Corey Robin's Blog, page 8

It’s the Only Face I Have

One of the big mistakes we make when we think about fear is to oppose fear to hope. Hope against fear, that’s the credo. And it’s badly mistaken. Nadezdha Mandelstam was one of the great writers on Stalinism. Her husband, the poet Osip Mandelstam, was murdered in 1938. She survived the purges and went on to write a miracle of a memoir titled, aptly, Hope Against Hope. This is what she had to say on the topic of hope and fear: Until a short time before, I had been full of concern for all my friends and relatives, for my work, for everything I set store by. Now this concern was gone—and fear, too…Having entered a realm of non-being, I […]

Pasionaria of the American State

MSNBC had on Susan Rice, Obama’s National Security Advisor, who claimed there that Signalgate, as it’s now being called, is “likely the biggest national security debacle that any professional can remember.” My first thought was, really? The biggest national security debacle that anyone can remember? Forget Vietnam, which might have well have happened under the Holy Roman Empire. What about, oh, I don’t know, the Iraq War? My second thought was, yeah, probably from the perspective of the “professional” class in DC, who can’t remember what happened two days ago, let alone what happened two decades ago, this probably is the biggest debacle that any of them can remember. My third thought was, wow, even when she’s obviously trying to […]

Pasionara of the American State

MSNBC had on Susan Rice, Obama’s National Security Advisor, who claimed there that Signalgate, as it’s now being called, is “likely the biggest national security debacle that any professional can remember.” My first thought was, really? The biggest national security debacle that anyone can remember? Forget Vietnam, which might have well have happened under the Holy Roman Empire. What about, oh, I don’t know, the Iraq War? My second thought was, yeah, probably from the perspective of the “professional” class in DC, who can’t remember what happened two days ago, let alone what happened two decades ago, this probably is the biggest debacle that any of them can remember. My third thought was, wow, even when she’s obviously trying to […]

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

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

Only the Wrestlers Can Save Us?

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

Patriarchy and the Labor Theory of Value

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

The careerist and the collaborator

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

From Max Weber to Zohran Mamdani

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

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

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

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

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