Month: October 2014

The Problem with Liberalism Today

Over at The National Interest, my Crooked Timber co-blogger Henry Farrell has a dissection of a certain strand of contemporary liberalism—embodied in the critiques of Edward Snowden and Glenn Greenwald offered by Sean Wilentz, George Packer, and Michael Kinsley—that is well worth reading. Some highlights: Yet their problems go deeper than sloppy practice and shoddy logic. For one thing, Wilentz, Packer and Kinsley are all veterans of the Clinton-era battles between liberals and the Left. Wilentz in particular poses as a latter-day Arthur Schlesinger, shuttling backwards and forwards between his academic duties and his political fealties. As for Packer, he has championed a muscular liberalism, pugnacious in the fight against moral purists at home and political Islam abroad. And Kinsley, a […]

Dayenu in Reverse: The Passover Canon of Arendt’s Critics

One of the more recent criticisms I’ve read of Eichmann in Jerusalem—in Bettina Stangneth’s and Deborah Lipstadt’s books—is that far from seeing, or seeing through, Eichmann, Arendt was taken in by his performance on the witness stand. Eichamnn the liar, Eichmann the con man, got the better of Arendt the dupe. For the sake of his defense, the argument goes, Eichmann pretended to be a certain type of Nazi—not a Jew hater but a dutiful if luckless soldier, who wound up, almost by happenstance, shipping millions of Jews to their death. Arendt heard this defense, and though she never accepted the notion that Eichmann was an obedient soldier (she thought he was a great deal worse than that), she did […]

On Arendt and Jewish Collaboration with the Nazis

Here’s another interesting factoid that I just learned from Deborah Lipstadt’s The Eichmann Trial. For all the abuse heaped on Arendt for what she wrote in Eichmann in Jerusalem about the issue of Jewish collaboration with the Nazis—leading some to claim that she put the Jews and the Nazis on the same level, a charge that Lipstadt unfortunately indulges*—there’s an irony to the trial that few have noticed. In the words of Lipstadt: The law under which Eichmann had been tried, the 1950 Nazis and Their Collaborators Law, was instituted in response to grassroots pressure from survivors, not to punish Nazis, but to punish Jews. The Knesset did not adopt the law in anticipation of the arrival of Nazi war criminals […]

What’s the point of having a political theory of American insanity when American insanity so seamlessly theorizes itself?

From Jezebel (h/t Anthony Galluzzo): A proposed new law in Arizona would give employers the power to request that women being prescribed birth control pills provide proof that they’re using it for non-sexual reasons. And because Arizona’s an at-will employment state, that means that bosses critical of their female employees’ sex lives could fire them as a result. If we could harness the power of the crappy ideas coming out of the state of Arizona, we could probably power a rocket ship to the moon, where there are no Mexicans or fertile wombs and everyone can be free to be as mean a cranky asshole as they want at all times! Arizona Heaven! Yesterday, a Senate Judiciary Committee endorsed Republican […]

Sheldon Wolin’s the reason I began drinking coffee

Sheldon Wolin‘s the reason I began drinking coffee. I was a freshman at Princeton. It was the fall of 1985. I signed up to take a course called “Modern Political Theory.” It was scheduled for Mondays and Wednesdays at 9 am. I had no idea what I was doing. I stumbled into class, and there was a man with white hair and a trim white beard, lecturing on Machiavelli. I was transfixed. There was just one problem: I was—still am—most definitely not a morning person. Even though the lectures were riveting, I had to fight my tendency to fall asleep. Even worse, I had to fight my tendency to sleep in. So I started drinking coffee. I’d show up for […]

David Brooks, Edmund Burke, and Me

David Brooks: Burke is famous for his belief in gradual change….I’m sticking to my Burkean roots. Change should be steady, constant and slow. Society has structural problems, but they have to be reformed by working with existing materials, not sweeping them away in a vain hope for instant transformation. Edmund Burke on the East India Company: It is fixed beyond all power of reformation…this body, being totally perverted from the purposes of its institution, is utterly incorrigible; and because they are incorrigible, both in conduct and constitution, power ought to be taken out of their hands; just on the same principles on which have been made all the just changes and revolutions of government that have taken place since the […]

Adolph Eichmann: Funny Man?

