Corey Robin's Blog, page 11

Everything melts away like butter in the sun: Hannah Arendt on McCarthyism

Hannah Arendt to Karl Jaspers, May 13, 1953: You probably know a lot [about the Second Red Scare] from the papers. Can you see from them how far the disintegration has gone and with what breathtaking speed it has occurred? And up to now hardly any resistance. Everything melts away like butter in the sun….It is essentially impossible to consider any specific parts of the society as set apart from it, for even where the Congressional investigating committees aren’t sticking in their dirty noses, an extremely effective self-censorship takes place. The editor of a newspaper or a magazine, for example, or the director of a business or the professors at a university will quietly conduct a purge….It all functions without […]

Only the Wrestlers Can Save Us?

About thirty years ago, I had a conversation with one of America’s great labor leaders, who told me that people at elite universities always misunderstand the power structure of their institutions. When you’re at a university, you imagine the place as a pyramid, with the students at the bottom, faculty in the middle, deans and provosts and such in the upper section, and the president at the top. You imagine, in other words, the power structure of the university to reside entirely on and within the campus. The real power structure of an elite university, he told me, is an upside-down pyramid. The president—the only person within the pyramid representing the campus—is at the bottom of the pyramid, the board […]

Patriarchy and the Labor Theory of Value

Apollo, speaking in Eumenides, the last part of Aeschylus’s trilogy The Oresteia: The woman you call the mother of the child is not the parent, just a nurse to the seed, the new-sown seed that grows and swells inside her. The man is the source of life—the one who mounts. She, like a stranger for a stranger, keeps the shoot alive unless the god hurts the roots. Maurice Dobb, Political Economy and Capitalism: That labour constitutes a cost in a unique sense was, of course, an assumption [of the labor theory of value]. But it was an assumption born of a particular view of what was the essence of the economic problem….The crux of the economic problem, as this theory […]

The careerist and the collaborator

In Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt identified two main struts in every regime of fear: careerists, who think about the cost of every action to their ambitions and aspirations; and collaborators, who cooperate with regimes, often under the belief that they have no other choice. These are different types: the careerist is an impresario of his own ascent; the collaborator, a depressive presiding over his descent. But both are critical to the operation of the regime. For each type, Arendt had some thoughts. For the careerist: “What for Eichmann was a job, with its daily routine, its ups and downs, was for the Jews quite literally the end of the world.” “Except for an extraordinary diligence in looking out for […]

From Max Weber to Zohran Mamdani

In his classic lecture, “Science as a Vocation,” which he delivered in Munich in November 1917, the sociologist Max Weber had this to say about the university scene in the United States: The American sees a teacher at the front of the room and thinks: This man is selling me his knowledge and methods for my father’s money, just like the woman in the grocery store sells my mother her vegetables. Fast forward a century, and it’s no longer students who think of professors as corner grocers; it’s the professors themselves. Here’s our old friend Columbia professor Brent Stockwell—last heard expressing terror in the NYT over the prospect of being reduced to the status of a community college instructor “teaching […]

No Ivory Tower: McCarthysim in the Universities, then and now

“The academy did not fight McCarthyism. It contributed to it.” That was historian Ellen Schrecker’s devastating conclusion in her classic study, No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities, which came out in 1986. Columbia University, while not the worst in Schrecker’s account, was certainly not the best. Today, as the New York Times has revealed, it’s probably the worst. At the height of the Second Red Scare, just as HUAC was beginning its first of many hearings on the threat of communism in higher ed, a group of 37 university presidents, from the nation’s most prestigious and elite institutions, including Columbia, gathered to make a statement of principles on academic freedom and the Cold War. The year was 1953. The […]

At moments like ours, the devil is in the details, the miracle is in the minutes

Last night, on Chris Hayes’s show, I learned about Sarah Inama, who teaches 6th grade in Idaho, and has a poster on her wall that says, “Everyone is welcome here.” Inama’s school administration told her to take down the poster because…not everyone agrees with that principle. No one ever complained about it or spoke against the principle. But the administration fears that…not everyone agrees with that principle. At a public school. So they told her to take it down by the end of the day. Here’s where the story gets interesting. Inama did as she was told. She took the poster down. For a few days. But then she thought about it and decided, no, I can’t live with this […]

A message to my colleagues at elite universities: You must choose, Stockwellism or Solidarity

It’s amazing to me—though it shouldn’t be—that at a moment when anyone and everyone who teaches or works or studies at an educational institution is under threat, that a professor at Columbia would formulate the threat in the New York Times in this particular way: “Ultimately, the university cannot exist without research,” said Brent R. Stockwell, the chair of biological sciences at Columbia. “It would be really, really more akin to a high school or a local community college where you’re just teaching some classes without world-class researchers bringing the frontier of knowledge into the classroom.” I don’t doubt that Stockwell sees his lifeworld in this way and that it would in fact be threatened in the way he says […]

Things you should never ask a political scientist

The screenshot below is of a passage in a chapter written by Susanne Lohmann, a top UCLA political scientist, in the Oxford Handbook of Political Economy, which is edited by Barry Weingast, an even more senior political scientist at Stanford. Two things of note. First, Lohmann claims that the Yale economist William Nordhaus coined the phrase “political business cycle” in 1975. That’s untrue. As Nordhaus himself acknowledges in his 1975 article, it was in fact the Polish Marxist economist Michał Kalecki who formulated the phrase, in 1943, in his article “Political Aspects of Full Employment.” But, second, by mistaking the authorship of the “political business cycle” idea, Lohmann erases its original meaning, or even the fact that it ever had […]

Not in our name

If you’re like me, you’re probably all-petitioned and all-statemented out. But if you are Jewish, and in academia, whether as a teacher, student, worker, staffer, or any kind of employee, I ask that you read and sign on to this statement. The statement denounces the cynical and terrible use of Jews and spurious charges of antisemitism “to harass, expel, arrest, or deport members of our campus communities” and “to concentrate power and exert ‘existential terror’ on our institutions and our communities–in part by threatening and slashing federal funding.” The statement has been signed by more than 2000 Jewish members of the academy, including noted Israeli scholar of the Holocaust Omer Bartov, the political theorists Wendy Brown and Seyla Benhabib, and […]