Corey Robin's Blog, page 71

Israel, Palestine, and the “Myth and Symbol” of American Studies

Lisa Duggan, president of the American Studies Association, has an excellent oped in the Los Angeles Times on the organization’s recent convention in Los Angeles and how the ASA has fared, academically and politically, in the year since it announced its boycott of Israeli academic institutions.

Lisa’s oped reminds me of a point that’s been bothering me for some time.

One of the frequent criticisms that opponents of the ASA boycott make is this: What in the world is an American Studies organization doing concerning itself with the affairs of another country? As one American Studies scholar (to whom Lisa is in part responding) put it in the LA Times:

Ostensibly devoted to the study of all things American, the 5,000-member academic cohort has ventured outside its natural borders and into the crossfire of Israeli-Palestinian politics by voting to bestow pariah status on Israel.

Other similarly inclined critics of the ASA—many of them of an older generation of scholars—often add to this claim a lament for the good old days of American Studies when scholars like Richard Slotkin (who also opposes the ASA boycott of Israel) penned learned and literate trilogies about the long and terrible career of American violence.

But here’s what seems so strange about this claim.

My sense of American Studies—admittedly from outside the field—is that it always has derived a great deal of its animating energy and intellectual purpose from the international arena (otherwise known as other countries). As Lisa’s interlocutor himself acknowledges, the early years of American Studies were shaped by the imperatives of the Cold War, and then in the 1960s and 1970s the field was reshaped by the Vietnam War, producing such canonical works as…Richard Slotkin’s learned and literate trilogy about the long and terrible career of American violence.

In order to reconcile this past of the discipline with the complaints of its contemporary critics, you have to make one of two assumptions: either that the field has another, completely different past or that Israel is not part of the foreign policy of the United States. Either way, you’re living in a fantasy land.

Once upon a time American Studies’s elders took apart the “myth and symbol” of America; now they’ve turned their field into one.

The Labor Theory of Value at the University of Illinois

In case you were wondering why conservatives worked so hard, historically, to scrap the labor theory of value…

Robert Easter, the president of the University of Illinois who helped do in Steven Salaita, was just given an outgoing bonus by the Board of Trustees, who did do in Steven Salaita, of $180,000. Which will bring his final year of salary to $658,558.

Just cause.

David Ricardo: Machiavelli of the Margin

In my course this semester at the Graduate Center, “The Political Theory of Capitalism,” we’ve been exploring how some of the classics of modern political economy translate, traduce, transmit, efface, revise, and/or sublimate traditional categories of and concepts in Western political theory: consent, obedience, rule, law, and so forth.

Through economic thinkers like Smith, Ricardo, Keynes, Schumpeter, Jevons, and the like, we try and read political economy as the distinctively modern idiom of political theory. In the same way that religion provided a distinctive language and vocabulary for political thought after Rome and before the Renaissance, might not economics provide modern political theory with its own distinctive idiom and form? In other words, our interest in the political moment of economic discourse is not when the state intervenes or intrudes; it’s when economic discourse seems to be most innocent of politics. That’s when we find the most resonant and pregnant political possibilities.

I’ll give you an example.

For the last several weeks we’ve been reading and talking about Ricardo’s On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, which I have to admit, damn near killed me. Turns out it’s really hard to teach a text you don’t understand.

But one of the more interesting—and, at least to me, semi-intelligible—arguments in Ricardo is his account of rent. (I don’t think the problem is Ricardo; it’s me.) For it’s there, in his chapter on rent, that he introduces the idea of the margin. I could be wrong, but I don’t see anything like a notion of the margin in other parts of the book. It’s all in his chapter on rent. (Ricardo experts or intellectual historians: is that right? Are there other places in Ricardo’s texts where he talks about the margin? Were there other theorists prior to Ricardo who talked about it?)

Now that in and of itself is interesting: Is there something to be gleaned from or learned about the idea of the margin from the fact that it arose, for Ricardo, in the context of a discourse on rent?

Anyway, here are three places in his chapter on rent where he talks about the idea of the margin:

The reason then, why raw produce rises in comparative value, is because more labour is employed in the production of the last portion obtained, and not because a rent is paid to the landlord.

…

Raw material enters into the composition of most commodities, but the value of that raw material, as well as corn, is regulated by the productiveness of the portion of capital last employed on the land, and paying no rent; and therefore rent is not a component part of the price of commodities.

…

It follows from the same principles, that any circumstances in the society which should make it unnecessary to employ the same amount of capital on the land, and which should therefore make the portion last employed more productive, would lower rent.

Ricardo’s basic idea of rent is that it arises from the differential in the quality of two tracts of land. So we start with land that is lush and fertile and easily farmed. At some point the population will require more food and more land will have to be put into play. So we move to the next piece of land, which is slightly less fertile and lush. At that point, the first piece of land generates a rent: the farmer and/or capitalist who use it will be willing to pay slightly extra in order not to have to use the slightly less fertile lend. And then we move to the third piece of land. And so on.

Ricardo’s basic intuition is that rent arises from difference:

If all land had the same properties, if it were unlimited in quantity, and uniform in quality, no charge could be made for its use, unless where it possessed peculiar advantages of situation. It is only, then, because land is not unlimited in quantity and uniform in quality, and because in the progress of population, land of an inferior quality, or less advantageously situated, is called into cultivation, that rent is ever paid for the use of it. When in the progress of society, land of the second degree of fertility is taken into cultivation, rent immediately commences on that of the first quality, and the amount of that rent will depend on the difference in the quality of these two portions of land.

At some point, we reach a final piece of land, beyond which it simply does not pay to work it at all. That final piece of land generates no rent; all it can afford is a wage to the laborer and a profit to labor’s employer. The tract of land just before that one generates a very little bit of rent. The one before that a little bit more. And so on back to the best land.

That last piece of really crappy land—with its concomitant last exertion of labor or last expenditure of capital—sets the value for the class of commodities that are produced on all the lands. For it is there, on that worst land, that the most labor will have to be expended in order to generate the commodity (the amount of labor required to produce the commodity determines the value of the commodity).

