Reading <Emphasis Type="Italic">The American Political Tradition</Emphasis> in the 21st Century

Brilliantly written, powerfully argued, The American Political Tradition by Richard Hofstadter, published in 1948, is flawed for readers today because of serious gaps and omissions, in particular its lack of reference to African American figures and sources. Late in his career, Hofstadter began to broaden his range of reference, calling attention in vivid prose to the horrors of slavery during the long period of American settlement and colonization. This later emphasis exposes all the more the shortcomings of The American Tradition, yet, at the same time, it does not diminish the rhetorical power and insight of this important book. It remains a significant work of American history but, even more, we should read and respond to it now as a major achievement, a distinguished act of writing, in the field of American literature.     

Remembering Bill Niskanen: pursuing economics as a public science in the service of liberty

This short essay is a memorial piece about William A. Niskanen (13 March 1933–26 October 2011). The essay starts with his time at the University of Chicago in the mid-1950s, and gives most attention to his contributions to public choice. Especial attention is paid to his Bureaucracy and Representative Government, which opened vast territory for subsequent analytical exploration. A good deal of attention is also paid to his Autocratic, Democratic, and Optimal Government because this work both conveys his interest in comparative constitutional analysis and is useful for illustrating the strengths and weaknesses of his approach to this material.     

Donald and Winston at the Ministry of Alternative Facts

Sales of Nineteen Eighty-Four and other dystopian classics have risen in response to the audacious attempts of President Donald Trump to manipulate public opinion by circulating “alternative facts” throughout the presidential campaign and since his November 2016 election victory. Various statements by Trump and his advisors that exemplify what has come to be known as the “post-factual world” account for the meteoric rise and final breakthrough of Nineteen Eighty-Four to the top of the bestseller lists in spring 2017.     

Election campaign resource allocation

This paper examines an electoral competition model where a candidate allocates his campaign efforts (resources) on two competing projects prior to election. A candidate is congruent if his objective is consistent with the wishes of his constituents and there is no potential political shirking. We show that a congruent candidate needs not exert any efforts towards successful implementation prior to election; however, a less than perfectly congruent candidate must exert efforts prior to election. In equilibrium, two campaign resource allocation strategies emerge; (1) concentrate resources on one project and (2) allocate resources evenly across both projects. We discuss potential inefficiencies that are resulted by these allocation strategies.     

The Warm Liberalism of Erik Gustaf Geijer

The name Erik Gustaf Geijer (1783–1847) is little known outside of Sweden, but the volume Freedom in Sweden: Selected Works of Erik Gustaf Geijer (Geijer 2017) translates choice works and presents Geijer to modern readers. In this essay we provide an introduction to Geijer (pronounced yay-yer). We raise the question of whether his declaring, in 1838, in dramatic fashion, for liberalism was an ideological migration or a coming out of the closet. We discuss the scope and flavor of his discourse, and suggest that he belongs in the company of moral philosophers and historians of civilization such as David Hume, Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, and Alexis de Tocqueville. We highlight his essay “An Economic Dream,” which prefigured Hayek’s likening of the price system to an allegory of society-spanning communication and intelligence.     

The outcome-prediction strategy in cases denied certiorari by the U.S. Supreme Court

We investigate whether the substantial use of the outcome-prediction strategy by Supreme Court justices occurs in the petitions denied certiorari by the Court. We show with a computer simulation that [Caldeira, G.A., Wright, J.R., & Zorn, C.J.W. (1999). Journal of Law, Economics and Organization, 15, 549–572], who modeled the missing final votes for denied petitions in order to include them in their study of the use of the outcome-prediction strategy, may have obtained spurious results. Application of the logic of conditional probabilities to the denied petitions suggests that all but those denied by the narrowest of margins are probably considered unacceptable by the justices on non-outcome-oriented grounds, and, therefore, are not subject to use of this strategy. We evaluate the pursuit of the outcome-prediction strategy in petitions that narrowly fail to be granted cert by focusing upon the petitions that are narrowly granted cert and find limited use of the strategy. We conclude that the outcome-prediction strategy probably is little used by the justices in confronting the petitions denied cert and that investigations of the use of this strategy are best confined to those petitions granted cert.     

