Corey Robin

Note to All Writers

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 11:40:51 -0400

Note to all writers/academics/journalists: Next time you set out to write about violence, terror, genocide, or some other bit of social nastiness, please check out Yehuda Bauer’s essay “Is the Holocaust explicable?” in Rethinking the Holocaust first. It provides some useful rules of the road, and will you save you—and us—from a lot of embarrassing and over-heated prose.

Why Liberals Shouldn't Be Celebrating Tax Day

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 21:05:00 -0400

Or at least one of the several reasons they shouldn’t be supporting Tax Day. As I argued a few years back in the London Review of Books:

Liberals often have a difficult time making sense of these [anti-tax] movements – don’t taxes support good things? – because they don’t see how little the American state directly provides to its citizens, relative to their economic circumstances. Since the early 1970s, with a few brief exceptions, workers’ wages have stagnated. What has the state offered in response? Public transport is virtually non-existent. Even with Obama’s reforms, the state does not provide healthcare or insurance to most people. Outside wealthy communities, state schools often fail to deliver a real education. In such circumstances, is it any wonder ordinary citizens want their taxes cut? That at least is change they can believe in.

And here Democrats like Obama and his defenders, who bemoan the stranglehold of the Tea Party on American politics, have only themselves to blame.

Nietzsche and the Marginals, Take 2

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 16:15:32 -0400

Menger, Principles of Economics:

Utility is the capacity of a thing to serve for the satisfaction of human needs…Our needs, at any rate in part, at least as concerns their origins, depend upon our wills or on our habits. (119)

Nietzsche, The Gay Science:

Need.—Need is considered the cause why something came to be; but in truth it is often merely an effect of what has come to be. (§205, p. 207)

Perry Anderson Learns Polemic the Hard Way

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 09:18:48 -0400

Reviewing his bitter and famous exchange with E.P. Thompson, Perry Anderson writes:

What had astonished me were the corners he cut in representing the arguments he wanted to refute, which I couldn’t match with anything he stood for as a historian. This was a generic mistake on my part. I didn’t understand the rules of polemic. This is a literary form whose history has yet to be written….Polemic is a discourse of conflict, whose effect depends on a delicate balance between the requirements of truth and the enticements of anger, the duty to argue and the zest to inflame. Its rhetoric allows, even enforces, a certain figurative license. Like epitaphs in Johnson’s adage, it is not under oath.

Edmund Burke on Austerity

Sun, 10 Mar 2013 23:40:40 -0400

From Letter to a Noble Lord (pp. 485-486):

I ever held a scanty and penurious justice to partake of the nature of a wrong. I held it to be, in its consequences, the worst economy in the world. In saving money, I soon can count up all the good I do; but when, by a cold penury, I blast the abilities of a nation, and stunt the growth of its active energies, the ill I may do is beyond all calculation….

…

Mere parsimony is not economy. It is separable in theory from it; and in fact it may, or it may not, be a part of economy, according to circumstances. Expense, and great expense, may be an essential part in true economy. If parsimony were to be considered as one of the kinds of that virtue, there is however another and a higher economy. Economy is a distributive virtue, and consists not in saving, but in selection. Parsimony requires no providence, no sagacity, no powers of combination, no comparison, no judgment. Mere instinct, and that not an instinct of the noblest kind, may produce this false economy in perfection. The other economy has larger views.

One good liberal deserves another...

Thu, 07 Mar 2013 23:12:11 -0500

Liberal imperialism in the 19th century:

For the same reason, we may leave out of consideration those backward states of society in which the race itself may be considered as in its nonage. The early difficulties in the way of spontaneous progress are so great, that there is seldom any choice of means for overcoming them…Liberty, as a principle, has no application to any state of things anterior to the time when mankind have become capable of being improved by free and equal discussion. Until then, there is nothing for them but implicit obedience to an Akbar or a Charlemagne.

Imperious liberalism in the 21st:

Perhaps in trying to evaluate the astonishing rule of Hugo Chávez the question to ask is this: whether the people he leaves behind regressed into a kind of childhood faith and dependency under his spell and what the price of such regression might be. Perhaps this is the state brought forth by those rulers we call caudillos—willful chieftans who rule by force of personality—of which Hugo Chávez Frías may have been the greatest of all. “There is no chavismo without Chavez,” he proclaimed repeatedly. Who now will dry Venezuela’s tears?

