Arsenault, Raymond, The Sound of Freedom: Marian Anderson, the Lincoln Memorial, and the Concert That Awakened America (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2009).
Benton-Cohen, Katherine, Borderline Americans: Racial Divisions and Labor War in the Arizona Borderlands (Cambridge & London: Harvard U. Press, 2009) (Here is another perspective on America’s history of’ race’ relations. “’Are you and American, or are you not?’ This was the question that Harry Wheeler, the sheriff of Cochise County, Arizona, used to determine his targets in one of the most remarkable vigilante actions in U.S. history. It took place in a remote mountain town near the Arizona-Mexico border on July 12, 1917, three months after the United States joined World War I.” Id. at 1. “By noon, the men had been marched through town, past the mines, to a suburban baseball field four miles away. Families and neighbors gathered and gaped as deputies weeded though the men and loaded at least 1,186 of them into twenty-three boxcars belonging to the mining-company railroad. The captives were shipped 180 miles into the New Mexico desert. Some…had families, but the majority were single and childless, Ninety percent were immigrants, Altogether they included men of thirty-four nationalities, but half came from Mexico or the Slavic regions of eastern Europe. An army camp in nearby Columbus, New Mexico…rescued the deported men from thirst and starvation, Some stayed there as long as three months. Almost none of them ever returned to Bisbee.” ‘The event became known across the country as the Bisbee Deportation. The term aptly characterized the forcible removal of ‘undesirables’ from a town concerned enough about its racial boundaries to call itself a ‘white man’s camp’” Id. at 2-3. “For Chisholm and others, the Cornish were at once the quintessential whites in the white man’s camp, and a ‘race’ unto themselves… “ “Bisbee’s Irish—who were not as numerous as the Cornish—had even more reason to assert their whiteness in the white man’s camp. In the mid-nineteenth century, the Irish were pilloried as ‘niggers turned inside out’ who wanted to get ‘white man’s work.’ The Irish were never truly nonwhite, but it is clear that the West proved friendlier to the Irish than did the East Coast. Irish immigrants had led the anti-Chinese movement in California in the 1870s, and Bisbee’s white man’s camp rules were an extension of that sensibility.. So was the role if Irish immigrants in the segregation of Bisbee’s Catholic church, whose first priest was Irish. Bisbee’s first Catholic parish was ‘built and financed primarily by the Mexican people of Bisbee,’ but Irish (and Polish) Catholics convinced the priest they needed a separate church, St. Patrick’s. Organizations like the Sons of Hibernia, the Lady Macabees, and the Knights of Columbus (who were primarily Irish in Bisbee) became forums to assert Irish identity as well.” Id. at 93.).
Bryan, Patricia L, & Thomas Wolf, Midnight Assassin: A Murder in America’s Heartland (New York: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2005).
Burns, Robert P., The Death of the American Trial (Chicago & London: U. of Chicago Press, 2009).
Burton, Stephen J., ed., The Path of the Law and Its Influence: The Legacy of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (Cambridge Studies in Philosophy and Law) (Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press, 2000).
Calabresi, Steven G., & Christopher S. Yoo, The Unitary Executive: Presidential Power from Washington to Bush (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2008) (As the authors admit, this is legal history 'lite'. Still, until train historians direct their full attention and competencies here, the book's overview of the ongoing contest(s) as to the scope of the presidential powers is a worthwhile gap-filler.)
Gorsuch, Neil M., The Future of Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2006).
Greenberg, Karen, The Least Worst Place: Guantanamo’s First 100 Days (New York & London: Oxford U. Press, 2009).
Gross, Ariela J., What Blood Won’t Tell: A History of Race on Trial in America (Cambridge & London: Oxford U. Press, 2008) (This is a very good and, I think, an important read. Race here is not limited to the black-white divide, and includes discussions of Native-Americans, Hawaiians, Asians, Mexicans, Italians, Hindus, etc. What is being policed is, basically, who is an 'American'. Being a work of legal history, it does not show the way forward. Then again, it is difficult to even begin to see a way forward without first appreciating America's rather tortured past. Professor Gross shines some light on aspects of that past. "Today our policies reflect this long and persistent history of making race a central part of U.S. law and citizenship. If we want to undo the world race made, we cannot pretend that our current situation of racial inequality happened naturally. Yet each of the dominant approaches to race that contemporary courts and scholars have taken risks just such a fallacy. It is tempting to read the history of racial identity trials as a fable about the folly of using law to put people in meaningless or nonsensical boxes, or of asking law to determine something it cannot do properly. And so, many legal scholars and political commentators argue that the correct response to such a fable is to eliminate all racial classification in the law; to end all positive remedial uses of race such as affirmative action in employment and education; to make ourselves officially blind to race." "The advocates of 'colorblindness' believe that if we refuse to recognize race, race will automatically cease being an informal prerequisite to the enjoyment of full civic participation as well. In other words, as soon as the law becomes officially colorblind, American society will follow suit. This view assumes that racism is simply the human error of identifying individuals by their race and judging them accordingly, Now that we are wise enough to recognize our error, they argue that all we have to do to correct it is to refuse to continue recognizing those categories." Id. at 298-299.).
Hahn, Steven, A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge & London: Belknap/Harvard U. Press, 2003).
Hahn, Steven, The Political Worlds of Slavery and Freedom (Nathan I. Huggins Lectures) (Cambridge & London: Harvard U. Press, 2009).
Hamburger, Philip, Law and Judicial Duty (Cambridge & London: Harvard University. Press, 2008).
Heap, Chad, Slumming: Sexual and Racial Encounters in American Nightlife, 1885-1940 (Chicago & London: U. of Chicago Press, 2009).
Jacoby, Susan, Alger Hiss and the Battle for History (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 2009).
Khalidi, Rashid, Sowing Crisis: The Cold War and American Dominance in the Middle East (Boston: Beacon Press, 2009).
Knight, Frank H., Selected Essays by Frank H. Knight, Volume One: What is Truth in Economics edited by Ross B. Emmett (Chicago & London: U. of Chicago Press, 1999) ("The scientific mind can rest only in one of two extreme positions, that there are absolute values, or that every individual desire is an absolute and one as 'good' as another. But neither of these is true, we must learn to think in terms of 'value-standards' which have validity of a more subtle kind. It is the higher goal of conduct to test and try these values, to define and improve them, rather than to accept and 'satisfy' them. There are no rules for judging values, and it is the worst error to attempt to make rules--beyond the rule to 'use good judgment'; but it is also most false to assert that one opinion is as good as another, that de gustibus non disputandum est. Professor Tuft has put the question in a neatly epigrammatic way which emphasizes its unsatisfactoriness from a rational, scientific standpoint: 'The only test for goodness is that good persons on reflection approve and choose it--just as the test for good persons is that they choose and do the good'." Id. at 55.).
Knight, Frank H., Selected Essays by Frank H. Knight, Volume Two: Laissez Faire: Pro and Con edited by Ross B. Emmett (Chicago & London: U. of Chicago Press, 1999) (From the essay, "Socialism: The Nature of the Problem": "No society can possibly be really individualistic. In a world in which individuals go through the biological life-cycle, and especially where they do not inherit acquired knowledge, training, and habits, the minimum ultimate unit is the natural family; what is called individualism would be far more descriptively designated as "familism." It really makes little practical difference whether the ultimate mechanics of continuity be that of biological heredity or culture inheritance, i.e., tradition perpetuated by some mixture of unconscious imitation and more or less deliberate education. It is true that in modern Western civilization the biological and subjective individual has come to play a much larger role in culture continuity, and especially in culture change, than was true in primitive society or earlier civilizations. But there are fairly narrow limits even to the possibilities in this regard. The individual cannot possibly be other than a social product, a social or domesticated animal. The more important peculiarity of what is called individualism is the greater role assigned to the private family, meaning to parents; and "parental individualism" might be a still better designation for the most important distinguishing characteristic of modern free or competitive society." Id. at 98.).
Lynch, Holly Fernandez, Conflicts of Conscience in Health Care: An Institutional Compromise (Cambridge & London The MIT Press, 2008).
Litwack, Leon F., Been In The Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (New York: Knopf, 1979) (“’Charles, you is a free man they say, by Ah tells you now, you is still a slave and if you lives to be a hundred, you’ll STILL be a slave, cause you got no education, and education is what makes a man free!’” Id. at 473.).
Litwack, Leon F., How Free Is Free?: The Long Death of Jim Crow (The Nathan I. Huggins Lectures) (Cambridge & London: Harvard U. Press, 2009).
Litwack, Leon F., North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States, 1790-1860 (Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 1961).
Litwack, Leon F., Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow (New York: Knopf, 1998) ("What was strikingly new and different in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was the sadism and exhibitionism that characterized white violence. The ordinary modes of execution and punishment were deem insufficient; they no longer satisfied the emotional appetite of the crowd. To kill the victim was not enough; the execution needed to be turned into a public ritual, a collective experience, and the victim needed to be subjected to extraordinary torture and mutilation. What had been in the past a usually rapid dispatch of the victim now became part of a voyeuristic spectacle prolonged as long as possible (once for seven hours) for the benefit of the crowd. Nor were whites content after the victim had died; in some instances, they continued to pump bullets into the body, after which they carved it up with knives or burned it to a crisp, or they might permit the body to dangle by the rope for the next several days as a warning to the black community." "The story of a lynching, then, is more than the simple fact of a black man or woman hanged by the neck. It is the story of slow, methodical, sadistic, often highly inventive forms of torture and mutilation. Of executed by fire, it is the red-hot poker applied to the eyes and genitals and the stench of burning flesh as the body slowly roasts over the flames and the blood sizzles in the heat. If executed by hanging, it is the convulsive movement of the limbs. Whether by fire or rope, it is the dismemberment and distribution of severed bodily parts as favors and souvenirs to participants and the crowd: teeth, ears, toes, fingers, nails, kneecaps, bits of charred skin and bones. Such human trophies might reappear as watch fobs or be displayed conspicuously for public viewing...." Id. at 285-286.).
Powe, Lucas A., The Supreme Court and the America Elite, 1789-2008 (Cambridge & London: Harvard U. Press, 2009) (“Several themes run throughout this book…. He dominant theme is that the Court is a majoritarian institution. That is, it identifies with and serves ruling political coalitions. It is staffed by men (and in recent years a few women) who for the most part are in tune with their times. Relatedly, changes in personnel matter. Lucky presidents who are able to appoint several justices can—and do—change the direction of the Court. That helps explain why the Court and its decisions at the beginning of the twenty-first century are a part of presidential politics and the country’s ongoing history. It is also a testament to how far the Supreme Court and the nation have come from the time when the Court’s fist major decision was immediately reversed by constitutional amendment.” Id. at ix.).
Rawls, John, A Brief Inquiry Into the Meaning of Sin and Faith, with “On My Religion”, edited by Thomas Nagel, with commentaries by Joshua Cohen and Thomas Nagel, and by Robert Merrihew Adams (Cambridge & London: Harvard U. Press, 2009).
Schama, Simon, The American Future: A History (New York: Ecco, 2009) ("I can tell you exactly, give or take a minute or two, when American democracy came back from the dead because I was there: 7:15 p.m. Central Time, 3 January 2008, Precinct 53, Theodore Roosevelt High, I know this as I was regularly checking my watch, and beside you couldn't miss the schoolroom clock, its old white face the object of generations of teenage hatred and longing.... After many months of maneuvering and talky self-promotion, it was time for the Iowa voters to offer judgment on who they thought should be the forty-fourth president of the United States. They would, the media hacks opined, "winnow the field," and Iowans are partial to a good winnow." Id. at 1. Also, David Brooks has a worthy review in the NYT Book Review, May 24, 2009.).
May 29, 2009
May 1, 2009
VARIED READINGS#3
Bolano, Roberto, 2666 translated from the Spanish by Natsha Wimmer (New York: Farrar, Straus & Goroux, 2008) ("What do you think, Professor? Is it all just a dream, or is it within the realm of possibility? I don't know, said Amalfitano curtly, since he still hadn't gotten over his fright, and he wasn't in the mood for a repeat of their last meeting. Well, said Marco Antonio Guerra, if you want to know what I think, I don't believe it. People see what they want to see and what people want to see never has anything to do with the truth. People are cowards to the last breath. I'm telling you between you and me: the human being, broadly speaking, is the closest there is to a rat." Id. at 219.).
Brown, Michael K., Martin Carnoy, Elliot Currie, Troy Duster, David B, Oppenheimer, Marjorie M. Shultz, & David Wellman, Whitewashing Race: The Myth of a Color-Blind Society (Berkeley & Los Angles: U. of California Press, 2003) (In the aftermath of the 2008 Presidential election, some have suggested that we have entered a 'post-racial America.' As many others I would like such to be true, but I doubt that such is true. Whitewashing Race, written well before the 2008 Presidential elections, is relevant in explaining some of the reasons that we should be hesitant in declaring a post-racial America. I suspect that a significant percentage of Americans could be classified, using the terminology of the authors of Whitewashing Race, as "racial realist." "Racial realists make three related claims. First, they say that America has made great progress in rectifying racial injustice in the past thirty-five years. The economic divide between whites and blacks...is exaggerated, and white Americans have been receptive to demands for racial equality. Thus, racism is a thing of the past." "The racial realists' second claim is that persistent racial inequalities in income, employment, residence, and political representation cannot be explained by white racism, even though a small percentage of whites remain intransigent. As they see it, the problem is the lethargic, incorrigible, and often pathological behavior of people who fail to take responsibility for their own lives." "The racial realists' final assertion is that the civil rights movement's political failures are caused by the manipulative, expedient behavior of black nationalists and the civil-rights establishment.... The real problem today is not racists like David Duke who still prey on white fears. Instead, the genuine obstacles are misguided black militants like Al Sharpton who overdramatize white racism and white apologists who have a pathological need to feel guilty. Racial realists feel that since black civil rights leaders and militants benefit from government handouts and affirmative action, they have a vested interest in denying racial progress and fomenting racial divisions. Many black politicians...ignore the real needs of their constituents and pursue instead 'the rhetoric of racial empowerment' and separation." Id. at 6-7. Whitewashing Race is, essentially, a critical response to racial realism and the racial realists. Regardless of where one presently stands on whether America is "post-racial," or on the explanations as to why America is or is not "post-racial." Whitewashing Race is a worthwhile read. It also contains an excellent and useful bibliography.).
Burleigh, Michael, Blood and Rage: A Cultural History of Terrorism (New York: Harper, 2009) ("This book's starting point is the moment when recognisably modern terrorist organisations emerged in the mid-eighteenth century, dubious precedence being accorded here to the Irish Fenians." Id. at ix. "This book focuses on the life histories and actions rather than the theories which validate them, roughly in accord with St. Matthew's precept 'By their fruits ye shall know them'.... Ideology is like a detonator that enables a pre-existing chemical mix to explode. Terrorists make choices all along their journey, and it these I am most interested in. Hence the book is about terrorism as a career, a culture and a way of life, although obviously one involving death, for the terrorists' victims and sometimes for the terrorists themselves...." Id. at ix-x. "As the book tries to make crystal clear, especially to anyone who might appear to harbor a sneaking admiration for those who wish to change the world by violence, the milieu of terrorists is invariably morally squalid, when it is not merely criminally." Id. at x. Also see Louise Richardson’s review in The NYT Book Review, Sunday, April 26, 2009.).
