Cure-alls and Remedies
John Keane imagined Havel’s funeral in 1999 : Prague would double in size. As he lay in state in the old Castle of the Bohemian kings above the city, a queue some miles long would spring up. Mourners would wait all day, and all night, to see his body for the last time. The day of the funeral…
Peter Levine’s post on Havel’s 1992 speech in Poland reminded me that I had planned to do some writing about Havel before he died. The New York Times titled his obituary ” A Melding of the Artist’s Politics and the Politician’s Art ,” and yet it focuses only on his writing career and offers not…
Apparently, it did! On Thursday, I produced a graph and some older papers in economics that made the case that there is a pretty clear trend in campaign spending that was completely unaffected by the 2002 BCRA. However, I’m a philosopher, not an econometrician, so I left off the most important part: comparing growth in…
So I’ve just completed grading 55 papers on Citizens United v FEC , and though I’d kind of like to reflect on it a bit, I’m also finding that grading has totally exhausted my interest in the legal questions. (But seriously: the personhood question is a red herring!) Maybe later this week I’ll post…
Today Dr. J encourages her readers to understand the Occupy Wall Street movement through the lens of Aristotle’s Metaphysics: The Occupy Movement is like our sense of sight. It’s not (instrumentally) valuable for what it allows us to see, but rather it’s (intrinsically) valuable in that it allows us to see. Like sight, it “brings to light many differences…
Whenever I talk to students about democracy, I like to emphasize that the original term for democratic rule was isonomy . Consider the account Otanes gives in Herodotus’ History : “[T]he rule of the multitude [plêthos de archon] has… the loveliest name of all, equality [isonomiên]…. It determines offices by lot, and holds power accountable, and…
Most discussions of the Commons assume that common-pool resources are supplied by nature, like the English fields that were available to locals for grazing, cultivation, and hay-cutting until the Inclosure Acts . However, it is equally possible to create new common pool resources for local control. Kojo Nnamdi spent an hour on his radio show…
I’ve been looking for good articles on local governance, in part related to the Tufts Summer Institute, and in part related to my goal of transforming my ethics course so that it takes up the paired questions of the Good Life and the Good Citizen. One resource for this is Sharon Meagher’s textbook Philosophy and…
In his new book 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism , Ha-Joon Chang offers a progressive explanation for what Tyler Cowen calls “The Great Stagnation ,” the slowing growth in public goods available for consumption or redistribution. Between his various jibes at a strawman version of the standard economic model, Chang offers a…
I’ve just returned from two weeks at the Tufts Summer Institute of Civic Studies , which culminated in a conference attended by 117 researchers, practitioners, philanthropists, and public officials interested in expanding the role of citizens in our democracy. Peter Levine summed up the conference here : The Frontiers conference was modeled on No Better…