In Medias Res: APSA Wrap-Up

Monday, September 06, 2010

APSA Wrap-Up

I got back from another APSA annual meeting, this year in Washington DC, late Saturday night. It was a great few days, as they almost always are. Perhaps someday such conferences will distract or bore or tire me, but for now, they still jazz me up, leaving me in a swirl of ideas and ambitions and reflections. Herewith, a quick wrap-up:

Bloggers seen:

Six years on, and with the blogging world much changed and probably on a definite downhill slide, I still love to put faces to names. This year, I was able to spend some time chatting and/or taking lunch with Jacob Levy, J. Nelson-Seawright, Laura McKenna, and Camassia (though at that latter gathering the hoped for appearance of Eve Tushnet and Lee McCracken didn't come about). I also ran into Patrick Deneen, Mark Mitchell, and passed Daniel Drezner and Chris Lawrence in panels and in the hallways. Apparently, there was a major poli-sci/journalist/blogger panel which I completely missed, so there went my chance to see a lot of famous online names in the flesh. Oh well. You can't see everyone.

Publishers spoken to:

Good, if brief conversations, with folks from Lexington Books, Routledge, Princeton, and the University of Kentucky. I'm working on a book with another scholar dealing with various non-Western and comparative theoretical approaches to the state of nature debate in political philosophy. Fascinating, no? Well, we're pleased with it. We'll see where it goes from here.

Workshops run:

I was in charge of the nearly-yearly "Comparative Political Theory" working groups this APSA. The attendance wasn't what I would have liked, but new contacts were made, and some good discussions about research agendas and teaching approaches were had. And that's what such meetings are all about, no?

Panels attended:

Two excellent and one very good panel stand out: a thought-provoking and eye-opening discussion of Chinese and Confucian traditions of constitutionalism (good preparation for a conference I'll be attending in Hong Kong this December), a fascinating set of comments on an upcoming--and must-by--book by Robert Putnam and David Campbell (best line from which came from Bill Galston: "Americans don't attend church as often as they say they do, and the French attend church more often than say they do; this is because most Americans feel guilty when they don't go to church, while most French feel guilty when they do"); and a wide-ranging set of papers talking about the application of Alexis de Tocqueville to numerous problems and situations (oh--and another blogger: I finally met Susan McWilliams there too).

Finally, books bought:

As always, I didn't have enough money to get everything I wanted, but it's always good to come home with must-buy-soon list. As it was, I ended up with a couple of classics, some new scholarship, some popular stuff, some deeply discounted on-sale stuff, and one freebie (it was a gallery copy).

The Limits of Power, Andrew J. Bacevich
The Communitarian Constitution, Beau Breslin
Bad Samaritans, Ha-Joon Chang
Shop Class as Soulcraft, Matthew B. Crawford (a book I've written about before, but didn't own a copy of)
Integral Pluralism, Fred Dallmayr (because I buy everything by Fred)
Constituent Moments, Jason Frank
Lament for a Nation, George Grant
The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It, Richard Hofstadter
Debating Moral Education, Elizabeth Kiss and J. Peter Euben, eds.
What the Heck Are You Up To, Mr. President?, Kevin Mattson (read this one on the flights home: a great book on the late 1970s, Jimmy Carter, and a crucial missed opportunity for political and moral change and leadership, the specific topic of which I've blogged about several times before)
The Mind and the Market, Jerry Z. Muller
Bob Dylan in America, Sean Wilentz
1688: The First Modern Revolution, Steven Pincus

What I wasn't able to get, but now really want to, include: Sagehood, Stephen Angle; The Eyes of the People, Jeffrey Green; The Making of the Political, Leigh Jenco; The Anti-Enlightenment Tradition, Zeev Sternhell; Waste: Uncovering the Global Food Scandal, Tristram Stuart; and, as mentioned above, American Grace, Robert Putnam and David Campbell. Anyone who happens to have access to free or promotional copies of any of the above should feel free to send them to me immediately.

