever recommended a dictatorship aiming at ends other than those he himself approved. He who advocates dictatorship always advocates the unrestricted rue of his own will, although operated by an intermediary, an amanuensis. He wants a dictator made in his own image." Id. at 270-271. Look around. Does not this characterized many of today's so-called political leaders, corporate managers, and (pseudo) public intellectuals?).

November 11, 2011

THE CIVIL WAR MADE US WHAT WE ARE AS A NATION.

Robert Penn Warren, The Legacy of the Civil War: Meditations on the Centennial (New York: Random House, 1961) ("Union, the abolition of slavery, the explosion of the westward expansion, Big Business and Big Technology, style in war, philosophy, and politics--we can see the effects of the Civil War in all of these things. In a sense they all add up to the creation of the world power that America is today. Between 1861 and 1865 America learned how to mobilize, equip, and deploy enormous military forces--and learned the will and the confidence to do so. For most importantly, America emerged with a confirmed sense of destiny, the old sense of destiny confirmed by a new sense of military and economic competence. The Civil War was the secret school for 1917-18 and 1941-45. Neither the Kaiser nor the Fuhrer had read the right history book of the United States." Id. at 46. "The War made us a new nation, and our problem, because of the very size and power of that new nation and the nobility of the promise which it inherits, remains that of finding in our time and in our new terms a way to recover and reinterpret the 'Founders' dream.' Is is possible for the individual, in the great modern industrial state, to retain some sense of responsibility? Is it possible for him to remain an individual? Is it possible, in the midst of all the forces making for standardization and anonymity, for society to avoid cultural starvation--to retain, and even develop, cultural pluralism and individual variety, and foster social and individual integrity? Can we avoid, in its deep and more destructive manifestations, the tyranny of the majority, and at the same time keep a fruitful respect for the common will? We sense that one way, however modest, to undertake this mandatory task of our time is to contemplate the Civil War itself, that mystic cloud from which emerged our modernity." Id. at 48-49. Unfortunately, I suspect that the questions Robert Penn Warren raised in 1961 would be answered, fifty years later in 2011, in the negative given the current state of early twenty-first-century America. Perhaps, just perhaps, as we have begun to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Civil War, the contemplation of the Civil War will cause us, both individually and collectively, to reassess what we have become, to understand how we got here and, then, to begin to make the necessary corrections . . . if possible and not too late.).

November 8, 2011

WOMEN (MOSTLY): SUGGESTED RE-READING

Mary C. Brinton, Women and the Economic Miracle: Gender and Work in Postwar Japan (Berkeley & Oxford: U. of California Press, 1993).

Judith C. Brown, Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy (New York & Oxford: Oxford U. Press, 1986).

Kim Chernin, Reinventing Eve: Modern Woman in Search of Herself (New York: Times Books, 1987) (reclaiming women's wildness).

Catherine Clement, Opera, or the Undoing of Women, translated from the French by Betsy Wing, with a Forward by Susan McClary (Minneapolis: U. of Minnesota Press, 1988) ("Opera is not forbidden to women. That is true. Women are its jewels, you say, the ornament indispensable for every festival. No prima donna, no opera. But the role of jewel, a decorative object, is not the deciding role; and on the opera stage women perpetually sing their eternal undoing. The emotion is never more poignant than at the moment when the voice is lifted to die. Look at these heroines. With their voices they flap their wings, their arms writhe, and then there they are, dead, on the ground. Look at these women who fill the theater, accompanied by penguins in uniform that scarcely vary: they are present, they are decorative. They are present for the dispatch of women like themselves. And when the curtain closes to let the singers take the last bow, there are the women kneeling in a curtsey, their arms filled with flowers; and there, beside them, the producer, the conductor, the set designer. Occasionally, a . . . But you wouldn't know how to say it: a produceress? A conductress? Not many have access to the great masculine scheme surrounding this spectacle though up to adore, and also kill, the feminine character." Id. at 5-6.).

Angela Y. Davis, Women, Culture and Politics (NEw York: Vintage Books, 1990).

