Conference announcement

Cross posted at Political Arguments.

"Principles of Association in British History"

Presented by The Nicholson Center for British Studies at the University of Chicago.

Friday, April 8, 2005, 8:30am - 6pm
Classics Building (1010 E. 59th Street), Room 10

This conference will explore the links, contrasts, and similarities between the principles that are thought to guide human association in different areas of social life. Several renowned scholars will head the discussion, among them Mary Lyndon Shanley (Vassar), Samuel Fleischacker (UIC), and Avigail Eisenberg (British Columbia). Several U of C faculty will also take part: Mary-Anne Case (Law School), Jacob Levy (Political Science), Patricia Nordeen (College) and Thomas Weber (History).

An inter-disciplinary event, of interest to students and scholars of Political Science, Philosophy, History, English, Economics, Sociology, Religious Studies, and related fields, the conference will encourage discussions in a broad scholarly context, drawing connections between disciplines and areas of study that are often isolated from each other. For more information please contact Mara G. Marin at or Víctor M. Muñiz-Fraticelli at .

Co-sponsors: The Chicago Center for Democracy, the Committee on Social Thought, the Center for Gender Studies, and the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago.

Conference schedule after the jump...

Conference Schedule:

8:30 - 8:45: Opening Remarks

8:45 - 10:30: Panel 1. Politics and Association

• Samuel Fleischacker (U. of Illinois at Chicago) "Face-to-face Relationships in Adam Smith: Some Political Implications"


• Michael Goode (U. of Illinois at Chicago) "Peace Shall Move Mountains: An Examination of Seventeenth Century Quaker Pacifism and the 1660 Declaration"


• Thomas Weber (U. of Chicago) "Principles of Association in Oxford Colleges between c. 1880 and 1914"

10:45 - 12:30: Panel 2. Identity and Pluralism

• Avigail Eisenberg (U. of British Columbia) "Mindful Neglect: Identity Politics in Liberal and Democratic Traditions"


• Jacob Levy (U. of Chicago) "British Pluralism, Liberalism, and Medievalism"


• Jane Silloway (Northwestern) "Rewriting the Reformation"

(Lunch Break)

2:00 - 3:45: Panel 3. Marriage, Sexuality, and the Family

• Mary Anne Case (U. of Chicago Law School) "The Role of the State in Marriage and in the Business Corporation"


• Mary L. Shanley (Vassar) "'Marriage Contract and Social Contract' Revisited: Persistent Dilemmas for Liberal Theory"


• Hristomir Stanev (U. of Chicago) "Wayward Sexuality and Domestic Instability in Thomas Dekker's City Comedies"

4:00 - 5:45: Panel 4. The Sovereign and its Subjects

• Robert McJimsey (Colorado College) "Founding the Stuart Monarchy: Honor and Virtue at the Court of James I"


• Victor M. Muniz-Fraticelli (U. of Chicago) "'On Obedience and Rebellion in Shakespeare"


• Dana Rovang (U. of Chicago) "The Head of the King: Madness, Passion and Sovereignty in Late-Eighteenth Century England"

5:45 - 6:00: Closing Remarks

Un article sur la République

Cross posted at Political Arguments.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy just release an entry on Jean Bodin, the Godfather of Sovereignty. I'm working on him (and others) at the moment so I'm especially excited.

Jean Bodin (1529/30-1596) was a lawyer, economist, natural philosopher, historian, and one of the major political theorists of the sixteenth century. There are two reasons why Bodin remains both fascinating and enigmatic: on the one hand, aspects of his life remain shrouded in legend; on the other, misunderstandings about his thought and political positions have engendered contradictions and discrepancies amongst historians which have been attributed mistakenly to Bodin himself. His most significant work, The Six Books of the Commonwealth (Les Six livres de la République, 1576), represents the sum total of legal and political thought of the French Renaissance. His Method for the Easy Comprehension of History (Methodus ad facilem historiarum cognitionem, 1566) is at the pinnacle of early-modern, European humanism's Ars historica. Finally, his work Colloquium of the Seven about Secrets of the Sublime (Colloquium Heptaplomeres de rerum sublimium arcanis abditis, 1683), which was published posthumously, provides clues about his own religious views. Bodin's spiritual beliefs did not coincide with any official religion of his day, but instead resembled a form of natural religion.

