Monthly Archive for April, 2011

Peter Stone to Speak at 2011 Social Sciences Conference

Published on April 30, 2011 in Headline and Newsletter. 0 Comments

Peter Stone is currently a Faculty Fellow at the Center for Ethics and Public Affairs at Tulane University. Before that, he taught Political Science at Stanford University for seven years. In the fall of 2011, he will be taking up a position as Ussher Lecturer in Political Science at Trinity College Dublin. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Rochester in 2000. He works in contemporary political theory, with particular interest in theories of justice, democratic theory, rational choice theory, and the philosophy of social science. He has published articles in such journals as the Journal of Political Philosophy, the Journal of Theoretical Politics, Political Theory, Rationality and Society, and Social Theory and Practice. His book The Luck of the Draw: On Lotteries and Decision-Making, was published this year by Oxford University Press.

Social Sciences Journal, Volume 5, Number 11 now available

Published on April 29, 2011 in Journal and Newsletter. 0 Comments

socialsciences_front1The eleventh issue of Volume 5 of The International Journal of Interdisciplinary Social Sciences has been published.

Volume 5, Number 11 contains:

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The Visitor

Published on April 28, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

From Alan Wolfe, the Book

Max Weber in America? The idea seems almost preposterous. We often think of Weber as the quintessential European thinker: abstract, worldly, brooding, and difficult. The America of his period of greatest productivity, the first two decades of the twentieth century, comes down to us as isolationist, anti-intellectual, bombastic, and about to embark on flapperdom. How could one have any influence on the other?

But as Lawrence Scaff effectively shows in his new book, Weber cannot be understood without an appreciation of his experiences in this country, and America’s special path to modernity is difficult to grasp without a substantial dip into Weber’s extensive body of writing. Like Antonín Dvo?ák, who incorporated American spirituals and folk tunes into his symphonic and chamber compositions, Weber’s fascination with all aspects of American culture belies any notion that the new world and the old were incapable of meeting on equal terms.

Weber and his wife Marianne arrived in the United States in August, 1904 for a three-month stay. The reason for their visit was the Congress of Arts and Sciences, an offshoot of the World’s Fair in St. Louis. Once capable of generating massive fascination, World’s Fairs have lost their appeal. (The 2012 Expo will take place in Yeosu, South Korea and will be devoted to issues of coastal management.) In Weber’s day, by contrast, not only did the events in St. Louis inspire a famous musical comedy, they brought together an all-star list of American and European intellectuals to debate whether there exists a methodological unity linking the natural and social sciences. John Dewey and William James did not show up in St. Louis, which was too bad, because not only Weber but also such extraordinary German scholars as Werner Sombart and Ernst Troeltsch did.

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Science Sheds Light on Population History and Living Standards

Published on April 27, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

From Omar Ali, 3 Quarks Daily

In a sense, all modern historiography includes the attempt to find objective facts rather than relying on folklore and opinion. To varying extents, a scientific mindset is part of the intellectual tookit of all modern people and while no person can be entirely rational and no judgment is as perfectly evidence-based as the idealized models would imply, there is a trend towards greater objectivity and a willingness (at least in principle) to change one’s mind if new facts come to light. There is an assumption among liberals (I self-identify as liberal and spend most of my time with others who do the same) that modern liberals are more “science-minded” than conservatives (the so-called “fact-based community”). Whether this is really true has been challenged but I will assume that liberals DO prefer a scientific approach to history and will touch on two examples where science brings objective information to bear upon history.  One is genetics, which has transformed our knowledge of the origins and relationships of different human populations. The other is height and what average height can tell us about different populations.

First, to genetics; a few days ago, blogger Razib Khan wrote a blog post about the population genetics of India and what those genetics can tell us about the origins and composition of the people of India. If you have not read that post, you should definitely do so; it is a superb and user friendly (and not overly detailed) example of how recent advances in genetics are radically transforming our view of human populations and their recent and distant history.  In some cases, the facts being uncovered are not entirely new or surprising, but in all cases, they provide a level of scientific certainty to debates that previously lacked such certitude.  Read another one of his posts (and other related articles) for examples of more detailed and finer scale analysis of the genetic data. These posts focus on India, but similar information (and in some cases, much more detailed information) is available about other populations and all of it is worth reading.

