(Caveat Lector: I am not a conservative. However, recent reflections on institutional experimentation have reminded me of some of the virtues of the philosophical movement that goes under that name.) With the publication of The Reactionary Mind , Corey Robin has taken up Phil Agre’s old point that conservatism is the defense of aristocracy and…
Most academics know some version of the critique of elite rule, administrative power, and centralized regulation by experts. Hannah Arendt called bureaucracy the “rule of No Man;” Michel Foucault described the overlap of legislative power, knowledge-production, and the apparatus of discipline and control; Iris Marion Young defended simple street activism against the demand that political…
While there is much more to be said about the risks associated with advocating “experimental disenfranchisement,” I stand by the claim that we cannot ignore the widespread temptation towards disenfranchising ignorant citizens. We must at least acknowledge that the challenge is not simply coming from nowhere: Jason Brennan reflects a widespread, even common-sensical, fear of…
In my last post , I noted that Jason Brennan’s published work strongly opposed disenfranchisement in the ordinary sense, and I claimed that Eric Schiesser had misrepresented his words in order to derive that conclusion. Today, Eric Schliesser supplied an unpublished paper in which Brennan offers an argument for experimentation with competency tests to disenfranchise…
Jason Brennan, The Ethics of Voting, 2011, page 5 : “The right to vote and the rightness of voting are different things. I do not argue that we should disenfranchise anyone. Though I think many voters are wrong to vote, I will not argue that anyone should prevent them from voting.” (Emphasis mine) Eric Schliesser, …
When I was an undergraduate, I took a class called “Truth and Beauty” with the poet Ann Lauterbach . It was basically a class on reading and writing essays, but I took it because I was a philosophy major and I thought it would be about aesthetics, i.e. about whether judgments about beauty can be…
John Keane imagined Havel’s funeral in 1999 : Prague would double in size. As he lay in state in the old Castle of the Bohemian kings above the city, a queue some miles long would spring up. Mourners would wait all day, and all night, to see his body for the last time. The day of the funeral…
Peter Levine’s post on Havel’s 1992 speech in Poland reminded me that I had planned to do some writing about Havel before he died. The New York Times titled his obituary ” A Melding of the Artist’s Politics and the Politician’s Art ,” and yet it focuses only on his writing career and offers not…
Apparently, it did! On Thursday, I produced a graph and some older papers in economics that made the case that there is a pretty clear trend in campaign spending that was completely unaffected by the 2002 BCRA. However, I’m a philosopher, not an econometrician, so I left off the most important part: comparing growth in…
So I’ve just completed grading 55 papers on Citizens United v FEC , and though I’d kind of like to reflect on it a bit, I’m also finding that grading has totally exhausted my interest in the legal questions. (But seriously: the personhood question is a red herring!) Maybe later this week I’ll post…