The Virtual Stoa

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.

I spent part of the morning tearing up old copies of the American Political Science Review, which is a curiously satisfying activity.

Rousseau scholar Robert Wokler died last month. Josh Cherniss obituarized him for the Guardian just a few days ago, and he also pointed me to robertwokler.com, from where you can download a copy of his splendid D.Phil thesis, “Rousseau on Society, Politics, Music and Language: An Historical Interpretation of His Early Writings”.

The committee appointed to investigate various complaints about his work has just published its report. Two excerpts:

“The other two apparently independent third-party sources cited in footnotes 63 and 64 are essays published in the same volume, The State of Native America, one under the name of a person named Rebecca Robbins and the other under the name of M. Annette Jaimes, the editor of the volume. Since both essays do contain statements of the type that Professor Churchill claims, that might have put an end to the matter of research misconduct regarding this allegation, except for the fact that in response to the separate allegation that he had plagiarized the Robbins essay in another later published piece, Professor Churchill said in Submission E that he had in fact ghostwritten both the Robbins and the Jaimes essays, in full…” [pp.23-24]“Judging the seriousness of the misconduct described in this report requires consideration of the damage Professor Churchill�s conduct imposes on other scholarship in the field of ethnic studies, especially Native American studies. This damage is particularly likely to be felt by those whose work concerns the mistreatment of Native Americans by European explorers, traders, settlers, and military personnel. Plenty of reliable evidence supports the conclusion that Native Americans were on more than one occasion subjected to racist genocidal campaigns by some of these actors. There is no need for any scholar to exaggerate data to support that conclusion. Those who do so inflict harm on other scholars doing meticulous work that documents aspects of the racism and genocide inflicted on Indian peoples of the Americas by the settler society, and on the enterprise of such scholarship more generally. Since this area of scholarly inquiry is often targeted by the hateful, the na�ve, and those bent on denying alternative historic truths, it is especially vulnerable to injury by association with work employing unacceptable scholarly techniques.” [p.97]

Full report here [pdf]; news report here. [via]

From the New York Times [via]:

Katha Pollitt and Steven Lukes were married yesterday at Provence, a restaurant in Manhattan. Justice Emily Jane Goodman of State Supreme Court in Manhattan officiated.Ms. Pollitt, 56, is keeping her name. She writes a magazine column, Subject to Debate, in The Nation and is the author of Virginity or Death! and Other Social and Political Issues of Our Time, a collection of her columns scheduled to be published by Random House in June. She is also the author of Antarctic Traveller (1982), a volume of poetry. She graduated from Radcliffe and received a Master of Fine Arts from Columbia. Ms. Pollitt is the daughter of the late Leanora and Basil Pollitt, who lived in Brooklyn.

Dr. Lukes, 65, is a professor of sociology at New York University and the author of Emile Durkheim: His Life and Work (1973), and The Curious Enlightenment of Professor Caritat: A Comedy of Ideas (1995). He graduated from Oxford, where he also received a master’s degree and a doctorate in sociology. Dr. Lukes is the son of the late Martha and Stanley Lukes, who lived in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, England.

The bride’s first marriage ended in divorce. The bridegroom was a widower.

On the whole I was taught by people who were taught by Steven Lukes, so, indirectly, I suppose he has something to answer for.

The other day I asked the security guard in the Bodleian what he was looking for when he dutifully inspected my laptop case for the seventeenth time. “Things you aren’t supposed to take into the Library”, he replied. “Sticky buns?”, I asked. “No”, he said, “explosives”.

“The responses from 648 students found many thought academics were ’snooty’ and had ‘objectionable facial hair’.” More of this kind of thing over here.

In one of the comments threads below, Marc Mulholland asks:

“I’m trying to swot up on Hegel a wee bit. Is there any ‘Hegel for Dummies’ text you’d recommend? I’m particularly interested about all this business regarding self-conscious subjectivities meeting with each other etc.”