Angela Y. Davis, Women, Race, and Class (New York: Vintage Books, 1983) (From "Class and Race in the Early Women's Rights Campaign": "The failure to recognize the potential for an integrated women's movement--particularly against sexism in education--was dramatically revealed in an episode occurring during the crucial summer of 1848. Ironically, it involved the daughter of Frederick Douglass. After her official admission to a girl's seminary in Rochester, New York, Douglass' daughter was formally prohibited from attending classes with the white girls. The principal who issued the order was an abolitionist woman! When Douglass and his wife protested this segregationist policy, the principal asked each white girl to vote on the issue, indicating that one objection would suffice to continue the exclusion. After the white girls voted in favor of integrating the classroom, the principal approached the girls' parents, using the one resulting objection as an excuse to exclude Douglass' daughter." "That a white woman associated with the anti-slavery movement could assume a racist posture toward a Black girl in the North reflected a major weakness in the abolitionist campaign--its failure to promote a broad anti-racist consciousness. This serious shortcoming . . . was unfortunately carried over into the organized movement for women's rights." Id. at 46, 59.).

Barbara Ehrenreich & Arlie Russell Hochschild, Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2003) ("Sex tourism, it is commonly noted, is fueled by the fantasies of white, First-Wold men who exoticize dark-skinned 'native' bodies in the developing world, where they can buy sex for cut-rat prices. These two components--racial stereotypes and the economic disparity between developed and the developing worlds--characterize sex-tourist destinations everywhere. But make sex tourists are not the only ones who travel to places like Sosua to fulfill their fantasies. Many Dominican sex workers look to their clients as sources not only of money, marriage, and visas, but also of greater gender equity than they can hope for in the households they keep with Dominican men. Some might hope for romance and love, but most tend to fantasize about greater resources and easier lives." "Yet even for the women with the most pragmatic expectations, there are few happy endings. . . Though only a handful of women regularly receive money wires from clients in Europe, the stories of those who do circulate among sex workers like Dominicinized versions of Hollywood's Pretty Woman." Id. at 156-157.).

Elissa D. Gelfand, Imagination in Confinement: Women's Writings From French Prisons (Ithaca & London: Cornell U. Press, 1983).

Claudia Goldin, Understanding the Gender Gap: An Economic History of American Women (New York & Oxford: Oxford U. Press, 1990) (From the bookjacket: "Goldin argues that women's employment advances are the result of a culmination of historical trends initiated nearly two centuries ago, not the consequence of abrupt social change. She demonstrates that the narrowing of the gender gap in earnings today finds historical precedent. Twice before in American history, the ratio of female to male earnings increased substantially--during the rise of white collar employment from 1890 to 1930, and during the industrial revolution, from 1820 to 1850.").

Mikiso Hane, ed., Reflections on the Way to the Gallows: Rebel Women in Prewar Japan (Berkeley, Los Angeles & London: U. of California Press, 1989).

bell hooks, Ain't I A Woman: Black Women and Feminism (Boston: South End Press, 1981) ("When the contemporary movement toward feminism began, there was little discussion of the impact of sexism on the social status of black women. The upper and middle class white women who were at the forefront of the movement made no effort to emphasize that patriarchal power, the power men use to dominate women, is not just the privilege of upper and middle class white men, but the privilege of all men in our society regardless of their class or race. White feminists so focused on the disparity between white male/white female economic status as an indication of the negative impact of sexism that they drew no attention to the fact that poor and lower-class men are as able to oppress and brutalize women as any other group of men in American society. The feminist tendency to make synonymous male possession of economic power with being the oppressor cause white men to be labeled 'the' enemy. The labeling of the white male patriarch as 'chauvinist pig' provided a convenient scapegoat for black make sexists. They could join with white and black women to protest against white male oppression and divert attention from their sexism, their support of patriarchy, and their sexist exploitation of women. Black leaders, male and female, have been unwilling to acknowledge black male sexist oppression of black women because they do not want to acknowledge that racism is not the only oppressive force in our lives. Nor do they wish to complicate efforts to resist racism by acknowledging that black men can be victimized by racism but at the same time act as sexist oppressors of black women. Consequently there is little acknowledgement of sexist oppression in black male/female relationships as a serious problem. Exaggerated emphasis on the impact of racism on black men has evoked an image of the black make as effete, emasculated, crippled. And so intensely does this image dominate American thinking that people are absolutely unwilling to admit that the damaging effects of racism on black men neither prevents them from being sexist oppressors nor excuses or justifies their sexist oppression of black women." Id. at 87-88.).

bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End Press, 1992).

