Is Harvard's Government Department Really Weaker Today Because of the Absence of Analogues to Ned Banfield, <strike>James Wilson</strike>, **Late-Period** Samuel Huntington, & Harvey Mansfield?
Is Harvard's Government Department Really Weaker Today Because of the Absence of Analogues to Ned Banfield, <strike>James Wilson</strike>, **Late-Period** Samuel Huntington, & Harvey Mansfield?
Steve Teles's pleas for help in fighting "academic sectarianism" seem convincing to me in abstract, but unconvincing to me when we get down to empirical cases of really-existing conservatives past...
This piece goes to the heart of what could be called the lengthy crisis of American conservative intellectuals. When any scholar or public intellectual is convinced that the solutions to nearly every social problem are settled issues, the result is intellectual and ideological rot.
Going back to the 1950s, the so-called conservative intelligentsia has preached the same gospel, with little variation: ‘we’ would all be happy if the country embraced lower taxes, little if any regulation, more religion, and zero tolerance for crime—though only among the poor and marginalized. A morally disastrous, fetishistic belief in gun rights has been added to this toxic cocktail over the last 30+ years. That not a shred of historical evidence or example can be marshaled in support of this program has nonetheless made its adherents ever more convinced in its absolute correctness.
I am unable to speak to your critique of these former Harvard faculty. However, as a sometime historian of economic thought, I've had disturbing intellectual encounters with a number of prominent "conservative" economists. Some, although by no means all, have displayed appalling intellectual dishonesty when discussing "the oppositions'" intellectual contributions. There is no value above replacement there. Winning an argument by rhetorical trickery is no way to run a scholarly enterprise.
Good one. Has the extra added advantage of making me glad I didn't go to Harvard. It would have been, as William Shawn said to me after interviewing me for a staff position at the New Yorker, "You would not fit in here." He was correct about the New Yorker, and he would have been correct about Harvard, from which more than a few New Yorker staffers graduated.
James Q. Wilson has lots of defenders—at least his big "Bureaucracy". (& I am one of them: that he had written that slipped me mmind.) Also early-period Huntington, but I confess that I do not (yet) see the attraction...
I couldn’t find “the Harvard government”—then or now—even you gave me a map and a flashlight. But I did (quite by chance) happen into a personal acquaintanceship with Ed Banfield back when I was a young newspaper reporter—I found him a lifeline, a breath of fresh air. I don’t think it be helpful to describe the Ed-of-that-time as “conservative” so much as “contrarian (I think he hated John Kenneth Galbraith: hmph, talk about gaseous pretension….). Likewise I thought Banfield-Wilson “City Politics” far more helpful than almost anything else hand for my reporter life. Ed did get more rancid later (but a battered copy of “Moral Basis” is tucked away in these bookshelves somewhere). If we need to find a soulmate for Banfield, maybe a better choice would be Saul Alinsky.
It seems to me that it all turns on what is meant by "conservative." I hear much talk praising or disparaging "conservatism" with little explication of the word. I never enjoyed the "advantages" of a Harvard education but as an undergraduate at UCLA studying political philosophy (among many other things) more than two-thirds of century ago, I was taught that conservatism involved the disposition to regard change to existing institutions as attended with sufficient danger to warrant careful critical scrutiny. I now spend a good deal of my time reading papers and books in the social sciences (broadly conceived) and frankly I fail to see any notable lack of conservatism (so defined) in them. Indeed, my assessment is that critical standards in social sciences has advanced markedly over the past six or seven decades (making me much more interested in them than I then would have imagined). And most of the writings and pronouncements of self-proclaimed "conservatives" to me seem notably deficient in critical standards. The world as a whole could use a good deal more and deeper critical thinking and investigation but I doubt very much whether that is what Messrs. Teles et al have in mind.
It's entertaining, to be sure, but of how much use is it in shaping hiring decisions? You've no doubt had broader experience than I, but over the course of my career I worked for some academic-ish institutes where I was involved in hiring decisions for scores of new PhDs, interviewing each candidate in extenso and reading their dissertations. I did routinely ask who had influenced them most but with very limited exceptions would have been hard put to have placed them on a political map. There was one who wrote her dissertation on Edmund Burke (a distant relation of mine) but she focused on Burke's impassioned (and rather impolitic) opposition to slavery, which would no doubt have disqualified her as a conservative in the eyes of most who claim that title in today's US. My point is that if someone had urged me to make my department "more conservative" (or even "more liberal") while still emphasizing intellectual standards I would have had no idea how to operationalize it. After a few years you will have a candidate's body of published work to review, but that will never tell you whether the candidate is the second coming of Wilson, Huntington, etc. To me it seems that a defining characteristic of a good scholar is the capacity always to surprise you.