Not to mention the famous De la démonomanie des sorciers (On the Demon-Mania of Witches).

And for those who can't get enough of Rawlsian trivia, it was from Bodin that Rawls got the concept of a "well-ordered society." Look it up! It's in page 4, footnote 6, of Law of Peoples. C'est drôle, ça.

Springer! Springer!

Cross posted at Political Arguments.

That great public servant, the former mayor of Cincinnati, has been signed up by Air America Radio, the liberal radio network. Is that what's meant by "changing the language"? Via Wonkette.

Hiatus

No, I have not fallen off the face of the earth. I've just been busy with serious academic stuff. I'll get back to blogging after the quarter starts.

Trouble in the rightland

Cross posted at Political Arguments.

Via Brian Leiter, there's a bitter schism in the conservative blogosphere. The fullest blow-by-blow is here and an anthology of rants, responses and retorts is there. As Leiter writes, "It's like the 1930s at City College all over again, except instead of Trotskyites and Stalinists, it's religious conservatives and other elements of the far right at each other's throats." Although, judging by the tone and content of the comments of TCP's gate-keeper, I don't blame the dissenters for leaving.

To be honest, The Conservative Philosopher was never very good, and I hope that it's successor—Right Reason—does a better job voicing an intelligent and principled conservatism.

Grand tour

Following Will Wilkinson, here's my run around the states. Granted, some of the states I've "been to" I've just driven through in a hurry (Ohio, Iowa, Oklahoma—but in Wyoming I did walk around a shrub-covered patch they called a "nature reserve"). I've actually seen the sites in some others, even if I didn't stay long (the Badlands and Mount Rushmore in South Dakota, for instance). But I'm still amazed at how many I've visited.

bold the states you've been to, underline the states you've lived in and italicize the state you're in now...

Alabama / Alaska / Arizona / Arkansas / California / Colorado / Connecticut / Delaware / Florida / Georgia / Hawaii / Idaho / Illinois / Indiana / Iowa / Kansas / Kentucky / Louisiana / Maine / Maryland / Massachusetts / Michigan / Minnesota / Mississippi / Missouri / Montana / Nebraska / Nevada / New Hampshire / New Jersey / New Mexico / New York / North Carolina / North Dakota / Ohio / Oklahoma / Oregon / Pennsylvania / Rhode Island / South Carolina / South Dakota / Tennessee / Texas / Utah / Vermont / Virginia / Washington / West Virginia / Wisconsin / Wyoming / Washington D.C /

Go HERE to have a form generate the HTML for you.

UPDATE: Since they include Washington D.C., I might as well add some other territories:

American Samoa / Northern Marianas / Guam / Puerto Rico / Virgin Islands

A Critical Theory primer

Cross posted at Political Arguments.

From the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, a new entry on Critical Theory. Here's the first paragraph.

Critical Theory has a narrow and a broad meaning in philosophy and in the history of the social sciences. "Critical Theory" in the narrow sense designates several generations of German philosophers and social theorists in the Western European Marxist tradition known as the Frankfurt School. According to these theorists, a "critical" theory may be distinguished from a "traditional" theory according to a specific practical purpose: a theory is critical to the extent that it seeks human emancipation, "to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them" (Horkheimer 1982, 244). Because such theories aim to explain and transform all the circumstances that enslave human beings, many "critical theories" in the broader sense have been developed. They have emerged in connection with the many social movements that identify varied dimensions of the domination of human beings in modern societies. In both the broad and the narrow senses, however, a critical theory provides the descriptive and normative bases for social inquiry aimed at decreasing domination and increasing freedom in all their forms.

The author of the article is James F. Bohman of Saint Louis University.

What does Phoebe look like

Mazeltov to Phoebe and Molly and Nick (oh my!) on their new design. The color scheme is a bit cMail-ish, though. Then again, not everyone's into herringbone tweed, but an off-white serge or gabardine might do the trick.

Comeback

I wouldn't go so far as to propose canonization (see below), but a Martha Stewart comeback would be a sock in the eye of a misguided, vindictive, and self-promoting justice system that had the gall to prosecute someone for lying about a crime that they were never convicted of comitting.

