Corey Robin's Blog, page 56

When We Betray Our Students

A couple of months ago, at the beginning of the semester, I posted on Facebook a plea to my fellow faculty that they not post complaints there about their students. I said that I considered such public commentary a kind of betrayal, even when the students weren’t named.

Yesterday, Gothamist reported that an undercover cop had been spying for months, if not years, on a group of Muslim students at Brooklyn College, leading to the arrest of two women last spring for allegedly planning to build a bomb.

Set aside the problem of entrapment with these schemes. Set aside Mayor de Blasio’s promise to stop this kind of surveillance of Muslims in New York. Let’s focus instead on the leadership of CUNY that either knowingly allows this kind of spying on our students to continue or does little to nothing to stop it.

Tolerating, actively or passively, undercover officers of the state on our campus, allowing them to spy on our students, to report back to the state what our students say, as they meet with their friends to share in their studies, swap their stories, figure out their faith, shoot the shit, or whatever it is that students do when they believe themselves to be among friends, is a betrayal. Of the worst sort.

I posted my comment on Facebook because I believe we, as faculty, have a trust to uphold with our students. That when they come to our campus, they will be allowed to try on new clothes, nudge themselves away from who they were toward who they will become, make a stab at independence, that they will be allowed to make mistakes—in full knowledge that their fumbles and foibles are safe with us.

As my friend Moustafa Bayoumi, who’s also a professor at Brookyn College, writes in his book This Muslim American Life, which is just out with NYU Press:

Americans of all types are expected to acquiesce to intrusions into their private lives, supposedly for greater security, while any objection is interpreted as “having something to hide.” But having something to hide—or having the right to hold an inner life and to be free to determine how much of yourself you show to others—is not only a guarantee of our democracy but also a necessary part of being human. Losing that right is troubling and dangerous for the same reason that Elaine Scarry identifies as the dark innovation of the Patriot Act. “The Patriot Act inverts the constitutional requirement that people’s lives be private and the work of government officials be public; it instead crafts a set of conditions in which our inner lives become transparent and the workings of the government become opaque.”

The same applies, even more so, when we are talking about students.

When we allow officers of the state onto our campus to monitor and surveil our students as they make their way into the world, to troll for trouble (even creating the circumstances for that trouble), we betray that trust. We simply cannot build a campus that is true to its mission if we allow this kind of practice to continue.

There’s a petition being circulated calling on CUNY Chancellor James Milliken to stop this practice. I urge you to sign it. And to share this post, and the petition, widely.

John Kasich, Meet Ronald Reagan

Republican Governor and GOP presidential candidate John Kasich:

I’ve about had it with these people. We got one candidate that says we ought to abolish Medicaid and Medicare. You ever heard of anything so crazy as that? Telling our people in this country who are seniors, who are about to be seniors that we’re going to abolish Medicaid and Medicare?

Former Republican Governor, GOP presidential candidate, and US President Ronald Reagan:

One of the traditional methods of imposing statism or socialism on a people has been by way of medicine….Write those letters [opposing Medicare] now; call your friends and tell them to write them….And if you don’t do this and if I don’t do it, one of these days you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children, what it once was like in America when men were free.

 

Sheldon Wolin, 1922-2015

Sheldon Wolin, the political theorist, has died.

In the last five years or so, we’ve seen the exit of an entire generation of scholars: David Montgomery, Carl Schorske, Peter Gay, Marshall Berman. This was the generation that taught me, sometimes literally. But Wolin’s death hits me hardest. I took two courses with him as an undergraduate: Modern Political Theory (Machiavelli to Smith) and Radical Political Thought (Paine to Foucault). The first in my freshman year, the second in my sophomore year. I would have taken more, but Wolin retired the following year. Those courses set me on my way. I would never have become a political theorist were it not for him.

There will be many texts and appreciations in the days and months to come. Wolin taught generations of students, many of whom are now leaders of the field, and their students are now teaching other students. At CUNY, we’re always swimming in his seas: Robyn Marasco, at Hunter, was the student of Wendy Brown and Nick Xenos, both of whom were students of Wolin. John Wallach, also at Hunter, and Uday Mehta, at the Graduate Center, were both students of Wolin. There’s probably no more powerful a demonstration of Wolin’s vision of political theory as a tradition of continuity and innovation, as a transmission across time, than these students of students of students.

While many of these texts and appreciations will focus, and rightly so, on the political side of Wolin—as mentor and participant and commentator on the student movements of the 1960s, particularly at Berkeley; as leader of the divestment movement at Princeton in the 1970s and 1980s; as searching public critic of technocratic liberalism, market conservatism, and American imperialism, in the pages of the New York Review of Books and his wondrous though short-lived journal democracy; as a theorist of radical or “fugitive” democracy—I want to focus here on the way he did political theory. Less the substance (though I’ll come to that at the end) than the style.

The first thing to note about Wolin’s approach is how literary it was. It’s hard to see this in some of his texts, but it was on full display in his lectures. I don’t know if Wolin was at all trained in New Criticism—I seem to recall him citing I.A. Richards’s Practical Criticism somewhere—but he read like a New Critic. The opening paragraph or page of every text was the site of an extended exploration and explication, as if the key to all of the Second Discourse was to be found in that arresting image of the statue of Glaucus which Rousseau mentions at the outset.

Chekhov has a line somewhere about how if you put a gun on the wall in the first act, you damn well better make sure it goes off in the second. Wolin paid attention to those guns, especially when they didn’t go off. He was endlessly curious about a theorist’s metaphors, asides, slips, and allusions, and mined them to great effect. Long before we were reading de Man and Derrida, he was reading like them. But without all the fuss. He just did it.

One moment I remember in particular. In his lecture on The Prince, Wolin stopped and stayed with the dedicatory letter to Lorenzo de’ Medici that precedes the text. These two paragraphs in particular:

I hope it will not be thought presumptuous for someone of humble and lowly status to dare to discuss the behavior of rulers and to make recommendations regarding policy. Just as those who paint landscapes set up their easels down in the valley in order to portray the nature of the mountains and the peaks, and climb up into the mountains in order to draw the valleys, similarly in order to properly understand the behavior of the lower classes one needs to be a ruler, and in order to properly understand the behavior of rulers one needs to be a member of the lower classes.

I therefore beg your Magnificence to accept this little gift in the spirit in which it is sent….And if your Magnificence, high up at the summit as you are, should occasionally glance down into these deep valleys, you will see I have to put up with the unrelenting malevolence of undeserved ill fortune.

Most readers, if they pay attention at all, focus on that last sentence, where Machiavelli lands, making the passage little more than an extended case of special pleading: cast out of office (Machiavelli had been an adviser to the Florentine republic) after the Medicis came to power in 1512, arrested and tortured, and then exiled to his country estate, Machiavelli wanted nothing so much as to be of use to the men who had ruined him.