Race Matters

Fri, 01 Mar 2013 01:08:39 -0500

Last fall, Gary Orfield and his colleagues at UCLA documented how school segregation has been increasing dramatically among blacks and Latinos. Just the other day, Jamelle Bouie reported that the wealth gap between blacks and whites is one of the largest we’ve ever seen. And now comes Thomas Edsall to tell us that racism — understood as individual prejudice — is on the decline. All of which supports a critical point Freddie DeBoer made yesterday about the limits of racial discourse and racial politics in this country.

The structural economic conditions of our country have created a white-black wealth gap. Every American could be in possession of pure hearts and pure thoughts and that wouldn’t change. This is why I have so little use for the ritualistic purity displays like those we witness for the past few days. They aren’t just unable to contribute to positive change; they suck all of the energy and the attention into those issues which are least material and thus least useful.

Hayek on Spielberg: the real unacknowledged legislators of the world

Wed, 13 Feb 2013 09:04:29 -0500

Friedrich von Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty:

However important the independent owner of property may be for the economic order of a free society, his importance is perhaps even greater in the fields of thought and opinion, of tastes and beliefs. (p. 193)

MSN Entertainment:

Steven Spielberg is sending free copies of his historical drama “Lincoln” to schools across the country so students can learn about President Abraham Lincoln.

DVDs will be distributed to every public and private middle and high school in the country as part of an educational outreach campaign called “Stand Tall: Live Like Lincoln,” which urges youngsters to follow in the 16th president’s example. A statement from Spielberg reads, “As more and more people began to see the film, we received letters from teachers asking if it could be available in their classrooms. We realized that the educational value that ‘Lincoln’ could have was not only for the adult audiences — who have studied his life in history books — but for the young students in the classroom as well.”

Nietzsche's Esotericism

Sat, 26 Jan 2013 22:37:00 -0500

Nietzsche, Nachlass:

Our true essence must remain concealed, just like the Jesuits who exercised dictatorship in conditions of general anarchy. (Cited in Don Dombowsky, Nietzsche’s Machiavellian Politics, 5)

The Entrepreneur as Medieval Lord

Fri, 25 Jan 2013 21:04:16 -0500

Joseph Schumpeter, The Theory of Economic Development:

There is the dream and the will to found a private kingdom, usually, though not necessarily, also a dynasty. The modern world really does not know any such position, but what may be attained by industrial and commercial success is still the nearest approach to medieval lordship possible to modern man. (93)

The Ding an sich of Economics

Wed, 23 Jan 2013 16:07:00 -0500

Stanley Jevons on the Ding an sich that is the human heart: “Far be it from me to say that we ever shall have the means of measuring directly the feelings of the human heart. A unit of pleasure or of pain is difficult even to conceive….We can no more know or measure gravity in its own nature than we can measure a feeling.” No surprise then that, for Jevons, “every mind is thus inscrutable to every other mind.” Every mind, after all, is in some measure inscrutable to itself. Of such sexy stuff is the theory of marginal utility made.

Everything you need to know about Christopher Hitchens in one graf

Sun, 20 Jan 2013 20:21:44 -0500

Richard Seymour, author of the new book Unhitched, writing in the Guardian:

^“To be able,” wrote the late Christopher Hitchens, “to bray that ‘as a liberal, I say bomb the shit out of them,’ is to have achieved that eye-catching, versatile marketability that is so beloved of editors and talk-show hosts. As a life-long socialist, I say don’t let’s bomb the shit out of them. See what I mean? It lacks the sex appeal, somehow. Predictable as hell.” That was in 1985.

Economics is easy, so why so many bad economists?

Sat, 19 Jan 2013 19:46:10 -0500

“The study of economics does not seem to require any specialised gifts of an unusually high order. Is it not, intellectually regarded, a very easy subject compared with the higher branches of philosophy and pure science? Yet good, or even competent, economists are the rarest of birds. An easy subject, at which very few excel! The paradox finds its explanation, perhaps, in that the master-economist must possess a rare combination of gifts. He must reach a high standard in several different directions and must combine talents not often found together. He must be mathematician, historian, statesman, philosopher—in some degree. He must understand symbols and speak in words. He must contemplate the particular in terms of the general, and touch abstract and concrete in the same flight of thought. He must study the present in the light of the past for the purposes of the future. No part of man’s nature or his institutions must lie entirely outside his regard. He must be purposeful and disinterested in a simultaneous mood; as aloof and incorruptible as an artist, yet sometimes as near the earth as a politician.”

—John Maynard Keynes, “Alfred Marshall,” in Essays in Biography (New York: Norton, 1963), pp. 140-141.