I am not going to spend more time on genetics, since I think Razib and his friends cover this area better than I ever could and I will be happy if you go to those links and start exploring on your own. But genetics is not the only way in which scientific knowledge can impact our view of history.

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The Two-Tiered Justice System: An Illustration

Published on April 20, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

From Glenn Greenwald, Salon.com

Of all the topics on which I’ve focused, I’ve likely written most about America’s two-tiered justice system — the way in which political and financial elites now enjoy virtually full-scale legal immunity for even the most egregious lawbreaking, while ordinary Americans, especially the poor and racial and ethnic minorities, are subjected to exactly the opposite treatment: the world’s largest prison state and most merciless justice system. That full-scale destruction of the rule of law is also the topic of my forthcoming book. But The New York Times this morning has a long article so perfectly illustrating what I mean by “two-tiered justice system” — and the way in which it obliterates the core covenant of the American Founding: equality before the law — that it’s impossible for me not to highlight it.

The article’s headline tells most of the story: “In Financial Crisis, No Prosecutions of Top Figures.” It asks: “why, in the aftermath of a financial mess that generated hundreds of billions in losses, have no high-profile participants in the disaster been prosecuted?” And it recounts that not only have no high-level culprits been indicted (or even subjected to meaningful criminal investigations), but few have suffered any financial repercussions in the form of civil enforcements or other lawsuits. The evidence of rampant criminality that led to the 2008 financial crisis is overwhelming, but perhaps the clearest and most compelling such evidence comes from long-time Wall-Street-servant Alan Greenspan; even he was forced to acknowledge that much of the precipitating conduct was “certainly illegal and clearly criminal” and that “a lot of that stuff was just plain fraud.”

Despite that clarity and abundance of the evidence proving pervasive criminality, it’s entirely unsurprising that there have been no real criminal investigations or prosecutions. That’s because the overarching “principle” of our justice system is that criminal prosecutions are only for ordinary rabble, not for those who are most politically and financially empowered. We have thus created precisely the two-tiered justice system against which the Founders most stridently warned and which contemporary legal scholars all agree is the hallmark of a lawless political culture. Lest there be any doubt about that claim, just consider the following facts and events:

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The Information Essay

Published on April 18, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

From n+1

Just as this is an age of great wealth inequality, it is also an age of great inequality of knowledge or, more exactly, factual information. For all its democratic potential, the fact-filled internet has only heightened the pre-Google asymmetry between those, on one side, loyal to Baconian methods of patient, inductive gathering of facts?—?the ways of the card catalog and the archive, of the analysis and evaluation of empirical data?—?and those, on the other side, who didn’t need to read Foucault or the Frankfurt School to nurture a suspicion that positivist orders of knowledge mask a hierarchy of power in which they are meant to occupy the lowest rungs.

It’s the Republican Party’s deliberate disinformation strategy, more than any properties inherent in so-called information technologies, that has created these two parallel Americas. In one of them, weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq, climate change is a patent hoax, and the Laffer curve is the most basic truth of economics. As for the inhabitants of the other universe?—?“the reality-based community” of old-fashioned skeptics and empiricists, frequenters of public and university libraries, readers of the New York Times and of Elizabeth Kolbert in the New Yorker, avid perusers of Harper’s Index and WikiLeaks?—?we possess ever vaster quantities of mostly accurate facts, and not much sense of what to do with them. Data data everywhere, and not a thought to think! Outside of a hedge fund or the CIA, there aren’t too many places where knowledge is power. Much of the time, intellectually and politically, knowledge is powerlessness.

The division between empiricists and fantasists is clearest in politics. But it’s beginning to enter literature. Dickens in Hard Times made fun of Gradgrind?—?“Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these girls and boys nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life”?—?and there is a way in which, until recently, information and what used to be called “imaginative literature” were usually understood to be addressing themselves to the right and left hemispheres of the brain instead of the political spectrum. Lately, however, there has also come to be a literary expression or embodiment of liberal empiricism, an emergent literary Gradgrindism that deserves analysis.

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