Digest

I've come across several interesting items sitting here this evening trying to recuperate from a visit to may parents this weekend. Susan and I took August to see my folks. Given the continuous misbehavior of his mom, who refuses to comply with visitation, August rarely gets that chance. And so, he acted weirdly much of the time even though my mother was bending over backwards to try to accommodate him. In any case, the weekend was mostly uneventful.

And here is what I found when I got home.

Dani Rodrik has an OpEd here in his regular series at Project Syndicate on the tensions between Islamists and democracy.

Roberto Mangabeira Unger has a multi-part podcast here charting the Path Forward for Progressives.

The Institute for New Economic Thinking is offering this free on-line course on the Economics of Money and Banking - taught be Perry Mehrling.

And the Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto) has an exhibition of Ai Weiwei that I want to get up to see. 

 

Speed Dating with Roberto Unger

I think the guy has many smart things to say. He also has one of the most peculiar presentational styles I've encountered. But in this format he makes his point and gets out. I guess I wonder what it would be like to be an undergrad who wandered in to his course unawares.

Unger Interview

Not long ago I posted a link to a now well known video of Roberto Mangabeira Unger criticizing Obama and advising progressives to not support his re-election. As I noted then, I am ambivalent about that advice - in large measure because I find Unger's idea that the Democrats will ever provide a vehicle for progressive politics pretty far-fetched. I have since come across this brief interview with Unger in which he elaborates on his views. Again, while I find Unger's stress on institutional experimentation and his faith (for lack of a better word) in common people and their capacities, I doubt seriously that the Democrats as presently constituted or in any conceivable incarnation have similar commitments.

Roberto Unger on Obama

This segment of commentary by Roberto Mangabeira Unger has created a bit of a stir. He insists - from the left - that Obama is a standing hindrance to progressive politics in the U.S.. I agree with much but not all of the assessment. Unger, who was among Obama's teachers at Harvard Law School,  is not naive - he concedes that a Republican in the White House will be costly in some ways (e.g. judicial appointments). But he also points out, rightly I think, that in terms of foreign policy a second term for Obama will make little difference. The point at which I really disagree is with Unger's tacit presumption that the democratic party can be transformed into a vehicle for progressive politics.

Recommended Reading: Pragmatic Utopianism as "The Future of Black Politics"

You can find a smart and provocative essay by Michael Dawson (along with a set of pointed responses) here at The Boston Review. I agree with a much of what Dawson has to say about the crucial importance of African-Americans to any viable progressive political mobilization in the U.S.. Yet I am persuaded too by Tommie Shelby's insistence (in his comment on Dawson) on the importance of multi-racial political organizations. (More generally, I wonder if Dawson might craft a reply by building upon the distinction, articulated by Bob Moses and Charles Payne as they channel Ella Baker, between mobilization and organization and on the crucial importance of both for progressive politics.) Finally, and perhaps gratuitously, I wish Dawson had felt less need to rely on the pronouncements of obscurantist leftist "theorists" like Badiou and Žižek. I simply have no patience for them. He should stick with the tradition of African-American political thought from DuBois through King and Malcolm X to Walter Mosley. Reconnect that to the American political theory of pragmatism from Dewey to Unger and Cornel West, and you have more than sufficient resources to spell out the sort of pragmatic utopianism Dawson advocates.

An Interview with Roberto Unger

"The opportunity for change has already been largely squandered. But the opportunity for insight, not yet, and insight today can mean transformation tomorrow." ~ Roberto Mangabeira Unger

Unger made that statement regarding the current global economic mess in an interview on "The Future of the Left" with The European last fall.

How the "Third Way" Memo Shows why "Moderates" Are As Dim as They Seem or, How to Make an Ass-Whuppin' Feel Pretty Darned Good

"The idea of a third way is simply the doctrine of the single way, accompanied by the announcement of the intention of moralizing it. . . . Such a project . . . humanization of the inevitable . . . represents little more than the disguise of a surrender." ~ Roberto Mangabeira Unger

Last Sunday The New York Times ran an Op-Ed by Ari Berman calling for the Democrats to stop cozying up to conservatives in their midst. I noted it at the time, but you can find the piece here. Unsurprisingly, conservative mouthpieces among the "big tent" - a phrase I loath - Democrats have their knickers in a knot and have begun a counterinsurgency campaign. Today The Times has reproduced a memo by Jon Cowan and Anne Kim at Third Way that purportedly takes issue with Berman. (You will guess from the quotation above what I think of calls for a "third way.") We'll let the folks from the self-proclaimed "leading moderate think-tank of the progressive movement" state their case. Here is their memo. I highlight passages that need to be challenged but will do so below the text.

The Domestic Policy Program
October 29, 2010

Some liberals have begun to argue that losing the House majority may ultimately be “good” for Democrats by purging the party of Blue Dogs and other moderates. As liberal commentator Ari Berman recently opined in The New York Times, “Democrats would be in better shape, and would accomplish more, with a smaller and more ideologically cohesive caucus.”

This small-tent strategy could not be more wrong.