Corwin, Edward S., Total War and the Constitution: Five lectures delivered on the Wiliam W. Cook Foundation at the University of Michigan, March 1946 (New York: Knopf, 1947) ("The totality we are interested in is 'functional totality,' by which I mean the politically ordered participation in the war effort of all personal and social forces, the scientific, the mechanical, the commercial, the economic, the moral, the literary and artistic, and the psychological." Id. at 4.).
Doniger, Wendy, The Hindus: An Alternative History (New York: The Penguin Press, 2009) ("India is a country where not only the future but even the past is unpredictable...." "The great mystery about the abuse of history is not the abuse itself but the question of why, in such a future-intoxicated age, we still reach for the past (or a past, however confected) to justify the present. 'That's history,' after all, is an American way of saying, 'So What?' But even such American amnesiacs practice a cult of the past with regard to the Constitution and the often unintelligible intentions of the founding fathers, and they have just a few hundred years of history. Hindus have thousands, and their concern for history is correspondingly more intense." Id. at 688-689. Also see Pankja Mishra’s review in The NYT Book Review, Sunday, April 26, 2009.).).
Hodgson, Godfrey, The Myth of American Exceptionalism (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 2009) ("[I]t is not good ... for individuals or nations, to believe things that are not quite true. It is not healthy to congratulate oneself, or to exaggerate how much one excels others. It is not wise to imagine that one is called upon, by God or history or some other higher power, to rule others by superior force. It is wise, and it has been the better part of American wisdom in the past, to resist the temptation to dominate merely because one has the power to do so. It is dangerous, for oneself and for others, to create a myth that seems to justify, even demand, domination, whether it is called empire or not...." "It is not the contention of this book that the tradition of American exceptionalism is the sole or even the principal cause of the things that have 'gone wrong' in American political life and foreign policy. It is a plea for looking with a skeptical and humble eye at the many and subtle dangers of self-praise." Id. at xvii.).
Kahn, Victoria, Wayward Contracts: The Crisis of Political Obligation in England, 1640-1674 (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2004) ("The Seventeen Century is the period in which scholars have located the emergence of a distinctively modern conception of political obligation.... It is the aim of this book to reconstruct the discourse of contract in the making and, in doing so, to revise this story of political obligation. Specifically I show that seventeenth-century contact theory was defined by a struggle over the role of language and representation, and of the passions and interests, in binding and releasing the political subject. Instead of presupposing a rational and autonomous individual who consents to the political contract, seventeenth-century contract theorists were compelled to create a new political subject ex nihilo. Rather than assuming that government was natural and only needed to be legitimated by consent, early modern writers argued that the state was an artifact that was brought into being by a powerful, if sometimes fictional, speech act. For these reasons, I argue, early modern contract theory is best thought of as a radically new poetics of the subject and the state, one that was manifest across a wide range of texts and genres in mid-seventeenth-century England." Id. at 1-2.).
Littell, Jonathan, The Kindly Ones translated from the French by Charlotte Mandell (New York: Harper, 2009) (see Neal Ascherson's book review in the 30 April 2009 edition of the London Review of Books).
Strauss, Leo, On Tyranny: Revised and Expanded Edition, Including the Strauss-Kojeve Correspondence edited by Victor Gourevitch & Michael S. Roth (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1961, 1991, 2000).
Brown, Michael K., Martin Carnoy, Elliot Currie, Troy Duster, David B, Oppenheimer, Marjorie M. Shultz, & David Wellman, Whitewashing Race: The Myth of a Color-Blind Society (Berkeley & Los Angles: U. of California Press, 2003) (In the aftermath of the 2008 Presidential election, some have suggested that we have entered a 'post-racial America.' As many others I would like such to be true, but I doubt that such is true. Whitewashing Race, written well before the 2008 Presidential elections, is relevant in explaining some of the reasons that we should be hesitant in declaring a post-racial America. I suspect that a significant percentage of Americans could be classified, using the terminology of the authors of Whitewashing Race, as "racial realist." "Racial realists make three related claims. First, they say that America has made great progress in rectifying racial injustice in the past thirty-five years. The economic divide between whites and blacks...is exaggerated, and white Americans have been receptive to demands for racial equality. Thus, racism is a thing of the past." "The racial realists' second claim is that persistent racial inequalities in income, employment, residence, and political representation cannot be explained by white racism, even though a small percentage of whites remain intransigent. As they see it, the problem is the lethargic, incorrigible, and often pathological behavior of people who fail to take responsibility for their own lives." "The racial realists' final assertion is that the civil rights movement's political failures are caused by the manipulative, expedient behavior of black nationalists and the civil-rights establishment.... The real problem today is not racists like David Duke who still prey on white fears. Instead, the genuine obstacles are misguided black militants like Al Sharpton who overdramatize white racism and white apologists who have a pathological need to feel guilty. Racial realists feel that since black civil rights leaders and militants benefit from government handouts and affirmative action, they have a vested interest in denying racial progress and fomenting racial divisions. Many black politicians...ignore the real needs of their constituents and pursue instead 'the rhetoric of racial empowerment' and separation." Id. at 6-7. Whitewashing Race is, essentially, a critical response to racial realism and the racial realists. Regardless of where one presently stands on whether America is "post-racial," or on the explanations as to why America is or is not "post-racial." Whitewashing Race is a worthwhile read. It also contains an excellent and useful bibliography.).
Burleigh, Michael, Blood and Rage: A Cultural History of Terrorism (New York: Harper, 2009) ("This book's starting point is the moment when recognisably modern terrorist organisations emerged in the mid-eighteenth century, dubious precedence being accorded here to the Irish Fenians." Id. at ix. "This book focuses on the life histories and actions rather than the theories which validate them, roughly in accord with St. Matthew's precept 'By their fruits ye shall know them'.... Ideology is like a detonator that enables a pre-existing chemical mix to explode. Terrorists make choices all along their journey, and it these I am most interested in. Hence the book is about terrorism as a career, a culture and a way of life, although obviously one involving death, for the terrorists' victims and sometimes for the terrorists themselves...." Id. at ix-x. "As the book tries to make crystal clear, especially to anyone who might appear to harbor a sneaking admiration for those who wish to change the world by violence, the milieu of terrorists is invariably morally squalid, when it is not merely criminally." Id. at x. Also see Louise Richardson’s review in The NYT Book Review, Sunday, April 26, 2009.).
Corwin, Edward S., Total War and the Constitution: Five lectures delivered on the Wiliam W. Cook Foundation at the University of Michigan, March 1946 (New York: Knopf, 1947) ("The totality we are interested in is 'functional totality,' by which I mean the politically ordered participation in the war effort of all personal and social forces, the scientific, the mechanical, the commercial, the economic, the moral, the literary and artistic, and the psychological." Id. at 4.).
Doniger, Wendy, The Hindus: An Alternative History (New York: The Penguin Press, 2009) ("India is a country where not only the future but even the past is unpredictable...." "The great mystery about the abuse of history is not the abuse itself but the question of why, in such a future-intoxicated age, we still reach for the past (or a past, however confected) to justify the present. 'That's history,' after all, is an American way of saying, 'So What?' But even such American amnesiacs practice a cult of the past with regard to the Constitution and the often unintelligible intentions of the founding fathers, and they have just a few hundred years of history. Hindus have thousands, and their concern for history is correspondingly more intense." Id. at 688-689. Also see Pankja Mishra’s review in The NYT Book Review, Sunday, April 26, 2009.).).
Hodgson, Godfrey, The Myth of American Exceptionalism (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 2009) ("[I]t is not good ... for individuals or nations, to believe things that are not quite true. It is not healthy to congratulate oneself, or to exaggerate how much one excels others. It is not wise to imagine that one is called upon, by God or history or some other higher power, to rule others by superior force. It is wise, and it has been the better part of American wisdom in the past, to resist the temptation to dominate merely because one has the power to do so. It is dangerous, for oneself and for others, to create a myth that seems to justify, even demand, domination, whether it is called empire or not...." "It is not the contention of this book that the tradition of American exceptionalism is the sole or even the principal cause of the things that have 'gone wrong' in American political life and foreign policy. It is a plea for looking with a skeptical and humble eye at the many and subtle dangers of self-praise." Id. at xvii.).
Kahn, Victoria, Wayward Contracts: The Crisis of Political Obligation in England, 1640-1674 (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2004) ("The Seventeen Century is the period in which scholars have located the emergence of a distinctively modern conception of political obligation.... It is the aim of this book to reconstruct the discourse of contract in the making and, in doing so, to revise this story of political obligation. Specifically I show that seventeenth-century contact theory was defined by a struggle over the role of language and representation, and of the passions and interests, in binding and releasing the political subject. Instead of presupposing a rational and autonomous individual who consents to the political contract, seventeenth-century contract theorists were compelled to create a new political subject ex nihilo. Rather than assuming that government was natural and only needed to be legitimated by consent, early modern writers argued that the state was an artifact that was brought into being by a powerful, if sometimes fictional, speech act. For these reasons, I argue, early modern contract theory is best thought of as a radically new poetics of the subject and the state, one that was manifest across a wide range of texts and genres in mid-seventeenth-century England." Id. at 1-2.).
Littell, Jonathan, The Kindly Ones translated from the French by Charlotte Mandell (New York: Harper, 2009) (see Neal Ascherson's book review in the 30 April 2009 edition of the London Review of Books).
Strauss, Leo, On Tyranny: Revised and Expanded Edition, Including the Strauss-Kojeve Correspondence edited by Victor Gourevitch & Michael S. Roth (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1961, 1991, 2000).
April 20, 2009
VARIED READINGS#2
Farnsworth, Ward, The Legal Analyst: A Toolkit for Thinking About Law (Chicago & London: U. of Chicago Press, 2007) (should be read by all first- and second-year law students).
Hastings, Max, Retribution: The Battle for Japan, 1944-1945 (New York: Knopf, 2008).
Herr, Michael, Dispatches (New York: Everyman’s Library, 2009).
Smith, Tara, Ayn Rand’s Normative Ethics: The Virtuous Egoist (Cambridge, England, & New York, New York: Cambridge U. Press, 2006).
Wiggins, David, Ethics: Twelve Lectures on the Philosophy of Morality (Cambridge: Harvard U. Press, 2006).
Hastings, Max, Retribution: The Battle for Japan, 1944-1945 (New York: Knopf, 2008).
Herr, Michael, Dispatches (New York: Everyman’s Library, 2009).
Smith, Tara, Ayn Rand’s Normative Ethics: The Virtuous Egoist (Cambridge, England, & New York, New York: Cambridge U. Press, 2006).
Wiggins, David, Ethics: Twelve Lectures on the Philosophy of Morality (Cambridge: Harvard U. Press, 2006).
April 13, 2009
VARIED READINGS
Ahamed, Liaquat, Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World (New York: The Penguin Press, 2009) ("No other issue would create more debate, disagreement, feuds, and confusion within the Federal Reserve System than what to do about the stock market. Wall Street had always loomed large in the American national psyche. Charles Dickens, visiting the United States in 1842, had been struck by the local taste for speculation and the desire 'to make a fortune out of nothing.' After the 1884 panic on the New York Stock Exchange, the London magazine, The Spectator commented, 'The English, however speculative, fear poverty. The Frenchman shoots himself to avoid it. The American with a million speculates to win ten, and if he takes losses takes a clerkship with equanimity. This freedom from sordidness is commendable, but it makes a nation of the most degenerate gamesters in the world.'" Id. at 270.).
Binmore, Ken, Rational Decisions (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2009) (This is a very nice read for those into game theory.).
Cohen, G.A., Rescuing Justice and Equality (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard U. Press, 2008) (This is an interesting and worthwhile critique of John Rawls's 'Difference Principle'. "We perforce live by rules: we cannot engage in funamental normative thought whenever we face a decision. And it is fine to act without reflection on a rule that we know belongs to the set of rules in which we repose confidence. But if something makes us reflect, or even it we perchance reflect, here and now, then we rise above the rule: it is only as a rule that a rule should do its work as a rule." Id. at 270-271.).
Herring, George C., From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776 (The Oxford History of the United States) (New York & Oxford: Oxford U. Press, 2008).
Kamm, F. M., Intricate Ethics: Rights, Responsibilities, and Permissible Harm (Oxford & New York: Oxford U. Press, 2007).
Macey, Jonathan R., Corporate Governance: Promises Kept, Promise Broken (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2008) (Though I am not completely convinced by the particulars of Macey’s arguments, his analysis is well worth the read. Nicely done is his discussion of how boards of directors, even those with supposedly independent outside directors, are often captured by management. We know the story: People tend to hire, or appoint to boards and committees, people who they think will think like they do and who can be counted on to do what (i.e., make the decisions) management wants them to do. The result is that boards and committees are rarely as independent in their thinking as we expect or want. And, they certainly do not function as much of a check or monitor to management’s decision. The term independent board,” or the term “independent committee,” may be an oxymoron. In short, Group-Think is the norm. We all want to be loved by the emperor or empress, and we don’t get their loved by informing them that they don’t have on any clothing or pointing out their warts. If you don’t need the love or insist on pointing out the warts, then one is not going to be on the board or on the committee. Thus, many corporate governance regulations, such as the Sarbones-Oxley Act, are a joke. As you know, that act was enacted in response to the Enron fiasco; yet the Enron board would have been, pretty much, in full compliance with it. Anyway, the book is worth suggesting to students. Macey manages to highlight some of the classic cases, e.g., Van Gorkom and Walt Disney, and do so in ways which may cause one to wonder why corporate American and The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit have survived as long as they have. Macey’s solution favors less governmental regulation and more regulation through market forces. Of course, the law review articles, where Macey first developed many of the thoughts refined here, were written before the present financial crisis. Some are chanting that we are in the mess we are in due to lack of regulation (resulting from a quarter century of deregulation—i.e., the Reagan legacy). Others are chanting that there has been too much regulation or too much of the wrong regulation. Macey will fall into the latter camp of chanters. “Regulation can impede, discourage, and even ban the operation of particular governance devices. Likewise, regulation also can facilitate, encourage, and even require corporate governance devices to operate—or to operate in a particular way. One of the principal contributions of this book is to point out that many of the most effective corporate governance devices, such as certain kinds of trading and activities in the takeover market, are either heavily regulated or banned outright. On the other hand, the mechanisms and institutions that I regard as the least effective, corporate boards of directors and credit rating agencies, for example, are facilitated, encouraged, and even directly or indirectly, required by regulation.” Id. at vii–viii.).
Moore, Honor, ed., Poems from the Women’s Movement (American Poets Project 28) (New York: Library of America, 2009).
Norrell, Robert J., Up from History: The Life of Booker T. Washington (Cambridge & London: Belknap Press/Harvard U. Press, 2009).
April 1, 2009
FOOD FOR (SOMETIMES UNSETTLING) THOUGHT
Akerlof, George, Explorations in Pragmatic Economics: Selected Papers of George A. Akerlof (and co-authors) (Oxford & New York: Oxford U. Press, 2005).