Someone asked me if I had a recommendation for an introduction to Hegel’s social philosophy last year, and this is what I wrote then (edited slightly):

It’s Hegel and the Philosophy of Right in the Routledge Philosophy GuideBooks series (red covers) by Dudley Knowles, published a couple of years ago, and it’s really very good indeed: highly intelligent, genuinely introductory, and saying all the right things to help beginning students get to grips with the rather forbidding text of the Philosophy of Right.The only problem with this recommendation is that it’s very much a book by a moral philosopher, so the material in the first two chapters gets dealt with at greater length than the material in the third chapter, on Ethical Life, where most of the “social philosophy” gets discussed. So for something more specifically focused on that, there’s Charles Taylor’s Hegel and Modern Society (from 1979, I think, pub. by Cambridge), which is good, and, as I recall, fairly wide-ranging.

More advanced are Michael Hardimon’s Hegel’s Social Philosophy: The Project of Reconciliation, which is good (though I haven’t read it all the way through); Allen Wood, Hegel’s Ethical Thought, which offers a good analytical discussion of the Philosophy of Right; or Shlomo Avineri, Hegel’s Theory of the Modern State.

The best book of all on Hegel’s social theory in English (I don’t know the German literature at all), but a book that is - like Hegel - a tough read even for very advanced undergraduates is Frederick Neuhouser, Foundations of Hegel’s Social Theory: Actualizing Freedom, which is one of the best philosophical books I’ve read in the last decade.

But for an introductory text, though, Knowles’s book is exemplary…

I think that’s still what I think, but that may not be helpful for Marc, who mentions “self-conscious subjectivities meeting with each other”, which makes it sound to me as if he’s more interested in the Phenomenology of Mind than in the Philosophy of Right - and I just don’t know the P of M literature at all. So if there are any Hegelians out there, can we have comments on these recommendations, additional bibliography for readers-approaching-Hegel and, in particular, suggestions for getting started with the Phenomenology?

I’ve just posted the text of Alasdair MacIntyre’s 1968 radio broadcast, “The Strange Death of Social Democratic England” over here. It’s not especially well-known, but it’s interesting for all kinds of reasons, and, like everything he’s ever written, it’s a good read.

I’m working in the Lower Reading Room of the Bodleian Library this afternoon, and because it’s the start of term, parties of new students pass through the reading room from time to time, being shown round the library, and told how it works, and so on. (Most of them will probably never return, but it’s their loss.) I suppose that somewhere along the way they will get to affirm the famous Bodleian Declaration. And it’s an old joke, but I think it’s a good one, to think that anyone might be deterred from burning down the library by reflecting that they’ll be committing perjury as well as arson.

As a lot of you probably know, some of my favourite books are dictionaries.

Pierre Bayle’s Dictionnaire historique et critique leads the way (I own a copy of the translation which Thomas Birch organised in the 1730s, the ten-volume General Dictionary, Historical and Critical, and one of these days I’m going to have to shell out to get the folios rebound, as they aren’t especially usable at the moment); astute observers of Thursday Kitten-blogging will have spotted that I’ve got a copy of Raymond Trousson and Frédéric S. Eigeldinger’s Dictionnaire de J-J Rousseau (it’s the big yellow book on the right in the lower of the two pics, just below the black kitten’s paw); time with the OED is never wasted; and recently I’ve been using the online Oxford Dictionary of National Biography a lot, which is also great fun, extremely useful, and partially written by my friends, current colleagues and former teachers, which is nice.

But that’s really just an over-long introduction to the question I wanted to ask, which follows (eventually):

Quite often — very often, in fact — undergraduate students begin their essays by telling you (the person who’s reading / marking it) what the key conceptual terms in the question they’re considering mean, and they do this by quoting from standard dictionary definitions, and generally from the OED. Now, on the one hand, there’s something handy about doing this. It helps to give clarity and content to words that might otherwise be slippery and vague, and - with a bit of luck - it gets the argument of the essay off on a firmer footing than might otherwise be the case.