Both politically and substantively, liberals need moderates. By rejecting the big-tent coalition that brought them power in the first place, the only things Democrats will accomplish are permanent minority status and the frustration of their legislative priorities. Here are three reasons liberals need moderates:

1. Liberal members need the votes of moderate colleagues to make legislative progress.

Passing legislation still takes 219 votes in the House of Representatives — a threshold Democrats can’t reach without the very moderates derided by Berman and others as “fake Democrats.”

Liberal members make up nowhere near a majority of the House. Nor do they make up a majority of the current House Democratic Caucus. The Progressive Caucus, the flagship coalition of liberals, has just 78 House members.

In fact, the Progressive Caucus comprises less than one-fifth of the House and just 30% of its 255 Democratic members. In contrast, 105 current House members are Blue Dogs, New Democrats or both. Moderates, not liberals, are the numerical base of the Democratic second (sic).

2. Liberal members need moderate voters to win and keep their seats.

According to Gallup, 42% of Americans now call themselves “conservative,” while 35% call themselves “moderate” and only 20% consider themselves “liberal.” Liberals aren’t just the smallest political constituency in America; they’re outnumbered 4 to 1 by moderates and conservatives. In no state are liberals either a majority or a plurality.

Even in Rhode Island — America’s most liberal state — moderates outnumber liberals 36% to 32%. In purple states such as Colorado, moderates outnumber liberals 33% to 27%. In Nevada, the moderate-liberal ratio is 41%-17%.

Winning moderates is the only way to overcome these numerical disadvantages, which is exactly what Democrats did in 2006 and 2008. The Congressional majority won in those years (thanks to the Schumer-Emanuel big-tent strategy liberals scorn) was a moderate, not liberal, wave involving deeply purple, if not outright red, districts.

Many seats now belonging to such moderate Democratic members as Reps. Jason Altmire, Frank Kratovil and Mike McMahon were wrested from Republican hands. Not surprisingly, 42 of the Democrats elected in the last two cycles are Blue Dogs and New Democrats, while just 14 have joined the Progressive Caucus. (And of these 14, four are also New Democrats.) Call them “fake Democrats,” but they delivered a real majority.

3. Liberals need moderates — from both parties — to forge good policy.

While liberals now find it fashionable to label moderates as obstructionists of a progressive agenda, this ignores historical reality. Most of the signature pieces of progressive legislation passed in the 20th century were the products of broad, bipartisan coalitions, not liberal victories eked out over moderate and conservative opposition.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964, for example, was a bipartisan compromise reached after a 54-day filibuster in the Senate led, incidentally, by a Democrat — Georgia Senator Richard Russell. The final bill passed 73-27 after Minority Leader Everett Dirksen rounded up enough Republicans to invoke cloture.

Likewise, the Social Security Act of 1935 passed with 372 yeses in the House and 77 yeses in the Senate, while Medicare passed the House in 1965 with 307 votes in the House and 70 votes in the Senate. Politifact.com rated a longstanding liberal claim that no Republicans supported Social Security and Medicare until the very end as “false.”

According to William Galston of Brookings and Elaine Kamarck of Harvard University, Congress’s most productive period was between roughly 1929 and 1974 — a period that coincided with the existence of a broad bipartisan and moderate coalition. In their view, polarization, not moderation, is what actually leads to gridlock.

Moreover, a more ideologically diverse Democratic coalition ensures vigorous policy debates. Liberals may believe their positions represent the best choices, but many moderates have principled and legitimate policy disagreements with liberals on trade, energy, deficits, education, terrorism and other issues. Challenging often outdated liberal orthodoxies is crucial for Democrats — liberals should not be afraid to battle for their ideas or to forge sensible center-left solutions where necessary.

Conclusion

To believe a small-tent strategy can achieve a big agenda is folly. In the aftermath of expected losses next week, Democrats should reject the purity-test view that moderates are either unnecessary or destructive. Instead of shrinking the tent still further, they should redouble their efforts to expand it.

(1) The Blue Dogs and New Democrats are not moderates, they are conservatives. Think Ben Nelson. Think Bart Stupak. (Or think of any of the "honorary co-chairs" on the Third Way team.) I will return to this matter below. For now, though, it is important to note that these conservatives hardly are "fake Democrats." They are just plain old Democrats, at least as the party is presently constituted.

The problem for progressives in the U.S. is that the Democratic Party is not liberal. So, as I have noted here before, progressives should not be disappointed that Obama and his minions have somehow failed to implement "their" progressive agenda or angry that the administration has been thwarted by the so-called moderates in their efforts to implement it. The Democratic Party does not have a progressive agenda. Neither does the Obama administration.

So, my first objection is that the Third Way-ers are complicit in the bastardization of American political discourse. Call people by what they are. In this instance call the conservatives conservatives.

(2) Notice that the Third Way-ers do not actually respond to Berman. Instead they engage in the standard ruse of ideologists (I come back to that label below) ~ change the subject. Here is what Berman claimed:

"A smaller majority, minus the intraparty feuding, could benefit Democrats in two ways: first, it could enable them to devise cleaner pieces of legislation, without blatantly trading pork for votes as they did with the deals that helped sour the public on the health care bill. (As a corollary, the narrative of “Democratic infighting” would also diminish.)