Pierre Bourdieu: From Neo-Kantian to Hegelian Critical Social Theory

Abstract

This paper challenges the commonly made claim that the work of Pierre Bourdieu is fundamentally anti-Hegelian in orientation. In contrast, it argues that the development of Bourdieu's work from its earliest structuralist through its later ‘post-structuralist’ phase is better described in terms of a shift from a late nineteenth century neo-Kantian to a distinctly Hegelian post-Kantian outlook. In his break with structuralism, Bourdieu appealed to a bodily based logic of practice' to explain the binaristic logic of Lévi-Strauss' structuralist analyses of myth. Effectively working within the tradition of the Durkheimian approach to symbolic classification, Lévi-Strauss had inherited Durkheim's distinctly neo-Kantian understanding of the role of categories in experience and action—an account that conflated two forms of representation—‘intuitions’ and ‘concepts’—that Kant himself had held distinct. Bourdieu's appeal to the role of the body's dispositional habitus can be considered as a retrieval of Hegel's earlier quite different reworking of Kant's intuition-concept distinction in terms of distinct ‘logics’ with different forms of ‘negation’. Bourdieu commonly acknowledged the parallels of his analyses of social life to those of Hegel, but opposed Hegelianism because he believed that Hegel had remained entrapped within the dynamics of mythopoeic thought. In contrast, Durkheim and Lévi-Strauss, he claimed, by instituting a science of myth, had broken with it. This criticism of Hegel, however, relies on an understanding of his philosophy that has been rejected by many contemporary Hegel scholars, and without it, the gap separating Hegel and Bourdieu narrows dramatically     

Hunters not Gatherers: Intelligence in the Twenty-First Century

Because of its origins in a sort of anti-Elizabethan paranoia against centralised government, the United States is poorly set up institutionally to cope with the major danger to itself in the twenty-first century: the threat posed by Islamist terrorism. The Director of Central Intelligence is neither central nor fully directing. A large part of the intelligence community, especially in terms of budgets and supervision, is outside his direct control. There is a 'waters edge' separation between the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the CIA. Essentially the CIA collects foreign intelligence and counter-intelligence overseas. The FBI, primarily a crime-oriented organisation, has had only a secondary function of domestic counter-intelligence. It is a case-oriented agency focused on establishing past facts in order to bring suspects to justice. It is psychologically ill-adapted to conceptualising threats that lie upstream, that is, in the future. In this context, September 11 can be most properly described as a failure of imagination. Remedies being proposed range from creating an internal security service à la Britain's MI5 to establishing a semi-autonomous domestic counter-intelligence agency within the FBI. In the field of covert action, intelligence in the twenty-first century likely will be characterised by what could be termed an offensive hunt strategy. Put in another way, intelligence operatives in the twenty-first century will become hunters, not gatherers. They will not simply sit back and gather information that comes in, analyse it, and then decide what to do about it. Rather they will have to go and hunt out intelligence that will enable them to track down or kill terrorists. This will involve sending operatives into countries with which we are not at war, indeed in some cases countries with which we have correct relations. In many circumstances, however, terrorist leaders will be hunted down with the help of host country elements. The likelihood is that this new strategy will be implemented primarily in terms of Special Forces operations aided by CIA elements. Modalities will have to be worked out between the Department of Defense and the CIA as to how such offensive hunt operations are to be carried out and how congressional oversight will be exercised.     

Finding social dilemma: West of Babel, not east of Eden

This paper refracts Gordon Tullock’s The Social Dilemma onto a framework of spontaneous order theorizing, and finds the refraction to work well. The Social Dilemma reveals Gordon Tullock to be a theorist whose conceptualizations are anchored in a societal setting represented better by networks than by fields, and where societal outcomes emerge out of local networked interaction. The theoretical orientation of The Social Dilemma is redolent with spontaneous order themes, including his adoption of a field of vision that looks for social order west of Babel and not east of Eden. The paper also makes some secondary effort to compare The Social Dilemma with James Buchanan’s The Limits of Liberty.     

Tax Britannica: Nineteenth Century Tariffs and British National Income

The literature on British economic history presumes thatBritain was a free trader after the repeal of the Corn Lawsand that her tariff levels were thus below those which wereoptimal for maximizing utility. Presumably, if the optimalBritish tariffs had been positive and greater than the levelsestablished by mid-century, a reduction to zero of all tariffsthat remained would have lowered British welfare even further.In this paper, we use a simple computable general equilibriummodel to simulate a drop in all British tariffs to zero. Theresulting substantial net increase in British welfaresuggests that British tariffs were much higher than would beconsistent with an optimum tariff policy. More important, thesize of British losses from her high tariff levels suggeststhat British policy was not consistent with the stance of anideological free trader.     