Wolin read things differently. First, he noticed the subtle dig at Lorenzo and rulers more generally: standing on the summit, they could only see one side of the art of rule. To truly understand the art of rule, however, one had to see it from both perspectives: that of the ruler and that of the ruled. And who could see both perspectives? The theorist, like the landscape artist who painted from the vantage of the valley and the peaks. Seemingly a humble plea from a humble servant, the dedicatory letter is in fact a brazen elevation of the letter writer, the theorist, over the ruler, the prince. By attending to the metaphor, Wolin found a deeper statement about the relationship between the political theorist and the political actor.

But then Wolin stepped back even further, asking us to think about that notion of perspective embedded in Machiavelli’s metaphor. Most theorists ask us to look upon the political world sub specie aeternitatis. To properly see things as they are, they ascend or exit to the view from nowhere. Plato leaves the cave, Rousseau (an imperfect example here, I know) is locked outside the gates of Geneva, Rawls removes himself to the original position, to a place where there are no positions. Machiavelli, said Wolin, takes a different tack: the political art is to see things from multiple positions and places, to adopt the vantage of one, then the other, to see (and draw) the whole as a composite of perspectives. Perspectivalism is the fancy word for this, and it’s usually traced to Nietzsche (who, perhaps not coincidentally, in his notebooks described Machiavelli’s teaching as “perfection in politics.”) But Wolin identified it with Machiavelli—and as a result, incidentally, came up with a far more interesting reading of the incommensurability of views in Machiavelli than that which we find in Isaiah Berlin’s famous essay on Machiavelli.

I remember Wolin doing something similar when we read The Wealth of Nations. He asked what it meant for a political text to open with men making pins in a factory, what it means to make these the leading figures in a political drama. He even might have compared it to the opening of The Prince, asking us to focus on the literary characters that people the one text versus the other. I can’t remember what conclusions he drew from that question, but it was a kind of reading that I was not used to. And that many theorists and philosophers, focused as they are on the formal logic and propositions of an argument, don’t really do.

The second thing to note about Wolin as a reader is his historicism. Historicism today, at least in political theory, is primarily identified with Quentin Skinner and his contextualist method. Political theorists, it’s said, are not in a dialogue across the ages. They are instead local, situated political actors, engaging in a series of moves and counter-moves that are structured by the rules of the game they happen to be playing. That game is the political discourse of the day. Its players are the lesser and greater polemicists and pamphleteers of an argument. To understand what Machiavelli, Hobbes, or Locke is doing when he writes a text, you have to read the hundreds if not thousands of local interlocutors he is responding to. Pace the claims of many readers, the Second Treatise is not a response to Hobbes, who was dead by the time Locke started to write it. Political theory, like politics itself, is a situated enterprise. To understand it historically, we have to disaggregate it into a series of local, often disconnected enterprises. That’s what it means to recover the pastness of the past.

(Though Skinner in his more recent work has suggested that Hobbes may be directly responding to Machiavelli. That very notion—that a theorist could be reaching across a century, not to mention a continent, in writing a text—is a great no-no among Skinner’s followers, which is why some of them seem so scandalized by it, as I discovered at a seminar last year. Hell hath no fury like an acolyte scorned.)

Wolin was called by a similar historical impulse as Skinner. He too sought to recover the discrete languages of the past, the situatedness of theory and action. But Wolin’s historicism was different. Without resorting to those thousands of interlocutors, he managed to contrive a much more radical and bracing sense of the past than most contextualists (it should be said that Skinner himself actually manages to do this with great aplomb), in part because he remains loyal to a notion of movement across time, of a dialogue across the ages.

There are so many instances of this sensibility at work in Politics and Vision, Wolin’s greatest book, but one in particular stands out for me. It comes early on, in the third chapter, where he’s discussing the move of political theory from ancient Greece to ancient Rome.

Already, you’re invited into a historicist frame. Wolin was a big one for the specificity of theory’s location in time and space. What effect did it have that political theory arises in the context of the polis, the city-state; moves to an empire radiating out of Rome; resides (and lives a covert life) for hundreds of years in the Church; and suddenly revives in the form of the modern nation-state? At each step, Wolin was attentive to how the location in time and space alters the vocabulary, the questions, the categories of theoretical inquiry.

Wolin opens his discussion of the move from the Greek city-state to the Roman empire with a quote from Tacitus, where Tiberius contrasts the austere virtue of the early days of Rome with the decadence of the imperium, and ascribes the shift to the fact that originally “we are all members of one city. Not even afterwards had we the same temptations, while our dominion was confined to Italy.”

For Wolin, the passage is filled with intimation: the suspicion that our understanding of politics is inescapably tied to the experience of the ancient city-state, with its “civic intimacy” and “nervous intensity” and “compelling urgency,” such that any alteration of that “spatial dimension” becomes a sign of political dilution and loss.

The essential questions raised by these political thinkers were: how far could the boundaries of political space be extended, how much dilution by numbers could the notion of citizen-participant withstand, how minor need be the “public” aspect of decisions before the political association ceased to be political?

Setting aside what might be seen as an implicit normative claim underlying these questions—this relentlessly local and immediatist understanding of the “political” would dog Wolin’s work on radical democracy for years, though I don’t think we need to accept that understanding in order to see the power of the historicism at play here—what he was pointing to was how significant an effect it was to be confronted, physically, concretely, by such a vast tract of land as that which was contained by Rome, and to attempt to conduct politics on that new terrain.

For Wolin, the vastness of the imperium helped make sense of the extended and elaborated codexes of law, administration, and jurisprudence that entered the theoretical canon with Rome, but even more interesting, the newfound attention to symbols and personae.

In large entities like…the Roman Empire, the methods of generating loyalties and a sense of personal identification were necessarily different from those associated with the Greek idea of citizenship. Where loyalty had earlier come from a sense of common involvement, it was now to be centered in a common reverence for power personified. The person of the ruler served as the terminus of loyalties, the common center linking the scattered parts of the empire. This was accomplished by transforming monarchy into a cult of and surrounding it with an elaborate system of signs, symbols, and worship. These developments suggest an existing need to bring authority and subject closer by suffusing the relationship with a religious warmth. In this connection, the use of symbolism was particularly important, because it showed how valuable symbols can be in bridging vast distances. They serve to evoke the presence of authority despite the physical reality being far removed….

…The “visual politics” of an earlier age, when men could see and feel the forms of public action and make meaningful comparisons with their own experience, was giving way to “abstract politics,” politics from a distance…

This shift from the visually immediate to the distant and the abstract—one can see it in Machiavelli’s claim that in politics, no one knows who you are but how you appear; in Hobbes’s notion of the Leviathan—would be a recurring theme in Wolin’s analysis, even a lament. (As Bonnie Honig pointed out to me in an email, Wolin was the master of the in-between: he was at his best when he understood how political beings are located in these in-between modes. He was especially attuned to this in-between-ness when the in-between was temporal. When it became spatial, he tended to be more of a catastrophist, seeing the move from one space to another, or one mode of space to another, as absolute, the portent or picture of a complete loss.)