Second, in the Senate, having a majority of 52 rather than 59 or 60 would force Democrats to confront the Republicans’ incessant misuse of the filibuster to require that any piece of legislation garner a minimum of 60 votes to become law. Since President Obama’s election, more than 420 bills have cleared the House but have sat dormant in the Senate. It’s easy to forget that George W. Bush passed his controversial 2003 tax cut legislation with only 50 votes, plus Vice President Dick Cheney’s. Eternal gridlock is not inevitable unless Democrats allow it to be."

What the Third Way-ers seek to do is depict the incessant intra-party bickering among the Democrats as "vigorous policy debate." On the health care bill, however, Nelson, Stupak and their ilk did not come out and offer sound policy prescriptions and defend them with reasons and evidence. They extorted positions - extreme anti-abortion positions pushed by the Catholic Church that run contrary to the interests of women in the Democratic party - by simply threatening to withhold their votes. Confronted with that reality (and one might multiply examples nearly endlessly) the Third Way-ers would no doubt just place being pro-choice into the category of what they call "outdated liberal orthodoxies." That is fine, but let's not pretend that that is anything other than what it is - a political assertion, not a reflection of some underlying reality.

As for Berman's second point, so far as I can tell the Third Way-ers never actually confront the matter. They claim that the conservatives are necessary to make progress legislatively without acknowledging the realities that Berman notes. A huge number of bills that are dead-on-arrival at the Senate door. Not only did the Blue Dogs and New Dems not manage to get those bills over the hump in the Senate, arguably the conservative Dems in the House were able to vote for them because they anticipated that the bills would never become law.

The Third Way-ers need to read Tom Schelling. Sometimes it is a good thing, from a strategic perspective, to have fewer resources rather than more. Berman is on solid ground here. The Dems never challenged the Senate Republicans, they never called their bluff on filibusters. And they ought to have done so. A more cohesive group might've had the gumption to make the Republicans filibuster reasonable legislation and then mock them loudly in public for so doing. I am not entirely confident about that, but it is possible; and the Third Way-ers have nothing but their blinkered ideology as evidence to the contrary.

(3) Let's talk sources. And let's be blunt. Screw Politifact.com! By playing fact check lotto, here too the Third Way-ers simply continue to debase political discussion. Facts by themselves are useless. What we need to understand is the way history has moved, the causal story behind the current polarized mess in D.C..

Having said that, let's play fact check. The Third Way-ers invoke "William Galston of Brookings and Elaine Kamarck of Harvard" as though they are independent source of authority and insight. Well not only is Galston a well-known advocate of conservationism among the Dems, but the Third Way-ers somehow neglect to mention that he and his co-author are listed as "contributing authors" on the staff page at "the leading moderate think-tank of the progressive movement." So, invoking Bill and Elaine is sort of like saying "Yeah, and my mom agrees with me too!" As though we should care.

This brings us to the matter of causality. As I have noted here repeatedly, there is good social scientific research demonstrating that the divisiveness in American politics is due primarily to the Republicans running far and fast to the right. That, in turn, reflects the massive increase in political-economic inequality in the country (and in which the Third Way-ers have been complicit!). In other words, the Democrats have not run to the left. And the Third Way-ers want them to stand put or, better yet, move rightwards. The problem is that since the political spectrum is now so skewed in a conservative direction (at the elite level) what looks "moderate" is frankly right-wing nuttiness. The Republicans are setting the agenda and the Third Way-ers don't grasp that at all. Their rhetoric of moderation is, as Unger notes a disguise for defeat.

(4) All that raises the matter of "realism." Third Way-ers have a remarkable propensity to be patronizing - accusing those who disagree with them of insisting on a "purity test" (as though wanting to dump conservatives like Ben Nelson and Bart Stupak who are beholden to the the misogynist, homophobic Catholic Bishops is so blindly ideological?) or of hewing to "outdated liberal orthodoxies" (like equality before the law). That is why they throw up all the "facts" about the electorate and the Democratic caucus - as though those numbers are cast in stone.

What's wrong with that view? Here, in simple terms, is my answer: This is politics people! Try this: lead public opinion instead of capitulating to it! The Republicans go to great lengths to lead public opinion; indeed they shame the Democrats on that dimension. Obama did nothing on that score in his first two years. He was asleep at the wheel because he is not a progressive and is satisfied with a hodge-podge health insurance reform, mediocre, "moderate" judicial appointments, continued military adventures overseas, and so forth. The excuse is that we need to obsess about what is "realistic" - is this bill passable? is that nominee confirmable? - instead of working to make things happen. Given how much the American political spectrum has shifted to the right the Democrats are reactionary in the simple sense. They react instead of shaping an agenda. And this run to the "middle" is getting the conservative Democrats and their Third Way apologists what precisely? Apparently it is getting them an ass-whuppin' in the mid-term elections next week. It surely has gotten them not an iota of "bi-partisan" cooperation from the Republicans. Unrequited groveling and crappy policy.Well done.