On the other hand, it may also have a number of drawbacks. By presenting the conceptual terms as givens at the start of the essay, it makes it harder for the argument of the essay to do the work of clarifying the content of the concept itself. (We might think, for example, that we’d prefer to find a well worked-out concept presented at the end of the argument of the essay, rather than at the beginning.) If we think that the key concepts that are likely to appear in an essay-title are “essentially contested” ones (and this is is especially true in political theory essays), then quite a bit turns on which particular dictionary, and therefore which particular decontestation, gets presented in the language of the definition. And, thirdly, it concedes to the lexicographers an authority that they don’t really possess — and, in the case of the OED, an authority which its contents and design-principles contradict at every turn, with its concern to track usage rather than to prescribe meaning, and to pile up definition upon definition upon attestation upon attestation, all of which tends to a happy anarchy (”confusion’s masterpiece”?) rather than to any kind of precise, concicse authority. (Hobbes would have hated the OED — or perhaps he would have said that that’s what inevitably happens when you put the dons in charge of the dictionary.)

So the question’s really this: should students be encouraged or discouraged to go down the “at the start of your essay, define your key terms” route? Or should those of us who get paid to teach them just remain agnostic on the general subject, and point out when they either do it well or badly?

(I’m especially interested in answers from anyone who does teach, has taught, or plans to teach at university-level here, though obviously opinions from anyone else are more than more than welcome.)

And a supplementary question: anyone know where students pick up this habit of starting with dictionary definitions? Is it something teachers at school tell them is good practice, is it something encouraged by other university teachers, or is it something that students do because they think it’s what we want to see? Or — more boringly, but perhaps more likely — is it some kind of combination of the three? (Or, more interestingly, something else altogether?)

Since I’m not doing much else these days apart from saying thanks to people, thanks go out also to those in the World of Blogs who worked to overturn last month’s boycott of two Israeli universities, in particular to Norm for his many informative posts on the subject, to the boys at Engage, who made a difference, and to Chris Bertram in Bristol AUT — and a special shout-out to Gauche’s Paul Anderson, delegate at Special Council, who tried to go the extra mile but whose “attempt to make a telling intervention in the debate was utter crap: I got stage-fright big-time, froze and then gibbered incoherently. Complete panic. I need help.”

(For my own views on the boycott, go here and scroll up.)

To all those who have made valuable suggestions about what to do with my royalty cheque, from step-by-step instructions as to how to open a dollar bank account in this country through to the suggestion (from several people) that I get it framed. I think I prefer the latter.

I’ve just received my first ever royalty cheque through the post. Well, it’s American, so it’s a check, rather than a cheque, but it’s still a royalty, apparently, even though America’s a Republic.

When I submitted my PhD to Harvard, a copy went off to the “ProQuest” people in Ann Arbor, Michigan, who keep copies of just about every US PhD that exists, and apparently enough people (ten of them, to be precise) have shelled out good money for copies of my MS — which I have always been happy to distribute for free to anyone who asks — that it’s generated a royalty payment for 2004 of $12.11. Riches beyond the dreams of avarice.

Well, not really. I don’t have a US bank account any more, so a cheque check for $12.11 isn’t an especially valuable thing to have. And the dollar’s comically weak right now, which is good for Christmas shopping Over There, but less good for living off US royalties from a PhD…

(I only wrote it for the money, of course.)

From yesterday’s Ha’aretz, over here.

An update written on a date where professional and personal concerns converge may require a special issue to be addressed. Today’s date traditionally marks both Shakespeare’s date of birth and death. It is also the Eve of Jewish Passover, known as the holiday of Liberation. As the old Chinese curse would has it, the Middle East will never fail to provide interesting occasions to furnish a special update.

The British AUT has voted a couple of days ago in favor of a motion to boycott two Israeli Universities, one of which is the one I am employed in. Since, I have been asked by many friends for my reaction to this, and I gather I owe you my response.

Whenever asked, over the last few years I expressed my opinion that even though the repressive policies of my country against the Palestinian population, especially in the territories occupied in 1967, is appalling, racist, sometimes horrifying in its cruelty, and often having crossed the boundaries of war crimes, academic boycott was neither morally justified nor effective. It does not distinguish between university administrations and faculty; nor am I sure that a proper mechanism was devised to distinguish between faculty members who think they can live in the ivory tower of academia in times of gross injustice and such - and there are many in Israeli academia - who risk their position for actively participating in acts of protest against of official policies of repression and cooperation with the victims of injustice.