But if we can step outside the lamentation, we can see in it a stunning reminder of the situatedness and historical specificity of theory. Not in the formal polemical arguments of the Romans or the Greeks (though there’s plenty of that in Wolin, too). But in these deeper idioms and unspoken grammars, in the almost unnoticed backgrounds of space and time (his discussion of the effect of introducing the category of an afterlife, of eternal time, on Christian thought is equally resonant), in the guns that don’t go off in the second act.

And, again, the only reason Wolin can notice them is that he’s willing to do what the contextualists say you can’t do: reach across time, force thinkers who never knew each other (maybe never even heard of each other) into a conversation. That is the way we can get at the specificity of their language, through comparison and confrontation. That is the way we can understand the ruptures of historical experience. With the exception of Nietzsche and Hegel, maybe Lukács (those passages on the effect of the changing mode of warfare in The Historical Novel are pretty incredible), I can’t think of a single theorist who understood this, who did this, so well.

The last thing to note about Wolin’s approach is how interested he was in translation. Not the translation from French to German or ancient Greek to English, but the translation of one language of politics into another. While Wolin is often, and justly, associated with the claim that we have lost the language of politics—again, in the style of a lament—what was always more interesting about his approach was how attuned he was to ways in which a political vocabulary or idiom gets translated in a new setting.

We’ve already seen a little of this in his account of the transposition of political concepts from the city-state of Greece to the imperium of Rome, but the most exciting moment, for me, occurs when Wolin turns to the rise of Christianity and its impact on political thought. Where most commentators, says Wolin, treat the political dimensions and elements of Christianity solely in those moments when the religion is forced to confront the polity, Wolin takes a different tack:

The significance of Christian thought for the Western political tradition lies not so much in what it had to say about the political order, but primarily in what it had to say about the religious order. The attempt of Christians to understand their own group life provided a new and sorely needed source of ideas for Western political thought.

What follows is an attempt to reconstruct the politicalness of the early and later Christians’ ideas of membership in the Church, of schism and heresy, of priesthood and papacy, and so on. It’s as if the entirety of the ancient political canon had been sublimated into a religious idiom and context; the task of reading was to recover the modes of that sublimation and to see what remained from the ancients and what was lost.

I can’t say how generative these notions of transposition and sublimation have been for me. In my first book on fear, I looked at how later, more psychological approaches to fear were sublimations of earlier, more political understandings of fear. More recently, I’ve been fascinated by the idea that economics is a sublimation of an earlier political vocabulary of action, glory, and greatness, how even someone as mathematically inclined as Ricardo may, in his idea of the margin, be transposing and transforming Machiavelli’s ideas of the founding and time. Where most theorists identify the political moments of these writings in the passages where an economist considers the state, I take my cues from Wolin and look for them in those moments where an economist deals with questions of exchange, risk, interest, profit, and so forth.

Sublimation is also the word Wolin uses when he reaches the nineteenth century and looks at the rise of “organization” as the central element of contemporary political life. In the last chapter of the book (in the first edition), Wolin takes us from Saint-Simon to Lenin to Elton Mayo and Peter Drucker, and sees in each of these writers and moments of theorizing, an attempt to escape from politics. Again in a declensionist mode, Wolin sets his sights on the ascendance of economistic modes of thinking. His clear target is the modern corporation and the managerialist discourse of human relations. These are political languages, practices and institutions; they are the result of centuries of displacement from ancient Greece to the modern nation-state. Yet they evade their politicalness or fail to understand it.

What’s interesting to me about this last chapter is how much it may have missed in its conflation of the economic with the organization and the corporation. Of course, it makes sense that it did. Wolin wrote Politics and Vision in 1960, on the heels of a decade that had seen the publication of such titles as The Hidden Persuaders, The Organization Man, White Collar, and the like. It was the age of the corporation and middle management; naturally, that was Wolin’s endpoint, which shouldn’t in any way diminish just how surprising and innovative it was for him to write a history of the Western political canon that ends with Peter Drucker!

But what it missed, I think, was the very insight that powered his earlier chapters on the Christians: not that the political vocabulary was lost or eclipsed, but that it got transposed into a new key. For that, to my mind, is how we should be reading thinkers like Schumpeter, Hayek, Coase, Mises, Friedman, even Jevons and Ricardo. Little in the way Wolin dealt with economistic modes of thinking could prepare us for the ferocity of the political assault that economics was about to visit upon us.  But that ill-preparedness was baked into the lament for the lost language of politics.

Politics, even the Grosse Politik of Nietzsche’s imaginings—which lurks, in a quieter, more quotidian vein, in the background of Wolin’s writing—never really goes away. It just assumes, as Wolin was the first to teach us, a new key. Always in-between.

Ecce Douchebag: Richard Cohen on Tipping

Richard Cohen has a…I’m not sure what to call it. Formally, it’s an oped in the Washington Post.* In defense of tipping. In reality, it’s more like an overheated entry from his diary. In which Cohen confesses that his feelings of noblesse oblige toward waiters are really a cover for his fantasies of discipline and punish. Where there’s no safe word. Except, maybe, “check please.”

The context for Cohen’s musings is that Danny Meyer, the restauranteur, has decided to eliminate tipping at his restaurants. This has prompted a spate of articles, praising Meyer and criticizing the anti-democratic elements of tipping. Enter Cohen.

I love tipping.

The practice originated with European aristocracy…

And he’s off. Now remember, in DC parlance, Cohen is considered a liberal.

There are four moments worth noting in the piece. First, this:

Like almost everyone else in America, I was once a waiter — and a busboy, and a short-order cook and a dishwasher — and I never felt I was groveling for tips. I did feel, as a friend told me before I went off on a wait job, “Remember, you work for the customer, not the restaurant.” If tipping doesn’t quite shift loyalties so neatly, it does put loyalties into play.

There’s the democratic nod to Cohen having once been a waiter. From Lincoln to Cohen, how many relationships of deference in the United States have been justified by reference to one’s own humble past, by invoking this escalator of social mobility, in which one begins at the bottom, serving a superior, and arrives at the top, being served by an inferior?

There’s also that invocation of loyalty. Though the capitalist workplace is often described by its defenders and critics as a glorious (or gory) space of untrammeled self-interest and personal advance, for many of its denizens, it is a domain of loyalty (and subordination). For Cohen, that loyalty is never to one’s co-workers; it is either to the boss or to the customer.

Finally, there’s that claim that when he was a waiter, Cohen “never felt I was groveling for tips.” No, I’m sure he did not. (Just as I’m sure he doesn’t feel as if he’s groveling for a different kind of tip when he sucks up to power now: once a courtier, always a courtier.) There’s a reason Sartre, in Being and Nothingness, chose the waiter as one of his paradigmatic examples of “bad faith.” Wrote Sartre: “I am a waiter in the mode of being what I am not.” Cohen was/is a waiter in the mode of being what he is.

Here’s the second moment of Cohen’s piece:

The waiter is my guy for the duration of the meal. He’s my agent. He looks out for me and, if he does a good job, I look out for him. He has an incentive to give me exceptional service, not some mediocre minimum, to ensure that my water glass is full, that my wine is replenished, to make sure that the busboy does not prematurely remove the plates — that I am not hurried along so that the owner can squeeze in another sitting. The waiter is my wingman.