Where does all that leave Berman and other progressives? In the position of saying to Third Way-ers - you conservatives need our votes too. You need them in elections and in the legislature. And we will play hardball with you. We will challenge you for leadership positions and withhold our votes if you propose ridiculous legislation. we will leave you hanging (as the unions ought to be doing to the Dems right now but are not). We will take advantage of political opportunities (as in fusion-voting states like New York) and garner support for candidates who support progressive policies but not for those who (like, for instance, Andrew Cuomo) don't. And we will argue out loud and in public when you do stupid things. That means working to mobilize demonstrations and other forms of pressure in the face of government failure to address the needs of regular people. In other words, it leaves progressives in the position of seeking to shape politics and policy rather than simply reacting to the world depicted by putative realists.

Solidarity and Health Care Reform - Again

"The greatest obstacle to transforming the world is that we lack
the clarity and imagination to conceive that it could be different."
~ Roberto Mangabeira Unger

People outside the arena raised their hands before dawn on
Tuesday after organizers asked those holding tickets with
numbers up to 100 to identify themselves. The group was
already overwhelmed on the first day after allowing 1,500
people through the door, nearly 500 of whom had still not
been served by day's end and had to return early Wednesday.
Photograph © Ruth Fremson/The New York Times.

A few weeks ago I posted on the spectacle of thousands of poor Appalachian residents queued up for a free medical clinic coordinated by Remote Area Medical (RAM) in Wise, Virginia. Last week RAM coordinated a similar clinic at The Los Angeles Forum. You can read the report in The New York Times.

As The Times reporter succinctly stated: "The enormous response to the free care was a stark corollary to the hundreds of Americans who have filled town-hall-style meetings throughout the country, angrily expressing their fear of the Obama administration’s proposed changes to the nation’s health care system." Just so. If this is what private medicine gets us, that should be lesson enough. The Democrats seem to be blind to this. But as the view from Europe makes clear: "Americans Want 'Freedom to Pay Too Much for Inferior Health Care." (Thanks JC!) That is what the nutters screaming and threatening at 'town meetings' are defending - their god given right to have health care rationed by the market and insurance company bureaucrats.

Roberto Unger is a good pragmatist. He places emphasis on the role of imagination in politics. Obama's Democrats lack imagination and they surely lack the ability or the desire (maybe both) to awaken the imagination of the folks who elected them. In my earlier post on RAM's remarkable efforts, I noted that solidarity is intimately dependent of imagination. It is, I suspect, impossible to evince solidarity among people if they cannot imagine the plight of others.

Photography is a useful technology for doing to things. First, as Patrick Maynard argues, it amplifies our imaginations. Second, it is (as Maynard also claims) an 'engine of visualization' - it helps us see. Part of what is valuable about the images that I've seen from the RAM clinics is that they show large numbers. These are the people without access to health care. And Obama's new talk of 'health insurance reform' instead of health care reform has simply distracted attention from these people.

Last week K.H. Bacon, an advocate for refugees died. In his obituary he is quoted to the effect that before his stint as Assistant Secretary of Defense in the Clinton Administration, he "had never seen refugees before, never fully appreciated the sheer magnitude of one million people leaving their homes and needing food, shelter and medical care." What we need, is to see the millions of people who are in dire need of health care. Those people - not gun-toting lunatics - are who we need to see.

Crisis & Change in Progressive Politics

Yesterday I received a notice of recently published essays in The Economist's Voice, which is an on-line journal of opinion pieces. Among the essays is a very interesting offering by John Roemer
a political economist at Yale. Roemer's essay is entitled "Changing the Social Ethos is the Key." You can find it here. Essentially, Roemer is arguing that political economic crisis, because it distributes risk more equally, can lead people to support more solidaristic political-economic policies (say, universal health care) because it is in their self interest to do so. He sees this - potentially - as the basis for an endogenous process by which more and more progressive policies might be adopted - even in the U.S.! His, in other words, is a vision of incremental, yet quite radical reform. Here is a chunk of the argument:

"Crises (wars and depressions) tend to induce greater social insurance. I believe one major reason is that a crisis tends to place all people in the same boat (or at least, it reduces the difference in the sizes of their boats), and if all people are in the same boat with respect to the risks they face, it is in each individual’s self-interest to pass universal insurance. (If everyone in a population of risk-averse citizens faces, for example, a 10% probability of unemployment, then the optimal tax policy for each is to pay 10% of his/her income into the insurance pool when employed, and to collect 90% of his/her salary when unemployed.) Conversely, if people face very different degrees of risk (that is, the probability of a bad event is much higher for me than for you) it becomes politically much more difficult to arrange an insurance plan which is simple, and which all will find in their self-interest. If a crisis changes risk exposures so that all people become more similar in that respect, then the political obstacles to designing universal insurance decrease. My argument is not that citizens immediately become more solidaristic because of a crisis— it is that with common risk exposures, it becomes the self-interest of all to implement universal insurance. The Depression in the U.S. placed a large number of citizens in the same boat; similarly, the Second World War significantly reduced wealth differences in Europe, thus making the former well-to-do much more similar to the former poor with regard to risk exposure, which facilitated the passage of social insurance.