And if we were to find a way to answer Teles' plea and install genuine critically-minded scholars who are inclined to investigate more deeply how these issues could be seen through a "conservative" frame (however defined) what might be accomplished? Would they somehow craft arguments that would convince skeptics that the claims of authoritative religion were not only true but deserved to be taken as law? That would convince the poor, members of racial minorities, people regarded as sexual and social deviants, etc. that their inferior status is deserved and must be embraced? That would reconcile the mass to the disproportionate political power of great wealth? Putting aside any considerations of morality, is such a thing even conceivable? Surely not if one is to give any credit to the work of Ron Inglehart, Pippa Norris, et al.
I agree with this. Despite significant attempts I was never able to discern a conservative *philosophy*. It's nothing more than, as you say, a disposition to be cautious of change or perhaps that's a principle to follow. But there's no factual or principled basis for the sound bites which have passed for "conservatism" over the past, say, 90 years: keep the government out of the market; the focus on equal rights, whether for women, minorities, or LGBTQ+, is misguided; "law and order"; religion is the only solid basis for society and the government should demand it; guns; et al.
Instead what we see is "conservatism" as the public face of ethno-national authoritarianism. Those who move that agenda, no matter how softly, are making no contribution to Harvard or anywhere else.
I feel like all of these critiques that the Academy has gone too left are really nothing more than white men complaining about their loss of status and other benefits. They dress it up somewhat benignly as a need for a more balanced discussion or somewhat malignantly as a response to “cancel culture,” but it’s all the same thing, white male grievance. Power corrupts and it is quite possible that as the left of the Academy has gained power it has applied it in unfair, self serving, and intolerant ways. But I find it hard to locate legitimate thoughtful criticisms of this corruption and really can’t swing a cat without hitting another whingeing conservative white guy.
A nice colloquy, but, still, the point of Dr. DeLong's original piece is that Harvard shouldn't employ anyone he or Glenn Loury disapproves of, which is not what "academic freedom" is supposed to mean. What we get, instead of a reasoned discussion of whether "the academy" is too uniformly liberal (if not tediously and oppressively "woke"), is a lot of professorial harumphing, consisting almost entirely of anecdotes and attitude as opposed to substance.
Lots of people I disapprove of have large positive VAR. I thought that the point of my original piece was: show me the money. Where is the VAR in Wilson, Banfield, Huntington, and Mansfield—and if there was VAR was it because or in spite of their conservatism?
The score so far on the "where is the VAR" question: Yes for Wilson (and I really should not have forgotten his "Bureaucracy"). IMHO, a very strong HELL NO!! for Mansfield. For Banfield and Huntington, I may be convinceable but so far I have not convinced myself and nobody has convinced me.
The score so far on the "was it because they were conservative?" question is, I think, probably not. The VAR claimed is collinear with the VAR for Glazer and Moynihan, who were definitely not conservatives but liberals. Brad
I appreciate the speed and courtesy of your response, if not its "accuracy". First of all, you began your piece by ridiculing "conservatism" in general, in very lazy terms--"the inerrancy of the King James bible", for example. Many conservatives are Catholic, who certainly don't believe in the inerrancy of the King James, because they believe that it was the Vulgate that had the direct guidance of the Holy Spirit, and because few Catholics take the bible with evangelical literalness. (I have always been an atheist, by the way.) As for "VAR", how are you supposed to judge what a scholar is "going to do" ahead of time? I recall you giving high praise to some European thinker who started far left (you disapproved) and ended far right (you also disapproved), but admired what he said in between. A lot of people, like Francis Fukuyama, who I guess you are OK with, liked "early Huntington", before he decided that only Europeans and Asians were capable of civilization. Also, if Glenn Loury was "wrong" about Wilson, why couldn't he have been wrong about the other people he trashed? Loury thinks that because he's black he's always right when it comes to anything having to do with race, a pose that I find unconvincing.
"Conservatism" as a philosophy scarcely exists today. The fact that Russell Kirk is considered a thinker at all (I find him laughable) tells you almost all you need to know. The most influential thinkers "on the right" tend to be libertarians like Friedman and Hayek, who tend to be disqualified because they're atheists. Also, to my own mind, "strict" libertarianism was effectively "refuted" by the Great Recession.