Again, notice the sublimation that goes on in the capitalist workplace. For most observers, I think, the relationship between a waiter/restaurant and a customer is a relatively straightforward exchange of money for service (the tip, as Cohen and others like to say, stands for “to ensure promptitude”). But notice the affective element that gets introduced here: the waiter becomes Cohen’s agent, his wingman. In that exchange of money for service a bromance develops, a rather one-sided bromance, in which Cohen gets to imagine that this man—my guy—cares about him, really cares about him, as a self, a soul. And that he, Cohen, cares about the man. My guy. That this bromance is consecrated by the exchange of money is incidental or ornamental.

Or maybe not, as Cohen makes clear in this third passage:

I hesitate to mention another reason I like tipping. I like to make a difference, not just to be a bit of a big shot or be noticed or appreciated, but to give some of what I make to those who make less. I’m not flipping silver dollars into the air or hurling twenties around with abandon, but I am a healthy tipper (once a waiter, always a tipper) because this is my way of recognizing a good job. A healthy tip is like a pat on the back.

The tip is recognition of service well-performed. It shows that I care, that I notice — that I recognize what the restaurateur way back in the kitchen does not because he cannot. Why would I want to treat everyone as if they were equally good at their tasks?

The real signification of that exchange of money is that it allows Cohen—and not some impersonal mechanism like the market or the law—to distribute benefits and largesse to the staff. Partly because he wants to recognize the help, to lift the individuals among them above the dross and drab of democracy, where everyone is treated equally and no one gets noticed. Tipping is about making distinctions, about awarding distinctions, which are threatened by those egalitarian rules of equal pay for equal work.

The real object of that art of distinction, however, is not the waiter doing an excellent job but the tipper who is recognizing and rewarding him for it. Notice the ostentatious subject of virtually every single sentence in this passage: “I hesitate…I like tipping. I like to make a difference…I make… I’m not flipping silver dollars…I am a healthy tipper…my way of recognizing a good job….I care…I notice…I recognize…Why would I want…”

In the act of dispensing rewards, Cohen gets to play the part of a lord. Money is the means of his conveyance. Circulating it advances his cause, elevates him above the crowd. Dispensing money puts his signature on the otherwise drab world of democracy and exchange.

And elevates him a particular sort of way. The last passage:

I like to reward, but occasionally I like to punish. Make my meal an ordeal, make me anxious about whether you got the order straight, and no 20 percent tip will come your way. Maybe that’s not democratic, but a meal is not a town hall meeting.

Reminds me of that passage from the ancient Laws of Manu, which de Maistre loved to cite:

Punishment is an active ruler; he is the true manager of public affairs; he is the dispenser of laws; and wise men call him the sponsor of all the four orders for the discharge of their several duties. Punishment governs all mankind; punishment alone preserves them; punishment wakes, while their guards are asleep….The whole race of men is kept in order by punishment.

If only someone would have written a book about all this.

*H/t Andrew Seal.

How Harvard Fights Unions: By Conceding the Union’s Most Basic Claims

Harvard’s grad students have launched a union campaign, and Harvard’s administration has launched its response. Internal documents from the administration to the faculty, which were leaked to me, reveal some fascinating developments in these increasingly common anti-union drives of elite Ivy League universities.

First, university administrations have grown highly sensitized to any perception that they or their faculty are using intimidation and coercion to bust unions of academic workers. So sensitized that they’ve drafted a set of four rules, replete with a handy acronym, just in case the faculty can’t remember to keep things cool.

The basic rule is: No “TIPS”

No Threats

No Interrogation

No Promises

No Surveillance

You have to appreciate the hilarity. Like most elite faculty, Harvard’s professor probably oppose a union of graduate students because they think it will sully the intellectual virtues of America’s most prestigious university. Yet here they are being instructed by that most prestigious university to oppose that union with the help of slogans and acronyms.

And believe or not: that’s the good news. The use of fear and favor can be fatal to a union drive, and it’s good that at least some portion of the faculty are being told not to go there. (Whether that message sticks once the drive really gets going is another matter.) What’s more, it shows how conscious Harvard’s administrators—really, lawyers (and probably not even in-house lawyers; there are firms that specialize in this stuff)—are that the law and the courts may not be on their side on this issue.

Second, and even more interesting , is how, having explained to the world’s leading luminaries of light and reason that they should not terrorize the workers and students with whom they work (and don’t assume these luminaries don’t need that explained to them), the administration proceeds to instruct the faculty in what they should do.

• Do Share the University’s Record on Stipends and Benefits, where known. Provide information to students about the array of benefits that they presently receive, including the University’s record of steady improvement over time—without a union.

• Do Explain the Disadvantages of Union Membership. There are economic costs to joining a union, including the likelihood that they will be required to pay annual dues. There are also non-economic costs, including the intrusion of a third party into an academic relationship, adding a new political entity (the UAW) with its own agenda to existing relations.

• Do Explain the Collective Bargaining Process. The process of collective bargaining requires parties to meet at reasonable times and places to discuss wages, hours, and working conditions. However, the law does not dictate what must go into a contract. Thus, the union cannot guarantee any specific outcome, such as an improvement in stipend or other benefits, as these matters would become subject to collective bargaining. If there is a recognized union of graduate students, the University would bargain in good faith, but the University cannot be forced to accept union demands. The University would also be allowed to propose its own changes to the status quo in negotiations. You can also mention that negotiations for a first contract usually take a year or longer during which time there could not be any unilateral changes to the status quo, including changes in compensation.

• Do Explain the Election Process. In order for a union to file a petition for an election with the NLRB, it must obtain authorization cards from at least 30 percent of the employees in an appropriate unit. Students have the right to decide whether or not to sign a union authorization card, and even if they do sign a card and an election is later held, they don’t have to vote in favor of the union. If there is an election, it would be conducted by the NLRB and would be a secret ballot election. The election is decided by a majority of votes cast, just like a political election. Also, because the majority of first and second year students do not teach or serve as research assistants, they may not be considered eligible members of a graduate student union.

• Do Correct Inaccurate or Misleading Union Statements and Campaign Materials. Inform students of inaccuracies and provide the correct information, if known. Remind students that the union may make promises, but it cannot guarantee anything. • Do Provide Information about the Union’s Record. Inform students about the union’s local, regional, and national track record representing graduate students, if you are aware of it.

What’s fascinating about this to-do list is just how much, without realizing it, Harvard’s administration has conceded the union’s case. In two ways: By having the faculty talk to grad workers about issues like pay and benefits, Harvard’s administration is conceding that grad workers think like other workers. They care about things like pay and benefits.

But Harvard is also conceding something about the faculty. The premise of grad union drives is that grad students are workers and the administration is management. Where the faculty stand in all that is usually a matter of some dispute. Most grad unions, for understandable reasons, try to reassure the faculty that they don’t view them as management, but as potential allies. Most administrations, for understandable reasons, try to deny that the faculty are management. Most faculty haven’t a clue what they are.