Akerlof, George A., & Robert J. Shiller, Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2009) ("A repeat of the Great Depression is now a possibility because economists, the government, and the general public have in recent years grown complacent. They have forgotten the lessons of the 1930s, In those hard times we learned how the economy really works. We also learned the proper role of government in a robust capitalist economy. This book recovers those lessons, while also giving them a modern slant. To see how the world economy got into its current bind, it is necessary to understand those lessons. More important, we must understand them in order to know what is to be done." Id. at vii.).
Arendt, Hannah, The Origins of Totalitarianism with an introduction by Samantha Power (New York: Schocken Books, 1948, 2004) ("If it is the common error of our time to imagine that propaganda can achieve all things and that a man can be talked into anything provided the talking is sufficiently loud and cunning, in that period it was it was commonly believed that the "voice of the people was the voice of God," and that the task of a leader was...to follow that voice shrewdly. Both views go back to the same fundamental error of regarding the mob as identical with rather than as a caricature of the people." "The mob is primarily a group in which the residue of all classes are represented, This makes it so easy to mistake the mob for the people, which also comprises all strata of society. While the people in all great revolutions fight for true representation, the mob always will shout for the "strong man," the "great leader." For the mob hates society from which it is excluded, as well as Parliament where it is not represented. Plebiscites, therefore, with which modern mob leaders have obtained such excellent results, are an old concept of politicians who rely upon the mob". Id. at 138.).
Bracey, Christopher Alan, Saviors or Sellouts: The Promise and Perils of Black Conservatism, from Booker T. Washington to Condoleezza Rice (Boston: Beacon Press, 2008) (a disappointing read).
Broyard, Bliss, One Drop: My Father’s Hidden Life–A Story of Race and Family Secrets (New York & Boston: Little, Brown, 2007).
Fallada, Hans, The Drinker translated from the German by Charlotte and A. L. Lloyd (Brooklyn, New York: Melville House, 1950, 1994, 2009).
Fallada, Hans, Every Man Dies Alone translated from the German by Michael Hofmann (Brooklyn, New York: Melville House, (1947, 1994, 2009).
Fallada, Hans, Little Man, What Now? translated from the German by Susan Bennett (Brooklyn, New York: Melville House, (1932, 1994, 2009).
Finkin, Mathew W., & Robert C. Post, For the Common Good: Principles of American Academic Freedom (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 2009).
Fish, Stanley, Save the World on Your Own Time (Oxford & New York: Oxford U. Press, 2008).
Harrison, Kathryn, While They Slept: An Inquiry into the Murder of a Family (New York: Random House, 2008).
Herbert, Christopher, War of No Pity: The Indian Mutiny and Victorian Trauma (Princeton & Oxford; Princeton U. Press, 2008).
Ifill,Gwen, The Break-Through: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama (New York: Doubleday, 2009).
Kaplow, Louis, & Steven Shavell, Fairness Versus Welfare (Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England: Harvard U. Press, 2002) ("In this book we ask what criteria ought to guide social decionmaking. Our thesis is that social decisions should be based exclusively on their effects on the welfare of individuals--and, accordingly, should not depend on notions of fairness, justice, or cognate concepts." Id. at xvii. Every law student should read this book, then determine for him/herself whether Kaplow and Shavell get it right, and why or why not.).
Kennedy, Paul, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict From 1500 to 2000 (New York: Random House, 1987) (This is still a relevant read. "The tests before the United States as it heads toward the twenty-first century are certainly daunting, perhaps especially in the economic sphere; but the nation's resources remain considerable, if they can be properly organized, and if there is a judicious recognition of both the limitations and the opportunities of American power. Id. at 534-535. Query: In the closing years of the first decade of the twenty-first century has America properly organized its considerable resources? Has America judicious recognized the limitations of American power? "For all its economic and perhaps military decline, it remains, in Pierre Hassner's words, 'the decisive actor in every type of balance and issue.' Because it has so much power for good or evil, because it is the linchpin of the western alliance system and the center of the existing global economy, what it does, or does not do, is so much more important than what any of the other Powers decides to do." Id. at 535. Query: Did America blow it?).
Levi, Edward H., Point of View: Talks on Education (Chicago & London: U. of Chicago Press, 1969).
MacAvoy, Paul W., The Unsustainable Costs of Partial Deregulation (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 2007).
Page, Benjamin I., & Lawrence R. Jacobs, Class War?: What Americans Really Think about Economic Inequality (Chicago & London: U. of Chicago Press, 2009) ("Our careful exploration of the data leads to a fascinating and perhaps counterintuitive picture of America that defies simply bifurcation into conservative and liberal camps. The evidence shows that most Americans are both philosophically conservative and operationally liberal. They believe in the American Dream, individual initiative, and free markets. In the abstract, they are uneasy with government. But Americans are also pragmatic. When their well-being (and that of people they care about) is threatened, or when their dreams are blocked by forces beyond their control, they turn to concrete government programs for help--programs that would greatly decrease economic inequality. Most Americans are conservative egalitarians." Id. at xi.).
Pisar, Samuel, Of Blood and Hope (Boston & Toronto: Little Brown, 1979, 1980).
Ricks, Thomas E., The Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006-2008 (New York: The Penguin Press, 2009) ("Lt. Gregory Weber, an infantry platoon leader in the 2nd Infantry Division, recalled responding to a bombing and RPG ambush of a U.S. patrol in southern Baghdad that summer...." "Five soldiers were killed in the incident, but the image that haunted Weber was the first thing he saw, the dead soldier in the blasted turret, 'iPod still in his ear.' He still wonders, 'Did his leadership know he was distracted by music; not being able to hear the battlefield?'" Id. at 189.).
Sandweiss, Martha A., Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line (New York: The Penguin Press, 2009) (“The practice of passing generally involves adopting a particular identity to move toward greater legal and social privilege. It might mean taking on a different gender, or ethnic or national identity, but it most often involves the assumption of a different racial identity. And since, in the United States, social privilege has been associated with light-colored skin, passing usually entails concealing one’s African American heritage to assume a white identity. The entire practice hinges on a peculiar idea. Since one’s race could be determined by heritage as well as appearance, very light-colored skin did not necessarily make one a ‘white’ person. In the aftermath of emancipation, a host of laws sprang up throughout the Deep South clarifying just what defined a person as ‘black’ or ‘Negro,’ almost always for the purpose of restricting his rights. In 1896 the Supreme Court of the United States upheld these laws in the case of Plessy v. Ferguson, which affirmed that people with one ‘black’ great-grandparent could, for all intents and purposes, be considered black themselves, no matter what they looked like. This peculiarity American idea came to be known as ‘hypodescent,’ ‘One drop of black blood’ trumped seven drops of ‘white.’” Id. at 7.).
Showalter, Elaine, A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx (New York: Knopf, 2009).
Sundquist, Eric J., King’s Dream (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 2009) (“For those on the political Left, King’s dream became associated less with colorblind “equal opportunity,” what was once the core value of democratic liberalism, than with race-based (and sometimes class-based) programs designed to achieve diversity, usually defined as proportionately equal outcomes, the new core vale of democratic liberalism.” Id. at 4. “By the same token, those on the Right have routinely cited the Dream speech–specifically, King’s hope that “my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character”–in support of an ideal of colorblind justice, and conservatives, no less than liberals, have presumed to know where King would stand on hot-button issues such as affirmative action, reparations for slavery, and school vouchers.” Id. at 5.).
Tough, Paul, Whatever It Takes: Geoffrey Canada’s Quest to Change Harlem and America (Boston & New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2008).
Villa, Dana, Public Freedom (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2008) ("Popular ignorance, apathy, and distraction present huge impediments to recovering what is left of out diminishing democracy. It is sobering to realize that these are hardly the only, or indeed the largest, obstacles to that project." Id. at 22. "What can 'the public' and political institutions be in a world so dramatically constrained by the imperatives of the global marketplace and the ubiquity of bureaucratic hierarchy and bureaucratic process?" Id. at 25. "The deepest reserves of civic docility are found in the human, all-too-human tendency to submit to the gravitational pull of custom and convention--to what is, in effect, a decidedly social and 'participatory' form of authority." "It is misleading, then to say that docile subjects are 'manufactured' or produced. More often than not, they are self-willed and, to a degree, self-created. We are docile because we want, if not to be like everyone else, then to be admired for the things everyone else wants and admires. We desire the socialization of our desires, even or especially when those desires invest themselves in the project of self-development. In this way, 'self-fashioning' has become one of the most superficial of all herd animal behaviors. The ancient 'arts of the self'... return to be marketed as so many techniques for individual fulfillment. This is the predictable result of a modern form of life that is less 'disciplined' than it is, put simply, shallow. It is shallow not because it lacks self-concern or self-care, but because it lack the depth that only a viable public realm can give it." Id. at 300-301.).
Whitaker, Robert, On the Laps of Gods: The Red Summer of 1919 and the Struggle for Justice that Remade a Nation (New York: Crown Publishers, 2008) (race, racism, equal protection, substantive due process, habeas corpus, and the underside of American history).
Wilson, William Julius, More Than Just Race: Being Black and Poor in the Inner City (New York: Norton, 2009) (“Policy makers committed to seriously addressing the problems of race and poverty face two serious challenges: How to create legislation that is designed to confront structural and cultural forces that create and reinforce racial inequality; and how to get sufficient support from the American people to support such legislation.” Id. at 154.)
Akerlof, George A., & Robert J. Shiller, Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2009) ("A repeat of the Great Depression is now a possibility because economists, the government, and the general public have in recent years grown complacent. They have forgotten the lessons of the 1930s, In those hard times we learned how the economy really works. We also learned the proper role of government in a robust capitalist economy. This book recovers those lessons, while also giving them a modern slant. To see how the world economy got into its current bind, it is necessary to understand those lessons. More important, we must understand them in order to know what is to be done." Id. at vii.).
Arendt, Hannah, The Origins of Totalitarianism with an introduction by Samantha Power (New York: Schocken Books, 1948, 2004) ("If it is the common error of our time to imagine that propaganda can achieve all things and that a man can be talked into anything provided the talking is sufficiently loud and cunning, in that period it was it was commonly believed that the "voice of the people was the voice of God," and that the task of a leader was...to follow that voice shrewdly. Both views go back to the same fundamental error of regarding the mob as identical with rather than as a caricature of the people." "The mob is primarily a group in which the residue of all classes are represented, This makes it so easy to mistake the mob for the people, which also comprises all strata of society. While the people in all great revolutions fight for true representation, the mob always will shout for the "strong man," the "great leader." For the mob hates society from which it is excluded, as well as Parliament where it is not represented. Plebiscites, therefore, with which modern mob leaders have obtained such excellent results, are an old concept of politicians who rely upon the mob". Id. at 138.).
Bracey, Christopher Alan, Saviors or Sellouts: The Promise and Perils of Black Conservatism, from Booker T. Washington to Condoleezza Rice (Boston: Beacon Press, 2008) (a disappointing read).
Broyard, Bliss, One Drop: My Father’s Hidden Life–A Story of Race and Family Secrets (New York & Boston: Little, Brown, 2007).
Fallada, Hans, The Drinker translated from the German by Charlotte and A. L. Lloyd (Brooklyn, New York: Melville House, 1950, 1994, 2009).
Fallada, Hans, Every Man Dies Alone translated from the German by Michael Hofmann (Brooklyn, New York: Melville House, (1947, 1994, 2009).
Fallada, Hans, Little Man, What Now? translated from the German by Susan Bennett (Brooklyn, New York: Melville House, (1932, 1994, 2009).
Finkin, Mathew W., & Robert C. Post, For the Common Good: Principles of American Academic Freedom (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 2009).
Fish, Stanley, Save the World on Your Own Time (Oxford & New York: Oxford U. Press, 2008).
Harrison, Kathryn, While They Slept: An Inquiry into the Murder of a Family (New York: Random House, 2008).
Herbert, Christopher, War of No Pity: The Indian Mutiny and Victorian Trauma (Princeton & Oxford; Princeton U. Press, 2008).
Ifill,Gwen, The Break-Through: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama (New York: Doubleday, 2009).
Kaplow, Louis, & Steven Shavell, Fairness Versus Welfare (Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England: Harvard U. Press, 2002) ("In this book we ask what criteria ought to guide social decionmaking. Our thesis is that social decisions should be based exclusively on their effects on the welfare of individuals--and, accordingly, should not depend on notions of fairness, justice, or cognate concepts." Id. at xvii. Every law student should read this book, then determine for him/herself whether Kaplow and Shavell get it right, and why or why not.).
Kennedy, Paul, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict From 1500 to 2000 (New York: Random House, 1987) (This is still a relevant read. "The tests before the United States as it heads toward the twenty-first century are certainly daunting, perhaps especially in the economic sphere; but the nation's resources remain considerable, if they can be properly organized, and if there is a judicious recognition of both the limitations and the opportunities of American power. Id. at 534-535. Query: In the closing years of the first decade of the twenty-first century has America properly organized its considerable resources? Has America judicious recognized the limitations of American power? "For all its economic and perhaps military decline, it remains, in Pierre Hassner's words, 'the decisive actor in every type of balance and issue.' Because it has so much power for good or evil, because it is the linchpin of the western alliance system and the center of the existing global economy, what it does, or does not do, is so much more important than what any of the other Powers decides to do." Id. at 535. Query: Did America blow it?).
Levi, Edward H., Point of View: Talks on Education (Chicago & London: U. of Chicago Press, 1969).
MacAvoy, Paul W., The Unsustainable Costs of Partial Deregulation (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 2007).
Page, Benjamin I., & Lawrence R. Jacobs, Class War?: What Americans Really Think about Economic Inequality (Chicago & London: U. of Chicago Press, 2009) ("Our careful exploration of the data leads to a fascinating and perhaps counterintuitive picture of America that defies simply bifurcation into conservative and liberal camps. The evidence shows that most Americans are both philosophically conservative and operationally liberal. They believe in the American Dream, individual initiative, and free markets. In the abstract, they are uneasy with government. But Americans are also pragmatic. When their well-being (and that of people they care about) is threatened, or when their dreams are blocked by forces beyond their control, they turn to concrete government programs for help--programs that would greatly decrease economic inequality. Most Americans are conservative egalitarians." Id. at xi.).
Pisar, Samuel, Of Blood and Hope (Boston & Toronto: Little Brown, 1979, 1980).
Ricks, Thomas E., The Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006-2008 (New York: The Penguin Press, 2009) ("Lt. Gregory Weber, an infantry platoon leader in the 2nd Infantry Division, recalled responding to a bombing and RPG ambush of a U.S. patrol in southern Baghdad that summer...." "Five soldiers were killed in the incident, but the image that haunted Weber was the first thing he saw, the dead soldier in the blasted turret, 'iPod still in his ear.' He still wonders, 'Did his leadership know he was distracted by music; not being able to hear the battlefield?'" Id. at 189.).
