My partner graduates from law school this week, and I’m reminded of Arendt’s husband, Heinrich Blücher, counseling one of his Bard students to go to law school:
“I decided to study law,” one of his students later recalled, “and came to him to ask advice. ‘I think our society is headed for calamitous events,’ I said, ‘I can’t see the law remaining stable for many years. Of what use would it be to be trained in it?’ ‘ The use,’ he said, ‘ is that you will be one of the ones to remember what it was.’”
It’s not the sixties anymore, but it’s still extraordinary to me that lawyers are able to sustain a link to English fox hunting, millworker’s promises, and the chancery system. The practice of law remains, at least in part, the practice of remembering what law was, of identifying those moments when it changes, and of preserving the continuity and sense of tradition that those legislative interruptions would otherwise efface. Valuable memories indeed.
There’s a great piece in the Boston Globe on the relationship between the African slave trade and current global inequalities: Shackled to the Past.
One thing that’s always irritated me about broadly materialist historical explanations is the tendency to miss the importance of contingent historical events. Geography is not destiny, as Jared Diamond suggests, but rather it becomes a destiny when mixed with certain kinds of choices and chances. In The Longterm Effects of Africa’s Slave Trades, Harvard economist Nathan Nunn has shown that Africa’s exceptional poverty is directly linked to the slave trade:
if the slave trades had not occurred, then 72% of the average income gap between Africa and the rest of the world would not exist today, and 99% of the income gap between Africa and the rest of the underdeveloped world would not exist. In terms of economic development, Africa would not look any different from the other developing countries in the world.
(Continued)
Many academics know about the great book by Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White. However, I think it’s not common knowledge outside of academics who specialize in race that he’s been involved in two journals, Race Traitor and The New Abolitionist, both focusing on undoing white privilege by abolishing whiteness. This is all old news at this point, but I’m just now reading some of the online archives over at Race Traitor, and loving the unreconstructed marxism of it all: “Abolish the White Race - By Any Means Necessary,” “Aux Armes! Formez vos Bataillons!” and “A Real Citizen’s Review Board.” (Continued)
Looking for Heidegger’s “Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics“? Maybe the library is across campus and you’re feeling lazy? Look for it on this forum, which includes most of the trendy continental texts you could want: Agamben, Bataille, Deleuze, Derrida. Thanks to Farhang for the link.
Saturday, February 2, 2008
Discussions of inequality usually focus on charity: what can we give or do for those in need? However, as the breakdown of last year’s WTO discussions demonstrates, most poor countries would much prefer fair dealing and equal opportunities to trade rather than handouts, especially when those handouts come in the form of ‘dumped’ surpluses created through our massive agricultural subsidies. So we should welcome a new round of Doha trade talks, and charitably forgo subsidizing our own farmers at the expense of agriculture around the world. The notion that charity always involves such trade-offs is the really hard point to digest. Worse still, this kind of charity might also be the best way to pursue our own self-interest. Uh oh.
Thursday, January 31, 2008
Two recent articles, one by Thomas Pogge, the other by David Held, highlight the distinction between globalization theorists who have principled repugnance for the structure of international markets, and those who see globalization as a challenge to statist theories of regimes. It’s no surprise, then, that Pogge proceeds as Rawlsian concerned primarily with rights, and Held as a Habermasian concerned with governance. (Continued)
Saturday, December 29, 2007
The other night I was discussing Lacan with a friend who practices psychotherapy, and he suggested that Lacan’s work ‘only makes sense in the clinic.’ We agreed that when philosophers and critical theorists try to invoke Lacan, they inevitably bungle the job. Today, I discovered Andrew Robinson’s nice little takedown of Zizek, Laclau, and Mouffe’s Lacanian inflected political theory, which proves the point. (Continued)
Monday, December 10, 2007
Kwame Anthony Appiah has an article in the New York Times Magazine on experimental philosophy. (Continued)