But what is Harvard doing here but treating the faculty as if they are management, as if they are the enforcers of the administration’s policies. In the same way that the moguls of General Motors or Hyatt or Amazon instruct their front-line managers in how to talk to workers—often using the same kind of boilerplate that Harvard is using here—so is Harvard training its managers in how to talk to the workers there.

Like most scholars, Harvard’s faculty are used to thinking of themselves as independent minds. They’ve engaged in intense, often solitary, study of their chosen fields for decades. They’ve learned to take nothing on faith; they examine the evidence and come to their own opinions.

Yet here is Harvard senior management providing middle management with a Cliff Notes guide to American labor law, and expecting leading scholars of Shakespeare, colonial America, urban poverty, and the EU to repeat its talking points to their students. If that doesn’t convince the Harvard faculty that, from the university’s perspective, they really are management, no amount of evidence and reason will.

 

You’ve Changed, You’re Not the Angel I Once Knew: David Brooks on the GOP

David Brooks is fed up with the GOP. Today’s conservative, he says, is not yesterday’s conservative. What happened?

Basically, the party abandoned traditional conservatism for right-wing radicalism. Republicans came to see themselves as insurgents and revolutionaries, and every revolution tends toward anarchy and ends up devouring its own.

I’ve been trying to combat this argument by amnesia for years. As he has done before, Paul Krugman valiantly takes up my critique today in his response to Brooks. Yet the argument keeps popping back up.

So let’s take it apart, piece by piece. Brooks says the rot set in 30 years ago, in the wake of Reagan. Let’s see how today’s conservatism compares to those loamy vintages of more than three decades past. The bolded passages are all from Brooks’ column.

By traditional definitions, conservatism stands for intellectual humility,

“The conservative principle has been defended, the past hundred and fifty years, by men of learning and genius.” (Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind)

“A successful defence of freedom must therefore be dogmatic and make no concessions to expediency….Utopia, like ideology, is a bad word today…But an ideal picture of a society which may not be wholly achievable, or a guiding conception of the overall order to be aimed at, is nevertheless not only the indispensable precondition of any rational policy, but also the chief contribution that science can make to the solution of the problems of practical policy.” (Friedrich von Hayek, Law, Legislation, Liberty, Vol. 1)

“Conservatism is in general the intuition of genius, whereas liberalism is the efficiency of talent.” (Elmer More, “Disraeli and Conservatism”)

a belief in steady, incremental change,

“Every little measure is a great errour.” (Edmund Burke, Letters on a Regicide Peace)

“The American people now want us to act and not in half-measures. They demand and they’ve earned a full and comprehensive effort.” (Ronald Reagan, Address Before a Joint Session of Congress on the Program for Economic Recovery)

a preference for reform rather than revolution,

“…espouse conservatism with the vehemence of a radical. The thinking conservative, in truth, must take on some of the outward characteristics of the radical, today; he must poke about the roots of society, in the hope of restoring vigor to an old tree strangled in the rank undergrowth of modern passions.” (Russell Kirk, A Program for Conservatives)

“Because of the corruption of the term liberalism, the views that formerly went under that name are now often labeled conservatism. But this is not a satisfactory alternative. The nineteenth-century liberal was a radical, both in the etymological sense of going to the root of the matter, and in the political sense of favoring major changes in social institutions. So too must be his modern heir.” (Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom)

It is fixed beyond all power of reformation…this body, being totally perverted from the purposes of its institution, is utterly incorrigible; and because they are incorrigible, both in conduct and constitution, power ought to be taken out of their hands; just on the same principles on which have been made all the just changes and revolutions of government that have taken place since the beginning of the world.” (Burke, Speech on Fox’s East India Bill)

“The conservatives, as a minority, are the new radicals. The evidence is overwhelming.” (William F. Buckley, God and Man at Yale)

a respect for hierarchy,

No argument from me.

precedence,

“Nothing looks more awful and imposing than an ancient fortification. Its lofty embattled walls, its bold, projecting, rounded towers that pierce the sky, strike the imagination and promise inexpugnable strength. But they are the very things that make its weakness. You may as well think of opposing one of those old fortresses to the mass of artillery brought by a French irruption into the field, as to think of resisting by your old laws and your old forms the new destruction which the crops of Jacobin engineers today prepare for all such forms and all such laws.” (Burke, Letters on a Regicide Peace)

“Here the beaten path is the very reverse of the safe road.” (Burke, Letters on a Regicide Peace)

“The conservative peasant, as much as anybody else, owes his way of life to a different type of person, to men who were innovators in their time and who by their innovations forced a new manner of living on people belonging to an earlier state of culture.” (Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty)

“That [Democratic] measure reflects an echo of the past rather than a benchmark for the future….More of the same will not cure the hardship, anxiety, and discouragement it has imposed on the American people.” (Ronald Reagan, Address Before a Joint Session of Congress on the Program for Economic Recovery)

“Change is our Ally: A Tory Approach to Industrial Problems.” (Title of 1954 Conservative Party pamphlet.)

balance and order,

“The madness of the wise…is better than the sobriety of fools.” (Burke, Letters on a Regicide Peace)

“Unhappily, history proves that war is, in a certain sense, the habitual state of mankind, which is to say that human blood must flow without interruption, somewhere or other on the globe, and that for every nation, peace is only a respite….the effusion of human blood has never ceased in the world. Sometimes blood flows less abundantly over some larger area, sometimes it flows more abundantly in a more restricted area, but the flow remains nearly constant.” (Joseph de Maistre, Considerations on France)

and a tone of voice that is prudent, measured and responsible….

“Acquiescence will not do; there must be zeal.” (Burke, Letters on a Regicide Peace)

“I enjoy wars. Any adventure’s better than sitting in an office.” (Harold Macmillan)

Conservatives of this disposition…also see the nation as one organic whole.

“We’ve got to destroy the confidence of the people in the American establishment.” (Richard Nixon)

Citizens may fall into different classes and political factions, but they are still joined by chains of affection that command ultimate loyalty and love.

“We had to fight the enemy without in the Falklands and now we have to fight the enemy within, which is much more difficult.” (Margaret Thatcher on the miners strike)

“Now listen, you queer, stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I’ll sock you in your goddam face, and you’ll stay plastered.” (William F. Buckley to Gore Vidal)

The…rhetorical tone has grown ever more bombastic, hyperbolic and imbalanced.

“There is no instant of time when some living thing is not being devoured by another. Above all these numerous animal species is placed man, whose destructive hand spares nothing that lives. He kills to nourish himself, he kills to clothe himself, he kills to adorn himself, he kills to attack, he kills to defend himself, he kills to instruct himself, he kills to amuse himself, he kills to kill….His tables are covered with corpses.” (Joseph de Maistre, St Petersburg Dialogues)

“The reason why we find ourselves in a position of impotency is not because our only powerful potential enemy has sent men to invade our shores, but rather because of the traitorous actions of those who have been treated so well by this Nation. It has not been the less fortunate or members of minority groups who have been selling this Nation out, but rather those who have had all the benefits that the wealthiest nation on earth has had to offer—the finest homes, the finest college education, and the finest jobs in Government we can give. This is glaringly true in the State Department.” (Joseph McCarthy, Lincoln Day Address)

Republicans from Newt Gingrich through Ben Carson have become addicted to a crisis mentality. Civilization was always on the brink of collapse.