Sandweiss, Martha A., Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line (New York: The Penguin Press, 2009) (“The practice of passing generally involves adopting a particular identity to move toward greater legal and social privilege. It might mean taking on a different gender, or ethnic or national identity, but it most often involves the assumption of a different racial identity. And since, in the United States, social privilege has been associated with light-colored skin, passing usually entails concealing one’s African American heritage to assume a white identity. The entire practice hinges on a peculiar idea. Since one’s race could be determined by heritage as well as appearance, very light-colored skin did not necessarily make one a ‘white’ person. In the aftermath of emancipation, a host of laws sprang up throughout the Deep South clarifying just what defined a person as ‘black’ or ‘Negro,’ almost always for the purpose of restricting his rights. In 1896 the Supreme Court of the United States upheld these laws in the case of Plessy v. Ferguson, which affirmed that people with one ‘black’ great-grandparent could, for all intents and purposes, be considered black themselves, no matter what they looked like. This peculiarity American idea came to be known as ‘hypodescent,’ ‘One drop of black blood’ trumped seven drops of ‘white.’” Id. at 7.).
Showalter, Elaine, A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx (New York: Knopf, 2009).
Sundquist, Eric J., King’s Dream (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 2009) (“For those on the political Left, King’s dream became associated less with colorblind “equal opportunity,” what was once the core value of democratic liberalism, than with race-based (and sometimes class-based) programs designed to achieve diversity, usually defined as proportionately equal outcomes, the new core vale of democratic liberalism.” Id. at 4. “By the same token, those on the Right have routinely cited the Dream speech–specifically, King’s hope that “my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character”–in support of an ideal of colorblind justice, and conservatives, no less than liberals, have presumed to know where King would stand on hot-button issues such as affirmative action, reparations for slavery, and school vouchers.” Id. at 5.).
Tough, Paul, Whatever It Takes: Geoffrey Canada’s Quest to Change Harlem and America (Boston & New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2008).
Villa, Dana, Public Freedom (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2008) ("Popular ignorance, apathy, and distraction present huge impediments to recovering what is left of out diminishing democracy. It is sobering to realize that these are hardly the only, or indeed the largest, obstacles to that project." Id. at 22. "What can 'the public' and political institutions be in a world so dramatically constrained by the imperatives of the global marketplace and the ubiquity of bureaucratic hierarchy and bureaucratic process?" Id. at 25. "The deepest reserves of civic docility are found in the human, all-too-human tendency to submit to the gravitational pull of custom and convention--to what is, in effect, a decidedly social and 'participatory' form of authority." "It is misleading, then to say that docile subjects are 'manufactured' or produced. More often than not, they are self-willed and, to a degree, self-created. We are docile because we want, if not to be like everyone else, then to be admired for the things everyone else wants and admires. We desire the socialization of our desires, even or especially when those desires invest themselves in the project of self-development. In this way, 'self-fashioning' has become one of the most superficial of all herd animal behaviors. The ancient 'arts of the self'... return to be marketed as so many techniques for individual fulfillment. This is the predictable result of a modern form of life that is less 'disciplined' than it is, put simply, shallow. It is shallow not because it lacks self-concern or self-care, but because it lack the depth that only a viable public realm can give it." Id. at 300-301.).
Whitaker, Robert, On the Laps of Gods: The Red Summer of 1919 and the Struggle for Justice that Remade a Nation (New York: Crown Publishers, 2008) (race, racism, equal protection, substantive due process, habeas corpus, and the underside of American history).
Wilson, William Julius, More Than Just Race: Being Black and Poor in the Inner City (New York: Norton, 2009) (“Policy makers committed to seriously addressing the problems of race and poverty face two serious challenges: How to create legislation that is designed to confront structural and cultural forces that create and reinforce racial inequality; and how to get sufficient support from the American people to support such legislation.” Id. at 154.)
March 4, 2009
REFLECTIONS ON DEMOCRACY (?)
Fogel, Robert William, Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery (New York: Norton, 1989) ("Here then is a dilemma posed not only by the antislavery struggle but by most other moral movements: It is difficult in a democracy, if not impossible, to transform a moral movement into a winning political coalition without deeply compromising its moral integrity; it is also difficult to pursue one moral goal without compromising or even sacrificing other important moral goals." Id. at 388-389. Fogel closes this work with a section titled "Toward a Modern Indictment." He writes: "I believe that we should no longer interpret the moral problem of slavery within the framework of the indictment fashioned by the winners of the antislavery struggle..." "I believe that the new indictment should turn on four counts...." "The first, and overarching, count in the new indictment is that slavery permitted one group of people to exercise unrestrained personal domination over another group of people...." "Denial of economic opportunity is the second count of the new indictment of slavery...." "Denial of citizenship to slaves is the third count of the new indictment. Even the word 'alien' is too weak to describe the utter exclusion of slaves from civil and political rights...." "Denial of cultural self-identification is the fourth count in the new indictment...." Id. at 393-406. How many of those moral indictments apply to many of social and political issues plaguing contemporary American society? Fogel main point, however, concerns the true important achievement of the American Civil War. It is not the ending of slavery per se, or the maintaining of the union per se. It is something much more profound. Fogel begins with a reference to William E. Channing. "William E. Channing, who had hoped against hope that slavery could be ended by moral suasion alone, explained why the destruction of slavery was the moral imperative of his age. 'Slavery must fall, he said, because it stands in direct hostility to all the grand movements, principles, and reforms of our age, because it stands in the way of an advancing world.'" Then Fogel finishes as follows: "What the Civil War achieved, then, was more than just inflated wealth for northern capitalists and 'half' freedom for blacks ("the shoddy aristocracy of the North and the ragged children of the South"). It preserved and reinforced conditions favorable to a continued struggle for the democratic rights of the lower classes, black and white alike, and for the improvement of their economic condition, not only in America but everywhere else in the world. The fall of slavery did not usher in the millennium, it produced no heaven on earth, but it vitalized all the grand movements, principles, and reforms of Channing's age and of our own." Id. at 416-417. It is why the American slavery and the American Civil War will forever loom large in United States history... or loom large as long as their remains a United States to have a history.)
Lessig, Lawrence, Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy (New York: Penguin Press, 2008) ("One great feature of modern society is the institutional respect we give to process designed to destroy the past. The free market is the best example. Democracy is another. In both cases, constant flux is not the objective.... But in both cases, the aim is to assure that the past survives only if it can beat out the future." "The commercial economies of the Internet are a fantastic example of exactly this dynamic. The neutral platform of the Internet democratized technical and commercial innovation. Power was thus radically shifted. The dropouts of the late 1990s (mainly from Stanford) beat the dropouts of the middle 1970s (from Harvard): Google and Yahoo! were nothings when Microsoft was said to dominate. This success of the new against the power of the old was made possible by a constitutional commitment in the architecture of the network to democratize innovation." "No government could have planned these successes, and not just because governments are unlikely to have the talent of the geniuses at the likes of a Google or an eBay. Rather, governments couldn't plan these successes because governments, at least, as we Americans know them, are inherently corrupted--not by bribery, not by greed, but by the reality of campaign financing, which lets them understand the views of only the last great success, and never the views of the next great success (which, as yet, lacks the funds to influence the government). Id. at 142.).
Litwack, Leon F., Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (New York: Knopf, 1979) (Behavioral law and economics? "The Civil War provided Americans with various opportunities to exploit the nation's military needs for personal profit and advantage. That white men should have used the recruitment of black regiments for such purposes is not altogether surprising. With the end of racial restrictions on enlistments, state and local bounties and military conscriptions instantly made black men valuable and marketable commodities. Capitalizing on the law which permitted a draftee to send a person in his place, the 'substitute broker' viewed the black man as a likely candidate; his lowly economic position often made him easier and cheaper to purchase, some were intimidated into enlisting, and the broker's commission for finding a 'substitute' justified whatever method he needed to employ. The practice became so widespread, in fact, that the War Department finally interceded and ruled that Negroes could substitute only for other Negroes. That decision not only forced brokers to look elsewhere but depressed the price which some blacks had been asking (and obtaining) for a substitute enlistment." Id. at 73.).
Wilson, Edmund, Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War (New York: Oxford U. Press, 1962) ("Having myself lived through a couple of world wars and having read a certain amount of history, I am no longer disposed to take very seriously the professions of 'war aims' that nations make. I think that it is a serious deficiency on the part of historians and political writers that they so rarely interest themselves in biological and zoological phenomena.... Now, the wars fought by human beings are stimulated as a rule primarily by the same instincts as the voracity of the sea slug. It is true that among the among the animals other than man it is hard to find organized aggression of the kind that has been developed by humanity.... In any case, all animals must prey on some form of life that they can capture, and all will eat as much as they can find. The difference in this respect between man and the other forms of life is that man has succeeded in cultivating enough of what he calls 'morality' and 'reason' to justify what he is doing in terms of what he calls 'virtue' and civilization.' Hence the self-assertive sounds which he utters when he is fighting and swallowing others: the songs about glory and God, the speeches about national ideals, the demonstrations of logical ideologies. These assertions rarely have any meaning--that is, they will soon lose any meaning they have had--once a war has been got under way.... In the case, however, of a people which has just had a successful revolution, the situation is a little more complicated. The slogans that such a people shouts may at first express a real exaltation on the part of some social group or country which has succeeded in escaping the clutches of some other group or country that has been eating it, as well as enthusiastic hopes for the freer and happier society which it hopes to construct in the future.... But once the insurgent party has succeeded in imposing its own authority, if it feels itself strong enough to go further, it will devour as much as it can, and its slogans will lose all meaning.... And now we Americans of the United States, we too the self-congratutulary grandchildren of a successful revolution but driven, also by the appetite for aggrandizement, have been adding such terms as 'the American dream,' 'the American way of life' and 'the defense of the Free World' to these other forms of warlike cant." Id. at xi-xiii.).
February 23, 2009
MORE READINGS IN HISTORY, and IN MODERN THOUGHT
Berlin, Ira, Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves (Cambridge & London: Belknap/Harvard U. Press, 2003).
Desmond, Adrian & James Moore, Darwin’s Sacred Cause: How a Hatred of Slavery Shaped Darwin's Views on Human Evolution ( New York: Boston & Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009).
Fogel, Robert William & Stanley L. Engerman, Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (Boston & Toronto: Little, Brown, 1974).
Fogel, Robert William & Stanley L. Engerman, Time on the Cross: Evidence and Methods: A Supplement (Boston & Toronto: Little, Brown, 1974).
Foner, Eric, ed., Our Lincoln: New Perspectives on Lincoln and His World (New York & London: Norton, 2008).
Fredrickson, George M., The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817-1914 (New York: Harper & Row, 1971) ("During the nineteenth century, race-thinking emerged for the first time as a central current in Western thought. Previously whites had encountered other races in the course of 'expansion of Europe' and had characteristically subjugated, enslaved, or exterminated them. Out of these brutal and crassly exploitative contacts developed a set of attitudes about dark-skinned peoples which were 'racist,' if racism is regarded as synonymous with race prejudice and discrimination, but which might be considered preracist or protoracist, if one defines racism in a more restricted way--as a rationalized pseudoscientific theory positing the innate and permanent inferiority of nonwhite. Racism in this second sense had some roots in the biological thinking of the eighteenth century but did not come to fruition or exert great influence until well along in the nineteenth. In large part this book is a study of the development of intellectualized racist theory and ideology as it was applied directly and programmatically to the 'problem' posed in the white mind by the presence of millions of blacks in the United States. It is also, however, a study of countertendencies, an examination of racial concepts, images, and proposals that deviated in some ways from those associated with the 'hard' racism of the inherent-inferiority school. In attempting to describe and interpret the debate that developed between spokesmen for differing conceptions of Afro-American character and destiny, I have found that disagreement occurred within a narrowing consensus; for pseudoscientific racism or its equivalent tended during the period of this study to increase its hold on the American mind and to infect even those whites who resisted its full implications." Id. at xi-xii.).
Gopnik, Adam, Angels and Ages: A Short Book about Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life (New York: Knopf, 2009).
Holzer, Harold & Joshua Wolf Shenk, eds., In Lincoln’s Hand: His Original Manuscripts with Commentary by Distinguished Americans (New York; Bantam Books, 2009).
Konner, Melvin, The Jewish Body (Jewish Encounters) (New York: Nextbook/Schocken, 2009).
Jordan, Winthrop D., White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812 (Chapel Hill: U. of North Carolina Press, 1958) ("My assumptions about the value of historical study are the same as those of most historians. A comprehension of the past seems to have two opposite advantages in the present: it makes us aware of how different people have been in other ages and accordingly enlarges our awareness of the possibilities of human experience, and at the same time it impresses upon us those tendencies in human beings which have not changed and which accordingly are unlikely to at least in the immediate future. Viewed from a slightly different vantage point, an understanding of the history of our own culture gives some inkling of the categories of possibilities within which for the time being we are born to live." "To say this is, I suppose, to make something of a claim for the value of studying current attitudes toward Negroes by taking, as they say, 'the historical approach.' What the historian contributes, inevitably, is a sense and appreciation of the important effect--perhaps even the great weight--of prior upon ensuing experience." Id. at ix.).
Kaplan, Fred, Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer (New York: Harper, 2008).
Keneally, Thomas, Searching for Schindler: A Memoir (New York: Doubleday, 2008).
McPherson, James M., Abraham Lincoln (New York: Oxford U. Press, 2009).
Voegeli, V. Jacque, Free But Not Equal: The Midwest and the Negro During the Civil War (Chicago & London: U. of Chicago Press, 1967).
Wood, Forrest G., Black Scare: The Racist Response to Emancipation and Reconstruction (Berkeley & Los Angeles: U. of California Press, 1968) ("The origins of backlash go far back in human history. The thesis of this study is not that modern racism began during the Civil War, but that the war and reconstruction polarized it for the first time into a psychological force of massive national proportions. As the radicals took the initiative in reconstruction, the Black Scare became the emotional counterpoint to the 'bloody shirt.' Emancipation had created a new class of Americans, a class that owned no land, controlled virtually none of the nation's wealth, was largely illiterate, and, most important of all, was easily distinguished by color. Humanitarians correctly recognized the government's responsibilities: to abandon the black man at this point would have been to condemn him to a state of permanent inequality. Racist demagogues, however, aware that most white Americans considered the Negro innately inferior, launched a white supremacy crusade through pamphlets, newspapers, books, leaflets, songs, pictures, and speeches, and accused the government of leading the nation down the road to ruin. It was the first white backlash." Id. at vii-viii.).
Woodward, C. Vann, American Counterpoint: Slavery and Racism in the North-South Dialogue (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971) ("History and circumstance have endowed Americans with a heritage rich in themes of counterpoint. They began to appear quite early in our history--as soon as paleface confronted redskin. And East-West (or Home-and-Frontier) counterpoint appeared before the North-South variation developed, just as there was a White-Red before there was a White-Black variation. The Old Settler-Immigrant counterpoint turned up about as soon as the second wave of immigrants landed. The Protestant-Catholic and the Gentile-Jewish themes were not long in following." "What America has lacked in the way of overt class conflict she has made up in indigenous tensions of her own peculiar heritage. Tensions of class were undoubtedly present and sometimes irrepressible, but Americans have characteristically thought and acted in terms of regional, religious, racial, or ethnic rather than class conflicts. In fact, Americans have often used them--nowhere oftener than in the South--to avoid or paper over class conflict. Their politics, their compromises, and their institutions have reflected these preoccupations and evasions in much of their history." Id. at 3-4.).