I do not wish to imply that this is the only reason that crises induce social reform. Class struggle may also be magnified due to crises: for instance, those who fought and risked their lives as soldiers in World War II returned with a feeling of entitlement and became more demanding of redistribution and welfare-state benefits. This was certainly important in the post-war period in Europe. A more nuanced version of my thesis is that crises tend to homogenize the risk exposures of the working and middle classes, who then form a sufficient majority to pass social insurance, even should the capitalist class oppose it."*

An even more nuanced version of the argument might recognize that among capitalists there may well be disagreement and conflict over the attractiveness of say, government provided health care. Some sectors, say the insurance industry, might remain unalterably opposed while other employers might see public health provision as quite attractive - if, indeed, it meant that they would be able to off-load significant benefits provision onto the state, thereby becoming more competitive relative to firms located in countries where such costs already are born publicly. But it is a safe bet that talk of "class struggle" is very likely to insure that Roemer is not among the economists whose views Obama and company are soliciting.

At first reading it seemed to me that this view ran counter to views about the reliance of progressive politics on "crisis" or "calamity" that Roberto Unger advances in his work.* But on second thought it seems that Roemer and Unger are simply identifying different mechanisms in different domains. Roemer is thinking about the way political organizations (e.g. political parties) might find constituents who, first based primarily on self-interest, but increasingly on solidarisitc grounds, would support progressive policies.** Unger actually is more concerned with another imperative: "the effort to loosen the dependence of change upon calamity, and to design institutions and discourses that organize and facilitate their own revision. ... It should be possible to be changed without first being ruined. We must redesign our institutions and discourses accordingly." It seems to me that Roemer's vision is probably prerequisite to Unger's, even as Unger's is necessary to solidify the "stable state" for which Roemer hopes.

In the recent past the right in the U.S. has proven especially adept at mobilizing working and middle class voters on the basis of "fear" (Unger) and "insecurity" (Roemer). The point here is that progressives need to figure out how to turn those motivations to their own political advantage. Whether that is possible, of course, is a major question.
__________
* Roberto Mangabeira Unger. 2005. What Should the Left Propose? Verso, pages 18-19, 37f, 61.

** The endogeneity continues: "crises homogenize risk exposures, creating a democratic demand for insurance (economics and politics), which then induces preference change in a socially-oriented direction (psychology) which then induces a demand for more insurance, and so on, until some new stable state is reached."

Unger to Leave Minister's Post

Regular readers will know that I admire the work of Roberto Mangabeira Unger. According to this report in Reuters, Unger will be leaving his ministerial position in the Brazilian Cabinet.

Roberto Unger on the World Economic Crisis

I've just come across this recent piece ~ "Using the Crisis to Remake the Market" ~ by Roberto Mangabeira Unger about whose work I've posted pretty regularly. He starts as follows:

The financial crisis of 2008 provides an occasion to advance two projects of vast consequence. One project is to revise the post World War II settlement for the purpose of making international arrangements more hospitable to national divergence, experiment, and alternatives than they are today. The other project is to reshape some of the institutions that define market economies so that they can afford more opportunity to more people.

And he concludes this way:

Such initiatives would represent a small down payment on a large shift in the focus of ideological controversy. It is not enough to regulate the market economy. It is not enough to counterbalance inequalities generated in the market by resorting to compensatory redistribution through tax and transfer. It is necessary to change piece by piece and step by step, the institutions that relate finance to the real economy if we are to recover from the present crisis in a way that helps us avoid future crises. Other ideals, of inclusion and opportunity, will require us to enlarge the scope of this practice of institutional reconstruction. The crisis is a chance but it is also a crutch. The task of the imagination will be to do the work of crisis without crisis.

In between Unger notes that, among other things, the projects he identifies require that we recognize something that I have pointed out here before, namely that financial markets have little to do with providing capital to productive economic activity that might benefit large numbers of people and lots to do with rewarding risky speculation by a very few. So, our stock markets - as they are currently configured - hardly are necessary to the functioning of a market economy. They can be reformed and made more useful. That is the aim of experimenting with political-economic institutions [1] [2] [3]. The question is whether an organized political constituency will emerge to push that agenda. Given the sheer mal-distribution of income, wealth and opportunity in the U.S. (to say nothing of other palces) such a constituency exists, but remains, in Dewey's words, "inchoate." What is needed is for it to recognize itself as a pubic and act as one.

Asked and Answered: Unger & the Military

I came across this short essay late last week and have not had time to comment on it until today:

But what is it for?

Jan 15th 2009 | SÃO PAULO
From The Economist print edition

A philosopher redesigns an army

WHEN Roberto Mangabeira Unger swapped life as a philosopher and Harvard law professor for a place in Brazil’s government, he was given a small ministry from which to think about the future. From this perch, Mr Unger has already produced a proposal for regularising land tenure in the Amazon. He also has a grand scheme for redesigning the world economy (with help from his former pupil, Barack Obama). His most recent plan is a blueprint for Brazil’s armed forces—an unusual task for a man whose previous life involved writing long, gnomic books about “the radicalisation of indeterminacy”.

There are some traces of the philosopher in his “National Defence Strategy”. Conscription, which Mr Unger is keen to continue (but which many youngsters avoid), is described as a “republicanising space”. But in some respects his report reiterates the military top brass’s traditional preoccupations, including the urge to master new technologies such as nuclear energy (to power submarines, not make bombs) and create a domestic arms industry, and a mild paranoia about Amazonia.