“In this time of moral and political crisis…” (Young American For Freedom, The Sharon Statement)

“We are at war with the most dangerous enemy that has ever faced mankind in his long climb from the swamp to the stars…If we lose freedom here, there is no place to escape to. This is the last stand on Earth.” (Ronald Reagan, Speech for Barry Goldwater, 1964)

This produced a radical mind-set. Conservatives started talking about the Reagan “revolution,”

“They called it the Reagan revolution. Well, I’ll accept that.” (Ronald Reagan, Farewell Address)

…this new Republican faction regards the messy business of politics as soiled and impure. Compromise is corruption.

“Whoever won a battle under the banner ‘I stand for Consensus?'” (Margaret Thatcher)

I could go on. Instead, I’ll leave you with a song:

You’ve changed

You’re not the angel I once knew

No need to tell me that we’re through

It’s all over now, you’ve changed

And Nancy Wilson.

Publics That Don’t Exist and the Intellectuals Who Write For Them

This Thursday, the Society for U.S. Intellectual History is convening its annual conference in Washington, DC. I’m thrilled to announce that I will be delivering the keynote address; it’s a tremendous honor for me. The full conference schedule is here; my talk is scheduled for Friday, October 16, at 2 pm, in the Hamilton Ballroom of the Hamilton Crowne Plaza Hotel. If you’re in DC, stop by and say hello. The title of my talk is: “Publics That Don’t Exist and the Intellectuals Who Write For Them.”

Here’s a sneak preview:

The problem with our public intellectuals today—and here I’m going to address the work of two exemplary though quite different public intellectuals: Cass Sunstein and Ta-Nehisi Coates—has little to do with their style. It has little to do with their professional location, whether they write from academia or for the little magazines. It has little to do with the suburbs, bohemia, or tenure. The problem with our public intellectuals today is that they are writing for readers who already exist, as they exist.

When Conservatives Invoke Lincoln: From Dred Scott to Obergefell

Conservative scholar Robert George has issued a “call to action” to constitutional scholars and presidential candidates who are opposed to the Supreme Court’s gay marriage decision in Obergefell v. Hodges. George believes the decision was wrongly decided, that it is a gross usurpation of judicial power and misinterpretation of the Constitution.

But things take an interesting turn in the statement, when George invokes Lincoln on Dred Scott to argue that, despite the Court’s ruling, we—and more important, government officials, including future presidents—should not accept Obergefell as the law of the land. That is, we, and they, should not accept Obergefell as binding on our/their conduct.

Obergefell is not “the law of the land.” It has no more claim to that status than Dred Scott v. Sandford had when President Abraham Lincoln condemned that pro-slavery decision as an offense against the very Constitution that the Supreme Court justices responsible for that atrocious ruling purported to be upholding.

Lincoln warned that for the people and their elected leaders to treat unconstitutional decisions of the Supreme Court as creating a binding rule on anyone other than the parties to the particular case would be for “the people to cease to be their own rulers, having effectively abandoned their government into the hands of that eminent tribunal.”

Because we stand with President Lincoln against judicial despotism, we also stand with these distinguished legal scholars who are calling on officeholders to reject Obergefell as an unconstitutional effort to usurp the authority vested by the Constitution in the people and their representatives….

As the 2016 election season heats up, we call on all who aspire to be our next President to pledge to

treat Obergefell, not as “the law of the land,” but rather (to once again quote Justice Alito) as “an abuse of judicial power”
refuse to recognize Obergefell as creating a binding rule controlling other cases or their own conduct as President…

Like Lincoln, we will not accept judicial edicts that undermine the sovereignty of the people, the Rule of Law, and the supremacy of the Constitution. We will resist them by every peaceful and honorable means. We will not be bullied into acquiescence or silence. We will fight for the Constitution and our beloved Nation.

This move is interesting for two reasons.

First, it’s always interesting to me when conservatives depart from their customary role as the defenders of the law and lawfulness, and take up the more lawless elements of what I think is their true patrimony. Here’s how George finesses that issue:

We have great respect for judges. We have even greater respect for law. When judges behave lawlessly, it is the law that must be honored, not lawless judges.

The Supreme Court is supreme in the federal judicial system. But the justices are not supreme over the other branches of government. And they are certainly not supreme over the Constitution.

In Obergefell v. Hodges, five justices, without the slightest warrant in the text, logic, structure, or historical understanding of the Constitution presumed to declare unconstitutional the marriage laws of states that maintain the historic and sound understanding of marriage as the conjugal union of husband and wife.

But, second, and perhaps more interesting, is how George uses, or misuses, Lincoln.

It’s certainly true that Lincoln was opposed, strongly opposed, to the notorious Dred Scott decision. It’s also true that Lincoln refused to treat that decision as constitutional precedent. But Lincoln was equally of the mind that he and other officials could not resist the decision. Here’s Lincoln’s famous speech on the case in 1857:

We believe, as much as Judge [Stephen] Douglas, (perhaps more) in obedience to, and respect for the judicial department of government. We think its decisions on Constitutional questions, when fully settled, should control, not only the particular cases decided, but the general policy of the country, subject to be disturbed only by amendments of the Constitution as provided in that instrument itself. More than this would be revolution. But we think the Dred Scott decision is erroneous. We know the court that made it, has often over-ruled its own decisions, and we shall do what we can to have it to over-rule this. We offer no resistance to it.

Lincoln is careful to say that in not treating Dred Scott as precedent he means that he will seek to overturn the decision by the Court itself, that he will not allow to be viewed as settled law. He will agitate for the wrongness of the decision, argue against its application in future rulings, and perhaps seek the appointment, if/when given the chance, of Supreme Court justices who agree with him. What he will not do is resist the decision.

Again, Lincoln:

He [Douglas] denounces all who question the correctness of that decision, as offering violent resistance to it. But who resists it? Who has, in spite of the decision, declared Dred Scott free, and resisted the authority of his master over him?

Lincoln draws a clear distinction between questioning the correctness of a decision and resisting that decision, acting in defiance of it. It’s true that he’s only referring to the specifics of the case (a qualification George makes much of: “a binding rule on anyone other than the parties to the particular case”), but in his First Inaugural, which George quotes (actually misquotes, albeit in a minor way*), Lincoln extends the distinction behind the specifics of the case.