January 19, 2009
AMERICAN PRESIDENTS, and some other topics
Alter, Jonathan, The Defining Moment: FDR’s Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006).
Cohen, Adam, Nothing to Fear: FDR’s Inner Circle and the Hundred Days that Created Modern America (New York: The Penguin Press, 2009).
Editors of Life, The, The American Journey of Barack Obama (New York: Little, Brown, 2008).
Fredrickson, George M., Diverse Nations: Explorations in the History of Racial and Ethnic Pluralism (U.S. History in International Perspective (Boulder & London: Paradigm Publishers, 2008).
Samuelson, Robert J., The Great Inflation and Its Aftermath: The Past and Future of American Influence (New York: Random House, 2008)(a nice, nontechnical essay explaining some of how America’s economy got into the trouble that it is in, etc.).
Schwartz, Barry, Abraham Lincoln and the Forge of National Memory (Chicago & London: U. of Chicago Press, 2000).
Schwartz, Barry, Abraham Lincoln in the Post-Heroic Era: History and Memory in Late Twentieth-Century America (Chicago & London: U. of Chicago Press, 2008).
Southworth, Ann, Lawyers of the Right: Professionalizing the Conservative Coalition (Chicago & London: U. of Chicago Press, 2008).
Trillin, Calvin, Deciding the Next Decider: The 2008 Presidential Race in Rhyme (New York: Random House, 2008).
Cohen, Adam, Nothing to Fear: FDR’s Inner Circle and the Hundred Days that Created Modern America (New York: The Penguin Press, 2009).
Editors of Life, The, The American Journey of Barack Obama (New York: Little, Brown, 2008).
Fredrickson, George M., Diverse Nations: Explorations in the History of Racial and Ethnic Pluralism (U.S. History in International Perspective (Boulder & London: Paradigm Publishers, 2008).
Samuelson, Robert J., The Great Inflation and Its Aftermath: The Past and Future of American Influence (New York: Random House, 2008)(a nice, nontechnical essay explaining some of how America’s economy got into the trouble that it is in, etc.).
Schwartz, Barry, Abraham Lincoln and the Forge of National Memory (Chicago & London: U. of Chicago Press, 2000).
Schwartz, Barry, Abraham Lincoln in the Post-Heroic Era: History and Memory in Late Twentieth-Century America (Chicago & London: U. of Chicago Press, 2008).
Southworth, Ann, Lawyers of the Right: Professionalizing the Conservative Coalition (Chicago & London: U. of Chicago Press, 2008).
Trillin, Calvin, Deciding the Next Decider: The 2008 Presidential Race in Rhyme (New York: Random House, 2008).
January 1, 2009
SOME RECENT BOOKS, MAINLY IN AMERICAN HISTORY, AND ALL WORTHWHILE READINGS FOR LAW STUDENTS
"History, as nearly no one seems to know, is not merely something to be read. And it does not refer merely, or even principally, to the past. On the contrary, the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do. It could scarcely be otherwise, since it is to history that we owe our frames of reference, our identities, and or aspirations."
---JAME BALDWIN, "White Man's Guilt," Ebony, 1965
Atwood, Margaret, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth (Toronto: Anansi Press, 2008).
Badger, Anthony J., FDR: The First Hundred Days (New York: Hill and Wang, 2008) ("The lawyers encouraged by Felix Frankfurter to staff government agencies in the Hundred Days were not by and large anticapitalist (although a small number were members of the Communist Party): many came from leading Wall Street law firms and investment houses. They were aware of the betrayal of fiduciary trust by investment bankers and utility companies, and they were anxious that the government should have legal expertise to match the legal teams of the corporations and finance houses. They were suspicious of the pricing policies of the firms they dealt with. They had a lawyer's skepticism of, rather than a businessman's trust in, the good faith of the food processors, for example, to set prices fairly. They expected to have access to the companies' books to check that good faith. They had a rather lofty faith in their ability as disinterested lawyers to act in the national interest. But they were not anticapitalist or antimarket: they aimed instead to get the market to operate in a more open and transparent way." Id. at 154.).
Barnes, Julian, Nothing to Be Frighten Of (New York: Knopf, 2008) ("It is not just pit-gazing that is hard work, but life-gazing. It is difficult for us to contemplate, fixedly, the possibility, let alone the certainty, that life is a matter of cosmic hazard, its fundamental purpose mere self-perpetuation, that it unfolds in emptiness, that our planet will one day drift in frozen silence, and that the human species, as it has developed in all its frenzied and over-engineered complexity, will completely disappear and not be missed, because there is nobody and nothing out there to miss us. This is what growing up means. And it is a frightening prospect for a race which has for so long relied upon its own invented gods for explanation and consolation." Id. at 171-172.).
Bon Tempo, Carl J., Americans at the Gate: The United States and Refugees during the Cold War (Politics and Society in Twentieth-Century America) (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2008).
Brands, H.W., Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (New York: Doubleday, 2008).
Burrows, Edwin G., Forgotten Patriots: The Untold Story of American Prisoners During The Revolutionary War (New York: Basic Books, 2008).
Chappell, David L., A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow (Chapel Hill & London: U. of North Carolina Press, 2004).
Dobbs, Michael, One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro in the Brink of Nuclear War (New York: Knopf, 2008).
Dumm, Thomas, Loneliness as a Way of Life (Cambridge, Ma. & Oxford, England: Harvard U. Press, 2008).
Dray, Philip, Capital Men: The Epic Story of Reconstruction Through the Lives of the First Black Congressmen (Boston & New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2008).
Ellis, Charles D., The Partnership: The Making of Goldman Sachs (New York: The Penguin Press, 2008) ("The Principles are: . . . . 14. Integrity and honesty are at the heart of our business. We expect our people to maintain high ethical standards in everything they do, both in their work for the firm and in their personal lives." Id. at 185-186.).
Faust, Drew Gilpin, This Republic of Suffering: Death and The American Civil War (New York: Knopf, 2008).
Ferguson, Niall, The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World (New York: The Penguin Press, 2008).
Gildea, Robert, Children of the Revolution: The French, 1799-1914 (Cambridge: Harvard U. Press, 2008).
Gildea, Robert, Marianne in Chains: Daily Life in the Heart of France During the German Occupation (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2003).
Gilliom, John, Overseer of the Poor: Surveillance, Resistance, and the Limits of Privacy (Chicago & London: U. of Chicago Press, 2001).
Gladwell, Malcolm, Outliers: The Story of Success (Boston: Little, Brown, 2008) ("No one who can rise before dawn three hundred sixty days a year fails to make his family rich." Id. at 238.).
Goldin, Claudia, & Lawrence F. Katz, The Race Between Education and Technology (Cambridge, Massachusetts & London, England: Belknap/Harvard U. Press, 2008).
Gordon-Reed, Annette, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (New York: Norton, 2008) ("It is an empirical, not just an intuitive or romantic, fact that law and social mores have never been able to stamp out constitutive elements of the human personality. The American slave society in which Hemings and Jefferson lived, with its tremendous grant of power to one group over another, grossly distorted the distribution of human emotions. One encounters vastly more instances of the negative ones that helped the institution along--some from Jefferson's own hand--than benign or positive ones that contradicted its basic tenets. Yet we would never expect law and even extreme social opprobrium to remove from a population jealousy, hatred, greed, sympathy, mirth, possessiveness--the entire palette of human emotions. If the shapers of law and social custom had that kind of power, social orders would stand forever. Cultures would never change. Very often the seeds of change are planted in the privacy of individual minds, home, and bedrooms--any place where people retreat to escape from the demands of society's rules and to take on personae that are more suited to their own needs than those the external community would have them adopt." Id. at 168.).
Gramlich, Edward M., Subprime Mortgages; America’s Latest Boom and Bust (Washington, D.C.: The Urban Institute Press, 2007).
Hamilton, Shane, Trucking Country: The Road to America’s Wal-Mart Economy (Politics and Society in Twentieth-Century America) (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2008) ([The] appraisal of the power of technology to transcend decades-old political conflicts drew on a wider current of technological optimism in postwar U.S. culture. Despite the worrisome devastation wrought by atomic weapons in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, U.S. journalists in the immediate postwar years touted atomic energy as ‘a blessing that will make it possible for the human race to create a close approach to an earthly paradise.’ . . . The plastics industry boomed after the war as entrepreneurs and chemical corporations manufactured everything from fishing rods to furniture out of inexpensive hydrocarbon compounds. . . . Mass production techniques promised a world of affordable suburban homes after 1947, when Levitt and Sons began constructing the first Levittown on Long Island, using gang construction and prefabricated home parts to erect the nation’s then-largest private housing development. As technological fixes, each of these solutions proved effective in fueling the postwar consumer-driven economic boom, but did little to resolve deeper political and social conflicts. Atomic utopians could not forever downplay the destructive potential of nuclear power. . . . Plastics offered a vibrant and colorful sheen to a consumer society nonetheless beset by continuing class tensions and lurking anxieties about the ephemeral nature of material abundance. Levittowns and other sprawling suburbs provided good housing at affordable prices, but did nothing to confront racial residential segregation based on white homeowners; self-fulfilling prophecies that property values would decline in integrated neighborhoods. William Levitt explained away his firm’s implicit support of white flight and restrictive race-based housing covenants, declaring that his firm could ‘solve a housing problem, or we can try to solve a racial problem, but we cannot combine the two.’ The technological optimism of U.S. postwar culture illustrates the historical truism that technological fixes, whether premised on utopian fantasies or upon pragmatic politics, tend to produce simplistic, reductionist ‘solutions’ to complex social problems. Even when ‘successful’, a technological fix more often displaces, rather than resolves, the source of conflict—generally by empowering technocrats and technical experts to approach political conflicts in engineers’ terms rather than in the messy public sphere of democratic debate.” Id. at 90-91. Is there a lesson here regarding the current U.S. financial crisis? Are the various bailouts, stimulus packages, supports, loans, or whatever, mere empowerment of the so-called economic experts, etc., and at the expense of true democratic debate?).
Hindman, Matthew, The Myth of Digital Democracy (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2008) ("A central claim of this book is that direct political speech on the Internet--by which I mean the posting of political views online by citizens--does not follow this egalitarian patterns. If we look at citizens' voices in terms of the readership their postings receive, political expression online is orders of magnitude more unequal than the disparities we used to in voting, volunteer work, and even political fund-raising. This book also shows that by the most commonly used social science metrics, online audience concentration equals or exceeds that found in most traditional media." Id. at 17.).
Hobsbawn, Eric, On Empire: America, War, and Global Supremacy (New York: Pantheon, 2008) ("Faced with the industrialization of Europe and the United States, Victorian Britain (then still massively industrialized, still the world's largest trader and investor), shifted its markets and capital investments to the formal and informal empire. The United States of the early twenty-first century has no such option, and in any case could not exercise it, since it is no longer a major exporter of goods and capital, and pays for the vast demand for goods which it can no longer produce itself by going into debt to the new centers of world industry. It is the only major empires that has also been a major debtor. Indeed, with the exception of the seventy years between World War I and 1988, the global bottom line of its economy has never been in credit. The capital assets, visible and invisible, accumulated since 1945 by the U.S. economy, are large and not liable to rapid erosion. Nevertheless, U.S. supremacy must be acutely vulnerable to its relative decline, and to the shift of industrial power, capital, and high technology into Asia. In a globalized world the 'soft power' of market and cultural Americanization no longer reinforces American economic superiority. America pioneered supermarkets, but in Latin America and China the pace was set by the French Carrefour chain. The American Empire, unlike the British, has consistently had to rely on its political muscle." Id. at 86-87.).
Jeffreys-Jones, Rhodri, The FBI: A History (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 2007).
Jones, Jacqueline, Saving Savannah: The City and the Civil War (New York: Knopf, 2008).
Keith, LeeAnna, The Colfax Massacre: The Untold Story of Black Power, White Terror, and the Death of Reconstruction (Oxford & New York: Oxford U. Press, 2008) (Here is the political and social road leading up to U. S. v. Cruikshank.).
Khanna, Parag, The Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order (New York: Random House, 2008) ("Whether globalization will continue is not the issue--only its extent . . . . Globalization is now part of every society's strategy for survival and progress. While protestors were swarming high-level World Trade Organization summits to bring an end to the existing rules of the game, the small producers of sugar and cotton whom they claimed to represent conducted business as usual because they had to do so in order to survive. Even the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, did not stop the falling costs of transportation, the liberalization of trade, and the explosion of communications technology that drive globalization." Id. at xxi-xxii. "Forty percent of America's trade is with East Asia, and most of the rest is with Europe. America depends on cheap Chinese goods and China's appetite for U.S. treasury bonds; China depends on European and American investment and now exports more to Europe than the United States does; Europe and America save costs and boost profits by relocating production to China. The three together have come to resemble conjoined triplets, where severing any artery hurts all sides. Only this sort of globalized integration can possibly prevent the full return of geopolitical rivalry among three such ambitious superpowers on one small planet." Id. at xxii.).
Kunhardt, Philip B., III, Perter W. Kunhardt, & Peter W. Kunhardt, Jr., Looking for Lincoln: The Making of an American Icon, Introduction by Doris Kearns Goodwin, Foreword by David Herbert Donald (New York: Knopf, 2008).
Lane, Charles, The Day Freedom Died: The Colfax Massacre, The Supreme Court, and The Betrayal of Reconstruction (New York: Henry Holt, 2008) (Here is another account of the road to U.S. v. Cruishank. It underscores America's own long history of domestic terrorism.).
Lombardo, Paul A., Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court, and Buck v. Bell (Baltimore; The Johns Hopkins U. Press, 2008).
Mayer, Jane, The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals (New York: Doubleday, 2008) (I think it is extremely imperative that law students read this book. Though several worthy lawyers are identified, the book identifies a much longer list of lawyers who have brought much dishonor to the legal profession and who, unfortunately, will not suffer any negative consequences for having done so. "In Charlottesville, Virginia, Phillip Zelikow, who returned to teaching history at the University of Virginia, tried to take stock. In time, he predicted, the Bush Administration's descent into torture would be seen as akin to Roosevelt's internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. It happened, he believed, in much the same way, for many of the same reasons. As he put it, 'Fear and anxiety were exploited by zealots and fools.'" Id. at 335. Unfortunately, many of those zealots and fools were some of the lawyers.).
McPherson, James M., Tried By War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief (New York: The Penguin Press, 2008).
Meacham, Jon, American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House (New York: Random House, 2008).
Mendell, David, Obama: From Promise to Power (New York: Amistad, 2008).
Noll, Mark A., The Civil War as a Theological Crisis (Chapel Hill: U. of North Carolina Press, 2006).
Shiller, Robert J., The New Financial Order: Risk in the 21st Century (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2003).
Shiller, Robert J., The Subprime Solution: How Today’s Global Financial Crisis Happened and What to Do about It (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2008).
Smith, Jean Edward, FDR (New York: Random House, 2007).