Brazil’s army occupies an ambiguous place in national life. Its officers, fired with a faith in progress imported from France, replaced the monarchy with a republic in the 19th century. The army has often seen itself as a force for nation-building, laying down roads and putting up hospitals. But it has also seized power at times, such as in the 21 years to 1985, during which time one member of the current cabinet was tortured for her political views.

When Brazil became a democracy again it managed to keep the army out of politics but did not define a clear new role for it. Brazil’s territory has not been seriously threatened since the 1860s, when together with Argentina and Uruguay it crushed little Paraguay. The armed forces now talk a lot about flexibility, though this is not so much a voguish notion as a reflection of the difficulty of imagining threats to a country that is almost instinctively pacifist. Mr Unger uses the word flexibility 31 times in his 70-page review.

In the past few years, however, the government has started to think about projecting power abroad. Since 2004, Brazil has commanded the United Nations’ intervention in Haiti. After a slow start during which the mission was plagued by unclear objectives, it is now held up as a great success amid the awful failures in Congo and Somalia, according to Richard Gowan of the Centre on International Co-operation at New York University, who has observed Brazilian marines in action.

A second use for the army, featured prominently in Mr Unger’s plans, is in the policing of the Amazon region. “The Amazon is a bit like the Mediterranean was at the beginning of the 19th century,” says Alfredo Valladão of Sciences Po, a French university, “full of smugglers and pirates, and without much effective state presence.” The former military government had a fixation with the idea that a long, jungly border made the country vulnerable and that foreigners coveted Brazil’s forests. Boosting troop numbers to deter illegal logging and ranching would thus be a return to two old modes of military thinking: defending the forests from invaders and extending the reach of the state.

So, while an outside observer (whom they themselves tracked down and interviewed) believes that statelessness in Amazonia is (at least potentially) a problem, the folks at The Economist dismiss concerns about deforestation and smuggling and so forth simply as simply products of Brazilian "paranoia." And, of course, an example of successful peacekeeping is nothing to sneeze at. Perhaps the military in the U.S., Canada and Britain (to name a few) could take some lessons from Brazilians? One need not have any illusions about the intrinsic virtue of the military in Brazil (or elsewhere for that matter) to see that the trajectory, at least, seems to be positive. And, for my money, Unger seems like a reasonable person to have drafting plans to help keep the military on that trajectory.

In large part, it seems that the sarcastic tone the editors at The Economist adopt in this piece reflects the fact that they are ideologically averse to any policy anywhere that might be construed as "extending the reach of the state." Of course, the notion that environmental protection and economic development in the Amazon - which is a matter of global significance - require well functioning markets, which in turn require effective political institutions seems obvious. Even The Economist folk know that. But they surely- also for ideological reasons - distrust Unger regarding the sorts of institutional arrangements that might best do the job. You can imagine the grumbling at editorial meetings: "What is all that stuff about 'institutional experimentation 'anyway? We have good market fundamentalist blueprints to tell us what to do!" Perhaps The Economist folk ought to read and engage with Unger's Free Trade Reimagined or other works in a serious way. That, of course, would require more than sniping. And, insofar as it is not simply a reflex of ideological shortsightedness, it might diminish the perplexity they express in this piece.

Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt is, in my estimation, among a small handful of truly profound 20th century political theorists. Maybe Weber, Dewey, Rawls, Foucault, and Habermas are in the same league. The picture at right is Arendt at the University of Chicago in the mid-1960s. In any case, she was born 14 October 1906 and I missed noting the anniversary this past week. That is ironic because I actually was reading her essay "What is Freedom?" that day in preparation for discussing it in my freshman political theory course.

There are two aspects of the essay that especially appeal to me. The first is her insistence that freedom requires public space in which we can interact and speak. And this leads her to note that in our world freedom is precarious precisely due to a lack of such a public world.

"Moreover, whenever the man-made world does not become the scene of action and speech - as in despotically ruled communities which banish their subjects into the narrowness of the home and thus prevent the rise of a public realm - freedom has no worldly reality. Without a politically guaranteed public realm, freedom lacks the worldly space to make its appearance. To be sure, it may still dwell in men's hearts as desire or will or hope or yearning; but the human heart, as we all know, is a very dark place, and whatever goes on in its obscurity can hardly be called demonstrable fact. Freedom as demonstrable fact and politics coincide and are related to each other like two sides of the same matter."

On Arendt's view, freedom is not a characteristic of thought or conscience or choice, but of action, where the latter, when free, involves the capacity "to call something into being which did not exist before, which was not given, not even as an object of cognition or imagination, and which therefore, strictly speaking, could not be known." It is, in other words, essential to our ability to make (although that is a word Arendt herself would not allow in this context) and sustain the world. This sounds as though Arendt would see politics as akin to art and she does in a somewhat unsatisfying way. She insists that politics resembles the performing arts, but not the creative arts. That is because, on her view, the former require continues performance if they are exist, while the latter reify thought and action in some object. This, it seems to me, is a mistaken - overly narrow - view of the creative arts and that, if we were to turn to Dewey and see that it is a mistake to conflate art and its objects. (This is a lesson, as I noted here, that we need to keep in mind if we want to think of photography and its uses instead of about photographs.) That, of course, would require an argument that I am not prepared to make here.

The second theme in the essay that I find appealing comes toward the very end where Arendt makes the following comments on the miraculous dimension of free action.