The thing is, the "liberalism" isn't doing all that well either. California is about as liberal as a state can get. Do you think it's well governed? What do government housing programs do other than provide jobs for bureaucrats? For 19 years, I wrote about the National Assessment of Educational Progress. In 2022, NAEP reading scores for grade 4 black students showed the following scale score results: New York (202) and California (201) were lower than Florida (215) and Mississippi (212). These are "statistically significant results", as we say in the biz. In the past, state officials used to say "thank God for Mississippi", because compared to Ole Miss, any state looked good. Today, they can say that about California.
Yathink "conservatives [who] are Catholic... certainly don't believe in the inerrancy of the King James, because they believe that it was the Vulgate that had the direct guidance of the Holy Spirit" is any better? A Dark-Age Papal power move that "we will not listen to corrections of St. Anselm from people who understand the original Greek" well is really not a good look at all. Indeed, in general pretending in public that you and yours have special access and insight to the 𝚨 & 𝛀, and that others should shut up is really not a good look.
Brad uses baseball's "Value Above Replacement" concept. VAR works for baseball players (or maybe politicians), but not scholars. Scholars--especially great scholars--are measured by their home runs, not their strikeouts. Nobody holds Einstein's errors on quantum mechanics ("God does not play dice") against him. EO Wilson and William Shockley were still great scientists, despite their embarrassing penchant for racist pseudoscience.
Did James Q. Wilson hit home runs? You betcha! His book on bureaucracy alone was enough to make anybody's reputation. Did his theories on crime cause more damage than good? Quite likely, but net social impact is not how we measure scholars.
I liked "Varieties of Police Behavior." But I'd call it "very good", rather than "great." And I'm neither a criminologist nor a sociologist, so I don't trust my judgment in this sphere.
Why would they ever learn? By definition, a conservative shouldn't learn. They should receive knowledge from those better than them and propagate it to their lessers.
You form a judgment -- "I don't the VAR there" -- about Wilson based on a comment by Loury. This is a waste of your time and ours. Please resist the compulsion to opine on everything under the sun, and stick to the many topics about which you have genuinely useful knowledge.
I cut off the end. Of my own post. Should continued (gumment) diatribe, but instead the book offers an insightful analysis of where bureaucracy succeeds/fails, and why.
This piece goes to the heart of what could be called the lengthy crisis of American conservative intellectuals. When any scholar or public intellectual is convinced that the solutions to nearly every social problem are settled issues, the result is intellectual and ideological rot.
Going back to the 1950s, the so-called conservative intelligentsia has preached the same gospel, with little variation: ‘we’ would all be happy if the country embraced lower taxes, little if any regulation, more religion, and zero tolerance for crime—though only among the poor and marginalized. A morally disastrous, fetishistic belief in gun rights has been added to this toxic cocktail over the last 30+ years. That not a shred of historical evidence or example can be marshaled in support of this program has nonetheless made its adherents ever more convinced in its absolute correctness.
:You won't hear much of an argument from me...
I am unable to speak to your critique of these former Harvard faculty. However, as a sometime historian of economic thought, I've had disturbing intellectual encounters with a number of prominent "conservative" economists. Some, although by no means all, have displayed appalling intellectual dishonesty when discussing "the oppositions'" intellectual contributions. There is no value above replacement there. Winning an argument by rhetorical trickery is no way to run a scholarly enterprise.
Wasn't that Buckley's whole shtick?
Indeed...
Good one. Has the extra added advantage of making me glad I didn't go to Harvard. It would have been, as William Shawn said to me after interviewing me for a staff position at the New Yorker, "You would not fit in here." He was correct about the New Yorker, and he would have been correct about Harvard, from which more than a few New Yorker staffers graduated.
James Q. Wilson has lots of defenders—at least his big "Bureaucracy". (& I am one of them: that he had written that slipped me mmind.) Also early-period Huntington, but I confess that I do not (yet) see the attraction...