I do not forget the position assumed by some that constitutional questions are to be decided by the Supreme Court, nor do I deny that such decisions must be binding in any case upon the parties to a suit as to the object of that suit, while they are also entitled to very high respect and consideration in all parallel cases by all other departments of the Government. And while it is obviously possible that such decision may be erroneous in any given case, still the evil effect following it, being limited to that particular case, with the chance that it may be overruled and never become a precedent for other cases, can better be borne than could the evils of a different practice. At the same time, the candid citizen must confess that if the policy of the Government upon vital questions affecting the whole people is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court, the instant they are made in ordinary litigation between parties in personal actions the people will have ceased to be their own rulers, having to that extent practically resigned their Government into the hands of that eminent tribunal. Nor is there in this view any assault upon the court or the judges. It is a duty from which they may not shrink to decide cases properly brought before them, and it is no fault of theirs if others seek to turn their decisions to political purposes.

Again, while Lincoln insists that there is a role for the people and their representatives to engage in constitutional politics, to argue for their preferred interpretations of the Constitution and what it requires (to that extent, George is correct), perhaps to contest the ruling at its perimeter, and while he also insists that he will do all that he can to ensure that Dred Scott will not become precedent, there’s little in these statements on Dred Scott to suggest that Lincoln believes government officials have it within their rights to “refuse to recognize” a Court decision as “creating a binding rule controlling…their own conduct.”

Lincoln scholar John Burt provides a sensitive summation of Lincoln’s position on Dred Scott in a 2009 article from American Literary History. 

In his Springfield speech of 26 June 1857 on the Dred Scott decision, Lincoln did not adopt the common antislavery ways of countering the decision. He proposed no popular acts of resistance, he did not propose nullifying the decision through the acts of the other branches or the state legislatures, and he did not propose attacking the Court’s power by changing the number of justices. He not only submitted to the decision as regards Dred Scott himself, but also conceded that the case would govern other persons in Scott’s position. Yet he did not concede that he would have to treat the decision as prescribing a political rule for his future course. In other words, he did not feel that as a legislator he was obligated to support further laws that would seem to have been called for in Chief Justice Taney’s opinion, or to pass other laws that would be consistent with that opinion. And he felt that he could still support laws that would challenge the decision at the margins, testing its limits and providing occasions for the Court to rethink its views. Lincoln also proposed pushing a gradual change in the Court’s point of view which would follow from his having political control over the confirmation of new justices over the long term: a Republican Senate could put in motion the reversal of the decision one justice at a time, in a process which might have taken decades to complete.

In fact, Burt provides additional information of how Lincoln attempts to push the boundaries of opposition to their outermost limits without going where George goes in his statement on Obergefell.

In the 1858 Quincy debate with Douglas, Lincoln distinguished between accepting the Dred Scott decision as binding upon poor Scott and adopting that decision as a political rule. Lincoln did not propose to defy the Court in that case, or in any subsequent case similar to it. But he did propose to treat the question it had attempted to close as one that is still open, subject to further legal testing, capable of being eroded around the edges by political challenges, until finally Dred Scott loses its legitimacy, loses the background sense that its conclusions are not only reasonable but inevitable, a sense, it’s fair to say, that the Dred Scott decision never enjoyed in the first place. Lincoln specifies rather precisely what it means to oppose the Dred Scott decision:

We oppose the Dred Scott decision in a certain way, upon which I ought perhaps to address you a few words. We do not propose that when Dred Scott has been decided to be a slave by the court, we, as a mob, will decide him to be free. We do not propose that, when any other one, or one thousand, shall be decided by that court to be slaves, we will in any violent way disturb the rights of property thus settled, but we nevertheless do oppose that decision as a political rule, which shall be binding on the voter to vote for nobody who thinks it wrong, which shall be binding on the members of Congress or the President to favor no measure that does not actually concur with the principles of that decision. We do not propose to be bound by it as a political rule in that way, because we think it lays the foundation not merely of enlarging and spreading out what we consider an evil, but it lays the foundation for spreading that evil into the States themselves. We propose so resisting it as to have it reversed if we can, and a new judicial rule established upon this subject.

George is not terribly clear as to what he means when he writes that presidential candidates should pledge to “refuse to recognize Obergefell as creating a binding rule controlling other cases or their own conduct as President.”

What does seem clear is that Lincoln’s strongest phrasing of opposition—that he opposes the “decision as a political rule,” meaning among other things that he refuses to accept the notion that he must “favor no measure that does not actually concur with the principles of that decision”—is miles more modulated than “refuse to recognize Obergefell as creating a binding rule.” After all, one can support many laws that depart from the principles of a decision without violating that decision. Part of what Supreme Court decisions are often about, after all, is whether some law or act of government is in fact a violation of the principles the Court has enunciated. What is or is not in keeping with the principles of a decision is a contested question. And even then, a law or act of government could lie outside the principles enunciated by the Court and still not violate the Court’s decision.

But when George calls in his statement for candidates who “support the First Amendment Defense Act to protect the conscience and free speech rights of those who hold fast to the conjugal understanding of marriage as the union of husband and wife,” he is definitively saying that public officials should be allowed to defy the ruling outright.

That, again, is a step Lincoln never took.

* George quotes Lincoln as saying, “the people to cease to be their own rulers, having effectively abandoned their government into the hands of that eminent tribunal.” Lincoln’s actual statement is this: “the people will have ceased to be their own rulers, having to that extent practically resigned their Government into the hands of that eminent tribunal.” Again, a minor misquotation.

NYT Public Editor Says NYTBR Conflict of Interest Is a Conflict of Interest

Margaret Sullivan, the New York Times public editor, writes a quietly devastating critique of the preferred authorized biographer writing a review of the authorized biography of Kissinger:

In the italic identification line appearing with his review of a new biography of Henry Kissinger, Andrew Roberts is described only as “the Lehrman Institute distinguished fellow at the New-York Historical Society.” And that is true.

But what is also true is that Mr. Roberts had what many reasonable people would consider a conflict of interest as a reviewer: He was Mr. Kissinger’s first choice to write his authorized biography.

The Times Book Review editor, Pamela Paul, told me Thursday that she was unaware of that fact before the publication of a Gawker piece that makes much of that relationship and of Mr. Roberts’s acquaintance with the book’s author, Niall Ferguson.

Gawker’s headline: “Kissinger Biography Is Great, Says Pal of Author and Kissinger in New York Times.” Indeed, the review is kind to Mr. Kissinger and to Mr. Ferguson; it calls the book “comprehensive, well-written and riveting.”

“We rely on our reviewers to disclose conflicts of interest,” Ms. Paul said. Mr. Roberts disclosed no conflict, saying only that he had met Mr. Ferguson a few times but that this wouldn’t affect his review.

She made the point that Book Review editors cannot realistically open full-fledged investigations into their reviewers’ backgrounds. If Mr. Roberts had told editors that he had turned down the chance to write the book himself, Ms. Paul said that it might not have disqualified him as the reviewer but that she would have had him acknowledge that information in the review.

Should he have told editors? If she’d been in Mr. Roberts’s place, she said, “I would have disclosed it.”

…

Indeed, Mr. Ferguson and Mr. Roberts will share a London stage to discuss Mr. Kissinger and the authorized biography later this month.