"Every act, seen from the perspective not of the agent but of the process in whose framework it occurs and whose automatism it interrupts, is a 'miracle' - that is, something which could not be expected. If it is true that action and beginning are essentially the same, it follows that a capacity for performing miracles must likewise be within the range of human faculties. This sounds stranger than it actually is. It is in the very nature of every new beginning that it breaks into the world as an 'infinite improbability,' and yet it is precisely this infinitely improbable which actually constitutes the very texture of everything we call real."

Having spent extended parts of my childhood in Catholic schools, I am almost viscerally averse to talk of miracles. Add to that the recent vogue for such talk among new age types and I'm usually ready, when someone mentions miracles, to back my way toward the door so that I might escape without taking my eyes off the crazy folks. That said, I think it is important to be able to think seriously about the truly unexpected both in art and in politics. What else, after all, do we have in mind when we think about surprise and creativity and innovation and reform?

Game theorists, for example, talk of unforeseen contingencies - occurrences to which we do not merely assign minuscule probabilities, but that we truly do not anticipate at all. It turns out, unsurprisingly, that one cannot exclude such events from formal models. That is part of what makes them useful and provocative. Similarly, pragmatists rightly stress the indeterminacy of social and political interaction in all sorts of ways. Roberto Mangabeira Unger, about whom I've posted here several times, speaks of the place of miracles in ways that echo Arendt too. Where those affinities might lead us, though, is a subject for another post. I was interested only in noting that Arendt directs us to ponder the same difficult subjects.

Pragmatist Progress in Brazil?

I have posted several times on Roberto Unger who moved from Harvard Law School to take up a Ministerial position in the cabinet of Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. From my perspective this represents an important attempt on Unger's part to put pragmatist philosophical commitments into political practice. (In the U.S. the greatest influence of pragmatism outside the academy tends, I think, to be among prominent judges such a Richard Posner and Stephen Breyer.) The stakes here are immense. According to this report from the BBC, Lula has appointed Unger to coordinate development policy in the Amazon. This is a complex task given the large number of cabinet portfolios (35) that exist in Brazil with the attendant possibility of conflicting claims among Ministers. Already, according to this story in The Economist, the politics involved apparently prompted Minister for the Environment Marina Silva to resign her post. Stay tuned.
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P.S.: Updated 19 May 08 ~ You can find a yet another report from Reuters here.

Making Up for Nike and McDonalds ~ Another American Export

It has been a busy day here in blogging land ... However, I want to call your attention to this profile of Roberto Mangabeira Unger from The New York Times yesterday. As I have noted here repeatedly [1] [2] [3] [4] [5], I think Unger is quite interesting insofar as he is trying to export a quite radical version of American pragmatism to Brazil. I do not agree with Unger in all the details, but his views on institutional experimentation, radicalizing democracy and disentangling systemic political-economic reform from crisis all are crucially important.

Can you imagine a U.S. Presidential candidate who promised to appoint a 'minister of ideas' or a council of intellectual advisors who were not narrow-minded economists? Lula has appointed Unger in Brazil. And, in a similarly remarkable move, in France the conservative Nicolas Sarkozy has solicited the views of Amartya Sen and Joseph Stiglitz [1] on what might be included in a plausible metric for economic growth only to be ridiculed by the anti-intellecctuals at The Wall Street Journal and The Financial Times. It is astounding how fearsome ideas and inquiry can be. In a country where we are hostage to neo-consrvative and neo-liberal ideologues, this is a fear I wish we could overcome.

Interview: Roberto Mangabeira Unger

Photograph © Fabio Pozzebom/ABr

I find legal and political theorist Roberto Mangabeira Unger fascinating for a number of reasons. Most especially, I think his recent writings [1] [2] [3] are provocative attempts to extend a pragmatist commitment to insititutional pluralism and experimentalism into the realm of political-economic arrangements. As I noted here last spring, Unger accepted a position as Minister for Long-Term Strategic Planning in the cabinet of Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (with whom he appears in the photo above). You can find a recent interview with Unger here at the Financial Times online in which he discusses the initiatives he is seeking to promote.

Roberto Unger (Again)

My overlapping interests in pragmatism, political economy and democracy have me reading recent books by Roberto Unger [1] [2] and following his move from the legal academy into government [3]. This book is his latest and it is quite interestig insofar as he rightly insists (i) that no abstract institutional model (e.g., an economic model of 'the' market) has a unique instantiation in practice and (ii) that there exists a "punumbra of possibility" around any particular institutional arrangement from which those who inhabit it might, via political action, move to another more attractive arrangement.

Reading Around: Pragmatists in Magenta & Cream

A couple of books have appeared this spring by influential pragmatist thinkers, so I thought I'd call them to your attention. The first is The Self Awakened by Roberto Unger about whom I've posted several times lately [1], [2], [3]. The second is Philosophy as Cultural Politics by Richard Rorty who also has made cameo apperances here in the past [1], [2].