One of the criticisms often made of Hannah Arendt’s account of the Eichmann trial was that she found Eichmann to be so unintentionally funny. Throughout Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt can barely contain her laughter at the inadvertent comedy of the man. Many at the time found this distasteful; since then, her ironic appreciation of Eichmann’s buffoonery has been a sign, to Arendt’s critics, of her haughty indifference to the suffering he inflicted. Yet, in reading about the trial, it’s quite clear that Arendt wasn’t the only one who found Eichmann funny. So did the courtroom, which periodically broke out into laughter at the accidental hilarity wafting down from the witness stand. As Deborah Lipstadt reports: This was not the only time […]

Ah, Princeton: Where the 1950s never died

One day I really have to write an essay on my absolutely all-time favorite magazine: Princeton Alumni Weekly. In this week’s edition, a letter writer named Houghton Hutcheson—of course—from Bellaire, Texas—of course—writes a grumbling missive about an earlier feature on Jennifer Weiner. Weiner is the fiction writer who’s been on a campaign to broaden our definition of literature to include books often relegated to the chick lit shelf. After the usual harrumphing about how there’s no such thing as gender in Literature, Hutcheson coughs up this hairball: Mirroring her [Weiner’s] own life experiences, many of her featured characters are “plus-size women.” Let’s be honest; do you know any men who would find this formula appealing? I dunno. Many of Homer’s […]

Congratulations, John Adams: You Got CUNY’d

On Twitter tonight, The New Yorker music critic Alex Ross, whose book The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century I discussed on Memorial Day, was tweeting about the protests that greeted the Met premiere of John Adams’s opera The Death of Klinghoffer. Here are just some of Ross’ tweets.   Giuliani concedes that John Adams is “one of our great American composers” but declares that his opera “supports terrorism.” #Klinghoffer — Alex Ross (@alexrossmusic) October 20, 2014 Ben Brafman says, “This may not be Auschwitz, it’s Lincoln Center,” but suggests that another Holocaust could happen. #Klinghoffer — Alex Ross (@alexrossmusic) October 20, 2014 Melinda Katz, Queens Borough President, says that she is “personally offended by the play.” #Klinghoffer — […]

When I draw comparisons between libertarians and slaveholders…

When I put libertarians and slaveholders in the same orbit, libertarians go ape-shit. But when they do it— We treat John C. Calhoun as a precursor of modern public choice theory. Calhoun anticipates the doctrine of public choice contractarianism as developed by Buchanan and Tullock and expands this approach in original directions. We consider Calhoun’s theory of why democracy fails to preserve liberty and Calhoun’s suggested constitutional reform, rule by unanimity. We also draw out parallels between Calhoun and Hayek with regard to theories of social change and Hayek’s analysis of “why the worst get to the top.” The paper concludes with some remarks on problems in Calhoun’s theory. —it’s all good. Of course, it helps if you can resolve […]

George Lakoff and Me

In the current issue of The Nation, in an article called “What Liberals Don’t Understand About Freedom,” George Lakoff writes: FDR, in giving his Four Freedoms speech of 1941, suggested that Democrats’ mission was to expand human freedom. Yet today Democrats have ceded the very concepts of freedom and liberty to Republicans. It’s time to take freedom back as the central Democratic issue. … For conservatives, individual responsibility is central: democracy provides the “liberty” to pursue your own interests, without any help from others (which would make you dependent and weak) and without any responsibility for others. This is the exact opposite of the progressive view…democracy is about citizens caring about one another and working through their government to provide […]

Of Collaborators and Careerists

The announcement of the death of David Greenglass has got me thinking a lot about collaborators. Though much of twentieth-century history could not be written without some discussion of collaborators—from Vichy to Stalinism to the Dirty Wars to McCarthyism—the topic hardly gets a mention in the great texts of political theory. Eichmann in Jerusalem being the sole exception. In my first book on fear, I tried to open a preliminary discussion of the topic. That discussion drew from a wide range of twentieth-century experiences, in Europe, Latin America, the US, and elsewhere, as well as from my reading of Eichmann and Montesquieu’s Persian Letters. Reading over what I wrote, I’d say I failed. I was so intent on breaking apart […]