Stroll, Ira, Samuel Adams: A Life (New York: Free Press, 2008).
Stuart, Douglas T., Creating the National Security State: A History of the Law that Transformed America (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2008).
Sugrue, Thomas J., Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (New York: Doubleday, 2008).
Weaver, Catherine, Hypocrisy Trap: The World Bank and the Poverty of Reform (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2008) ("This book is concerned with a critical problem facing the World Bank today: its perceived hypocrisy. A label often affixed to the World Bank and other International organizations (IOs), hypocrisy refers to the gap between what an IO says and what it does, or in Nils Brunsson's definition, the contradictions between 'organizational talk, decision, and action'." Id. at xi. "This book is driven by two sets of questions. First, why does the Bank exhibit hypocrisy? What does this hypocrisy look like in the manifested behavior of the Bank? What factors, external or internal to the Bank, drive the divergence of bureaucratic talk and action? Second, why is hypocrisy so difficult to resolve, especially when it is exposed as a critical threat to legitimacy and authority? Stated differently, what is it about the nature of change, and specifically strategic reform efforts within international organizations, that enables or even requires hypocrisy?" Id. at 4.).
---JAME BALDWIN, "White Man's Guilt," Ebony, 1965
Atwood, Margaret, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth (Toronto: Anansi Press, 2008).
Badger, Anthony J., FDR: The First Hundred Days (New York: Hill and Wang, 2008) ("The lawyers encouraged by Felix Frankfurter to staff government agencies in the Hundred Days were not by and large anticapitalist (although a small number were members of the Communist Party): many came from leading Wall Street law firms and investment houses. They were aware of the betrayal of fiduciary trust by investment bankers and utility companies, and they were anxious that the government should have legal expertise to match the legal teams of the corporations and finance houses. They were suspicious of the pricing policies of the firms they dealt with. They had a lawyer's skepticism of, rather than a businessman's trust in, the good faith of the food processors, for example, to set prices fairly. They expected to have access to the companies' books to check that good faith. They had a rather lofty faith in their ability as disinterested lawyers to act in the national interest. But they were not anticapitalist or antimarket: they aimed instead to get the market to operate in a more open and transparent way." Id. at 154.).
Barnes, Julian, Nothing to Be Frighten Of (New York: Knopf, 2008) ("It is not just pit-gazing that is hard work, but life-gazing. It is difficult for us to contemplate, fixedly, the possibility, let alone the certainty, that life is a matter of cosmic hazard, its fundamental purpose mere self-perpetuation, that it unfolds in emptiness, that our planet will one day drift in frozen silence, and that the human species, as it has developed in all its frenzied and over-engineered complexity, will completely disappear and not be missed, because there is nobody and nothing out there to miss us. This is what growing up means. And it is a frightening prospect for a race which has for so long relied upon its own invented gods for explanation and consolation." Id. at 171-172.).
Bon Tempo, Carl J., Americans at the Gate: The United States and Refugees during the Cold War (Politics and Society in Twentieth-Century America) (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2008).
Brands, H.W., Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (New York: Doubleday, 2008).
Burrows, Edwin G., Forgotten Patriots: The Untold Story of American Prisoners During The Revolutionary War (New York: Basic Books, 2008).
Chappell, David L., A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow (Chapel Hill & London: U. of North Carolina Press, 2004).
Dobbs, Michael, One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro in the Brink of Nuclear War (New York: Knopf, 2008).
Dumm, Thomas, Loneliness as a Way of Life (Cambridge, Ma. & Oxford, England: Harvard U. Press, 2008).
Dray, Philip, Capital Men: The Epic Story of Reconstruction Through the Lives of the First Black Congressmen (Boston & New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2008).
Ellis, Charles D., The Partnership: The Making of Goldman Sachs (New York: The Penguin Press, 2008) ("The Principles are: . . . . 14. Integrity and honesty are at the heart of our business. We expect our people to maintain high ethical standards in everything they do, both in their work for the firm and in their personal lives." Id. at 185-186.).
Faust, Drew Gilpin, This Republic of Suffering: Death and The American Civil War (New York: Knopf, 2008).
Ferguson, Niall, The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World (New York: The Penguin Press, 2008).
Gildea, Robert, Children of the Revolution: The French, 1799-1914 (Cambridge: Harvard U. Press, 2008).
Gildea, Robert, Marianne in Chains: Daily Life in the Heart of France During the German Occupation (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2003).
Gilliom, John, Overseer of the Poor: Surveillance, Resistance, and the Limits of Privacy (Chicago & London: U. of Chicago Press, 2001).
Gladwell, Malcolm, Outliers: The Story of Success (Boston: Little, Brown, 2008) ("No one who can rise before dawn three hundred sixty days a year fails to make his family rich." Id. at 238.).
Goldin, Claudia, & Lawrence F. Katz, The Race Between Education and Technology (Cambridge, Massachusetts & London, England: Belknap/Harvard U. Press, 2008).
Gordon-Reed, Annette, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (New York: Norton, 2008) ("It is an empirical, not just an intuitive or romantic, fact that law and social mores have never been able to stamp out constitutive elements of the human personality. The American slave society in which Hemings and Jefferson lived, with its tremendous grant of power to one group over another, grossly distorted the distribution of human emotions. One encounters vastly more instances of the negative ones that helped the institution along--some from Jefferson's own hand--than benign or positive ones that contradicted its basic tenets. Yet we would never expect law and even extreme social opprobrium to remove from a population jealousy, hatred, greed, sympathy, mirth, possessiveness--the entire palette of human emotions. If the shapers of law and social custom had that kind of power, social orders would stand forever. Cultures would never change. Very often the seeds of change are planted in the privacy of individual minds, home, and bedrooms--any place where people retreat to escape from the demands of society's rules and to take on personae that are more suited to their own needs than those the external community would have them adopt." Id. at 168.).
Gramlich, Edward M., Subprime Mortgages; America’s Latest Boom and Bust (Washington, D.C.: The Urban Institute Press, 2007).
Hamilton, Shane, Trucking Country: The Road to America’s Wal-Mart Economy (Politics and Society in Twentieth-Century America) (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2008) ([The] appraisal of the power of technology to transcend decades-old political conflicts drew on a wider current of technological optimism in postwar U.S. culture. Despite the worrisome devastation wrought by atomic weapons in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, U.S. journalists in the immediate postwar years touted atomic energy as ‘a blessing that will make it possible for the human race to create a close approach to an earthly paradise.’ . . . The plastics industry boomed after the war as entrepreneurs and chemical corporations manufactured everything from fishing rods to furniture out of inexpensive hydrocarbon compounds. . . . Mass production techniques promised a world of affordable suburban homes after 1947, when Levitt and Sons began constructing the first Levittown on Long Island, using gang construction and prefabricated home parts to erect the nation’s then-largest private housing development. As technological fixes, each of these solutions proved effective in fueling the postwar consumer-driven economic boom, but did little to resolve deeper political and social conflicts. Atomic utopians could not forever downplay the destructive potential of nuclear power. . . . Plastics offered a vibrant and colorful sheen to a consumer society nonetheless beset by continuing class tensions and lurking anxieties about the ephemeral nature of material abundance. Levittowns and other sprawling suburbs provided good housing at affordable prices, but did nothing to confront racial residential segregation based on white homeowners; self-fulfilling prophecies that property values would decline in integrated neighborhoods. William Levitt explained away his firm’s implicit support of white flight and restrictive race-based housing covenants, declaring that his firm could ‘solve a housing problem, or we can try to solve a racial problem, but we cannot combine the two.’ The technological optimism of U.S. postwar culture illustrates the historical truism that technological fixes, whether premised on utopian fantasies or upon pragmatic politics, tend to produce simplistic, reductionist ‘solutions’ to complex social problems. Even when ‘successful’, a technological fix more often displaces, rather than resolves, the source of conflict—generally by empowering technocrats and technical experts to approach political conflicts in engineers’ terms rather than in the messy public sphere of democratic debate.” Id. at 90-91. Is there a lesson here regarding the current U.S. financial crisis? Are the various bailouts, stimulus packages, supports, loans, or whatever, mere empowerment of the so-called economic experts, etc., and at the expense of true democratic debate?).
Hindman, Matthew, The Myth of Digital Democracy (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2008) ("A central claim of this book is that direct political speech on the Internet--by which I mean the posting of political views online by citizens--does not follow this egalitarian patterns. If we look at citizens' voices in terms of the readership their postings receive, political expression online is orders of magnitude more unequal than the disparities we used to in voting, volunteer work, and even political fund-raising. This book also shows that by the most commonly used social science metrics, online audience concentration equals or exceeds that found in most traditional media." Id. at 17.).
Hobsbawn, Eric, On Empire: America, War, and Global Supremacy (New York: Pantheon, 2008) ("Faced with the industrialization of Europe and the United States, Victorian Britain (then still massively industrialized, still the world's largest trader and investor), shifted its markets and capital investments to the formal and informal empire. The United States of the early twenty-first century has no such option, and in any case could not exercise it, since it is no longer a major exporter of goods and capital, and pays for the vast demand for goods which it can no longer produce itself by going into debt to the new centers of world industry. It is the only major empires that has also been a major debtor. Indeed, with the exception of the seventy years between World War I and 1988, the global bottom line of its economy has never been in credit. The capital assets, visible and invisible, accumulated since 1945 by the U.S. economy, are large and not liable to rapid erosion. Nevertheless, U.S. supremacy must be acutely vulnerable to its relative decline, and to the shift of industrial power, capital, and high technology into Asia. In a globalized world the 'soft power' of market and cultural Americanization no longer reinforces American economic superiority. America pioneered supermarkets, but in Latin America and China the pace was set by the French Carrefour chain. The American Empire, unlike the British, has consistently had to rely on its political muscle." Id. at 86-87.).
Jeffreys-Jones, Rhodri, The FBI: A History (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 2007).
Jones, Jacqueline, Saving Savannah: The City and the Civil War (New York: Knopf, 2008).
Keith, LeeAnna, The Colfax Massacre: The Untold Story of Black Power, White Terror, and the Death of Reconstruction (Oxford & New York: Oxford U. Press, 2008) (Here is the political and social road leading up to U. S. v. Cruikshank.).
Khanna, Parag, The Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order (New York: Random House, 2008) ("Whether globalization will continue is not the issue--only its extent . . . . Globalization is now part of every society's strategy for survival and progress. While protestors were swarming high-level World Trade Organization summits to bring an end to the existing rules of the game, the small producers of sugar and cotton whom they claimed to represent conducted business as usual because they had to do so in order to survive. Even the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, did not stop the falling costs of transportation, the liberalization of trade, and the explosion of communications technology that drive globalization." Id. at xxi-xxii. "Forty percent of America's trade is with East Asia, and most of the rest is with Europe. America depends on cheap Chinese goods and China's appetite for U.S. treasury bonds; China depends on European and American investment and now exports more to Europe than the United States does; Europe and America save costs and boost profits by relocating production to China. The three together have come to resemble conjoined triplets, where severing any artery hurts all sides. Only this sort of globalized integration can possibly prevent the full return of geopolitical rivalry among three such ambitious superpowers on one small planet." Id. at xxii.).
Kunhardt, Philip B., III, Perter W. Kunhardt, & Peter W. Kunhardt, Jr., Looking for Lincoln: The Making of an American Icon, Introduction by Doris Kearns Goodwin, Foreword by David Herbert Donald (New York: Knopf, 2008).
Lane, Charles, The Day Freedom Died: The Colfax Massacre, The Supreme Court, and The Betrayal of Reconstruction (New York: Henry Holt, 2008) (Here is another account of the road to U.S. v. Cruishank. It underscores America's own long history of domestic terrorism.).
Lombardo, Paul A., Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court, and Buck v. Bell (Baltimore; The Johns Hopkins U. Press, 2008).
Mayer, Jane, The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals (New York: Doubleday, 2008) (I think it is extremely imperative that law students read this book. Though several worthy lawyers are identified, the book identifies a much longer list of lawyers who have brought much dishonor to the legal profession and who, unfortunately, will not suffer any negative consequences for having done so. "In Charlottesville, Virginia, Phillip Zelikow, who returned to teaching history at the University of Virginia, tried to take stock. In time, he predicted, the Bush Administration's descent into torture would be seen as akin to Roosevelt's internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. It happened, he believed, in much the same way, for many of the same reasons. As he put it, 'Fear and anxiety were exploited by zealots and fools.'" Id. at 335. Unfortunately, many of those zealots and fools were some of the lawyers.).
McPherson, James M., Tried By War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief (New York: The Penguin Press, 2008).
Meacham, Jon, American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House (New York: Random House, 2008).
Mendell, David, Obama: From Promise to Power (New York: Amistad, 2008).
Noll, Mark A., The Civil War as a Theological Crisis (Chapel Hill: U. of North Carolina Press, 2006).
Shiller, Robert J., The New Financial Order: Risk in the 21st Century (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2003).
Shiller, Robert J., The Subprime Solution: How Today’s Global Financial Crisis Happened and What to Do about It (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2008).
Smith, Jean Edward, FDR (New York: Random House, 2007).
Stroll, Ira, Samuel Adams: A Life (New York: Free Press, 2008).
Stuart, Douglas T., Creating the National Security State: A History of the Law that Transformed America (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2008).
Sugrue, Thomas J., Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (New York: Doubleday, 2008).
Weaver, Catherine, Hypocrisy Trap: The World Bank and the Poverty of Reform (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2008) ("This book is concerned with a critical problem facing the World Bank today: its perceived hypocrisy. A label often affixed to the World Bank and other International organizations (IOs), hypocrisy refers to the gap between what an IO says and what it does, or in Nils Brunsson's definition, the contradictions between 'organizational talk, decision, and action'." Id. at xi. "This book is driven by two sets of questions. First, why does the Bank exhibit hypocrisy? What does this hypocrisy look like in the manifested behavior of the Bank? What factors, external or internal to the Bank, drive the divergence of bureaucratic talk and action? Second, why is hypocrisy so difficult to resolve, especially when it is exposed as a critical threat to legitimacy and authority? Stated differently, what is it about the nature of change, and specifically strategic reform efforts within international organizations, that enables or even requires hypocrisy?" Id. at 4.).
October 29, 2008
PLEASE VOTE ON NOVEMBER 4TH!
Bartels, Larry M., Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age (Princeton & Oxford: Sage Russell Foundation/Princeton U. Press, 2008) (“Observers of contemporary American politics may be unsurprised to hear that elected official attached more weight to the preferences of affluent and middle-class constituents than of low-income constituents. However, only the most cynical critic of American democracy could be unsurprised to learn that low-income constituents seem to have been entirely ignored in the policy-making process.” Id. at 285-286. “What do these finding suggests about the state of American democracy? Political leaders appear to be responding significantly to the policy preferences of millions of middle- and upper-income citizens….” “These disparities in representation are especially troubling because they suggest the potential for a debilitating feedback cycle linking the economic and political realms: increasing economic inequality may produce increasing inequality in political responsiveness, which in turn produces public policies that are increasingly detrimental to the interest of poor citizens, which in turn produces even greater economic inequality, and so on. If that is the case, shifts in the income distribution triggered by technological change, demographic shifts, or global economic development may in time become augmented, entrenched, and immutable.” Id. at 286.).