On the back of the Rorty book you will find a blurb from the very smart, insightful philosopher Ian Hacking who says, in part: "Wise and immensely readable, these essays hammer home John Dewey's theme: philosophy matters when it changes what we want to talk about, and how we do it. In detail they seem to me to be blissfully right or infuriatingly wrong ..." While no one would accuse Unger of being "immensely readable," Hacking's latter assessment seems to me to be true too of his argument. So, Rorty and Unger share more than a remarkably similar color scheme. They also will both provoke you to reconsider what you talk about and how.

The Unger Experiment in Brazil

According to economist Dani Rodrik's blog, Brazilian President Luis Inacio “Lula” da Silva has appointed pragmatist law professer Roberto Mangabeira Unger to a ministerial post heading a newly created "special secretariat for long-term actions." This is an interesting appointment from my perspective insofar as Unger has articulated (more on that verb below) a view of institutional pluralism and political experimentalism that I find extremely congenial.* (You can find an earlier post of mine on Unger here.) Unger himself is Brazilian and, if I have this correctly, was the youngest person ever granted tenure at Harvard Law School.

Rodrik describes Unger as "the most erudite and impenetrable man I know." And this recent interview with Unger from The Guardian begins with this observation: "Talking to Roberto Mangabeira Unger for an hour is like waltzing with a very articulate cement mixer. Being slippery in his intellectual formulations is a matter of perverse pride to him. When The London Review of Books rejected an article of his on the grounds that it was somewhat lacking in "conversational" tone, Unger retorted that he was never conversational; even in conversation."

I find that sort of purposeful obscurity totally unhelpful, especially because Unger's underlying ideas are, I think, both extremely provocative and politically innovative. This obscurity has been a problem for pragmatist political thought since Dewey, whose writing "style" was, to be polite, atrocious. Reading either presents an unnecessarily high barrier to entry.

Interesingly enough, I cannot find any reference to Unger's appointment in the press but it puts him into a public position similarly visible to that occupied by Richard Posner which, from a pragmatist viewpoint should be interesting. We should soon see something of an answer to the question that Unger proposd in his recent book "What Should the Left Propose?"
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Follow up (added later that evening): You can find a disparaging - and I think not entirely fair - review of Unger's What Should the Left Propose? by Michael Bérubé from Dissent here. I guess just as initial warrent regarding the seriousness of a writer's political-economic ideas, I find the endorsement of an economist like Rodrik more persuasive than the flippancy of English Professors, even smart ones like Bérubé.

More importantly, and disturbingly, are claims by bloggers that Unger recently has removed a 2005 paper from his Harvard web page in which he attacked Lula's first administration as “the most corrupt government in the history of Brazil.” Unger was among the founders of the Brazilian Republican Party and his new appointment has been interpreted as a political sidepayment by Lula to the party which is part of the President's political coalition. Stay tuned.
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* For the truly nerdy, you can find my views on such things in Jack Knight and James Johnson. 2007. “The Priority of Democracy: A Pragmatist Approach to Political-Economic Institutions and the Burden of Justification,” American Political Science Review, Volume 101, Issue 01, pages 47-61. This essay is an advertisement for the book Jack & I are writing.

Questions prompted by Roberto Unger

This afternoon I picked up a copy of Roberto Unger's What Should The Left Propose? (Verso, 2005) in large part because I sympathize with the experimentalism he endorses with respect to political-economic institutions. This is a theme that emerges directly from American pragmatism of the sort I find especially persuasive. In any case, at the start of the book Unger writes the following: "The great European social theorists ... indentified the internal dynamics of societies - the revelation of inescapabale conflicts and missed opportunities - as the proximate cause of their transformation. These thinkers were mistaken. War and economic collapse have been the chief levers of change; catastrophe - unforeseen and uncontrolled - has served as the midwife of reform. The task of imagination is to do the work of crisis without crisis."

I think this is an extremely interesting point. We need not adjudicate the empirical question - namely whether catastrophe has underwritten more political-economic reform than has the workings of scoial dynmamics or one or another sort - in order to appreciate the potentially expansive role Unger accords imagination in politics. He takes a very Deweyian view of education as, essentially a training of the imagination. But even so, if we also acknowledge that, like our other "mental" capacities, imagination does not take place 'in our heads,' relying instead on a set of prosthetic devices, then it seems apparent that there is a rather large role in Unger's political project for photography as well as other visual arts.

At this point I will send readers back to one of my very first posts here where I discuss Patrick Maynard's claim that photography is best understood as a technology, one that allows us to not only see things but to imagine ourselves doing so. Unger suggests that we ought to be able to substitute imagining alternatives for having to come up with them as a way of pulling our collective butts out of the fire. Of course, he puts the point much more gracefully. He hopes to "loosen the dependence of change on calamity; and to design institutions and discourses that organize and facilitate their own revision." Invoking an historical case, he continues: "Franklin Roosevelt had war and economic collapse as his allies in the project of reform. It should be possible to be changed without being ruined."

If we confront a surfeit of images of calamity and catastrophe, perhaps we might use them as a substitute for the real thing. Perhaps they might serve as a basis from which to imagine alternatives to the political and economic and social arrangements that sustain such disasters. (Recall, for instance, the finding by Amartya Sen that famine results not from an absolute lack of food but from systems of property rights that differentially distribute access to such food as is available.) Are there other ways that we might use photography for such political purposes? If so, would extant photographic conventions enable or hinder any such potential efforts?