3 comments:

Bob said...: Totally lightweight comment on my part Russell, but at $64 a copy I think I will pass on 'Sagehood' - even though it might change my thinking (or not!); Wednesday, September 08, 2010
Matt said...: Funny. I ended up staying in the Omni just after the APSA, which I only knew was there because of the remains of the book display, so I could go see BSU beat Virgina Tech. Not as intellectual, but certainly louder and probably more fun.; Wednesday, September 08, 2010
Hector said...: Re: "Americans don't attend church as often as they say they do, and the French attend church more often than say they do; this is because most Americans feel guilty when they don't go to church, while most French feel guilty when they do")

Fascinating. It doesn't surprise me that Americans exaggerate their church attendance, but it had never occurred to me that French people and other Western Europeans (as distinct from, say, people in Soviet Russia or modern China) might actually _understate_ their religiosity. I was just commenting the other day to someone that I dislike the sort of surveys where people self-report their religious, moral or political values- we often answer surveys less than perfectly honestly, and much of America's 'religiosity' seems to me to be a mile wide and an inch deep.

Do you have any hard numbers on the percentage of French people (or, for that matter, Swedes or English) who actually _do_ go to church services?; Thursday, September 09, 2010

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Quotes

"Every one of the standards according to which action is condemned demands action. Although the dignity of persons is inevitably violated in action, this dignity would be far less recognized in the world than it is had it not been supported by actions such as the establishment of constitutions and the fighting of wars in defense of human rights. Action must be untruthful, yet religion, science, philosophy, and the arts, the main forms of absolute fidelity to the truth, could not survive were they unsupported by action. Action cannot but be anticommunal in some measure, yet communal relationships would be almost nonexistent without areas of peace and order, which are created by action. We must act hesitantly and regretfully, then, but still we must act."

(Glenn Tinder, The Political Meaning of Christianity: The Prophetic Stance [HarperSanFrancisco, 1991], 215)

"[T]he press was still the last resource of the educated poor who could not be artists and would not be tutors. Any man who was fit for nothing else could write an editorial or a criticism....The press was an inferior pulpit; an anonymous schoolmaster; a cheap boarding-school; but it was still the nearest approach to a career for the literary survivor of a wrecked education."

(Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams [Mariner Books, 2000], 211)

"Mailer was a Left Conservative. So he had his own point of view. To himself he would suggest that he tried to think in the style of [Karl] Marx in order to attain certain values suggested by Edmund Burke."

(Norman Mailer, The Armies of the Night [The New American Library, 1968], 185)

"All those rely on their hands, and each is skillful at his own craft. / Without them a city would have no inhabitants; no settlers or travellers would come to it. / Yet they are not in demand at public discussions, nor do they attain to high office in the assembly. They do not sit on the judge's bench or understand the decisions of the courts. They cannot expound moral or legal principles and are not ready with maxims. / But they maintain the fabric of this world, and the practice of their craft is their prayer."

(Ecclesiasticus (Sirach) 38:31-34, in The Revised English Bible with the Apocrypha [Oxford University Press, 1989])

"The tendency, which is too common in these days, for young men to get a smattering of education and then think themselves unsuited for mechanical or other laborious pursuits is one that should not be allowed to grow up among us...Every one should make it a matter of pride to be a producer, and not a consumer alone."

(Wilford Woodruff, Millennial Star [November 14, 1887], 773)

"We are parts of the world; no one of us is an isolated world-whole. We are human beings, conceived in the body of a mother, and as we stepped into the larger world, we found ourselves immediately knotted to a universe with the thousand bands of our senses, our needs and our drives, from which no speculative reason can separate itself."

(J.G. Herder, Metacritique of the Critique of Pure Reason in Werke in zehn Bänden [Deutsche Klassiker Verlag, 1985-2000], 8:508, translated by Sonia Sikka)

"'Business!' cried the Ghost, wringing its hands again. 'Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were all my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!'"

(Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol [Candlewick Press, 2006], 35)

"The Master said, 'At fifteen, I set my mind upon learning; at thirty, I took my place in society; at forty, I became free of doubts; at fifty, I understood Heaven's Mandate; at sixty, my ear was attuned; and at seventy, I could follow my heart's desires without overstepping the bounds of propriety.'"