The Quest for Certainty and the Demise of Political Theory

In this paper, I contribute to the ongoing conversation in New Political Science regarding the status of political science in general, and political theory in particular. I argue that the quest for certainty and desire to quantify knowledge has not been limited to empiricist political scientists. The emphasis on quantification and deductive logic is found in many places within the political theory tradition itself. Time and again, mathematics and the physical sciences are held up as the model for all knowledge. I argue that this focus has led theorists to distance themselves from politics, either out of despair or disdain for the ambiguity and variability present in political life. While I do not propose that Aristotle provides a magic remedy for the current problems in the discipline, I suggest that his combined interest in logic and the close examination of material detail provides a perennially viable framework for political theory.     

The Paradox of American Global Power

This paper will address these two questions:

1. 1
   Can the US be meaningfully seen as an empire in the ways it has behaved since entering the world stage as a central player after World War II?
    
2. 2
   If it is an empire, how has this affected the quality of its democratic life and institutions? One central hypothesis connects both explorations. It can be formulated as follows: if there is a logic to the life of empires that one might call the imperial imperative—a logic according to which the pursuit of hegemonic control to the far periphery of empire calls for ever greater concentration of power at the center—the US too will show the effects of this logic. In spite of its creed of democracy and republicanism the US, acting as an empire, cannot escape this imperial imperative. An obvious test case is offered by the two recent presidencies of George W. Bush and of Barack Hussein Obama. Although the latter presented himself as the anti-Bush, opposing all transgressions of constitutional constraints that his predecessor had stood for, and promising to take America back to its first republican principles, the imperial imperative, according to our hypothesis, would prevent Obama from pursuing such a course.
    

     

Pluralism in the Mind and the Structure of Cognitive Minorities

In his book The Many Altars of Modernity Peter L. Berger (2014) called for the replacement of secularization theory, which in his view no longer has much relevance today, with a theory of (religious) pluralism. Such a theory must encompass two levels, the level of the mind and the level of society. In this paper I will focus on the level of mind and explain some of the conceptual linkages with the level of society which Berger only touches upon in his book. The paper’s main purpose, however, is to sketch out a framework in which Berger’s ideas on “pluralism in the mind” could be investigated empirically. I will argue to focus on “cognitive minorities”, that is, on groups of people whose understanding of the world differs significantly from that of their social environment. As concrete cases I suggest a comparative study of a religious group (Evangelical Protestants) in a strongly secularized city (Leipzig, Germany) and a group of skeptics and seekers (Unitarians) in a city characterized by evangelical religiosity (Dallas, Texas). With the help of these settings – that is my thesis – it will be possible to investigate what Berger formulated as the central issue in his pluralism theory: How is it possible for people to integrate religious and secular worldviews in their minds, more or less simultaneously?     

W.E.B. Du Bois in Turn-of-the-Century Atlanta, 1897–1910

In the decade and a half between the completion of his Harvard Ph.D. (1895) and his founding of The Crisis for the NAACP (1910), African American historian and sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois laid the empirical foundations for modern sociology and the revisionist interpretation of history. Despite his prodigious academic efforts, he eventually lost faith in the ability of scholarship to help African Americans and he left academe for the NAACP and the world of advocacy.     

Autocracy and coups d’etat

In this paper I first briefly survey Tullock’s contributions to the study of autocracy and coups d’etat. Tullock’s analysis of the coup d’etat is insightful. He suggested that those at the top could control those at the bottom with a proper system of incentive payments. Here I expand on that idea by asking the reverse question, not what keeps those at the bottom from rebelling, but what keeps those at the top from looting the regime? I begin by noting that shareholders of the modern widely held corporation face a similar problem: what keeps the CEO from looting the company when the market for corporate control is flawed, shareholders are too weak to exercise discipline, and the board is in the CEO’s pocket? I suggest the answer is provided by “internal governance”: the old need the young for good performance. I explain the financial crisis of 2008 as in part the result of the failure of this mechanism. I also explain the success of modern China this way: The Communist Party facilitates growth because its structure provides a way for superiors (the “old”) to trade with subordinates (the “young”). I have also expanded on Tullock’s analysis to ask what conditions might prevent the dictator from implementing his solution to the coup d’etat problem, thus explaining why coups d’etats actually occur. The basic reason is the weakness of the state. Japanese history provides two interesting illustrations of this: first the Tokugawa regime, where the people were over-controlled, and second, the Meiji constitution, implemented after the fall of the Tokugawa state. The Japanese problem after Meiji was that the military (the young) had no incentive to offer their loyalty to the old (the civilian regime), so the young acted on their own. The problem was the reverse of the Tokugawa regime’s: the Meiji constitution left the bottom with too much control over the top. There was no formal coup d’etat but a number of coup attempts were made and de facto the military increasingly constituted a state within a state. This reversal of authority apparently continued down the chain of command, ultimately with tragic consequences, most notably the invasion of Pearl Harbor.     