…

My take: Both assignments were considerably less than ideal. Times readers must be able to believe that a review is an impartial assessment of a book’s merits. That assessment shouldn’t be influenced (or appear to be influenced) by deference to a fellow Times employee or by a significant relationship or circumstance — especially one that goes undisclosed to readers.

But, wait, there’s more.

Not only is Roberts, as Greg Grandin reported in his Gawker piece, a quarter-century-long friend of Ferguson’s (contrary to Roberts’s claim that they only met a few times). He also, my friend Jonathan Stein told me, co-wrote an article with Ferguson back in 1997. In a volume of essays edited by Ferguson.

Here’s the cite: Niall Ferguson and Andrew Roberts, “Hitler’s England: What If Germany had Invaded Britain in May 1940?” in Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals, ed. Niall Ferguson (London: Picador, 1997), 281–320.

Update (11: 15 am)

One last question: How did Roberts come to be chosen as the reviewer of the Ferguson bio in the first place? He’s not exactly a natural choice in that he’s mostly written about British politics and European war in the 19th century and early 20th century; there are lot of experts on Kissinger and American foreign policy. Indeed, it was just such an expert whom the NYTBR chose to review Grandin’s book on Kissinger in the very same issue of the NYTBR that Roberts reviewed Ferguson’s bio. (And, incidentally, one can tell the difference in the choices: where Roberts’s review is a combination of pabulum and hagiography, the review of Grandin’s book is judicious, scholarly, and intelligently critical). So who suggested Roberts as the reviewer and dealt with him on his review?

Update (4:30 pm)

NYT Public Editor Margaret Sullivan has posted the following update to her post:

Corey Robin, an author and political science professor at Brooklyn College and CUNY, pointed out in a post today that Mr. Roberts and Mr. Ferguson co-authored a chapter in a 1999 book edited by Mr. Ferguson. That almost surely would have disqualified Mr. Roberts as a reviewer had it been known.

David Johnson pointed me to this: Four years ago, Roberts told an interviewer, “I stand in awe of friends such as Niall Ferguson.”

Greg Grandin turns the dialectical knife in this nice followup:

This kind of literary kerfuffle is usually presented as “conflicts of interest.” In this case, though, no conflict exists. There is a perfect convergence of interest and ideology. Like Ferguson and Kissinger (who was one of the first in 1990 to compare Saddam Hussein to Adolph Hitler), Roberts has been wrong, catastrophically so, when using history to justify militarism in the present. As was Winston Churchill, Roberts wrote in early 2003, Tony Blair will be vindicated “when Iraq is successfully invaded and hundreds of weapons of mass destruction are unearthed.”

Kissinger, Ferguson, and Roberts are also unique among historians (Kissinger has in the past identified himself as an historian more than a statesman) in that they understand the study of history to be, primarily, a warrant for never, ever, apologizing. For anything. All three predictably respond to any catastrophe the US finds itself in as a result of intervention by arguing the problem wasn’t enough intervention. “He had no stomach for endless war,” Kissinger once said of Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense under JFK and LBJ—as if endless war was a too spicy Bánh mì.

…

On second thought, then, scratch any criticism: Roberts is the perfect reviewer for Kissinger’s perfect biographer.

Clusterfuck of Corruption at NYT Book Review

Greg Grandin takes to Gawker to report on a clusterfuck of corruption at the New York Times Book Review:

This Sunday, the New York Times Book Review will publish a review of the first volume of Niall Ferguson’s authorized biography of Henry Kissinger, Kissinger: The Idealist. The reviewer is Andrew Roberts.

Roberts brings an unusual level of familiarity to the subject: It was Roberts whom Kissinger first asked, before turning to Ferguson, to write his authorized biography. In other words, the New York Times is having Kissinger’s preferred authorized biographer review Kissinger’s authorized biography.

…

Oh, and Roberts isn’t just close to the subject of the book he is reviewing. He has also been, for a quarter-century, a friend of the book’s author.

…

The Times, too, normally checks those things. When I’m approached about reviewing books there, I’m usually asked if I know the author or have a conflict of interest.

…

Last May, the Times’ public editor, Margaret Sullivan, weighed in on the topic: How close a connection between reviewer and author (and in this case, between author, reviewer, and subject) is too close a connection? “It’s fine if readers disagree with our reviews,” the Times Book Review editor Pamela Paul told Sullivan, “but they should not distrust them.”

…Still, it’s a “tricky challenge,” Paul said, “to get someone informed but not entrenched.”

If Roberts were any more entrenched, he’d be wearing a Brodie helmet and puttees.

A spokesperson for the New York Times offered the following statement to Gawker, on behalf of Pamela Paul:

“We always ask our reviewers about any potential conflict of interest, as we define it, and disclose any possible conflicts in the review if necessary. In this particular case, we asked Andrew Roberts and were satisfied with his assurances that no conflicts of interest existed that would sway his review one way or the other.”

The Times might as well have asked Kissinger to review his own biography. Or, better, Ferguson himself, since, along with Roberts, there’s not a nano-difference between the three men, at least when it comes to controversies about war.

…

So how is the review itself? Contrary to the bet that an opinionated yet informed expert might turn in an exciting piece, Roberts’s essay is ponderous, and, if possible, even more hagiographic than the authorized biography itself.

“Kissinger’s official biographer,” writes the man Kissinger first asked to be his official biographer, “certainly gives the reader enough evidence to conclude that Henry Kissinger is one of the greatest Americans in the history of the republic, someone who has been repulsively traduced over several decades and who deserved to have a defense of this comprehensiveness published years ago.”

Let me be clear: I think it would be totally legitimate if, say, Ferguson, with his well-known conservative politics, were to review my new, critical book on Kissinger. That might indeed make for an engaging, fun debate; readers would know where author and reviewer stand. However, asking Roberts to review Ferguson, without acknowledging their connections, not to mention Roberts’ history with Kissinger, is a trench too far.

Thus a new genre is born: the authorized review of the authorized biography.

I should admit that I have my own vested interest in the matter. Not only is Greg a friend, but as he reports in his piece:

My friend Corey Robin had a relevant experience. When his book The Reactionary Mind was coming out in 2011, the Times contacted a widely respected intellectual historian to review it. The potential reviewer didn’t know Corey personally or professionally. Although they had never met, Corey had begun blogging that year, and he and the would-be reviewer began exchanging occasional comments on sites like Facebook. Minimal as the relationship was, the Times nixed the reviewer because of their putative entanglement.

The irony of that experience is that the person the Times wound up choosing to review my book—Barnard political scientist Sheri Berman, whose negative review (along with Mark Lilla’s in the New York Review of Books) set off a round of bitter controversy, at Crooked Timber and elsewhere, as the Times itself would go onto report—actually does know me personally. She and my wife had done cat rescue work together for years, and on several occasion I had been to her house, where we talked about political science and cats.

In related news, I‘ll be interviewing Greg about his new book on Kissinger—about which I have been blogging here these past weeks—on Sunday, October 4, at 12:30, at the Brooklyn Public Library. If you’re in the neighborhood, stop by.