I couldn’t find “the Harvard government”—then or now—even you gave me a map and a flashlight. But I did (quite by chance) happen into a personal acquaintanceship with Ed Banfield back when I was a young newspaper reporter—I found him a lifeline, a breath of fresh air. I don’t think it be helpful to describe the Ed-of-that-time as “conservative” so much as “contrarian (I think he hated John Kenneth Galbraith: hmph, talk about gaseous pretension….). Likewise I thought Banfield-Wilson “City Politics” far more helpful than almost anything else hand for my reporter life. Ed did get more rancid later (but a battered copy of “Moral Basis” is tucked away in these bookshelves somewhere). If we need to find a soulmate for Banfield, maybe a better choice would be Saul Alinsky.
:-)
Let me see if I can find a copy of "City Politics"
It seems to me that it all turns on what is meant by "conservative." I hear much talk praising or disparaging "conservatism" with little explication of the word. I never enjoyed the "advantages" of a Harvard education but as an undergraduate at UCLA studying political philosophy (among many other things) more than two-thirds of century ago, I was taught that conservatism involved the disposition to regard change to existing institutions as attended with sufficient danger to warrant careful critical scrutiny. I now spend a good deal of my time reading papers and books in the social sciences (broadly conceived) and frankly I fail to see any notable lack of conservatism (so defined) in them. Indeed, my assessment is that critical standards in social sciences has advanced markedly over the past six or seven decades (making me much more interested in them than I then would have imagined). And most of the writings and pronouncements of self-proclaimed "conservatives" to me seem notably deficient in critical standards. The world as a whole could use a good deal more and deeper critical thinking and investigation but I doubt very much whether that is what Messrs. Teles et al have in mind.
Which is why I want to talk about actual, real individuals...
It's entertaining, to be sure, but of how much use is it in shaping hiring decisions? You've no doubt had broader experience than I, but over the course of my career I worked for some academic-ish institutes where I was involved in hiring decisions for scores of new PhDs, interviewing each candidate in extenso and reading their dissertations. I did routinely ask who had influenced them most but with very limited exceptions would have been hard put to have placed them on a political map. There was one who wrote her dissertation on Edmund Burke (a distant relation of mine) but she focused on Burke's impassioned (and rather impolitic) opposition to slavery, which would no doubt have disqualified her as a conservative in the eyes of most who claim that title in today's US. My point is that if someone had urged me to make my department "more conservative" (or even "more liberal") while still emphasizing intellectual standards I would have had no idea how to operationalize it. After a few years you will have a candidate's body of published work to review, but that will never tell you whether the candidate is the second coming of Wilson, Huntington, etc. To me it seems that a defining characteristic of a good scholar is the capacity always to surprise you.
Yes, indeed: someone for whom ideologies and frameworks are their tools rather than their masters...
And if we were to find a way to answer Teles' plea and install genuine critically-minded scholars who are inclined to investigate more deeply how these issues could be seen through a "conservative" frame (however defined) what might be accomplished? Would they somehow craft arguments that would convince skeptics that the claims of authoritative religion were not only true but deserved to be taken as law? That would convince the poor, members of racial minorities, people regarded as sexual and social deviants, etc. that their inferior status is deserved and must be embraced? That would reconcile the mass to the disproportionate political power of great wealth? Putting aside any considerations of morality, is such a thing even conceivable? Surely not if one is to give any credit to the work of Ron Inglehart, Pippa Norris, et al.
I agree with this. Despite significant attempts I was never able to discern a conservative *philosophy*. It's nothing more than, as you say, a disposition to be cautious of change or perhaps that's a principle to follow. But there's no factual or principled basis for the sound bites which have passed for "conservatism" over the past, say, 90 years: keep the government out of the market; the focus on equal rights, whether for women, minorities, or LGBTQ+, is misguided; "law and order"; religion is the only solid basis for society and the government should demand it; guns; et al.
Instead what we see is "conservatism" as the public face of ethno-national authoritarianism. Those who move that agenda, no matter how softly, are making no contribution to Harvard or anywhere else.
This is the problem... Brad
I feel like all of these critiques that the Academy has gone too left are really nothing more than white men complaining about their loss of status and other benefits. They dress it up somewhat benignly as a need for a more balanced discussion or somewhat malignantly as a response to “cancel culture,” but it’s all the same thing, white male grievance. Power corrupts and it is quite possible that as the left of the Academy has gained power it has applied it in unfair, self serving, and intolerant ways. But I find it hard to locate legitimate thoughtful criticisms of this corruption and really can’t swing a cat without hitting another whingeing conservative white guy.