The exchangeable value of all commodities, whether they be manufactured, or the produce of the mines, or the produce of land, is always regulated, not by the less quantity of labour that will suffice for their production under circumstances highly favorable, and exclusively enjoyed by those who have peculiar facilities of production; but by the greater quantity of labour necessarily bestowed on their production by those who have no such facilities; by those who continue to produce them under the most unfavorable circumstances; meaning—by the most unfavorable circumstances, the most unfavorable under which the quantity of produce required, renders it necessary to carry on the production.

And while that last bit of land generates no rent—for all the value of the commodities sold is devoted to the wages of labor and the profit of the capitalist—every infinitesimal differential above that last bit of land will generate a rent. And though that last bit of land doesn’t generate a rent, the value of the rents on the better lands will be set by the value of the commodities produced on that last bit of land. The value of the commodities on that last bit will be high—”with every worse quality [of land] employed, the value of the commodities in the manufacture of which they were used, would rise, because equal quantities of labour would be less productive”—so the more productive labor working the better land will produce more commodities, so that better land will fetch a high rent.

Anyway, that’s the little bit of economics I could figure out (and I probably didn’t even get that right.)

But here’s the interesting part for me, as a political theorist.

In political theory, the great political moment, the highest mode of political action, is the founding of a new polity. Read Machiavelli, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Tocqueville, Nietzsche, Arendt: the founding moment is when all the basic laws, institutions, customs and mores of the polity are set out. It’s a moment of great drama and great art (that’s why Aeschylus mined it to such tremendous effect in the last play of the trilogy The Oresteia).

For political theorists of this vein, the further away you move from the founding moment—the further in time and place—the more loss, decay, corruption you will see. There is simply a fact of entropy that sets in, once the fervor and fever of that founding moment is lost. Machiavelli’s great obsession with Rome has much to do with the distance in time and space that the republic/empire travels from its founding as a small city.

The art of politics, then, is to steal back from time (and space) what it takes from the polity as it was founded, to deprive age of its ravages, to find a way to repeat the intensity, the engagement, the connection and commitment, of that founding moment. Whether through education, laws, festivals, rites, wars, what have you.

It struck me in reading Ricardo just how much the marginal theory of rent turns that idea of a founding moment on its head. Where the western theoretical tradition begins with a moment in time and place, and sees a threat in any movement away from that time and place, Ricardo’s theory of the margin begins at the opposite end of that process, with the last tract of land, which is furthest removed from the original tract in both time and space. And where the founding tradition of political theory sees the founding as the source of value from which all politics and morals emanate and decay—the founding is the pacesetter of values—the marginal theory of rent sees the outer limits of decay and decadence as the source of value: of the labor on that outer tract of land that is required for the production of the commodity, of the value of the commodity itself, and of the rent that commodity will generate on the inner tracts of land.

Ricardo himself seems to have had some intuition of how strange this all is. Not from a political theory perspective (though his comments are quite generative on that score) but from a more general cultural and sociological perspective:

Nothing is more common than to hear of the advantages which the land possesses over every other source of useful produce, on account of the surplus which it yields in the form of rent. Yet when land is most abundant, when most productive, and most fertile, it yields no rent; and it is only when its powers decay, and less is yielded in return for labour, that a share of the original produce of the more fertile portions is set apart for rent. It is singular that this quality in the land, which should have been noticed as an imperfection, compared with the natural agents by which manufacturers are assisted, should have been pointed out as constituting its peculiar pre-eminence.

Rent arises from decay, from the distance traveled from that founding tract of land.

And here’s where the fact that the marginal theory arises in the context of an account of rent, of money paid to a semi-aristocratic landlord, might matter. For in classical political theory of the kind we’ve been examining here, the supreme political actor is often assumed to be some sort of propertied worthy, a member of the landed gentry (that was part of the Country tradition of Bolingbroke’s circle in 18th century England) or such. His landed independence frees from him the imperatives of fear and favor, makes him a creature of civic virtue. It is a precondition of his agency.

But in Ricardo’s hands, the landlord is completely without agency. He’s more than a parasite; he’s utterly passive. Not only do his rents derive from the activities of others, but they go up in response to the imperatives of population growth that compel the harvesting of new and less fertile lands. He doesn’t act at all; he merely presides over and profits from the expansions and exertions of others.

And where the landed gentry of the political tradition are expected to attend to the maintenance and the upkeep of the polity, the preservation of its founding fervor, the landlords of Ricardo have a vested interest in the decay and demise of the lands and labors surrounding them. For that decay and demise provide the raw ingredients of difference that serve as the source of their rents.

Without multiplying instances, I hope enough has been said to show, that whatever diminishes the inequality in the produce obtained from successive portions of capital employed on the same or on new land, tends to lower rent; and that whatever increases that inequality, necessarily produces an opposite effect, and tends to raise it.

…it is obvious that the landlord is doubly benefited by difficulty of production. First, he obtains a greater share, and secondly the commodity in which he is paid is of greater value.

If what I’m saying about Ricardo’s theory of rent (and the significance of the margin for that theory) is true, the question becomes: to what extent can we read the entire tradition of marginal economics, which comes later and moves significantly beyond the category of rent, in a similar light, as standing the basic categories and concepts of political foundings on their head?

Update (November 13, 11:45 pm)

Several folks have asked me to post a copy of the syllabus. Which I thought I had a while back, but turns out the link is dead. So here it is now.

A Palestinian Exception…at Brooklyn College

Next week, I’m proud to announce, the political science department at Brooklyn College, of which I am chair, will be co-sponsoring two events.

The first, which is being put on by the Wolfe Institute of the Humanities at Brooklyn College, is a talk by Nation columnist, poet, and essayist Katha Pollitt. Katha has just published a book called Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights, and that is the title of the talk she will be giving next Tuesday, November 18, at 2:25 (yes, 2:25), in Woody Tanger Auditorium at Brooklyn College.

The second, which is being put on by the Students for Justice in Palestine at Brooklyn College, is a conversation between Steven Salaita, who needs no introduction on this blog, and Columbia Law Professor Katharine Franke, who was so instrumental in his defense this past summer. I will be moderating the conversation. It will be held next Thursday, November 20, at 5:30 in the Gold Room of the Student Center at Brooklyn College. You have to register in advance for the event. Please do so now. While the seats for non-BC students are now full, there is a waiting list, and it’s often not hard to get off the waiting list, since not everyone shows up. The students are also negotiating with the administration to get more seats for members of the community. So sign up for the wait list and keep checking back in.

