The Virtual Stoa

I bought Charles Taylor’s new book A Secular Age the other day. It’s a good book, but its publishers have given it a stupid dustjacket that is guaranteed to annoy (it isn’t big enough; see also here). And this reminded me that last year I bought John Rawls’s Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy, another book with a stupid dustjacket, similarly annoying, though differently stupid (crinkly clear plastic). Both are published by Harvard University Press. So what’s going on? Why is Harvard experimenting with stupid dustjackets on new books by distinguished political philosophers? Are there other books by DPP’s that they are mangling in this way? And when will they stop?

Who knew there was quite so much money to be made out of an academic career in the study of political ideas? These are extraordinary sums of money.

* Charles Taylor won the 2007 Templeton Prize (£800,000!)
* Ronald Dworkin won the 2007 Holberg Prize ($750,000!)
* Quentin Skinner won the 2006 Balzan Prize (1m Swiss francs!)
* Jürgen Habermas won the 2005 Holberg Prize (NOK 4. 5 million!)

Perhaps they’ve been there for years, but I’ve only just noticed. Anyway, the papers from PECUS: Man and Animal in Antiquity, a conference held at the Istituto Svedese (i.e., Swedish Institute) in Rome in September 2002 are all online over here. I showed up with the rest of the gang from the British School at Rome in order to provide moral support for Michael MacKinnon, who was presenting some of his zooarchaeological work (i.e., ancient animal bones), and it then turned out to be easily the most enjoyable academic conference I’ve ever been to. Though I’m sorry to see the poster presentation (with music!) on bestialities ancient and modern in the rural mezzogiorno didn’t seem to make it through to the publication stage.

From my Balliol colleague Adam Roberts’ valedictory lecture, on retiring from the Montague Burton chair in International Relations at Oxford (and reproduced in this week’s Oxford Magazine):

Montague Burton (1885-1952), the great pioneer of mass production tailoring and the benefactor of the chair, was an incurable believer in modernity. In his extensive travels, his notes on which he published privately in two volumes entitled Global Girdling, he demonstrated a love of the modern and, with only a few exceptions, a dislike of antiquity. Visiting the Middle East in the 1930s, he hated the Pyramids and the Wailing Wall. By contrast he loved the railway on which one could glide from Cairo to Tel Aviv and thence to Jerusalem - a symbol of modernity to him that now seems to us to belong to an era long gone. He praise the Jerusalem Electricity Works - and he had no higher terms of praise than this - as ‘reminiscent of Bourneville and Port Sunlight. He was a passionate believer in the League of Nations: 6,000 of the employees at his Leeds factory belonged to the Montague Burton Branch of the League of Nations Union. His progressivism itself looks charmingly antique - as does his belief that if you put all men in suits you would deliver a body blow to the class system. Indeed, he developed ingenious schemes whereby customers could buy not just the suit but all that goes with it - the shirt, the tie, even socks and shows. This is almost certainly the origin of the phrase ‘The Full Monty’. I was tempted to entitle this lecture ‘The Full Monty’, but I don’t believe in encouraging false expectations, especially as by a perverse irony, thanks to Peter Cattaneo’s memorable 1997 film, The Full Monty now means the exact opposite of what it did originally.

Andrew Glyn, Marxist economist, born 30 June 1943, died 22 December 2007 [via].

Marc’s blog’s been silent for a bit, but he’s now posting great big chunks of the article nobody wanted to publish on why Marx thought the proletariat would become socialist here, here, here and here, with more to come.

The Stoa has long been interested in universities, Fabians and beavers, so I’m interested to learn that the newspaper of the LSE student union is called The Beaver. But can anybody tell me why?

Over here. [thanks BG]

Public reason may be possibly the most boring topic in contemporary political philosophy, which takes some doing, but it is also the name of a new blog by a bunch of political philosophers which looks as if it might become quite good. They’ve got a distinguished line up of contributors, not all of whom have yet contributed, and I suppose those of us with a sense of history will worry that this looks a little bit too much like the old Left2Right blog, which looked so promising at first, but never seemed to me to do that much beyond hosting some great posts by Elizabeth Anderson on Hayek and other related topics, and rather ran into the buffers. Anyway, I’m particularly pleased to see my old-friend-whom-I-haven’t-seen-in-years Alyssa Bernstein on the roster, as she’s great fun, if not a little Rawlsian.