bell hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (Boston: South End Press, 1984) ("Since we live in a society that promotes fadism and temporary superficial adaptation of different values, we are easily convinced that changes have occurred in arenas where there has been little or no change. Women's sexist attitudes towards one another are one such arena. All over the United States, women spend hours of their time daily verbally abusing other women, usually through malicious gossip (not to be confused with gossip as positive communication). Television soap operas and night time dramas continually portray woman-to-woman relationships as characterized by aggression, contempt, and competitiveness. In feminist circles sexism towards women is expressed by abusive trashing, total disregard and lack of concern or interest in women who have not joined feminist movement. This is especially evident at university campuses where feminist studies is often seen as a discipline or program having no relationship to feminist movement. In her commencement address at Barnard College in May, 1979, black woman writer Toni Morrison told her audience: 'I want not to ask you but to tell you not to participate in the oppression of your sisters. Mothers who abuse their children are women, and another woman, not an agency, has to be willing to stay their hands. Mothers who set fire to school buses are women, and another woman, not an agency, has to tell them to stay their hands. Women who stop the promotion of other women in careers are women, and another woman must come to the victim's aid. Social and welfare workers who humiliate their clients may be women, and other women colleagues have to deflect their anger.' 'I am alarmed by the violence that women do to each other: professional violence, competitive violence, emotional violence. I am alarmed by the willingness of women to enslave other women. I am alarmed by a growing absence of decency on the killing floor of professional women's world.' To build a politicized, mass-based feminist movement, women must work harder to overcome the alienation from one another that exists when sexist socialization has not been unlearned, e.f., homophobia, judging by appearance, conflicts between women with diverse sexual practices. So far, feminist movement had not transform woman-to-woman relationships, especially between women who are strangers to one another or from different backgrounds, even though it ha been the occasion for bonding between individuals and groups of women. We mist renew out efforts to help women unlearn sexism if we are to develop affirming personal relationships as well as political unity." Id. at 48-49 (italic added). Sadly, the charge remains true.).

bell hooks, Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black (Boston: South End Press, 1989) ("At times, the insistence that feminism is really 'a white female thing that has nothing to do with black women' masks black female rage towards white women, a rage rooted in the historical servant-served relationship where white women have used power to dominate, exploit, and oppress. Many black women share this animosity, and it is evoked again and again when white women attempt to assert control over us. This resistance to white female domination must be separated from a black female refusal to bond with white women engaged in feminist struggle. This refusal is often rooted as well in traditional sexist models: women learn to see one another as enemies, as threats, as competitors. Viewing white women as competitors for jobs, for companions, for valuation in a culture that only values select groups of women, often serves as a barrier to bonding, even in settings where radical white women are not acting in a dominating manner. In some settings it has become a way of one-upping white women for black women to trivialize feminism." Id. at 179.).

bell hooks, Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (Boston: South End Press, 1990) ("Aesthetics then is more than a philosophy or theory of art and beauty; it is a way of inhabiting space, a particular location, a way of looking and becoming. It is not organic. I grew up in an ugly house. No one there considered the function of beauty or pondered the use of space. Surrounded by dead things, whose spirits had long ago vanished since they were no longer needed, that house contained a great engulfing emptiness. In that house things were not to be looked at, they were to be possessed--space was not to be created but owned--a violent anti-aesthetic. I grew up thinking about art and beauty as it existed in our lives, the lives of poor black people. Without knowing the appropriate language, I understood that advanced capitalism was affecting our capacity to see, that consumerism began to take the place of that predicament of heart that called us to yearn for beauty. Now many of us are only yearning for things." Id. at 104.).

Alice Kessler-Harris, Out to Work: A History of Wage_Earning Women in the United States (New York & Oxford: Oxford U. Press, 1982) (From the bookjacket: "This pioneering study traces the transformation of ;women's work' into wage labor in the U.S. from the colonial days to the present [i.e, late 1970s, early 1980s], and identifies the social, economic, and ideological forces that have shaped our expectations of what women do.").

John Stuart Mill, The Subjection of Women, with an Introduction by Wendell Robert Carr (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: M.I.T. Press, 1970) ("When we consider the positive evil caused to the disqualified half of the human race by their disqualification--first in the loss of the most inspiriting and elevating kind of personal enjoyment, and next in the weariness, disappointment, and profound dissatisfaction with life, which are so often the substitute for it; one feels that among all the lessons which men require for carrying on the struggle against the inevitable imperfections of their lot on earth, there is no lesson which they more need, than not to add to the evils which nature inflicts, by their jealous and prejudiced restrictions on one another. Their vain fears only substitute other and worse evils for those which they are idly apprehensive of: while every restraint on the freedom of conduct of any of their human fellow-creatures (otherwise than by making them responsible for any evil actually caused by it), dries up pro tanto the principal fountain of human happiness, and leaves the species less rich, to an inappreciable degree, in all that makes life valuable to the individual human being." Id. at 100-101.).