Now all this talk of registration and wait lists and such should instantly alert you to the strange way that a student event around Palestine is treated at Brooklyn College. In Katha’s case, anyone from the college or community can just show up; in the Salaita case, you have to register in advance, and if history is any guide, pass through an elaborate set of security checkpoints just to get in.

In fairness to Brooklyn College, I’m told that this is how all student events are treated. But if we’re honest for a second, it’s fairly clear that all these procedures were created in the wake of the BDS controversy of February 2013. And they’ve proven to be especially onerous for the Students for Justice in Palestine. I myself had to intervene in this case—as a member of the faculty—with a high-level official in the administration in order to move the process along; it’s that cumbersome and difficult.

What’s more, during the week of November 17, Steven Salaita will be speaking at eight colleges and universities in the area: Rutgers Newark, Rutgers New Brunswick, Princeton, NYU, Columbia, the New School, the College of Staten Island (CUNY), and Brooklyn College. Only at Brooklyn College will attendees have to go through this baroque set of checkpoints and procedures. How ironic that private universities like NYU and Princeton and Columbia are more welcoming of the public than Brooklyn College.

While I’m excited that our department is co-sponsoring both events, I would be less than honest if I didn’t express a certain disappointment with my colleagues in other departments. The only departments co-sponsoring both events are the departments of sociology, political science, and secondary education, as well as the Shirley Chisholm Project. Many others were asked to co-sponsor the Salaita event, but they refused.

Now, I should make clear that every department is entitled to co-sponsor or organize whatever events it chooses to co-sponsor. My department has an especially tolerant policy of co-sponsorship; not all departments do. And just as I objected when political science was lambasted for co-sponsoring the BDS event, I would not want departments to be pilloried for refusing to co-sponsor the Salaita event. It’s their right to decide; I wouldn’t have it any other way.

But while acknowledging and affirming that right, I can’t help noticing that some departments are perfectly happy to co-sponsor the Katha Pollitt talk, but won’t get near the Salaita event with a ten-foot pole. And while these departments invoke two arguments for steering clear of a Salaita-type event—the event is “one-sided,” and its content has nothing to do with the particular mission of the department—they seem willing to dispense with these arguments when it comes to Katha Pollitt’s talk. Even though abortion rights has nothing to do with the missions of some of these department, and her talk is so one-sided that it’s called “pro.”

It doesn’t seem to occur to my liberal colleagues at Brooklyn College that were they a professor in Alabama or Mississippi, they would have to be just as careful around a talk by Katha Pollitt as they are at Brooklyn College around an event focused on Palestinians. Abortion is a no-brainer here; there it’s as controversial as Israel/Palestine is here. It’s the mere happenstance of living in New York that leads them to push in one instance, and pull in another.

And here’s why that’s a problem. A university is not supposed to reflect the conventional wisdom of its environs. It’s supposed to challenge that conventional wisdom. It’s all too easy in progressive (except for Palestine) Brooklyn to co-sponsor a talk in defense of abortion rights. But the real guts of academic freedom is to defend it when it matters, when it’s most on the edge, pushing the boundaries of conventional wisdom. Not because edginess is a value unto itself, but because it’s often at the edges where a society’s deepest, most difficult, issues lie, where its deepest and most difficult issues are repressed. The job of the heresy hunters is to keep those issues at the edge, repressed; the job of intellectuals and academics (or so we like to tell ourselves) is to force them into the center, into the light.

In the past at Brooklyn College, our problem has been donors and alums and politicians. And that’s the way we on the faculty like it: they’re easy targets. But that’s not the case this time around. The administration has worked hard on behalf of the students; the donors and alums and politicians have been silent. The only thing standing in the way of a robust conversation is…us.

Contemporary liberalism: minimalism at home, maximalism abroad

So Kurt Andersen devoted a segment of his show Studio 360 to ISIS’s destruction of various cultural shrines and monuments in Iraq and Syria. It sounds beyond awful. As did the Taliban’s destruction of all those Buddhist monuments back in 2001. But here’s what I don’t understand about these types of reports from western journalists. When NYU destroyed Edgar Allan Poe’s home, did Kurt Andersen publicly say a word? That was an assault on our cultural heritage that he might have helped avert, but there’s no record of him, at least not that I can find, saying a thing. Yet here he is having a good old time with some State Department flack, calling for “archaeological boots on the ground”—presumably to match the other kind of boots—in order to save these treasures of civilization. But when it comes to our own treasures, our own New York treasures (the guy lives in Brooklyn), not a word. Kurt Andersen’s also the sort of guy who would castigate the left for not caring enough about America.

Contemporary liberalism: minimalism at home, maximalism abroad.

Sign Petition for Princeton to Divest from Companies Involved in the Israeli Occupation

A group of Princeton faculty, staff, and students are circulating a petition calling on the university to divest from companies that are contributing to or profiting from the Israeli occupation of the West Bank. If you’re a member of the staff or faculty, an undergrad or grad student, or an alum or member of the community, please sign. Whether you’re or pro- or anti-BDS (but especially if you’re anti-BDS on the grounds that it targets the entire State of Israel rather than the occupation itself), this is a good statement to support, and one that all of us in both sides of that debate can unite around.

The petition reads as follows:

We, the undersigned members of the Princeton University community, are deeply concerned about the Israeli military occupation of the West Bank and siege of the Gaza Strip, which are responsible for severe violations of Palestinian human rights.

The Israeli military has occupied the West Bank for nearly half a century in violation of UN Security Council Resolution 242. The disproportionate violence against civilians during Israeli military engagements in Gaza in 2008-09, 2012, and 2014 has been condemned by many, including the United Nations and Amnesty International. Israeli settlements, illegal under the Geneva Convention and illegitimate according to the U.S. State Department, continue to expand in the West Bank and East Jerusalem despite international condemnation.