Blackmon, Douglas A., Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II (New York: Doubleday, 2008) ("'You have violated not only the laws of your country but that great law of honor and justice, which bids the powerful and strong not to oppress the down-trodden.'" Id. at 224.).
Ellickson, Robert C., The Household: Informal Order Around the Hearth (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2003) (“My aim in this volume is to help bare the organization of home life…. Most of the rules that govern the hearth, I argue in this volume, are not derived from law but rather are household-specific norms that evolve from the repeated interactions of household participants. In this book , I address the factors that influence how individuals select their co-participants in home life (that is, how household are constituted) and how these clusters of individuals choose to govern themselves. Id. at xi.).
Filkins, Dexter, The Forever War (New York: Knopf, 2008).
Noonan, Peggy, Patriotic Grace: What It Is and Why We Need It Now (New York: Collins, 2008) ("Our elites, our educated and successful professionals, are the ones who are supposed to dig us out and lead us. I refer specifically to the elites of journalism and politics, the elites of the Hill and Foggy Bottom and the agencies, the elites of our state capitals, the accomplished and successful of Washington and elsewhere. I have a nagging sense, and I think I have accurately observed, that after 9/11, after its high feelings and fumbles, many of these people have made a separate peace. That they're living their lives and taking their pleasures and pursuing their agendas; that they're going forward each day with the knowledge, which they hold more securely and with greater reason than non-elites, that the wheels are off the trolley and the trolley's off the tracks, and with a conviction, a certainty, that there is nothing they can do about it.... So they've turned inward. They build new pools and plan exotic vacations. But have you seen their mansions in McLean? They're like little fortresses... I suspect that history, including great historical novelists of the future, will look back and see that many of our elites simply decided to enjoy their lives while they waited for the next chapter of trouble. And that they consciously, or unconsciously, took grim comfort in this thought: I got mine... Which is what the separate peace comes down to: 'I got mine, you get yours.'" Id. at 125-126.).
Scanlon, T.M., Moral Dimensions: Permissibility, Meaning, Blame (Cambridge, Massachusetts & London, England: Belknap/Harvard U. Press, 2008).
Taylor, Nick, American-Made: The Enduring Legacy of the WPA: When FDR Put the nation to Work (New York: Bantam Books, 2008).
Vowell, Sarah. The Wordy Shipmates (New York: Riverhead Books, 2008).
Woodward, Bob, The War Within: A Secret White House History 2006-2008 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008).
Blackmon, Douglas A., Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II (New York: Doubleday, 2008) ("'You have violated not only the laws of your country but that great law of honor and justice, which bids the powerful and strong not to oppress the down-trodden.'" Id. at 224.).
Ellickson, Robert C., The Household: Informal Order Around the Hearth (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2003) (“My aim in this volume is to help bare the organization of home life…. Most of the rules that govern the hearth, I argue in this volume, are not derived from law but rather are household-specific norms that evolve from the repeated interactions of household participants. In this book , I address the factors that influence how individuals select their co-participants in home life (that is, how household are constituted) and how these clusters of individuals choose to govern themselves. Id. at xi.).
Filkins, Dexter, The Forever War (New York: Knopf, 2008).
Noonan, Peggy, Patriotic Grace: What It Is and Why We Need It Now (New York: Collins, 2008) ("Our elites, our educated and successful professionals, are the ones who are supposed to dig us out and lead us. I refer specifically to the elites of journalism and politics, the elites of the Hill and Foggy Bottom and the agencies, the elites of our state capitals, the accomplished and successful of Washington and elsewhere. I have a nagging sense, and I think I have accurately observed, that after 9/11, after its high feelings and fumbles, many of these people have made a separate peace. That they're living their lives and taking their pleasures and pursuing their agendas; that they're going forward each day with the knowledge, which they hold more securely and with greater reason than non-elites, that the wheels are off the trolley and the trolley's off the tracks, and with a conviction, a certainty, that there is nothing they can do about it.... So they've turned inward. They build new pools and plan exotic vacations. But have you seen their mansions in McLean? They're like little fortresses... I suspect that history, including great historical novelists of the future, will look back and see that many of our elites simply decided to enjoy their lives while they waited for the next chapter of trouble. And that they consciously, or unconsciously, took grim comfort in this thought: I got mine... Which is what the separate peace comes down to: 'I got mine, you get yours.'" Id. at 125-126.).
Scanlon, T.M., Moral Dimensions: Permissibility, Meaning, Blame (Cambridge, Massachusetts & London, England: Belknap/Harvard U. Press, 2008).
Taylor, Nick, American-Made: The Enduring Legacy of the WPA: When FDR Put the nation to Work (New York: Bantam Books, 2008).
Vowell, Sarah. The Wordy Shipmates (New York: Riverhead Books, 2008).
Woodward, Bob, The War Within: A Secret White House History 2006-2008 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008).
October 7, 2008
BOURGEOIS SOCIETY IS "ESSENTIALLY ANTI-DEMOCRATIC AND FUNDAMENTALLY PERVERTED."
HANNAH ARENDT, “CHRISTAINITY AND REVOLUTION,” reprinted in Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954 edited by Jerome Kohn ((New York: & London: Harcourt Brace, 1994) at 151, 152.
Archer, Robin, Why Is There No Labor Party in the United States (Princeton Studies in American Politics: Historical, International, and Comparative Perspectives) (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2007) (“The failure to establish a labor party had fundamental and wide-ranging consequences, not only for the political development of the United States, but also for its subsequent social and economic development. If a labor party had been established, it is highly likely that business interests would have had less influence over public policy, that income and wealth would have been more equally distributed, that trade unions, would have been stronger, and that a more comprehensive welfare state would have developed. This last point can be made with particular confidence. After more than two decades of comparative research, it is now widely accepted that there is an important causal link between the influence wielded by labor-based parties, and the extent, type, and timing of welfare state development. Indeed, this ‘working-class power resources’ or ‘social democratic’ model of welfare state development has become a kind of orthodoxy. Like all orthodoxies, it has its challengers, and its supporters accept the need for various revisions and modifications. But even after all due weight had been given to a range of additional factors, there is good evidence that the political influence of organized labor is a key part of the explanation for some of the most important variation in social and economic policy.” Id. at 1-2. “The American economy appears distinctive, not because of the prosperity it generated, but, rather, because of the weakness of union organizations in certain areas of the labor market. Despite the fact that the United States had one of the most industrialized economies in the world, new inclusive unions of unskilled and semi-skilled workers found it difficult to survive.” “American political institutions appear distinctive, not because of the precocious commitment to democracy that they embodied, but, rather, because of the extensive use of state repression. Representative institutions and the early expansion of manhood suffrage did give ordinary people real opportunities to exercise control over the actions of government. But judicial rulings, and police and military repression made it difficult or impossible for some groups to maintain organizations that could pursue their interests.” “American political culture appears distinctive, not because of the prevalence of liberal values, or the pervasive influence of racial hostility, but, rather, because of the strength and sway of religion.... Of course religion does play a role in the textbook account of the United States. But that account sees American political culture as a haven for religious minorities, rather than as a cauldron of religious conflicts.” Id. at 242.).
Ehrenreich, Barbara, This Land is Their Land: Reports From a Divided Nation (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2008) (This is standard Ehrenreich, social criticism at its best! "The 2004 remake of The Stepford Wives didn't have anything coherent to say about gender politics: Men are the oppressors? Women are the oppressors? Or maybe just Glenn Close? But it did play to the fantasy, more widespread than I'd realize, that if you were to rip off the face of the person sitting in the next cubicle, you'd find nothing by circuit boards underneath." "I trace the outbreak of droidlike conformity to the aftermath of 9/11, when groupthink became the official substitute for patriotism and we began to run our of surface for affixing American flags. Bill Maher lost his job for pointing our that, whatever else they were, the 9/11 terrorists weren't cowards, prompting press secretary Ari Fleischer to warn that Americans 'need to watch what they say.' Never mind that somewhere in his oeuvre, Sun Tzu [author of the Art of War], so beloved by the leadership industry, says that while it's soothing to underestimate the enemy, it's often fatal, too...." "Societies throughout history have recognized the hazards of group think and made arrangements to guard against it.... Because, while the capacity for groupthink is an endearing part of our legacy as social animals, it's also a common precondition for self-destruction. Thousands of soldiers and civilians have died because the CIA was so eager to go along with the emperor's delusion that he was actually wearing clothes." "Instead of honoring groupthink resisters, we subject them to insults and abuse.... As Fred Alford, a political scientist who studies the fate of whistle-blowers, put it: 'We need to understand in this 'land of the free and home of the brave' that most people are scared to death. About 50 percent of all whistle-blowers lose their jobs, about half of these lose their homes, and half of those people lose their families.'" "This nation was not founded by habitual groupthinkers. But it stands a fair chance of being destroyed by them." Id. at 214-215..).
Feldman, Noah, The Fall and Rise of the Islamic State (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2008).
Wolin, Richard, Democracy Inc.: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism: (Princeton: & Oxford Princeton U. Press, 2008) (A very worthwhile read! “What is typically meant by ‘totalitarianism? First and foremost, it is the attempt to realize an ideological, idealized conception of a society as a systematically ordered whole, where the ‘part’ (family, churches, education, intellectual and cultural life, economy, recreation, politics, state bureaucracy) are premeditatedly, even forcibly if necessary, coordinated to support and further the purposes of the regime. The formulation of those purposes is monopolized by the leadership. In classical totalitarian regimes it was assumed that total power demanded that the entirety of society’s institutions, practices, and beliefs had to be dictated from above and conditioned (gleichgeschaltet), that total power was achievable only through the control of everything from the top….” “Inverted totalitarianism works differently. It reflects the belief that the world can be changed to accord with a limited range of objectives, such as ensuring that its own energy needs will be met, that ‘free markets’ will be established, that military supremacy will be maintained, and the ‘friendly regimes’ will be in place in those parts of the world considered vital to its own security and economic needs. Inverted totalitarianism also trumpets the cause of democracy worldwide… ‘[D]emocracy” is understood as ‘managed democracy,’ a political form in which governments are legitimized by elections that they have learned to control, the most recent example being the presidential election in Egypt in September 2005. President Mubarak, who had served for more than two decades, easily triumphed over a dozen rivals, Intimidation, corruption, unequal access to the media, and similar tactics reportedly were widespread.” Id. at 46-47. “The United States has the highest rate of incarceration of any country in the world, a prison system with brutalizing conditions, and one that has been significantly privatized. Equally striking, a disproportionately high percentage of the imprisoned are African Americans. Assuming that most of the imprisoned African Americans have committed some crime, their incarceration would appear to contrast with the Nazi policies that herded millions of Jews, Gypsies, homosexual, political opponents, and Slavs into slave labor camps for no other reason than to satisfy irrational ideological beliefs (‘racial identity’) and obtain ‘free’ labor. Or do the high incarceration rates among blacks reflect not only old-fashioned racism but inverted totalitarianism’s fear of political dissidence?” “The significance of the African American prison population is political. What is notable about the African American population generally is that it is highly sophisticated politically and by far the one group that throughout the twentieth century kept alive a spirit of resistance and rebelliousness. In that context, criminal justice is as much a strategy of political neutralization as it is a channel of instinctive racism” Id. at 57-59. “The lesson of Hobbes and Tocqueville can be boiled down to a brief but chilling dictum: concentrated power, whether of Leviathan, a benevolent despotism, or a superpower, is impossible without the support of a complicitous citizenry that willingly signs on to the covenant, or acquiesces, or clicks the ‘mute button.’ Id. at 81. “An inverted totalitarian regime, precisely because of its inverted character, emerges, not as an abrupt regime change or dramatic rupture but as evolutionary, as evolving out of a continuing and increasingly unequal struggle between an unrealized democracy and an antidemocracy that dare not speak its name. Consequently while we recognize familiar elements of the system--popular elections, free political parties, the three branches of government, a bill or fights—if we re-cognize, invert, we see its actual operations as different from its formal structure. Its elements have antecedents but no precedents, a confluence of tendencies and pragmatic choices made with scant concern for long-term consequences.” Id. at 213.).
October 1, 2008
ITS A SCREWED UP WORLD; SO SOME READINGS FOR THOSE WHO THINK FACTS & IDEAS (STILL) MATTER
Alexander, Jeffrey C., The Civil Sphere (Oxford & New York: Oxford U. Press, 2006) (“The premise of Civil Sphere is that societies are not governed by power alone and are not fueled only by the pursuit of self-interest. Feelings for others matter, and they are structured by the boundaries of solidarity. How solidarity is structured, how far it extends, what it’s composed of—these are critical issues of every social order, and especially for orders that aim at the good life. Solidarity is possible because people are oriented not only to the here and now but to the ideal, to the transcendent, to what they hope will be the everlasting.” Id. at 3.).
Alexander, Jeffrey C., The Meaning of Social Life: A Cultural Sociology (Oxford & New York: Oxford U. Press, 2003) (“[T]he task of a cultural sociology… is to bring the unconscious cultural structures that regulate society into the light of the mind.” Id. at 3-4. “In our postmodern world, factual statements and fictional narratives are densely interwoven. The binaries of symbolic codes and true/false statements are implanted one on the other. Fantasy and reality are so hopeless intertwined that we can separate them only in a posthoc way…. One needs to develop an alternative, more cultural sociology because reality is not nearly as transparent and rational as our sociological forefathers believed.” Id. at 5-6.).
Bacevich, Andrew J., The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism (Oxford: Oxford U. Press, 2008) (“Today, no less than in 1776, a passion for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness remains at the center of America’s civic theology. The Jeffersonian trinity summarizes our common inheritance, defines our aspirations, and provides the touchstone for our influences abroad.” Yet if Americans still cherish the sentiments contained in Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, they have, over time radically revised their understanding of those ‘inalienable rights.” Id. at 15. “If one were to choose a single word to characterize that identity [i.e., “what it means to be an American in the twenty-first century”], it would have to be more. For the majority of contemporary Americans, the essence of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness centers on a relentless personal quest to acquire, to consume, to indulge, and to shed whatever constraints might interfere with those endeavors. A bumper sticker, a sardonic motto, and a charge dating from the Age of Woodstock have recast the Jeffersonian trinity in modern vernacular: ‘Whoever dies with the most toys wins’, ‘Shop till you drop’, ‘If it feels good, do it.’ Id. at 16. “Few, however, have considered how an American preoccupation with ’more’ has affected U.S. relations with the rest of the world. Yet foreign policy implications of our present-day penchant for consumption and self-indulgence are almost entirely negative. Over the past six decades, efforts to satisfy spiraling consumer demand have given birth to a condition of profound dependency. The United States may still remain the mightiest power the world has ever seen, but the fact is that Americans are no longer masters of their own fates.” Id. at 16-17. “Paradoxically, the belief that all (or even much) will be well, if only the right person assumes the reins as president and commander in chief serves to underwrite the status quo. Counting on the next president to fix whatever is broken promotes expectations of easy, no-cost cures, permitting ordinary citizens to absolve themselves of responsibility for the nation’s predicament. The same Americans who profess to despise all that Washington represents look to–depending on a partisan affiliation–a new John F. Kennedy or a new Ronald Reagan to set things right again. Rather than seeing the imperial presidency as part of the problem, they persist in the fantasy that a chief executive, given a clear mandate, will ‘change’ the way Washington works and restore the nation to good health. Yet to judge by the performance of presidents over the past half century, including both Kennedy and Reagan (whose legacies are far more mixed than their supporters will acknowledge), a citizenry that looks to the White House for deliverance is assured of disappointment.” Id. at 171-172. “Pick the group: blacks, Jews, women, Asians, Hispanics, working stiffs, gays, the handicapped–in every case, the impetus for providing equal access to the rights guaranteed by the Constitution originated among pinks, lefties, liberals, and bleeding-heart fellow travelers. When it came to ensuring that every American should get a fair shake, the contributions of modern conservatism has been essentially nil.” Id. at 26.).