Thinking of Rawlsians, this thread over at Brian Leiter’s place could become great fun, and possibly quite heated. In my balanced splitting-the-difference kind of way, I’m comfortable with the thought that Rawls was both a political philosopher of the first rank and that much Rawlsian thought is very possibly deep down “a generalizing [of] one’s own local prejudices and [a] repackaging [of] them as demands of reason”. And I think I’m comfortable with that thought because it seems obvious to me that much top-notch political philosophy has always been that, but the good stuff has never been just that, and one of the reasons progress gets made in philosophy, if it does, is through thinking about the extent to which this might in fact be the case and what, if anything, we might do about it. What’s funny is that philosophers sometimes get quite so defensive about the idea that their work might just be a little bit more parochial and a little less universal than they like to think it is, and that historians too often use their discipline’s own distinctive and not always attractive prejudices as a way of avoiding thinking hard about the difficult, interesting stuff.

Thanks also to this thread from Harry B at Crooked Timber, who asked the important question, “are philosophers scruffy?”, thereby reminding me of one of my favourite bits of De Civitate Dei, at the start of Book XIX, in which Augustine discusses Varro’s demonstration that there are 288 logically possible sects of philosophers, 144 of which are scruffy (”following the habits and fashions of the Cynics”), which I suppose follows naturally from our discussion of bearded philosophers from a few days ago.

Right: back to work.

The Barry Amiel & Norman Melburn Trust, in partnership with Compass, is to appoint a one year Political Research Fellow commencing October 2007. The Fellow will conduct research of a socialist orientation on themes to be agreed with the Trust and Compass.

The Fellow will work from the Compass office in central London and will receive an award in line with ESRC research rate of £14,300.

Applications are invited from people with a relevant degree and/or research experience. The deadline for applications is 13th August 2007.

More details here.

By my count there are seven PPEists in Gordon Brown’s new Cabinet: Jacqui Smith (Hertford & Home Secretary), Yvette Cooper (Balliol & Housing), Ruth Kelly (Queen’s & Transport), Ed Miliband (Corpus Christi & Cabinet Office), James Purnell (Balliol & Culture - an unlikely combination), Ed Balls (Keble & Schools), David Miliband (CCC & FCO). That’s a lot of PPEists. And at least three of the Chancellor’s most recent team of special advisers are PPEists, too (Shriti Vadera, Dan Corry, Stewart Wood; I’m not sure where the other two studied. Perhaps Michael Jacobs and Gavin Kelly did PPE, too? Who knows?). So Gordon Brown may not like Oxford University much, but he does seem to like the PPE degree (or at least a subsection of those who take the course) very much indeed.

Below the fold is a statement from the Oxford branch of UCU, which will appear in the next issue of the Oxford Magazine.

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I don’t often (read: ever) do this at the Virtual Stoa, but it’s for a friend. So read on…

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Adam H sends me pictures of his MIT Philosophy Department mug. And it’s a fine mug.

Front:

Back:

In other mug-related news, our “Tough on Crime” bright green Labour 1997 campaign pledge mug is not long for the world, and now leaks coffee. Symbolically, it is choosing to bow out at the same time as the man who gave those words their immortality.

Is it true, as more than one person has suggested to me this evening, that Kant was only four foot eleven?

If it is true, a follow-up question: what was the average height of the German professoriat in the second half of the eighteenth century?

A bunch of my friends went off to Helsinki last week. They said they were going to attend the Joint Sessions of the European Consortium of Political Research. But were they just too embarrassed to say that that they had tickets to Eurovision 2007? It’d be nice to think there were several analytical political theorists in the audience. Perhaps one of them was holding the much-filmed “Where Is Andorra?” placard?

In my world, the letters “TMS” can refer either to Test Match Special or to the Theory of Moral Sentiments. So far the different bits of that world have stayed sufficiently distinct from one another that I don’t think I’ve ever made myself horribly confused, but I’m sure the day will come when I muddle them up (and I’m also confident that the day has become closer now that I’ve become self-conscious about the possibility of that confusion).