Many companies profit from the illegal Israeli military occupation and siege. These include Caterpillar, which provides bulldozers used to demolish Palestinian homes; Hewlett-Packard, which produces bioscanners used to profile Palestinians and track their movements; and Combined Systems Inc, which manufactures tear gas used on nonviolent protesters.

It is time for our university to join institutions like the Presbyterian Church (USA), the United Methodist Church, the Mennonite Church, the Quaker Friends Fiduciary Corporation, and Teachers Insurance and Annuity (TIAA-CREF) in divesting from such companies.

We therefore call on Princeton University to divest from all companies that contribute to or profit from the Israeli occupation of the West Bank until the State of Israel complies with UN Resolution 242, ends its military occupation of the West Bank, and lifts its siege of Gaza.

Faculty/staff/students can sign here.

Alums can sign here.

Members of the community, including families and friends of students, faculty, or staff, can sign here.

Once you sign, please circulate this widely.

Multicultural, Intersectional: It’s Not Your Daddy’s KKK

So I know I wrote this in The Reactionary Mind:

Beyond these simple professions of envy or admiration, the conservative actually copies and learns from the revolution he opposes. “To destroy that enemy,” Burke wrote of the Jacobins, “by some means or other, the force opposed to it should be made to bear some analogy and resemblance to the force and spirit which that system exerts.”

This is one of the most interesting and least understood aspects of conservative ideology. While conservatives are hostile to the goals of the left, particularly the empowerment of society’s lower castes and classes, they often are the left’s best students.

Sometimes, their studies are self-conscious and strategic, as they look to the left for ways to bend new vernaculars, or new media, to their suddenly delegitimated aims. Fearful that the philosophes had taken control of popular opinion in France, reactionary theologians in the middle of the eighteenth century looked to the example of their enemies. They stopped writing abstruse disquisitions for each other and began to produce Catholic agitprop, which would be distributed through the very networks that brought enlightenment to the French people. They spent vast sums funding essay contests, like those in which Rousseau made his name, to reward writers who wrote accessible and popular defenses of religion.

…

Even without directly engaging the progressive argument, conservatives may absorb, by some elusive osmosis, the deeper categories and idioms of the left, even when those idioms run directly counter to their official stance. After years of opposing the women’s movement, for example, Phyllis Schlafly seemed genuinely incapable of conjuring the prefeminist view of women as deferential wives and mothers. Instead, she celebrated the activist “power of the positive woman.”…When she spoke out against the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), she didn’t claim that it introduced a radical new language of rights. Her argument was the opposite. The ERA, she told the Washington Star, “is a takeaway of women’s rights.” It will “take away the right of the wife in an ongoing marriage, the wife in the home.” Schlafly was obviously using the language of rights in a way that was opposed to the aims of the feminist movement; she was using rights talk to put women back into the home, to keep them as wives and mothers. But that is the point: conservatism adapts and adopts, often unconsciously, the language of democratic reform to the cause of hierarchy.

Still, I was surprised to read this in the International Business Times:

White supremacist organisation, the Ku Klux Klan is rebranding as the “new Klan” by trying to increase membership to Jews, black people, gays and those of Hispanic origin.

…

Some black people have already expressed an interest in joining, after John Abarr organised a summit with civil rights groups.

Abarr, who has claimed that he is a former white supremacist, told the Great Falls Tribune, “The KKK is for a strong America. White supremacy is the old Klan. This is the new Klan.”

Abarr has organised a peace summit with religious groups and the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP) next summer.

The KKK organiser from Great Falls, Montana told the Associated Press that he filled out a membership card to NAACP, not only paying the $30 enrollment fee but also adding a $20 donation.

Jimmy Simmons, a president of the Montana NAACP chapter, said that while he questioned the use of the letters KKK, if the peace summit took place, he would “take a strong look” at joining the Rocky Mountain Knights.

“If John Abarr was actually reformed, he could drop the label of the KKK,” said Rachel Carroll-Rivas from the Montana Human Rights Network. “They know that their beliefs aren’t popular, so they try to appear moderate. I think it’s just a farce. Our mission for the last 24 years has been to shine a light on hatred.”

However, the more traditional elements of the organisation were unhappy about the direction Abarr is heading in.

Bradley Jenkins, Imperial Wizard of the KKK, said: “That man’s going against everything the bylaws of the constitution of the KKK say. He’s trying to hide behind the KKK to further his political career.”

In 2011 Abarr, describing himself as a former KKK organiser, ran as a Republican for Montana’s seat in the US House of Representatives, reportedly believing there would be a backlash against President Obama’s re-election.

According to an Associated Press report at the time, Abarr’s manifesto included “promises to legalize marijuana, increase mental health programs, keep abortion legal, abolish the death penalty… and ‘save the White Race.'”

At the time mainstream Republicans denounced Abarr as a racist. “There’s no room for racism in our party,” said Rich Hill, a former Republican congressman who lost the 2012 election for Montana’s governor. “That is not what we are about, and we have never been about that.”

Thoughts on Migration and Exile on the 25th Anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall

Over at Crooked Timber, Chris Bertram writes:

Yesterday I was listening to BBC Radio 4, and they were remembering the people who died, shot by East German border guards. It doesn’t seem to occur to our official voices of commemoration that there are parallels today with the thousands who die trying to escape tyranny, war or poverty and who drown in the Mediterranean, perish from thirst in the Arizona desert, or with those who the Australian government turns back at sea or interns offshore.

He’s right. Years ago, I reviewed two books on migration, immigration, and exile—one by Caroline Moorehead, the other by Seyla Benhabib—for The Nation. Here’s a factoid from that review:

Between 1994 and 2001, at least 1,700 migrants from Mexico died trying to reach the United States. Throughout its entire existence, by contrast, exactly 171 people died trying to cross the Berlin wall.

And that, mind you, was under the Clinton regime, before the last decade and a half of agitation around the extension and elaboration of a security wall between Mexico and the United States.

It’s been years since I (and probably anyone) read that Nation review, so I thought I’d reprint it here. If anything I suspect what I had to say then is even  truer now.