November 6, 2011

BOOK OF THE WEEK: FORTY-FIVE, 2011

David Margolick, Elizabeth and Hazel: Two Women of Little Rock (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 2011) ("Life Is More Than a Moment." Id. at 242. From the bookjacket: "Elizabeth and Hazel is about the lives of two central figures in one of the most harrowing and instantly recognizable photographs of the civil rights era: the picture, taken on September 4, 1957, of Elizabeth Eckford, immaculate in a handmade white cotton pique skirt and blouse, trying to enter, and desegregate, Little Rock Central High School, while an angry white girl, Hazel Bryan, shouts racial epithets at her from behind. The book traces the worlds, completely separate but in some ways very similar, from which these two fifteen-year-old girls came; the racial attitudes that permeated those worlds; how the famous picture came to be taken (and by whom), and the impact it would have, far beyond Little Rock and in the lives of the two women themselves. It recounts the nightmarish experience that Eckford, one of the 'Little Rock Nine' who desegregated Central, went on to have that year, and the way in which it has haunted her ever since. And it relates the very different way in which it affected Hazel, who tried mightily to transcend the photograph but could never fully escape it shadow." Also see, Amy Finnerty, "Aftermath," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 10/9/2011.).

November 4, 2011

BOOKS FEED THE SOUL

Markus Zusak, The Book Thief (New York: Knopf, 2006) (From the bookjacket: "Narrated by Death, Mark Zusak's groundbreaking new novel is the story of Liesel Meminger, a young foster girl living outside of Munich in Nazi Germany. Liesel scratches out a meager existence for herself by stealing when she discovers something she can't resist--books. Soon she is stealing books from Nazi book-burnings, the mayor's wife's library, wherever they are to be found." "With the help of her accordion-playing foster father, Liesel learns to read and shares her stolen books with her neighbors during bombing raids, as well as with the Jewish man hidden in her basement." "Markus Zusak . . . has crafted an unforgettable novel about the ability of books to feed the soul.").

November 2, 2011

ON THE NEED FOR COMBINING COLOR-BLIND AND RACE-CONSCIOUS POLICIES

Desmond S. King & Rogers M. Smith, Still a House Divided: Race and Politics in Obama's America (Princeton & Oxford: Oxford U. Press, 2011) ("One final point is worth underlining because today, the Supreme Court is the major governing institution most controlled by color-bind forces and most likely to challenge an executive branch advancing mixed, and therefore partly race-conscious, policies. If America's political leaders are to begin to devise and defend policies that combine color-blind and race-neutral measures in ways that they believe the evidence shows to be effective, it will be necessary for the Supreme Court's majority to cease its efforts to revise constitutional doctrines in order to require more extensive, if to date never full, color blindness. Thus, rather than making professions of color-blind objectivity prerequisites for appointment to the Supreme Court, as may in the Senate sought to do in the Sonia Sotomayor confirmation hearings, it would be preferable for judges, for those who appoint them, and for those who argue before them all to interpret the Constitution so that policies are assessed on whether they can reasonably be thought to contribute to achieving constitutional goals for all persons. Again, this means embrace of an overarching public philosophy in which there are still disputes between rival ideological camps, but in which all recognize that the real choices are not between color-blind or race-conscious principles, only between what combinations of color-blind and race-conscious policies will best serve American in the early twenty-first century." Id. at 291-292.).

October 31, 2011

THE FAIRY TALE OF CHEAP MONEY

Ludwig von Mises, On the Manipulation of Money and Credit: Three Treatises on Trade-Cycle Theory, translated and with a Foreword by Bettina Bien Greaves, and edited by Percy L. Greaves, Jr. (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1978, 2011) ("It is vain to object that the public favors the policy of cheap money. The masses are misled by the assertions of the pseudo-experts that cheap money can make them prosperous at no expense whatever. They do not realize that investment can be expanded only to the extent that more capital is accumulated by savings. They are deceived by the fairy tales of monetary cranks . . . Yet, what counts in reality is not fairly tales, but people's conduct. If men are not prepared to save more by cutting down their current consumption, the means for a substantial expansion of investment are lacking. These means cannot be provided by printing banknotes or by loans on the bank books." Id. at 198. Americans still believe the fairy tale. And the crash of 2008 (and its continuing effects) is the price paid for their inability to be and act like responsible financial grownups.).