The most serious criminal charge against her is not perjury or insider trading but securities fraud, based on the fact that she denied to the press, personally and through her lawyers, that she had engaged in insider trading. This was done, the feds say, not for the purpose of clearing her name, but only to prop up the stock price of her own publicly traded company, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia. In other words, her crime is claiming to be innocent of a crime with which she was never charged.

Michael McMenamin. "St. Martha—Why Martha Stewart should go to heaven and the SEC should go to hell" Reason Online Oct. 2003

Welcome back Martha!

UPDATE: Orin Kerr at the Volokh Conspiracy proposes a criminological angle on Stewart's liberation.

UPDATE: More on Ms. S, from Henry Blodget at Slate.

So, Martha's back, and she's not sorry.

Her detractors are incensed that she's getting out of jail, free—that she gets to go back to being rich, powerful, and famous. They seethe that the jailbird has made no groveling apologies or pleas for forgiveness. Perhaps, once her appeal is finished, Stewart will provide them. Based on her comments so far, however—don't hold your breath.

Not so fast, chap

Cross posted at Political Arguments.

Brian Leiter points to Christopher Hitchen[s]'s article in Vanity Fair on voting fraud in the 2004 election. What strikes me as off is Leiter's title:

Even Some on the Right are Now Worried about Election Fraud in Ohio

Now, Hitchens may be a lot of things, but a right-winger he's not, at least not yet. That he finds some unsavory characters in the Bush administration to be fellow-travelers doesn't stop him from being the kind of person who'd use the term "fellow traveler" and mean it.

¶ I don't know if he does, but he sprinkles his talks with exhortations to his "comrades", which is close enough.

Know your Left from your other Left, people!

Labor history... and pretty pictures too

Cross posted at Political Arguments.

I was browsing for materials for an upcoming conference that a friend and I are organizing, and came upon the online holdings of the British Trades Union Congress. The highlight of the site is the timeline, which has an abundance of etchings, flyers and photographs dating back to 1815. Some examples after the jump.

more...

General Association (1830s) Anti-union cartoon


Copenhagen Fields Demonstration (1834) Demonstration against the sentences imposed on the Tolpuddle Martyrs


Reform demonstration in London (1867) For an extension of the franchise to working men

Æsthetic interlude

Cross posted at Political Arguments.

At Speak Up, the Word It word is "mine". The politico-theoretical meanings of the word are manifold, and some of the designs are quite intiguing. Another recent word was "public". Ditto.

Word it is your opportunity to express in as many words, and as many other graphic elements as you need, what best describes each monthly topic.

Each month we will choose a specific topic, idea or theme. For example: the first theme was "inspiration." So you would go home, or do it at work, and find words, images, artwork, whatever that best describes what inspiration means to you. It could be anything: music, cats, chocolate, museum, love, laundry. Anything that reflects what inspiration is to you. You can do whatever you want to it: vectorize it, photoshop it, scan it or build it and then send it to us.

Enjoy.

Two times a local

I was in San Francisco recently and noticed a remarkable number of Francophones around the city. It was hard to trace the direction of causality between their presence and the innumerable crêperies we encountered. But that relationship has been found to be specious, and has been superseded by a more robust theory... They were there for the wine.

You see, last week, the Court of Master Sommeliers was holding its diploma exam in the City by the Bay. Only eleven candidates rose to the rank of Master Sommelier, among them Serafín Alvarado, the head sommelier at Chicago's Charlie Trotter's. Why two times a local? Because Alvarado was raised in Villalba, Puerto Rico, which gives him both Chi-town and PR cred. I've also met him and can vouch for his kindness and generosity.

¶ Academic trivia: Trotter was a political science major at Wisconsin–Madison. No word on which was his preferred subfield, but one of the quotations that cycles on his website is by Burke—"our ancestors have turned a savage wilderness into a glorious empire".

Alvarado's remarkable achievement has made headlines in the island's main newspaper. The article itself [in Spanish] draws rather oddly on baseball analogies to explain his journey, but the accompanying timeline [also in Spanish] tells an interesting story: how does a kid from an island with not a vine in sight end up as one of the top wine specialists in the world?

Congratulations to him. ¡Felicidades!