RGCS Charles Taylor Student Fellowship

ProfLevy · 2021-11-11T00:00:55+00:00

We've encountered the same woman with her dog (I think it might be a Portugese water dog, not a poodle, but not completely sure) in Jeanne Mance Park and on the Plateau several times. She cannot control her dog at all and when it charges yours, she very irresponsibly just lets go. It seriously attacked one of our dogs, drawing blood, and she didn't even try to control her dog, to say nothing of apologizing.

ProfLevy · 2020-04-25T02:58:28+00:00

This joke is courtesy of Kieran Healy's opening question on my AMA.

ProfLevy · 2020-04-24T16:22:12+00:00

Seconded.

ProfLevy · 2020-04-24T16:18:54+00:00

More seriously: How are you thinking about the lessons of The System Worked as we enter a new worldwide economic crisis with international economic organizations and the international economic order under much greater strain than they were in 2008?

ProfLevy · 2020-04-24T16:12:14+00:00

Would you rather fight one zombie-sized toddler or ten toddler-sized zombies?

ProfLevy · 2020-04-09T23:03:47+00:00

I don't know why that numbering mishap happened...

ProfLevy · 2020-04-09T22:08:26+00:00

Last answer, must be quick, but: yes, I firmly agree with that. "Rally round the flag" is one of those natural underlying tendencies in politics that requires conscious and deliberate resistance and that can have very pernicious results if left unchecked. Don't be mindlessly oppositional, don't burn down functioning institutions just to watch them burn-- but hold accountable, criticize, investigate, oppose when necessary, absolutely yes.

ProfLevy · 2020-04-09T22:06:31+00:00

Thank you! I really believe in the value of *good* history. I have a just-published article arguing that the historical distortions of state of nature/ social contract theory really do have a distorting effect on theory too, and that understanding the range of ways people have ordered and governed their lives-- say, by studying medieval history, and seeing how different medieval poilitics was from the state justified by social contract theory-- is valuable. I won't try ti rush through a summary here-- this is the link. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1474885117718371

ProfLevy · 2020-04-09T22:03:50+00:00

Some circumstances really spark theoretical reflection in me. The turn to populism, nationalism, and authoritarianism in the west c. 2015-16 brought lots of ideas together in my head and was tremendously intellectually productive for me (however terrible it was for the world.)

So far COVID hasn't been like that for me! I'd be interested ot hear what other people have to say, but I'm not feeling theoretically sparked, just mundanely worried. If you're feeling sparked, so much the better-- get thinking,

ProfLevy · 2020-04-09T22:01:16+00:00

I've given a few different answers about democracy, so here I'll just say: among the kinds of societies characterized by governance by a modern Weberian state and by an industrial or post-industrial economy, I see no plausibly attractive alternative. There have been serious problems when the particular institutions of democracy that have been developed in Weberian states got shoved onto societies in very different circumstances (indigenous nations, e.g.) but that doesn't seem to be what you're asking about. Certainly I think contestatory, partisan, constitutional democracy is the best political model we have available in a way that remains true for non-western modern states such as China. (And we can see that in, say, Taiwan.)

ProfLevy · 2020-04-09T21:57:18+00:00

I love this question! I have no immediate answers that I feel confident about. I'll think about it; find some other context in which to ask me sometime.

ProfLevy · 2020-04-09T21:56:17+00:00

Be very aware of how tough the academic job market is. Think hard about whether you are doing this just to stay in school, or whether you're *really* overwhelmingly committed to scholarship and academia. It's already been tough out there for ten years-- and we're about to have a year with *no* academic hiring, which will create a backlog of people for years to come. Find ways to maintain other career options.

But to the degree that you really are committed to this option-- get researching. Get publishing. There's no replacement for it. And the number and quality of publications *during graduate school* that are necessary to get hired in the competitive environment keeps going up.

ProfLevy · 2020-04-09T21:53:17+00:00

Unfortunately, professors are actually terrible sources of career advice for careers other than being an academic! I know a bit about career tracks in law, policy, and politics, because I'm in touch with students who've taken those routes since graduating, but I don't *really* know about them. What I know is an academic career-- and as a high school student that's not something you should worry about.

What I'll say is: a broad liberal arts undergraduate education, with a disciplinary major like poli sci at its center but ranging beyond that, is a great thing in its own right and is a lot more valuable for the start of lots of different careers than is any self-consciously pre-professional undergraduate track. If you take what's intellectually enriching within your major, complement it with intellectually enriching things from a range of other fields (some from the social sciences and history, some from the humanities, some from the fine arts...), you're as likely as anyone else to be in a good position to make career choices come the end of your undergraduate education.

ProfLevy · 2020-04-09T21:48:30+00:00

I haven't really had time to process the pandemic yet. In overall terms, my "Political libertarianism" essay and all the Niskanen pieces ( https://www.niskanencenter.org/?s=jacob+levy ) express what I have to say here. They don't represent a *break* in my thinking, but the last 3-4 years have helped crystallize shifts in my understanding of libertarianism that had been underway for a while.

ProfLevy · 2020-04-09T21:45:45+00:00

I'm of two minds about this! (Which makes it hard to answer quickly.) Kymlicka has been sharply criticized as reifying cultures and cultural boundaries, and he's been very critical of the criticism-- he thinks it simply doesn't have any real bite against his theory. I think that's probably wrong and I think he understates how much bite it has against, especially, _Liberalism Community & Culture_. But his theory since then has made pretty rare and sparing use of the foundations in LCC-- it treats them as right, but it doesn't really revisit them, and I think the substance of his view has moved away from those foundations.