Economic justice and economic power: An inquiry into distributive justice and political stability

We characterize and study the relationship between income redistributions that are just and stable. We assume that for a given economy there exists a set of possible income redistributions, the constitution of the economy. The choice of redistribution is in the hands of the agents, who decide by majority vote. A stable redistribution is one that majority vote cannot alter when each agent tries to maximize his income. A just redistribution is defined thus: in the set of all possible redistributions it is the one that leads to an income distribution which, when viewed as a lottery, optimizes the expected von Neumann-Morgenstern utility function of the agents of the economy. We assume that all agents have the same utility function, that is, the same attitude toward risk. We postulate a trade-off between efficiency and egalitarianism and derive and analyze conditions for just and stable redistributions. We look for the characteristics of initial income distributions that make just and stable redistributions identical. In an example we show how a certain tax schedule on productive work implies certain income redistributions. This work was completed when I, as a research fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, was a guest of the Fakultät für Volkswirtschaftslehre und Statistik, Universität Mannheim. I would like to thank the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the Fakultät, and the Sonderforschungsbereich 5, Universität Mannheim, for their support.     

Reflections on Hofstadter’s <Emphasis Type="Italic">The American Political Tradition</Emphasis>

Richard Hofstadter’s The American Political Tradition (1948) depends for its reputation on the author’s rich historiographical heritage, including the progressive vision of Charles Beard, a somewhat detached and ironic vision of America also shared with his friend, C. Vann Woodward, and the literary and intellectual traditions of his own time, running from Marx to Mencken. Hofstadter by no means spared American icons such as Jefferson, TR, Wilson and FDR; even Lincoln was treated the gloves off rather than on. Hofstadter was often at his best with marginal and dissenting figures such as Wendell Phillips and John C. Calhoun, but he treated the mixing of religion and politics, along with America's celebration of itself with considerable. Finally, though The American Political Tradition still repays study, including close re-reading, it also demands to be historicized and understood in its own context.     

Thinking About Constitutionalism at the Start of the Twenty-First Century

At the beginning of a new century, constitutional democracyseems ascendant almost to the point of a universal inevitability.What follows is in part a cautionary tale and in part an assessmentof where we now stand in one of history's most hopeful long-termtrends. An examination of the diffusion of constitutional democracy,and of general trends in cross-national constitutional developmentssince World War II, leads to a consideration of the manner andextent to which modern constitutionalism embodies a recapitulationof human cultural and political evolution. The culture-power-justicenexus that characterizes modem constitutionalism was first dissectedby Montesquieu, and an examination of his approach to constitutionalismprovides a useful window into why we developed the politicaltechnology of constitutional democracy and why the future ofthis technology is not a foregone conclusion.     

The Stein Rokkan Lecture 2016 Mission impossible? Reconciling economic and social Europe after the euro crisis and Brexit

During the crisis, the European Union's ‘social deficit’ has triggered an increasing politicisation of redistributive issues within supranational, transnational and national arenas. Various lines of conflict have taken shape, revolving around who questions (who are ‘we’? – i.e., issues of identity and inclusion/exclusion); what questions (how much redistribution within and across the ‘we’ collectivities) and who decides questions (the locus of authority that can produce and guarantee organised solidarity). The key challenge facing today's political leaders is how to ‘glue’ the Union together as a recogniseable and functioning polity. This requires a double rebalancing: between the logic of ‘opening’ and the logic of ‘closure’, on the one hand, and between the logic of ‘economic stability’ and ‘social solidarity’, on the other. Building on the work of Stein Rokkan and Max Weber, this article argues that reconciliation is possible, but only if carefully crafted through an extraordinary mobilisation of political and intellectual resources. A key ingredient should be the establishment of a European Social Union, capable of combining domestic and pan‐European solidarities. In this way, the EU could visibly and tangibly extend its policy menu from regulation to (limited, but effective) distribution, reaping the latter's benefits in terms of legitimacy. The journey on this road is difficult but, pace Rokkan, not entirely impervious.