However, while I still adhere to my opinion regarding this matter, both my government and my university hardly have a cause for complaint: they did whatever they could to provoke the responses leading to this, to my mind, erroneous move. The Ministress of Education and Culture, who will probably soon cry havoc on that boycott, is the same person who threatened to deny Daniel Barenboim a prestigious prize, and goes on demanding the firing of academics whom she blacklisted as traitors to the national cause. An academic community which didn’t shout its protest when an eminent academic and moral figure such as the late Professor Yeshayahu Leibowitz was forced to withdraw the Israel prize following an ugly wave of political bigotry; which kept quiet when academic freedom in the Occupied Territories was constantly curbed by closures and harassments; which is even now piling on my friend and colleague Ilan Pappe as responsible for the move, while having cheered and elected the person who demanded his firing as their academic leader, but never seriously questioned the “academic privilege” overriding transparency when a formerly cum laude awarded thesis was suddenly disqualified by an anonymous group of readers following a political controversy surrounding its conclusions; such an academic community should first question its own standards, before proclaiming itself the victim of an anti-Semitic campaign. No equivalent to the AUT was ever created in Israel, to become a body where not only local problems are tackled in the face of a system which made higher education in Israel approach total crumbling, but also take a stand in matters which transcend local issues, and protect the rights of those individuals within academy who face injustice perpetrated by the administrations for protesting against the abuse of justice.

As many of you know, on a personal level, I have many reasons to endorse the allegations directed against my university: I will not elaborate on matters which are still subject to a court litigation. However, while still believing the AUT measure to have been counterproductive, I would advise my colleagues to look deeper into the circumstances which have led a majority of members of the AUT council to go along with such an extreme motion. Hiding our heads in the old arguments of Jew-baiting will not answer many viable questions directed at us, which we often fail to address. Justification for boycott aside, can we really, in all honesty, brush aside the issues directed not only against Israeli policies, but against the general functioning of academia in Israel? I wish all of us will take a moment, while celebrating tonight the holiday of Liberation, to ponder on “the oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely… the law’s delay, the insolence of office, and the spurns that patient merit of th’unworthy takes,” rather than exonerate ourselves of any wrongdoing by assuming the role of the eternal victims.

For better days,

A. Oz

As someone who is strongly opposed to Israel’s behavior towards the Palestinians in the territories as well as its misconduct of its Arab citizens, I would like to make the following points:

1. While I do find some similarities between South Africa’s apartheid and Israel’s conduct in the occupied territories, I do not find the AUT boycott to be similar to that imposed on South African universities. The latter was part of a total embargo - diplomatic, economic, cultural, and educational - a concerted effort of the international community to force SA to abandon apartheid. Had there been a total international embargo on Israel to force it to abandon the occupation of the territories, I would have supported that embargo, including the boycott of Israeli Universities (all of them).

2. The University of Haifa has made many mistakes, or even worse, has acted in an unfair manner towards its Arab students. Yet, this is an institution with a dynamic community of lecturers, many of whom are opposed to both its policies against Arab students (see the recent discussion about signs in Arabic) and some (perhaps others) are opposed to Israel’s policies in the occupied territories. As an institution, the University of Haifa has not allied itself in any way with expansionist anti-Palestinian policies. Hence, the university is not a tool in the hands of the state or the expansionist forces in Israel, but rather a battleground in which different ideologies are in conflict.

3. Even if [Ilan] Pappe’s allegations (as reported) are all true, this is not enough of a reason to impose a boycott on the whole university. There could be more specific ways to challenge the university’s decision re Teddy Katz’s MA or re Pappe’s secure position at the university.

4. While I do not trust the Jerusalem Post as a source of reliable information, I haven’t seen any alternative reports of what went on at the AUT conference. If these are indeed the facts of the decision making procedure, I condemn the decision as both illegal and unjustified in light of 1, 2, and 3 above.