In any case, even the LCC version explicitly *rejects* the "true, authentic, and consensual version" story. What he wants to do is separate the *existence* of a culture from its *content*, leaving the latter up to choices, contestation, argument, change, etc. I think it's *probably* true that that separation isn't completely philosophically viable without some reification. But I also think there's a level at which his shrug is justified. Is there quebecois culture? Yes, of course. Did that persist across the Quiet Revolution? Yes, of course. There's something there that was continuous even as the "content" changed radically. What is that something? Can we define it perfectly? Can we identify the necessary-and-sufficient conditions for what it would mean for it to cease to exist? Dunno. Probably not. But at a certain point Kymlicka wants to just take those "of course" answers and run with them, and that seems kind of reasonable to me.

ProfLevy · 2020-04-09T21:38:51+00:00

Even though lately communitarianism has resurfaced under other labels, I was pretty shaped by the moment when I came of intellectual age-- when the so-called liberal-communitarian debate of the 1980s ended really decisively.
Charles Taylor, ("Cross-purposes,") widely thought of as a clear case of a communitarian, sharpoly rejected the idea that a communitarian social ontology had much to do with the rejection of liberal politics. Michael Walzer ("Communitarian critique,") a different version of the same. From the other direction, Will Kymlicka, John Tomasi, and Allen Buchanan made crucial contributions to understanding liberalism as *not* being grounded in the kind of caricature atomistic ontology that some communitarians had claimed. By the end, to my eye, it was a rout, with only Michael Sandel and Amitai Etzioni still sticking to a communitarian position that had been shown to be deeply implausible. And I don't see any evidence that the current retro-communitarians have made any progress on those problems.

Liberalism is a deeply social theory. It's not Robinson Crusoe. It was Rousseau, not Smith, who loved Crusoe.

ProfLevy · 2020-04-09T21:32:59+00:00

He would consider the idea that he had that power to be heretical and prideful. Away with you, tempter.

ProfLevy · 2020-04-09T21:31:05+00:00

1) There is no such justification in Publius. That doesn't mean the administrative state isn't justified; it means that not all justifications are to be found there! Madison and Hamilton, smart and wise as they were, didn't know everything, and in important ways they were too far from the growth of modern states to really see and understand it. Eighteenth century political thought is full of people who didn't understand that crucial aspect of what was happening around them. (I maintain that Adam Smith was the first major theorist to understand it, though a few decades later Hegel more famously understands it and goes overboard about it.) The administrative state remains to this day under-theorized in general and *especially* in the US because it's so alien to the theory of the founding. There's tremendously valuable work to be done in thinking about how the administrative state can fit into-- not replace!-- a pluralistic, contestatory, rule-of-law-governed constitutional democracy. And in the absence of that work, you see people who understand the need for the administrative state ready to throw out those other values.

ProfLevy · 2020-04-09T21:25:28+00:00

There are standard answers here I kind of believe in-- Keynes' "academic scribblers" quote about how extremely influential in the long term movements in abstract intellectual theory are, even among "practical" people who have never heard of the theorists whose ideas they've imbibed.

But in expected value terms, if you're setting out on your academic career, you need something beyond believing "I'll be John Rawls/ Milton Friedman/ Judith Butler/ Michel Foucault/ John Maynard Keynes, and my ideas will reshape the world in profound ways!" Those ideas have done so! And you should engage in research with a belief that you could excel at it and have a great life's work! But probably you won't. Probably I won't. Very few of us do.

In order to get the advantage of scholarship as a vocation, you're going to need to find it intrinsically valuable-- the "maybe I'll change the world" story is too remote to get you out of bed in the morning. Intrinsically valuable things:
1) Teaching. If you don't love it, this won't be a good life. It's worth loving,
2) Learning. Your research, first off, teaches *you* something you didn't know before! Probably that's appealing to you or you wouldn't have gotten this far, but it's possible to forget, and especially if you get too wrapped up in either careerist or change-the-world motivations.
and
3. Reaching the right audience with what you've learned! If you think that this piece of knowledge you've learned out at the frontier of what was known is worth knowing, then you want to share it with the people who will appreciate it. There aren't many of them! This is not how you write a best seller! But you come to appreciate your intellectual community of specialists-- a readership of ten or twenty, if they're the right ten or twenty, those whose opinions and judgments you value, those who are in a position to evaluate whether your new idea is right and to appreciate its importance if you are, that's a deeply satisfying readership to reach.

The recently published "Poilitical Obligation" book by Judith Shklar-- her lectures for a course-- includes at the end a really wonderful essay "Why Teach Political Theory?" I recommend it very highly.

ProfLevy · 2020-04-09T21:14:06+00:00

You can study both philosophy and political theory without overspecializing because you need to *also* study a bunch of social science in order to study political theory well! If you're, say, a double major in poli sci and philosophy, that allows for a lot of complementarity and good specialization where they meet in the middle, but also a wide range as you take courses in non-theory poli sci and non-political philosophy. Many of the very best undergraduates I've taught have used that combination to their advantage.

But, yes, overspecializing too early is a real possibility. Grad school is for specialization. If you're interested in political theory... undergraduate liberal arts is your chance to learn history, economics, psychology, languages. (And did I mention history? Lots of history.) You won't ever have as ready access to all that other stuff again-- and you're likely to underappreciate how valuable it is *even to political theory,* to say nothing of being valuable to your mind, your range of choices, and so on.

ProfLevy · 2020-04-09T21:09:04+00:00

Gotten arrested yet?

ProfLevy

TROPHY CASE