• • • • •

Nathan Berzok, son of Joseph and Mollie, was born in Odessa on October 7, 1905. A multicultural metropolis on the Black Sea, Odessa was home to some 138,000 Jews–and the site, eleven days after Nathan’s birth, of a four-day pogrom that took at least 400 of their lives. The Berzoks survived; Mollie hid Nathan in a stove. But like many of Odessa’s Jews, they took the pogrom as a sign that it was time to pack their bags. On March 1, 1908, Nathan, his two older brothers and Mollie arrived at Ellis Island. Joseph was there waiting for them, having already left Odessa to scout out New York. When he spied his wife and three sons inside the immigration center, Joseph rolled them oranges under the railing–the sweetest of signs that they had permanently left Odessa and its pogroms behind.

Nathan Berzok was my grandfather. But it wasn’t until I had nearly finished Human Cargo, Caroline Moorehead’s book about contemporary refugees and migrants, that I even thought of these stories, which he told me while I was growing up. I hadn’t forgotten them. They just didn’t register as I read Moorehead’s harrowing tales of people fleeing persecution, warfare and destitution, traveling thousands of miles in search of a new and better life.

Despite the efforts of postmodern theorists to convince us that exile is the emblematic condition of modern life, when it comes to immigrants and refugees we still seem incapable of the barest gesture of recognition, much less empathy. We remember Oedipus Rex: lover of one parent, killer of another. We forget Oedipus at Colonus: exiled king who wandered twenty years in search of “a resting place” near Athens, “where I should find home” and “round out there my bitter life.” We feel Medea’s rage over Jason’s betrayal, driving her to kill their two sons. We scarcely notice her equally poignant–and more frequent–lament that she is “deserted, a refugee,” with “no harbor from ruin to reach easily.”

Even those of us who for reasons of personal background, religion or politics should be most sensitive to the suffering of refugees can be astonishingly indifferent to their plight. “Four hundred years of bondage in Egypt,” Cynthia Ozick has written, “rendered as metaphoric memory, can be spoken in a moment; in a single sentence. What this sentence is, we know; we have built every idea of moral civilization on it. It is a sentence that conceivably sums up at the start every revelation that came afterward…. ‘The stranger that sojourneth with you shall be unto you as the home-born among you, and you shall love him as yourself; because you were strangers in the land of Egypt.'”

Fine, even beautiful, words, both the original and the gloss. But where are we to find them in Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, from the exile it thrust upon them in 1948 to the ongoing hostility to their return–or, for that matter, in Ozick’s anti-Arab fulminations? From one vantage, the story of Israel and Palestine can seem the most idiosyncratic of ironies: A people forced to wander thousands of years forces another people to wander for who knows how many years. From another vantage, the story is sadly universal: the refusal to see or imagine oneself in the pain of another, even–or particularly–when one has suffered a similar ordeal. If exile has any larger import, then, it is not that we all share in its status. It is that it occasions the most sacred and sublime of obligations–“love him as yourself”–and the most wretched of betrayals.

Consider two points often made in debates about refugees and immigrants. Writers and politicians, in this country and in Western Europe, have long complained that immigrants and refugees do not conform to the rules and norms of liberal democracy. Arabs and Africans, we are often informed, do not accept the rights of women; Muslims are more loyal to their religion than to the state (something said of Europe’s Jews not so long ago); immigrants carry, along with their luggage and food, the conflicts and violence of their countries of origin to their new homes. Since 9/11 writers and politicians have grown increasingly apprehensive about the security threat posed by Muslims and Arabs. Worried about insufficient assimilation and potential terrorism, many commentators now believe that Western countries need to reconsider their open immigration policies.

What’s most interesting about these claims is not their truth or falsity but the terms of the debate, in which even the most right-minded men and women feel free to toss off one or two adjectives as a complete account of an entire people. When a Dutch vegan murdered the gay right-wing politician Pim Fortuyn, the distinction between a criminal and his dietary tastes remained sharp. But when Mohammed Bouyeri, a Muslim with dual citizenship in the Netherlands and Morocco, murdered Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, a leap was instantly made from a lone assassin to an entire religion and region. Debates about immigration not only turn newcomers into outlaws; they also transform native-born citizens into a church of unsullied virtue. Start an argument in France about Muslim women wearing the hijab, and suddenly every Frenchman is a feminist.

What is it about immigrants and refugees that frees us from the stricture against guilt by association and the duty to treat individuals as individuals? Perhaps it is simply because we can. It is in the nature of immigration regimes, after all, to classify each arrival or departure as an instance of a larger whole. And because the immigrant’s entry into or exit from a society is a question of choice–sometimes his or hers, always ours–there’s a tendency on the part of host countries to assume that vexing social issues can be resolved merely by removing a distasteful ingredient from the mix.

It would be a mistake, however, to view the immigrant–or the exile or refugee–as simply a symbol of our fallen humanity, forever standing outside the gates of time, accusing us of hypocrisy and disregard. Exiles, refugees and immigrants are the subjects and objects of history and politics: in their countries of origin and destination, in the economies that push and pull them, in the global conflicts between contending state powers. And it is Moorehead’s sensitivity to these historical circumstances and political contingencies–not to mention her considerable skills as a writer and storyteller–that makes her book such a vital contribution to debates over migration.

Moorehead is a British writer who has been reporting on human rights since the early 1980s. Working in an already crowded genre, she differs from those showy journalists of alarm who view the distress of others as an opportunity for overwrought prose and self-display. Though a vital presence on the page–indeed, we occasionally see her intervening in the lives of the refugees she profiles–she is devoted to the quiet narration of disquieting fact. Each of Moorehead’s chapters focuses on a different set of migrants trying to make their way across a different border. Wherever they are–in Sicily, northern Britain, Finland, Tijuana, Australia, southern Lebanon, Cairo or Guinea–she is with them. If her brief is universal, her eye and ear are local, attuned and affixed to the toll of state policies and their historical context. Inevitably, she brings to mind the great Martha Gellhorn, the subject of her last biography, whose “small, still voice” carried a “barely contained fury and indignation at the injustice of fate and man against the poor, the weak, the dispossessed.”