(Confucius, Analects [translated by Edward Slingerland, Hackett, 2003], 2.4)

"That drunken poet from whom you would not take a dreary tragedy, he believed in himself. That elderly minister with an epic from whom you are hiding in the back room, he believed in himself. If you consulted your business experience instead of your ugly individualistic philosophy, you would know that believing in himself is one of the commonest signs of a rotter. Actors who can't act believe in themselves; and debtors who won't pay. It would be much truer to say that a man will certainly fail because he believes in himself. Complete self-confidence is not merely a sin; complete self-confidence is a weakness."

(Gilbert K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy [Bradford and Dickens, 1957], 10)

"Lack of experience diminishes our power of taking a comprehensive view of the admitted facts. Hence those who dwell in intimate association with nature and its phenomena grow more and more able to formulate, as the foundations of their theories, principles which admit a wide and coherent development: while those whom devotion to abstract discussions has rendered unobservant of the facts are too ready to dogmatize on the basis of a few observations."

(Aristotle, On Generation and Corruption [translated by H.H. Joachim, Oxford, 1922], lines 316a5-9)

"The man who has gone through college or university easily becomes psychically unemployable in manual occupations without necessarily acquiring employability in, say, professional work."

(Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy [Harper Perennial, 1975], 152)

"[God] does not want men to give the Future their hearts, to place their treasure in it. . . . His ideal is a man who, having worked all day for the good of posterity (if that is his vocation), washes his mind of the whole subject, commits the issue to Heaven, and returns at once to the patience or gratitude demanded by the moment that is passing over him."

(C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, revised paperback edition [Macmillan, 1982], 69)

"Money is simply a tool. We use money as a proxy for our time and labor--our life energy--to acquire things that we cannot (or care not to) procure or produce with our own hands. Beyond that, it has limited actual utility: you can't eat it; if you bury it in the ground, it will not produce a crop to sustain a family; it would make a lousy roof and a poor blanket. To base our understanding of economy simply on money overlooks all other methods of exchange that can empower communities. Equating an economy only with money assumes there are no other means by which we can provide food for our bellies, a roof over our heads and clothing on our backs."

(Shannon Hayes, Radical Homemakers, [Left to Write, 2010], 57)

"Was du ererbt von deinen Vätern hast, / Erwirb es, um es zu besitzen. / Was man nicht nützt, ist eine schwere Last; / Nur was der Augenblick erschafft, das kann er nützen."

"What from your fathers you received as heir, / Acquire [anew] if you would possess it. / What is not used is but a load to bear; / But if today creates it, we can use and bless it."

(Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Faust [translated by Walter Kaufmann, Anchor Books, 1963], lines 682-685)

"A scholar's business is to add to what is known. That is all. But it is capable of giving the very greatest satisfaction, because knowledge is good. It does not have to look good or even sound good or even do good. It is good just by being knowledge. And the only thing that makes it knowledge is that it is true. You can't have too much of it and there is no little too little to be worth having. There is truth and falsehood in a comma."

(Tom Stoppard [spoken by A.E. Houseman], The Invention of Love [Grove Press, 1997], 37)

"I believe in democracy. I accept it. I will faithfully serve and defend it. I believe in it because it appears to me the inevitable consequence of what has gone before it. Democracy asserts the fact the masses are now raised to a higher intelligence than formerly. All our civilization aims at this mark. We want to do what we can to help it. I myself want to see the result. I grant that it is an experiment, but it is the only direction society can take that is worth its taking; the only conception of its duty large enough to satisfy its instincts; the only result that is worth an effort or a risk. Every other possible step is backward, and I do not care to repeat the past. I am glad to see society grapple with issues in which no one can afford to be neutral."

(Henry Adams, Democracy: An American Novel [Farrar, Straus, and Young, Inc., 1952], 53)

"Old men ought to be explorers / Here or there does not matter / We must be still and still moving / Into another intensity / For a further union, a deeper communion / Through the dark cold and the empty desolation, / The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters / Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning."

(T.S. Eliot, "East Coker," Four Quarters [Harcourt, 1943])

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Monday, September 06, 2010

APSA Wrap-Up

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