Le Figaro (and a cracking photo here), Le Monde, Associated Press.

(Haven’t read any myself, though some of my friends say he’s pretty good.)

UPDATE [7.3.2007]: Steven Poole in the Guardian.

Can people stop dying, please, at least for a bit? The last six months or so of my life have been punctuated far more than I’d like them to be by the news of deaths. My grandmother Eileen died in August at 95, which is a pretty good innings by any stretch of the imagination; the others have all gone long before their time, whether scholars in my field like Robert Wokler (cancer) or Iris Marion Young (cancer), colleagues and friends here in Oxford like Ewen Green (MS-related) or Peter Derow (heart attack), the poor 15-year old chap who rode his bike into the river a few hundred yards from where I live, or, most recently, one of my undergraduate political philosophy students here at Balliol, Andrew Mason, whom I’d barely got to know, but who was clearly a great guy. It’s too many. And I’d like it to stop.

The curious thing about this piece in yesterday’s tehgraun is how few of the pleasures these intellectuals list — country music, Elvis Presley, Trinny and pro-wrestling, baseball, and so on — ought to induce guilt in any way, shape or form. (The odd inclusion is James Wood’s nomination of car magazines, but that stands out because it’s hard to see how they could be pleasurable.) Still, I don’t suppose that this crowd was going confess an interest in horse-porn or dogging to a random journalist.

Thinking of dogging, as I suppose we all do from time to time, is this still something that the Great British Public pursues at night in motorway laybys, or was it very much an early-millennium fad? And if it has faded from the scene, did fashions just change, or did the police develop some effective anti-dogging strategies when they weren’t investigating cash-for-peerages? Or something else?

(The rest of you won’t be interested.)

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And, just to branch out into relevant adjacent territory, here are three key remarks about wigs from the philosophers who matter. Two of these have appeared on the Virtual Stoa before, but if you minded about that sort of thing you’d have stopped reading decades ago.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, on his “reform”:

“The moment my resolution was confirmed, I wrote a note to M. de Francueil, communicating to him my intentions, thanking him and Madam Dupin for all goodness, and offering them my services in the way of my new profession. Francueil did not understand my note, and, thinking I was still in the delirium of fever, hastened to my apartment; but he found me so determined, that all he could say to me was without the least effect. He went to Madam Dupin, and told her and everybody he met, that I was become insane. I let him say what he pleased, and pursued the plan I had conceived. I began the change in my dress; I quitted laced cloaths and white stockings; I put on a round wig, laid aside my sword, and sold my watch; saying to myself, with inexpressible pleasure: “Thank Heaven! I shall no longer want to know the hour!”

Immanuel Kant explains why wig-makers, but not barbers, should have the vote:

“He who does a piece of work can sell it to someone else, just as if it were his own property. But guaranteeing one’s labour is not the same as selling a commodity. The domestic servant, the shop assistant, the labourer, or even the barber, are merely labourers, not artists (artifices, in the wider sense) or members of the state, and are thus unqualified to be citizens. And although the man to whom I give my firewood to chop and the tailor to whom I give material to make into clothes both appear to have a similar relationship towards me, the former differs from the latter in the same way as the barber from the wig-maker (to whom I may in fact have given the requisite hair) or the labourer from the artist or tradesman, who does a piece of work which belongs to him until he is paid for it. For the latter, in pursuing his trade, exchanges his property with someone else, while the former allows someone else to make use of him. But I do admit that it is somewhat difficult to define the qualifications which entitle anyone to claim the status of being his own master.”

Karl Marx:

“I may negate powdered wigs, but that still leaves me with unpowdered wigs.”

Oh, this is very good:

Should old Aquinas be forgot
And never brought to mind?
Should old Aquinas be forgot
In these days of Wittgenstein?

Can quiddity, haececity,
Analogies divine,
Resolve the paradoxes of
Willard van Orman Quine?

[via, via]

I’m very pleased to learn of the existence of the Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists™, from the same people who bring us the annual Ig Nobel Prizes.