In the past century, Moorehead argues, no historical force has had more immediate effect on immigration politics than the cold war. Throughout that conflict, exiles and refugees were treated as political gold, especially in the West. Eager to expose the tyranny of the Soviet Union and its allies, the anti-Communist powers spearheaded international conventions and institutions that firmly established the refugee as a victim of repression, unable to go back to her native land because of “a well-founded fear of persecution.” The persecutors were presumed to be “totalitarian Communist regimes, and the refugees were therefore, by definition, ‘good.'” Whether Soviet scientists or Vietnamese boat people, refugees were happily received by the United States, Western Europe and other countries. Indeed, during the 1970s, some 2 million people from Indochina found a home in the West. (Though the United States, it should be pointed out, never rolled out the red carpet to the victims of its interventions in Central America.)

With the end of the cold war, millions of people living under former Communist rule could move more freely, whether out of fear of repression and civil war or in the hope of economic opportunity. Mass migration, free and forced, has always been a central element of capitalism, from the Europeans who colonized the Americas in the seventeenth century to the Indians who settled in Africa in the nineteenth. Once the Communist world succumbed to the free market, that economic migration accelerated–though not, Moorehead writes, as much as we might think. “Most people today, as in the past, are not mobile. Somewhere between 2 and 3 percent of the world’s population can be counted as international migrants…the proportion is no higher and no lower than at any time in the last fifty years.” Still, the promise of economic betterment–and the need for cheap labor–remains a potent lure, reinforced by the threat or reality of persecution and violence in the Third World.

Released from the constraints of the cold war, prosperous nations have devised more elaborate measures to control, limit and regulate this movement of peoples. (Ironically, for all the recent talk of global flows, the cold war may have paved wider lanes of traffic.) Racism and xenophobia are, of course, permanent fixtures of immigration politics, albeit in varying degrees of intensity. But the end of the cold war allowed Western governments to indulge an image of the refugee as an economic and cultural parasite–crawling across or burrowing beneath the border in order to sap the nation’s affluence and identity. September 11 and the “war on terror” have only hardened this impulse. “The whole notion of security, once seen as a matter of keeping refugees safe…has shifted. Now it is the refugees themselves who are seen to pose the danger.”

Australia has been the leader of this trend, as Moorehead shows, establishing “one of the most exclusionary immigration policies of any democracy” in the world. Where most countries sell their beaches, nightlife or mountains to potential tourists, the Australian government has distributed a video depicting an island continent “inhabited by poisonous snakes, fearsome crocodiles, and man-eating sharks.” In 2001 the government instituted “the Pacific Solution,” in which trespassers would be intercepted at sea and deposited in Indonesia or transferred to “off-shore processing centers.” Under no circumstances would they be allowed on Australian soil and thereby gain access to the courts. Deprived of all hope–and traditional implements of self-destruction–detainees have been known to sew up their lips or drink whole bottles of shampoo.

On the Mexican border, US officials have built sharp slopes along canals separating the two countries, making it difficult for anyone to climb out on the American side. The Clinton Administration launched a succession of militarized endeavors–Operation Blockade, Operation Hold the Line, Operation Gatekeeper–in the name of “prevention through deterrence.” As a result, migrants and refugees now swim across rivers teeming with typhoid, cholera, and hepatitis, “holding their breaths under submerged bridges and along a twenty-foot culvert.” Between 1994 and 2001, at least 1,700 migrants from Mexico died trying to reach the United States. Throughout its entire existence, by contrast, exactly 171 people died trying to cross the Berlin wall.

For all its pretensions to liberalism and openness, Western Europe has hardly been more welcoming. (Moorehead cites the case of one refugee in Britain leaving a suicide note that read, “You have to kill yourself in this country to prove that you would be killed in your own country.”) In response, many Africans have attempted to sail surreptitiously across the Mediterranean in vessels the Phoenicians would have scuttled long ago.

On a stormy night in September 2002, to cite just one of Moorehead’s examples, a boat built to carry fifteen people went down less than 100 meters off Sicily’s southern coast. As tourists danced unknowingly at a popular bar on the beach, thirty-five of the 150 Liberians on board drowned and twenty more disappeared. Watching the bloated bodies float to shore over a period of days was gruesome enough. But what truly haunted Vera Sciortino, a local resident, was the thought of hungry fish feeding on the corpses. The inverse of little Oskar Matzerath’s mother in The Tin Drum–so filled with disgust upon seeing a horse’s head writhing with eels that she begins to eat fish obsessively–Vera was never able to eat fish again.

It would be some comfort if we could confine the misery of life on the move to Western Europe, North America and Australia. But as Moorehead reminds us, 90 percent of all refugees remain in the region of their birth, and Iran, Pakistan and Tanzania receive the most refugees of any country in the world. Not surprisingly, these and other governments are just as reluctant–and certainly less able, economically–to absorb people from abroad.

Cairo, the mise-en-scene of Human Cargo, is “a staging post” for “Africa’s displaced people…a step on a journey that should, but seldom does, move from terror to safety.” As they wait for the gates of Fortress Europe or North America to open, refugees and migrants from Liberia and Sudan are hassled and beaten by the Egyptian police, robbed in the streets and forced to stand in lines at immigration centers that would make the most harried holiday shopper blanch–only to find at the end of the day that the store has closed or run out of goods. For many migrants, homelessness turns out to be a kind of salvation: Only in Cairo’s uncharted slums and squats can they be somewhat assured of protection from the police.

In southern Lebanon Palestinian refugees suffer from the racism of their hosts, which keeps them out of jobs and power, and from the fear among the Lebanese that this largely Muslim refugee population will upset the country’s delicate confessional balance. Forbidden to expand their refugee camps “outward,” Palestinians are forced to build Manhattans of misery out of cinder blocks and scraps of tin: “Much of the inner camp [of Shatila] is almost completely dark, the daylight reduced to a pale glimmer by the overarching buildings and the canopy of wires that dangle not far above the head. Windows open onto walls.” Where migrants to New York City like my grandfather could look out such windows and see the world, Palestine’s refugees gaze out on a road to nowhere.