I don't want the state to pardon Aaron Swartz

Tue, 15 Jan 2013 08:34:39 -0500

I completely understand why some would want the state to pardon Aaron Swartz. But something about that move — and the wording of this petition — doesn’t sit right. It grants the state too much: not just the power to pardon Swartz but, effectively, the power to pardon itself. As my friend Michael Pollak pointed out to me, “Under our laws, Swartz was still innocent. Therein lies the crime of what the state did to him. This would remove it.” I want the death of Swartz, and the prosecution that helped produce it, to hang around the neck of the state for a very long time. If the state wishes to remove it, let it start by curbing its prosecutorial zeal, of which Swartz was sadly only one victim.

When Salman Met Saul

Sun, 06 Jan 2013 00:17:00 -0500

So this exchange really did happen, once upon a time (i.e., 1986).

Salman Rushdie:

There are very few works by contemporary American writers that treat the subject which, for the rest of us, is the paramount subject about America: how America behaves in the rest of the world. I would like to ask both the Americans and the non-Americans why it is that American writers have, so to speak, abdicated this task?

Saul Bellow:

We don’t have any tasks. We just have inspirations. Tasks are for people who work in offices.

H/t Pankaj Mishra

When Steve Jobs Met Nietzsche von Hayek

Mon, 24 Dec 2012 08:42:50 -0500

Alex Gourevitch dug this one up for my Nietzsche von Hayek files. It’s from Apple’s “Think Different”/”Crazy Ones” ad campaign:

Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.

Nietzsche and Neoliberalism: When commercial transactions become acts of great noblesse

Tue, 18 Dec 2012 21:46:57 -0500

At the heart of my next book project is the argument that neoliberalism is the reinvention of aristocratic politics for a capitalist age, that the political theory of the free market is an effort to create what Nietzsche called “great politics” in the realm of the economy.

Nietzsche, of course, had nothing but contempt for capitalism (and economics more generally) — in part because he saw it as destroying whatever possibility there might be for aristocratic great politics.

Yet re-reading The Gay Science on the train this morning, I found this passage, which somehow I missed on my first go-around:

Trade and nobility.—Buying and selling have become common, like the art of reading and writing. Everybody has practiced it even if he is no tradesman, and gets more practice everyday — just as formerly, when men were more savage, everybody was a hunter and practiced that art day after day. Then hunting was common; but eventually it became a privilege of the powerful and noble; it lost its everyday character and its commonness because it ceased to be necessary; it became a matter of moods and luxury. The same might happen some day to buying and selling.

One can imagine social conditions in which there is no buying and selling and in which this art gradually ceases to be necessary. Perhaps some individuals who are less subject to the laws of the general condition will then permit themselves to buy and sell as a luxury of sentiment. At that point trade would acquire nobility, and the nobility might then enjoy trading as much as they have hitherto enjoyed war and politics… (§ 31, pp. 102-103)

It’s just a moment’s notice, and it doesn’t begin to describe our contemporary reality (where more and more, rather than fewer, realms of social life are becoming subject to the economy). Even so, it provides a glimpse of a possibility that Nietzsche seems to have dimly envisioned — when commercial transactions become acts of great noblesse — and that gets at the heart of the political theory of the free market.

A Boy Can Dream

Sun, 09 Dec 2012 22:45:00 -0500

I have a dream that one day this internet will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all trolls are created equal.” I have a dream that one day on some forgotten website the trollish sons of trolls and the trollish sons of other trolls will be able to sit down together at a table of trollhood. I have a dream that one day even that forgotten website for trolls will be transformed into an oasis of forgotten trolls. I have a dream that my one child will one day live in a world where she will not be subjected to the trollery of trolls but will instead subject the trolls to their trollery. I have a dream today.

My Political Credo

Sun, 09 Dec 2012 14:53:12 -0500

I’ve never been much of an Emerson fan — on the two occasions that I taught him, we didn’t really click — but this line from his essay “History” comes pretty close to perfectly expressing my approach to politics:

All public facts are to be individualized, all private facts are to be generalized.

Nietzsche in the New York Times

Sat, 08 Dec 2012 12:19:00 -0500

Despite the sad news it delivers, an obituary in the New York Times can often be an occasion for hilarity. To wit:

Prof. Nietzsche was one of the most prominent of modern German philosophers, and he is considered the apostle of extreme modern rationalism and one of the founders of the socialistic school. (New York Times, 8/26/1900, p. 7)

H/t Brian Leiter