Thursday, April 12, 2018

Reading update: libertarianism, democracy, black studies, and Marxism

So long libertarianism

It's been over a year since my last reading update! In my last post I summarized both my feminism and libertarianism reading projects. One interesting development of the libertarianism reading project plus marinating in the Trump era is that I've determined I can no longer call myself a libertarian. One thing I gleaned from my reading is that there's a useful distinction to be drawn between libertarianism and classical liberalism, based roughly on the property rights absolutism/monism and anti-institutional tendencies of libertarianism versus the more comprehensive value pluralism and sensitivity to institutional context of classical liberalism. That's the theory. In recent practice, most libertarians have also just proven to be exceptionally useless in understanding Trump. Trump, to most libertarians, is just another politician, and not any kind of special threat. I wrote a rather long critique of libertarian anarchism, and most of the arguments therein apply to minarchist libertarianism as well.

Democracy

In my last post I also hinted at a miniature reading project inspired by Jerry Gaus's Tyranny of the Ideal, and I did read a few such books:
I recommend Page and Muldoon, even though I somehow failed to review Muldoon's book. The common theme within all the books except Brennan's is that a pluralistic society leverages epistemic advantages by the very fact of pluralism. People from different walks of life, regardless of their raw intelligence, bring different perspectives, or different ways of organizing information about the world. These different perspectives each can make certain problems more readily soluble. I read Against Democracy as a sanity check on my enthusiasm for this idea. As I make clear in the link, I was unimpressed.

And all that other stuff

I took a break from major reading projects after this mini-project just to read a few things I'd been meaning to get to. I read Tyler Cowen's Stubborn Attachments and Wolff & de-Shalit's Disadvantage, from the capabilities literature, back to back. I have a long simmering idea of writing an essay connecting these two works. Namely, I want to argue that access to effective, growth oriented institutions (Cowen) is a powerful example of a fertile functioning (Wolff & de-Shalit), or a capability/functioning that naturally tends to enable the development of further valuable capabilities/functionings.

In my hodgepodge between-projects reading, I also read Liz Anderson's wonderful book, Private Government. Francis Fukuyama's Origins of Political Order and Mark Weiner's Rule of the Clan both helped me write my critique of anarchism. And I finally got around to reading a couple classics: Charles Taylor's Sources of the Self and Seneca's On Anger. After finally serendipitously spotting it at Powell's after years of looking, I read Martha Nussbaum's Fragility of Goodness. All of Nussbaum is really an ongoing project of mine. I've loosely set a goal to read one Nussbaum book per year, which should keep me busy for the rest of my life at her rate of publication. Next up in this effort will be the Therapy of Desire. I read Capitalism: For and Against, by Ann Cudd and Nancy Holmstrom after seeing it referenced by Charles Mills (see below) in his Occupy Liberalism essay (incidentally one of my favorite essays since my last update here). Ann Cudd is amazing and I'm looking forward to reading more by her. Finally, Jacob T Levy did not disappoint with Rationalism, Pluralism, and Freedom (which, inexcusably, I neglected to review).

Black studies

That brings me to my tour of black studies, which I have kinda finished, though I'm still reading the autobiography of Malcolm X and I'm planning to read more Angela Davis for my next project (see below).

And I watched Black Panther. Only half kidding about this, given the amount of commentary I read both before and after the film's release and the discussion groups I participated in.

This was an incredibly productive reading project, significantly nudging my perspective, albeit in a direction I was already trending. Concretely, I was skeptical of affirmative action before embarking on this tour, and I thought reparations were a clearly bad idea, both for political reasons and problems with targeting. Anderson convinced me of the merits of affirmative action as an instrument for integration even while she criticized other more common defenses of affirmative action that I was familiar with (as compensation, for example). By the time I got through Kendi, even though he doesn't focus on this, I came around to the idea of reparations (details matter, obviously) and the principle of black power generally. Blacks and other marginalized or oppressed peoples have to seize what power (economic, social, political) they can when they can (though not by "any means necessary"). Waiting for those things to come from the grace of the powerful is getting the cart before the horse. Power and privilege is jealously guarded, and this seems to be just a feature of humanity. Interestingly, my thoughts on black power resonate with some of the things I've learned from, e.g., Fukuyama and Acemoglu/Robinson on how equality and inclusive institutions typically depend on historical contingencies that happen to empower some groups relative to the existing elites. This is also in line with Jacob Levy's sort of agonistic view of politics and pluralism, from which I've learned a lot.

I'm also enchanted with the idea of "black radical liberalism" as is being developed by Charles Mills. Mills accepts what I view as the most challenging critiques of liberalism in both theory and practice without trying to claim these aren't "real liberalism." He argues that liberalism can survive these critiques but only if it turns away from ideal theory and embraces instead a non-ideal and rectificatory approach. Specifically, racialization and sex/gender oppression seen in actual non-ideal societies should be the focus of corrective justice, rather than being seen as deviations from liberalism (see paragraph above). I'm itching to write about this, especially since I think there are potentially very fruitful alternative directions to the one Mills has chosen. He's working from a theoretical tripod of liberalism (Kant and Rawls), radical theory (Marx), and black critical theory. A black radical capabilities liberalism could, at least in some ways, replace both the Kant/Rawls and the Marx legs, with the additional advantage that the capabilities approach is already well-suited to non-ideal theory and liberal practices.

Marxism/socialism

I've just started the Selected Writings of Karl Marx, edited by David McLellan. I've only read one book on socialism thus far (Socialism after Hayek), and this seems like a clear gap in my knowledge, especially since some kind of Marxian analysis is often implicit in some of the other topics I've become at least peripherally interested in, like radical feminism and black radicalism (see above). I'm ... not exactly in danger of becoming a Marxist. Or a socialist, except insofar as democratic socialists blend into social democrats blend into social justice-oriented (neo!)liberals. But I do have the impression that Marx has a far more humanistic perspective than some of the more economistic classical liberals. Marx was also inspired to some degree by Aristotle. Whatever the failures are of the labor theory of value and like, actual communism in the world (understatement), I'm pretty open-minded that Marxian class analysis might have useful resources. Anyway, at this point I don't even know enough to know what to read, but here are a few I'm intending to read so far:

  • Karl Marx: Selected Writings - David McLellan
  • Marxism and Freedom - Raya Dunayevskaya
  • Women, Race, and Class - Angela Davis
  • I dunno some other stuff open to suggestions
  • Main Currents of Marxism - Leszek Kolakowski


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