Like Moorehead, Seyla Benhabib, a professor of political science and philosophy at Yale, writes out of a moral concern for the rights of refugees and migrants and the wrongs done to them. To this she adds a refreshingly cosmopolitan vision of travel and association between and among different peoples. Unlike Moorehead, though, Benhabib is a political theorist, whose profession requires a certain abstraction from the concrete and often ugly details of the refugee experience. If Moorehead’s credo is no ideas but in things, Benhabib’s, by necessity, is no things but in ideas.

Lest readers assume that the first enterprise is more to their liking, Benhabib’s The Rights of Others shows–unflinchingly, astutely and bravely–that immigration remains such a pitched battle in the West because it is part of a larger war of ideas, fought between two contending, even morally attractive, ideals. On the one side are the rights of democratic polities to govern themselves. On the other are the rights of asylum seekers, refugees and migrants to enter, remain and ultimately join those polities as full and equal members.

In many ways, this conflict is a version of the old debate between liberalism and democracy, between a commitment to universal rights, which cannot be challenged or overturned, and a vision of mass participation, which puts everything, even rights, up to a vote. But when liberal universalists–or libertarians and free marketers–square off against populist democrats over immigration, seemingly innocent moral positions can assume toxic political form. One side bends toward the dissolution of all borders, toward an international regime that would protect rights everywhere, inviting charges of despotism and imperialism. The other slouches toward national chauvinism, insisting that the people have a right to preserve “their way of life” from intruding others.

Benhabib argues that the second camp–which includes a surprisingly wide array of defenders in academia–makes a series of mistakes. Beyond ignoring the fact that most nations have already committed themselves, by treaty, to welcoming refugees and asylum seekers (though not economic migrants), many populists assume that the nation has a fixed identity, that its mix of customs, habits and history is indivisible and unchanging rather than conflicted and in flux.

Immigrants and refugees, in this view, threaten rather than renew or enrich a people. But “peoplehood,” Benhabib reminds us, “is an aspiration; it is not a fact.” A list of titles from the past three decades–Eugen Weber’s Peasants Into Frenchmen, Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, Noel Ignatiev’s How the Irish Became White and Rogers Smith’s Stories of Peoplehood–echoes her argument that nations are made, not born, and that stories and myths, laws and institutions, are the necessary instruments of their making.

The most noxious element of the populist position, according to Benhabib, is that it dissolves the ideal of democracy in the illusions of blood, ethnicity and sameness. As all of us learned in high school or college, early Americans–like Americans today–were fundamentally divided about questions of power and authority. It was not their common racial stock but divisive conflicts among them, and between them and those who did not share their ethnicity or heritage, that set the nation on its faltering and unsteady march toward greater freedom and equality. Democracy is thus a political art, Benhabib observes, not a cultural or racial inheritance. Just as nothing in the literature or veins of a nation predisposes it to democracy, nothing in the immigrant precludes him or her from contributing to democracy.

In fact, one could argue–and Benhabib does–that immigrants sustain and expand democracy by fighting for rights and broadening popular notions of “we, the people.” This point was brought home to me one Saturday eight years ago, when I was organizing in Los Angeles around several items on the ballot: a referendum on bilingual education, another on the political contributions of labor unions and a city council election. Walking door to door with a Spanish-speaking hotel worker from Guatemala, I listened to her explain to her neighbors the ins and outs of American electoral law, the powers of local versus state governments and the US Constitution. The irony was not lost on me: Not only do immigrants deepen democracy; they sometimes understand its substance and procedures better than its native proponents do.

But if Benhabib refuses to join the second camp, she is also wary of the first. Though she finds the notion of a world without borders morally attractive, she fears that its political embodiment could be dangerous. Inherent in the idea of democracy, she argues, is that the authors of the law should be its subjects and that the subjects of the law should be its authors. Unless we imagine a world government or international-rights regime–which would radically dilute the power each individual exercises over and through her national government–we have to accept that democracy requires a territorially bounded space. As she points out, where “empires have frontiers,” extending as far as the metropolis can rule, “democracies have borders.”

Benhabib’s understanding of democracy as a territorially bounded unit does pose some problems, which she herself acknowledges. On the one hand, she favors a liberal immigration regime of “porous” but not “open” borders–where, first, asylum seekers and refugees, and second, migrants (in that order of preference) would be allowed to enter a country and, after a specified period of time, offered the opportunity to join it as citizens. But given her commitment to democratic deliberation–and the likelihood that many people would reject her preferred regime–how can Benhabib insist upon that regime, over and against the expressed wishes of the people? On the other hand, if those who are subject to a nation’s laws should be its authors, why shouldn’t immigrants have a say in formulating those laws? Surely no one is more subject to those laws than they.

Benhabib’s solution is to insist that all nations, particularly democracies, must ground their immigration policies in standards of argument and justification that everyone–including the immigrant–would accept as reasonable. These are standards that “you would accept if you were in my situation and I were in yours” and that treat men and women as individuals capable of rational debate and justification. Because these ideals of reciprocity and rational justification are the moral underpinning of liberal democracy, such democracies must not stray from them in their immigration policies.

What this means in practice is that no democracy can bar people from entering or, if they have already entered, from becoming citizens, because of their “race, gender, religion, ethnicity, language community, or sexuality.” Criteria like these would not be acceptable to all peoples. Nor do such criteria treat an immigrant or potential immigrant as someone who can enter a rational discussion with us.

At the same time, nations can require immigrants to “show certain qualifications, skills, and resources.” Because everyone can understand why a nation would need or want people with those skills or resources, these criteria would be acceptable to everyone. Nations can also establish “language competence” and “a certain proof of civic literacy” as conditions, where applicable, for entry or citizenship. Such criteria “do not deny” an immigrant’s capacity for dialogue or rationality. On the contrary, their very premise recognizes that capacity. Democratic debate over immigration may not be a free-for-all, then, but it does leave room for disagreement.

From Benhabib’s earliest work on Habermas and the Frankfurt School, her high standard of argument and justification has always been the best advertisement for a certain kind of cosmopolitan liberalism. There is likewise much to admire in this book, not least her willingness to give sound reasons for her positions. But The Rights of Others raises questions, at least for me, that need to be answered.