5. The boycott against Bar-Ilan University is fully justified since this university actively supports a college which is part of the settlement apparatus.

Ron Kuzar

One thing we can usefully do at the present time is read the thoughts of progressive Israeli academics on the AUT’s boycott. Which is why the next two posts are appearing here: the first is from Dr Ron Kuzar, from the English Department at Haifa University (one of those targetted for boycott); the second is from Professor Avraham Oz of the Department of Hebrew and Comparative Literature, also at Haifa.

[via SM, for which, many thanks.]

Here’s a new blog, Engage, created to reverse the AUT boycott of Haifa and Bar-Ilan universities.

Perhaps it’s not about the politics of pressure or of symbols, but about consciousness raising. (I heard Sue Blackwell suggest that it was, I think on the PM programme earlier this afternoon, though I might be wrong.) Well, fuck it, lots of us academics don’t need to be made much more aware than we are of the injustices of Israeli state policy. And if some of us aren’t, boycott motions as inadequate as these are almost certainly not the best way of educating the rest of us.

Alternatively, I’ve also heard it suggested (I think it was on the radio, it might have been on a webpage somewhere) that the point of this motion is just that it’s a first step. It doesn’t matter much on its own, but it may lead on to better things. If that’s right, then good. More effective politics of Palestinian solidarity and hostility to Israeli occupation, etc., is to be welcomed, even from British lecturers.

But I’ve also heard the kinds of phrases I don’t much like on the lips of the proponents of boycott — Israel as an “illegitimate state”, and so on. And if anyone is going to defend this as the politics of a first step, I want to know what the second, third, fourth and fifth steps are ahead of time, just to be sure, you know (and to mix metaphors) that they aren’t taking us onto a rather unpleasant slippery slope.

Perhaps this isn’t about bringing real pressure to bear on Israel; perhaps it’s just symbolic politics, gesture politics, feel-good politics.

Maybe it’s that, and maybe that’s important. But it also provides a propaganda victory to all the cheerleaders for the Israeli government, who will say (and who are saying, but I’m not going to link to Little Green Footballs) that this is a victory for anti-Semitism, that we’re attacking academic freedom, that it’s a crap union, anyway, that double standards are rampant in this case, and so on. Lots of the people who will say these things are nuts, of course, and we shouldn’t worry too much that they’ll be saying the kinds of things that they’re going to say. But we’re handing over exactly the kind of ammunition that they most want to get hold of.

Obviously I don’t think there’s a significant anti-Semitism issue here, and I don’t really think there’s a core academic freedom issue in play here, either (though, as I say, the idea of the political test rather sticks in the craw). But we can’t easily evade all of the double standards problems this case opens up.

Why Israel, not other Middle Eastern countries? Other repressive, expansionist, colonial regimes? If we’re opposed to imperialism, why not boycott the universities of the leading imperialist power in the world, the United States, which also happens to be the major source of international support for Israeli government policy? And why not boycott ourselves while we’re at it, for the assistance that British academics often provide to the British state in support of its activities of which the AUT might disapprove?

Often charges of double standards are levied in pretty bad faith, to displace attention from somebody’s wrongdoing onto somebody else’s. And some of these questions can be addressed, to some extent, probably. But there are too many double-standard worries flying around this particular issue to make this a politically sensible road to go down.

There are principles at stake, but there are also tactics to consider. What is this particular boycott likely to achieve?

Well, strangely enough, I think that a union not well known for its political effectiveness to call for a boycott with no means to enforce it, that does not have overwhelming support amongst either its members or its delegates to Council, which affects only a very small number of its members, which gives Israeli academics an opt-out if they just say they don’t like what their government is doing very much, and so bloody on and so bloody forth, is unlikely to achieve very much at all.

It might, just, generate another Mona Baker / Andrew Wilkie cause célèbre. (I’m not sure we need another of those.) It’s unlikely to do more. And I don’t think it’s terribly likely to get the Israeli government or electorate to change its mind about the Occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.