Leszek Kolakowski

On a couple of occasions I've posted here about Leszek Kolakowski, a Polish intellectual who died several years ago, and whom I had the great good fortune of having as a teacher during graduate school. This week at The Nation you can find this long, appropriately critical if largely sympathetic, review essay on some of his posthumously published works.

Ready! Take Aim! Fire!~ The University of Chicago Shoots Itself in the Other Foot

Once again, my Alma Mater, is in the news. And, once again, the news is not good. Not long ago I posted on the self-congratulatory love fest that the department of economics held recently - celebrating their market fundamentalism in the face of any and all evidence or reason. And just over a year ago I noted in a post on Studs Turkle that the University is buying the building on South University Avenue that houses the Seminary Coop Bookstore - arguably the best academic bookstore in the country, if not the world. I am not at all confident that the University can help itself; it will in all likelihood strike a fatal blow to the coop before the story ends. Stay tuned. The link between those two posts is that the building the coop now occupies is intended to house an institute in honor of ideologue-in-chief Milton Friedman. How fitting that that enterprise (funded by rich alums) should threaten the existence of the coop!

The University of Chicago seems to be incredibly ham-fisted when it comes to recognizing the value of community resources and public spaces. This morning I came across this contribution by Jamie Kalven to The Huffington Post. It seems the University is intent on evicting a community garden - and the robust set of associations that revolve around it - so that they can use the parcel of land as a staging area for a construction project. Kalven is sensible and articulate about the University. The administration apparently is populated by people who, while maybe polite and well-intentioned, seem have no clue whatsoever. Among the problems from which Hyde Park has suffered throughout the years is an emaciated 'community' and anemic 'public space.' Here the University is going out of its way to exercise it property rights in a way that will undermine the prospects even further. Worse. The construction project for which the garden land will be taken over is - you guessed it - going to produce a building that will house the Seminary Coop Bookstore.

While I do not want to get carried away with the virtues of gardening - what I think of as adults playing in the dirt - it is clear that the University is more concerned with community in the abstract than what it looks like in reality.

How Gardeners Learn Things from Invisible Institute on Vimeo.

Shirley Burtz from Invisible Institute on Vimeo.

Apostasy in Chicago

I recently received my copy of The University of Chicago Magazine. It contains this puff piece about a self-congratulatory conference of the economists there. The article was incredibly annoying for a couple of reasons. In the first place, the author never managed to actually talk to anyone who disagrees with the market fundamentalists in Hyde Park. He quotes some critics of the Chicago School. But he mostly let the true believers run on about how great they are; the consequence is that they end up caricaturing their critics and denying that they themselves have been wrong, ever, about anything. One upshot of that - and this is truly irritating - was that they were able to rationalize their (specifically Milton Fridman, Arnold Harberger and their acolytes) complicity in the murderous Pinochet dictatorship. The defense amounts to acknowledging that just maybe rates of economic inequality were higher under Pinochet but that his "reforms" (let's not use the word coup!) nevertheless ushered in economic progress on the continent. That is a howler given that the real problem is that Pinochet murdered his opponents in very large numbers. The complicity of Friedman et. al lies in having lent intellectual legitimacy to a murderous regime. It would be refreshing to have the Chicago economists acknowledge that their much loved "free markets" too often are instituted through the barrel of a gun. It pains me to see the alumni magazine of a great university celebrating ideologues.

Having said that, there is some evidence of active brain waves in Hyde Park. I recommend this essay ~ "How I Became a Keynesian" ~ by Richard Posner in The New Republic. Posner has not, I suspect, become a convert. He has simply demonstrated that it is easy to learn from those with whom one disagrees, if only one reads them first.

Passings: Leszek Kolakowski (1927-2009)

"I wish to live in a small rustic cabin, on the edge of a great forest,
located at the intersection of the Champs Elysee and
52nd Street in Manhattan" ~ Leszek Kolakowski

Some time ago I posted on one of my graduate school teachers, philosopher Leszek Kolakowski. I use his "wish" as the basis for part of a lecture here in Ann Arbor each summer. In the news this morning I learned that Professor Kolakowski has died at the age of 81. This is a great intellectual loss. You can find the notice from the BBC here. And there is an appreciative essay in the NYRB here. Today I am traveling, so I will have to wait to offer some proper comments.

Solow on Posner on "the Depression"

In the NYRB this week you can find this review by Robert Solow of Richard Posner's new book A Failure of Capitalism. Here is the punchline, which appears at the outset:

"The plainspokenness I mentioned is what makes this book an event. There is no doubt that Posner has been an independent thinker, never a passive follower of a party line. Neither is there any doubt that his independent thoughts have usually led him to a position well to the right of the political economy spectrum. The Seventh Circuit is based in Chicago, and Posner has taught at the University of Chicago. Much of his thought exhibits an affinity to Chicago school economics: libertarian, monetarist, sensitive to even small matters of economic efficiency, dismissive of large matters of equity, and therefore protective of property rights even at the expense of larger and softer "human" rights.

But not this time, at least not at one central point, the main point of this book. Here is one of several statements he makes:

Some conservatives believe that the depression is the result of unwise government policies. I believe it is a market failure. The government's myopia, passivity, and blunders played a critical role in allowing the recession to balloon into a depression, and so have several fortuitous factors. But without any government regulation of the financial industry, the economy would still, in all likelihood, be in a depression; what we have learned from the depression has shown that we need a more active and intelligent government to keep our model of a capitalist economy from running off the rails. The movement to deregulate the financial industry went too far by exaggerating the resilience—the self-healing powers—of laissez-faire capitalism.

If I had written that, it would not be news. From Richard Posner, it is. The underlying argument—it is not novel but it is sound—goes something like this. [ . . .]"

Studs Terkel (1912-2008)

Long time radio personality and Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Studs Terkel has died in Chicago at age 96. There, very appropriately, will be a host of notices and remembrances and appreciations in the coming days. Here is part of the initial wave from The Nation and The Chicago Tribune. Terkel and I are both alums of the University of Chicago which is in the process of trying to establish a major institute named for the late, unlamented ideologue Milton Friedman. I look forward to the day when there is a similar move on campus to commemorate Studs.

Update 1 November: Here are more recollections and tributes, most with various links - The Nation (again), In These Times, and The New York Times, . . .

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.

University of Chicago & Darfur

Well, my alma mater has made it into the news again for being ethically and politically tone deaf. See this report from The Nation on how the trustees and administration at the University of Chicago have refused to divest from investments in Sudanese companies as well as from corporations doing business in Sudan. This seems shameless. There is a student organization on campus trying to pressure the trustees to reverse their decision. But, the organization does not have any contact information and neither does it afford alums any way to raise their voices. Alums are otherwise known as DONORS! And like it or not, Trustees are more likely to listen to current and future donors than to students.

Leszek Kolakowski

While in graduate school in Chicago, I had the good fortune to take a seminar on "Cartesianism" with Leszek Kolakowski. That must've been in the late 1980s. We read Descartes, Husserl and Rorty. The course was offerd through the Committee on Social Thought and was chock full of Straussians drawn, no doubt, by Kolakowski's anti-communism but surely not by his affirmative position as a "Conservative-Liberal-Socialist." The seminar turned out, for reasons that I will not rehearse, to be a very enjoyable intellectual adventure. In any case, Kolakowski has won the Jerusalem Prize for Literature this year. This is a prize "awarded every two years for literary achievements in the field of freedom of the individual in society"