For starters, why should linguistic competence be a factor–or acceptable as an item of democratic debate–in determining citizenship? As my comrade for a day in Los Angeles would attest, a non-English speaker in the United States not only can get and hold down a job; she can also turn out the vote. Why should a non-English speaker be allowed to mobilize for American democracy but not to join it as a citizen?

Conversely, why should we require “a certain proof of civic literacy” for immigrants seeking to become citizens? I know a great many native-born Americans who could not pass such a test. Why should immigrants have to prove that which the native-born need not–and, in some cases, could not–prove? Doesn’t this double standard assume the very view that Benhabib so skillfully takes apart elsewhere in her book, namely, that Americans take in democracy with their mother’s milk?

While the economic criteria Benhabib accepts–“qualifications, skills, and resources”–avoid the ascriptive criteria of race and gender she rejects (though the two may be more closely linked in practice, a point I shall return to shortly), it’s not clear that these criteria stand the test of reciprocity she favors. Would a poor immigrant really accept the stringent economic qualifications that a middle-class citizen has voted for? Would she accept the underlying reasons for those justifications? Would an unemployed worker in a rich country accept the liberal immigration regime that a wealthy employer in that same country has lobbied for? Could each of us–citizen and immigrant, rich and poor, employer and employee–find a position that all of us would accept? I doubt it.

And what would such economic criteria look like in practice? Only people with advanced computer skills or a college degree need apply? Only those who have held down a job for five years can stay and become citizens? (The more likely scenario, of course, is that the employing classes of a prosperous country will favor liberal immigration policies–or allow, with a nod and a wink, millions of undocumented workers to cross the border in order to staff the bottom tiers of the economy.) It’s ironic that a regime implementing Benhabib’s criteria of “marketable skills” could prove more restrictive than the United States that allowed my grandfather into this country a century ago.

Benhabib could reply that yesterday’s United States is not today’s, that America in 1900 required millions of uneducated workers from Eastern and Southern Europe and East and Southeast Asia in order to build its expanding industrial economy. She might be right, but that only raises a deeper, more troubling, question: Has Benhabib offered a critique of society or–in some important respects–merely reflected it? How far does her theory, with its stringent opposition to policies of ascription and mild toleration of economic exclusions, depart from contemporary norms? Though I doubt that Benhabib personally would favor economic exclusions–she claims that democracies can institute them, not that she would support them–it says something about our moment that they can be accepted, without much argument, as the inevitable price of democracy.

There was a time when nothing so vexed left-liberals as how to justify such economic distinctions–not in the realm of immigration policies but in capitalism’s distribution of resources. Facing worker activism at home and then communist insurgencies abroad, theorists from John Stuart Mill to T.H. Marshall to John Rawls were forced either to defend the inequalities of capitalism or to offer some program for their amelioration and gradual abolition. Through their efforts, classical liberalism was nudged, ever so slowly, toward something approaching social democracy.

Benhabib has neither forgotten nor abandoned this heritage. In one section of her book, she discusses the inequalities of the international political economy, arguing that prosperous nations often accumulate their wealth through the misery of poorer nations–a fact, as she points out, that Rawls never confronted in his discussions of global economic justice. But the inferences Benhabib draws–and doesn’t draw–from this discussion suggest the contemporary weakness of that heritage. In countering the claims of Rawlsian leftists that the globe’s resources and assets should be redistributed in order to benefit the world’s “least advantaged,” Benhabib writes that we lack “clear and non-controversial judgments about who is to count as ‘the least advantaged’ member of society.” Yet even more controversy surrounds the ascriptive identities she wishes to take off the table. (Controversy would also surround, were they subject to genuine international debate, the economic criteria that Benhabib argues everyone would accept.) Why does one controversy inspire her to push and another to pull?

More important, Benhabib derives no moral conclusion about immigration policy from these international inequities. Distinguishing between economic and ascriptive criteria in theory, she overlooks how they are intertwined in practice–in part because of the very history of slavery and imperialism that she discusses. Race and class have made a witch’s brew of inequality in the United States, and many of the poorest classes in today’s Europe hail from its former colonies in Africa and the Middle East. If I understand Benhabib’s criteria correctly, it would not be unreasonable for Europe to refuse entry or deny citizenship to these men and women and their families on economic grounds, even though the motivation or effect of such refusals could be entirely skewed by the color of their skin.

Whether or not Benhabib’s distinction holds up in reality, shouldn’t the mere fact that the United States has ravaged its neighbors to the south play some role in its decisions about whether to accept economic migrants from that region? Shouldn’t the misery that Western Europe imposed upon Africa and elsewhere figure in the moral calculus of its immigration policies? Shouldn’t these histories of exploitation at least mitigate the “qualifications, skills, and resources” that wealthier countries require of newcomers? As South Asians and Caribbeans in Britain used to say, “We are here because you were there.”

Benhabib and Moorehead both show that people flee not only persecution and civil war but also poverty and destitution. That this reality–and the contributions of Western Europe and the United States to it–is not reflected in our contemporary immigration regimes or in the work of our best theorists is a problem. I wish I could say that it was Benhabib’s alone. Sadly, I think it’s ours, too.

From Berlin to Jerusalem

Twenty-five years ago, almost to the day, when men and women did the exact same thing in Berlin, it was heralded as the dawn of a new age of universal progress and civilization. Let’s see how this incident in Israel today is reported, if it’s reported at all.

Palestinian smashes hole in the separation wall near Jerusalem.

Send in the Couch Brigades: A Palimpsest of Freud, Phillip Rieff, and the Sandinistas

In my first two years of college, I was very much under the spell of Freud and Hofstadter/Weber. I was convinced that all political and social conflicts could be reduced to questions of sex and status. (Actually, I was probably much more under the spell of high school than anything else.) Anyway, my roommate David Hughes, who was more political and more of an activist than I—as in, he was political and he was an activist, whereas I was neither—summarized my worldview thus: “In your eyes, Nicaraguans don’t need the Sandinistas [this was the mid-80s]; we should just send in the couch brigades.”

Sometimes I think the entirety of my intellectual career has been little more than an extended attempt to extricate myself from that worldview. And probably the most important book for me along the way has been Philip Rieff’s Freud: The Mind of the Moralist, which, to this day, remains the best book ever written on Freud.