Barbery, Muriel, The Elegance of the Hedgehog translated from the French by Alison Anderson (New York: Europa Editions, 2006, 2008) (This is a thoughtful novel. "As for me, I implore fate to give me the chance to see beyond myself and truly meet someone." Id. at 145.).
Bauer, Susan Wise, The Art of the Public Grovel: Sexual Sin and Public Confession in America (Princeton &Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2008).
Darwall, Stephen, The Second-Person Standpoint: Morality, Respect, and Accountability (Cambridge, Ma. & London, England: Harvard U. Press, 2006).
Friedman, Thomas L., Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution–and How It Can Renew America (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2008) (For those who actual read more than the just the headlines and the sport section of The New York Times, or a comparable alternative, most of the facts and their implications should be known to you. Then again, what percentage of us read The New York Times, etc., and read beyond the sport sections and the headlines? Thus, Friedman and his book(s) serve an important function, collection and synthesize of a lot of important materials and presenting it in a fashion that even a third grader should comprehend. “I have already mentioned one disturbing trend: Post-9/11, we as a nation have put up more walls than ever, and in the process we have disconnected ourselves emotionally, if not physically, from many of our natural allies and our natural instincts to embrace the world. In the process, America has shifted from a country that always exported its hopes (and so imported the hopes of millions of others) to one that is seen as exporting its fears.” “The other disturbing trend has been building slowly since the 1980s. It is a ‘dumb as we wanna be’ mood that has overtaken our political elite, a mood that says we can indulge in petty red state-blue state catfights for as long as we want and can postpone shoring up our health care system and our crumbling infrastructure, postpone addressing immigration reform, postpone fixing Social Security and Medicare, and postpone dealing comprehensively with our energy excesses and insecurity—indefinitely. The prevailing attitude on so many key issues in Washington today is ‘We’ll get to it when we feel like getting to it and it will never catch up to us, because we’re America.’” Id. at 8.).
Gelman, Andrew, David Park, Boris Shor, Joseph Bafumi, & Jeronomo Cortina, Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State: Why Americans Vote the Way They Do (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2008) (“It is middle- and upper-income voters who drive the political culture war, and it is in this upper stratum of society where rich states and poor states have their political differences, at least when it comes to national politics.” Id. at 20. “In poor states, rich people are very different from poor people in their political preferences. But in rich states, they are not.” “Part of the story is race. In poor southern states such as Mississippi, the rich-poor divide coincides with a racial divide, which, given the differences between the two parties on racial issues, will lead to bigger differences between the voting patterns of rich and poor. Beyond this, race is tied to economic issues and policies: given the high correlation of income and race, redistribution often looks like a racial policy.” Id. at 22. ‘The rich Northeast and West of the United States, along with much of Europe, seem to have moved toward what might be called a postindustrial politics in which supporters of liberal and conservatives parties differ more on religious than on income, and politics feels more like a culture war than a class war. Meanwhile, poorer states in the South and middle of the country look more like Mexico, with a more traditional pattern of votes of the rich and poor.” Id. at 106.).
Ghilarducci, Teresa, When I’m Sixty-Four: The Plot Against Pensions and the Plan to Save Them (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2008).
Gourevitch, Philip and Errol Morris, Standard Operating Procedure (New York: The Penguin Press, 2008) (“There is a constant temptation, when rendering an account of history, to distort reality by making too much sense of it. This temptation is greatest when the history is fresh and deals with crises that are ongoing—crises that mold our understanding of our world and ourselves. Surely, if you have come this far in this sordid tale, you must crave some relief, some release, from the relentless, claustrophobic annihilation of the dungeon: a clear and cleansing note of sanity, an interlude of avenging justice or an eruption of decency, the entry of a hero. But surely you don’t want to be deceived. There is no such solace or sanctuary in this story. Abu Ghraib was bedlam, and the MI block was its sick, racing heart. There was no excuse for it, and there was nothing to show for it either, no great score of useful intelligence, no ends to justify the means. Nobody has ever bothered to pretend otherwise. The horror of Tier 1A was entirely gratuitous, and it just kept getting worse.” Id. at 159. I have a question. What does it say about us, that is, we Americans, that Abu Ghraib is, pretty much, removed from our collective memory already?).
Grewal, David Singh, Network Power: The Social Dynamics of Globalization (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 2008) ("The idea of network power argues that we are pulled by our choices along avenues smoothed by the prior choices of others. In an age of accelerating globalization, these social dynamics are ever more central and ever more apparent. It is our very sociability that draws us out of ourselves and into conventions that regulate our access to others--access based on standards that at once free us and entrap us, binding us in ongoing histories only partly of our on creation. Or, as Marx put the matter famously and succinctly: 'Men make their own history but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.'" Id. at 140 (citation omitted). A worthwhile read. I thought of assigning it, or at least chapters 8 and 9, for my class in International Trade Law.).
Kmiec, Douglas W., Can A Catholic Support Him? Asking the Big Question About Barrack Obama with an Introduction by Martin Sheen (Woodstock & New York: Overlook press, 2008) ("Senator Obama's historic quest for the presidency hinges on the Catholic vote and whether Catholics feel themselves free to vote for him under the teaching of the Church. We should. Seldom has a non-Catholic candidate been so taken with the Catholic social justice tradition. Obama's worldview reflects Dorothy Day's Catholic spirit of hospitality and the search for common ground pursued by the late Joseph Cardinal Bernardin of Chicago..." Id. at 21. "When the senator met with me and about thirty other religious leaders, he was asked by the eminent Dr. Franklin Graham whether he believed that 'Jesus was the way, the truth, and the light.' Senator Obama paused and looked Reverend Graham in the eye. 'Jesus is my way,' said Barack. 'No,' said Reverend Graham, 'do you accept Jesus as the way?' 'You know, Reverend, the most Christ-like person, the person of most generous heart I've ever encountered in my life, was my mother. She did not have the benefit of baptism and I cannot believe in a Christianity that would exclude her fro eternity. Jesus is my way and I believe completely that I will see my mother again.'" Id. at 123.).
Levy, Bernard-Henri, Left in Dark Times: A Stand Against the New Barbarism translated from the French by Benjamin Moser (New York: Random House, 2008) (A defense of a melancholy as opposed to a lyrical) left, or in America a melancholy liberalism. "Not sadness, of course./And even less the indifference and tepidity of a person who no longer does anything because he no longer hopes for anything./But the initiative, to the contrary, the Prometheanism of one who--precisely because he has no other hopes; precisely because heaven is empty and because he knows he has nowhere else to turn; precisely because the world has nobody but him, now, to light it a bit--is going to take up that practice, which after all is rather improbable, which is the child of human abandonment, and which is called politics./That was the motto of William of Orange: 'One need not hope in order to undertake, nor succeed in order to persevere.'" Id. at 211-212.).
Lichtman, Allan, White Protestant Nation: The Rise of the American Conservative Movement (New York: The Atlantic Monthly Press, 2008) (“Recent pathbreaking research by behavioral scientists John Alford, Carolyn Funk, and John R. Hibbing has shown that individuals attracted to right-wing politics had strongly genetic and to a lesser extent socially conditioned attitudes that inclined them to creedal, not temperamental, conservatism. According to their work, the conservative disposition was ‘absolutist.’ Conservatives were ‘characterized by a relatively strong suspicion of out-groups (e.g., immigrants), a yearning for in-group unity and strong leadership…a desire for clear, unbending moral and behavior codes (strict constructionists), a fondness for swift and severe punishment for violations of this code (the death penalty), a fondness for systematization (procedural due process), and an inherently pessimistic view of human nature.’ Consistent with the thesis of this book the researcher also argue that the attitudes held by today’s conservatives were ‘remarkably similar‘ to those held by conservatives ‘ at earlier times in American history.’” Id. at 453 (citations omitted)).
Noll, Mark A., God Race in American Politics: A Short History (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2008) (“This book offers a simply stated thesis about an immensely complicated history. First, race has always been among the most influential elements in American political history, and in many periods absolutely the most influential. Second, religion has always been crucial for the workings of race in American politics. Together, race and religion make us, not only the nation’s deepest and most enduring moral problem, but also its broadest and most enduring political influence.” “Yet how race and religion have interacted to shape politics has differed dramatically over time and by community.” Id. at 1. The following passage triggered thoughts about Sarah Palin’s characterization of Barack Obama’s experience as that of a mere ‘community organizer.’ “The second effect of the civil rights movement for white evangelicals was political. With exceptions in some southern locales, the most important factor in realigning evangelical political allegiance throughout the nation was not race directly. It was rather the expansion of central governmental power that, to be sure, had been demonstrated forcibly in the enforcement of desegregation. As several sociologists ... have shown, the great political complain of modern evangelicals have been directed against what is perceived as a federally sponsored intrusion of alien moral norms into situations where local mores and local leaders once dominated.... Especially critical was the fact that evangelicals perceived the national mandates imposed by the federal government in the wake of civil rights initiatives as offensive intrusions attacking the family, gender, and sex.” Id. at 157 (italics added). So, the comment about ‘community organizer’ is not essentially about Obama’s level of experience. Rather it is a comment about community organizers and, by extension, Obama, as outsiders, outside agitators, etc., who would engage in “offensive intrusions attacking” of “local mores and local leaders.” This allows McCain-Palin to be the outsiders relative to the federal government, but insiders relative to local communities;, while insinuating that Obama-Biden are the outsiders relative to the local community and the stand in for the big, bad, Washington-based federal government. It did not work as Palin and McCain had hope because they did not anticipate the emergence of a call-in to a radio talk show that Jesus Christ was a community organizers, which undermined some of the rhetorical force of the description. That does not mean that it did not work at some more fundamental level in the minds of the base McCain’s pick of Palin was meant to energize.).
O’Connell, Mary Ellen, The Power and Purpose of International Law: Insights from the Theory and Practice of Enforcement (Oxford & New York: Oxford U. Press, 2008).
Pyle, Kenneth P., Japan Rising: The Resurgence of Japanese Power and Purpose (New York: Public Affairs, 2007).
Roberts, Russell, The Price of Everything: A Parable of Possibility and Prosperity (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2008) (This is nice little effort of explaining economics through fiction. Might be helpful in easing into law and economic course those law students with no economics background.).
Summers, John H. ed., The Politics of Truth: Selected Writings of C. Wright Mill (Oxford & New York: Oxford U. Press, 2008) (“The positive question for us is not so much whether we are losing our sense of belonging as whether we can help build something that is worth belonging to. Perhaps that has always been the major social question for men and women shaped by the big discourse. For just as freedom that has not been fought for is lightly cast off, so belonging that does not require the building and the maintaining of organizations worth belonging to is often mere a yearning for a new bondage.” “ To really belong, we have got, first to get it clear with ourselves that we do not belong and do not want to belong to an unfree world. As free men we have got to reject much of it, and to know why we are rejecting it.” “Wee have got, second, to get it clear within ourselves that we can only truly belong to organizations which we have a real part in building and maintaining, directly and openly and all of the time.” “And we have got, third, to realize that it is only in the struggle for what we really believe, as individuals and as members of economics, political and social groups, that the sense of belonging befitting a free man in an unfree world can exist. In such a world, only the comradeship of such a struggle is worth our loyalty; and only to truly human associations, which we ourselves create, do we,, as rational men, wish to belong.” From the essay‘Are We Losing Our Sense of Belong?’, id. at 87, 92-93.).
Steidle, Brian and Gretchen Steidle Wallace, The Devil Came on Horseback: Bearing Witness to the Genocide in Darfur (New York: Public Affairs, 2007) (Though others have done better, and still others will do it better still, this short book on the genocide in Darfur is a worthwhile introductory read. It would be 100 percent better were the author(s) able to narrate from a third-person perspective.).
Von Mises, Ludwig, Planning for Freedom: Let the Market System Work: A Collection of Essays and Addresses edited by Bettina Bien Greaves (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2008) (“Laissez faire does not mean: let soulless mechanical forces operate. It means; let individuals choose how they want to cooperate in the social division of labor and let them determine what the entrepreneurs should produce. Planning means: let the government alone choose and enforce its rulings by the apparatus of coercion and compulsion.” From 'Laissez Faire or Dictatorship,' id. at 15, 21-22.).
Zak, Paul J., ed., Moral Market: The Critical Role of Values in the Economy (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2008) (This collection of essays is a disappointing, yet not without merit, read. Chapter Nine, titled ‘Trustworthiness and Contract,’ will be of more immediate interest to law students and lawyers. “This chapter explores the relationship between trustworthiness and contract law, paying particular attention to how contract damages rules interact with interparty trust and trustworthiness. Its central claim is that the optimal contract damages rule provides substantial but not complete protection against braches of contract.” Id. at 173, 175. However, in reading this collection of essays, I could not help but think the role of values in lawyering, and how poor a job legal academia does in fostering the characteristics of trustworthiness, honesty and fairness in our students. Yes, there are the courses, e.g., : Legal/Professional Ethics/Responsibility, but for the most part these are courses without substance or, where there is substance, courses on how to stay just inside the lines. Most members of the legal academy have abdicated a core responsibility: to be the objective, but brutally honest, critics of the law, lawyers, and the legal profession. There is a deceit in the Uniform Commercial Code’s requirement of good faith. Section 1-203 reads as follows: “Obligation of Good Faith. Every contract or duty within this Act imposes an obligation of good faith in its performance.” Yet, when one reads the Official Comment to 1-203, it is made clear that “This section does not support an independent cause of action for failure to perform or enforce in good faith. Rather, this section means that a failure to perform or enforce, in good faith, a specific duty or obligation under the contract, constitute a breach of that contract or makes unavailable, under the particular circumstances, a remedial right or power. This distinction makes it clear that the doctrine of good faith merely direct a court towards interpreting contracts within the commercial context in which they are created, performed, and enforced, and does not create a separate duty of fairness and reasonableness which can be independently breached.” Thus, when section 1-201(19) states that “’Good Faith’ mans honesty in fact in the conduct or transaction concerned,” a fair bit or moral discretion has been given to the parties and their respective (e.g., their lawyers). Funny the things one thinks about when trying to see the broader connections and implications.).
A Film Worth Another Viewing and Further Discussion:
Lars von Trier's Dogville (2004).
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