Princeton Hillel Ponders Barring Princeton Professor from Speaking at Event on His Own Campus

A PR flack for the Israeli government at Princeton’s Center for Jewish life is thinking of barring a Jewish professor of history at Princeton from speaking at Princeton’s Hillel. Because that professor has the wrong position on Israel. Inside Higher Ed reports: As one of the student organizers, Kyle Dhillon, the president of the Princeton Committee on Palestine, explained it, his group and two others – Tigers for Israel and J Street U Princeton – got together at the end of the summer to organize a panel on the Gaza conflict. They planned to invite Princeton professors – including Max Weiss, an associate professor of history and Near Eastern Studies – and they decided to seek co-sponsorship from the university’s […]

David Greenglass, 1922-2014

David Greenglass has died. Actually, he died over the summer. He was 92. In the Book of Daniel, there’s an Aramaic phrase for an informer: Akhal Kurtza. Its literal translation is “to eat the flesh of someone else.” By his own admission, David Greenglass made up testimony that sent his sister, Ethel Rosenberg, to the electric chair. David Greenglass was worse than an informer. Update (9:30 pm) In 2001, Greenglass was interviewed by Bob Simon for 60 Minutes. Here’s a brief account of part of that interview. Why did think Julius and Ethel maintain their silence to the end? Greenglass has an answer: “One word: stupidity. My sister was not very smart about what she did. She should’ve confessed.” But […]

There’s got to be a better way to prep for class

There’s got to be a better way to prep for class. First I read the assigned text, taking notes while I’m reading either in the back of the book or, when space runs out, in a little pocket notebook that I carry. Then I read through those notes, highlighting specific passages or commentary that might be potentially relevant for lecture and discussion. Then I re-type some (hopefully more coherent) version of those highlighted notes in a Word file, organizing them in some kind of thematic fashion or outline. (Sometimes, I divide that step up into two steps: first, I retype all the highlighted notes in a Word file; then I organize those notes into outline form in a new Word […]

Von Mises to Milton Friedman: You’re all a bunch of socialists

In 1947, Milton Friedman and George Stigler traveled together to Europe for the inaugural meeting of the Mont Pèlerin Society. In 1992, Friedman reminisced about that trip in a memorial to Stigler, who had died the previous year. Here’s the conclusion: One incident above all impressed George and me. In the course of a spirited discussion of policies about the distribution of income among a group that included Hayek, Machlup, Knight, Robbins, and Jewkes among others, Ludwig von Mises suddenly rose to his feet, remarked, “You’re all a bunch of socialists,” and stomped out of the room. H/t Suresh Naidu

Violence Against Women and the Politics of Fear

Last week, Gloria Steinem had this to say: If you added up all the women who have been murdered by their husbands or boyfriends since 9/11, and then you add up all the Americans who were killed by 9/11 or in Afghanistan and Iraq, more women were killed by their husbands or boyfriends. PolitiFact then confirmed the truth of her claim. How can this be, you ask? How can something that is so dangerous to the population (at least a majority) not galvanize political attention and public policy in the same way that something less dangerous does? That was a question that inspired my first book Fear: The History of a Political Idea. Here’s what I wrote there: Political fear […]

Cynthia Ozick and the Palestinians

I’ve talked on this blog many a time of my love of Cynthia Ozick‘s writing. On Twitter tonight, a bunch of us are talking about her again, particularly her confrontation with Norman Mailer at Town Hall in 1971. But Cynthia Ozick has also said some terrible things about the Palestinians. Like this from the Wall Street Journal in 2003: By replacing history with fantasy, the Palestinians have invented a society unlike any other, where hatred trumps bread. They have reared children unlike any other children, removed from ordinary norms and behaviors. And they have been assisted in these deviations by Arab rulers who for half a century have purposefully and pitilessly caged and stigmatized them as refugees, down to the […]