A nice colloquy, but, still, the point of Dr. DeLong's original piece is that Harvard shouldn't employ anyone he or Glenn Loury disapproves of, which is not what "academic freedom" is supposed to mean. What we get, instead of a reasoned discussion of whether "the academy" is too uniformly liberal (if not tediously and oppressively "woke"), is a lot of professorial harumphing, consisting almost entirely of anecdotes and attitude as opposed to substance.
Lots of people I disapprove of have large positive VAR. I thought that the point of my original piece was: show me the money. Where is the VAR in Wilson, Banfield, Huntington, and Mansfield—and if there was VAR was it because or in spite of their conservatism?
The score so far on the "where is the VAR" question: Yes for Wilson (and I really should not have forgotten his "Bureaucracy"). IMHO, a very strong HELL NO!! for Mansfield. For Banfield and Huntington, I may be convinceable but so far I have not convinced myself and nobody has convinced me.
The score so far on the "was it because they were conservative?" question is, I think, probably not. The VAR claimed is collinear with the VAR for Glazer and Moynihan, who were definitely not conservatives but liberals. Brad
I appreciate the speed and courtesy of your response, if not its "accuracy". First of all, you began your piece by ridiculing "conservatism" in general, in very lazy terms--"the inerrancy of the King James bible", for example. Many conservatives are Catholic, who certainly don't believe in the inerrancy of the King James, because they believe that it was the Vulgate that had the direct guidance of the Holy Spirit, and because few Catholics take the bible with evangelical literalness. (I have always been an atheist, by the way.) As for "VAR", how are you supposed to judge what a scholar is "going to do" ahead of time? I recall you giving high praise to some European thinker who started far left (you disapproved) and ended far right (you also disapproved), but admired what he said in between. A lot of people, like Francis Fukuyama, who I guess you are OK with, liked "early Huntington", before he decided that only Europeans and Asians were capable of civilization. Also, if Glenn Loury was "wrong" about Wilson, why couldn't he have been wrong about the other people he trashed? Loury thinks that because he's black he's always right when it comes to anything having to do with race, a pose that I find unconvincing.
"Conservatism" as a philosophy scarcely exists today. The fact that Russell Kirk is considered a thinker at all (I find him laughable) tells you almost all you need to know. The most influential thinkers "on the right" tend to be libertarians like Friedman and Hayek, who tend to be disqualified because they're atheists. Also, to my own mind, "strict" libertarianism was effectively "refuted" by the Great Recession.
The thing is, the "liberalism" isn't doing all that well either. California is about as liberal as a state can get. Do you think it's well governed? What do government housing programs do other than provide jobs for bureaucrats? For 19 years, I wrote about the National Assessment of Educational Progress. In 2022, NAEP reading scores for grade 4 black students showed the following scale score results: New York (202) and California (201) were lower than Florida (215) and Mississippi (212). These are "statistically significant results", as we say in the biz. In the past, state officials used to say "thank God for Mississippi", because compared to Ole Miss, any state looked good. Today, they can say that about California.
Yathink "conservatives [who] are Catholic... certainly don't believe in the inerrancy of the King James, because they believe that it was the Vulgate that had the direct guidance of the Holy Spirit" is any better? A Dark-Age Papal power move that "we will not listen to corrections of St. Anselm from people who understand the original Greek" well is really not a good look at all. Indeed, in general pretending in public that you and yours have special access and insight to the 𝚨 & 𝛀, and that others should shut up is really not a good look.
I'll put in a good word for James Q. Wilson.
Brad uses baseball's "Value Above Replacement" concept. VAR works for baseball players (or maybe politicians), but not scholars. Scholars--especially great scholars--are measured by their home runs, not their strikeouts. Nobody holds Einstein's errors on quantum mechanics ("God does not play dice") against him. EO Wilson and William Shockley were still great scientists, despite their embarrassing penchant for racist pseudoscience.
Did James Q. Wilson hit home runs? You betcha! His book on bureaucracy alone was enough to make anybody's reputation. Did his theories on crime cause more damage than good? Quite likely, but net social impact is not how we measure scholars.
I give you "Bureaucracy". Anything else? Brad
I liked "Varieties of Police Behavior." But I'd call it "very good", rather than "great." And I'm neither a criminologist nor a sociologist, so I don't trust my judgment in this sphere.
Neither am I! Brad
Where have all the conservatives gone,
Long time passing?
Where have all the conservatives gone,
So long ago?
Where have all the conservatives gone?
Off to think tanks, everyone (and political campaigns and hackery.)
When will they ever learn,
When will they ever learn?
Why would they ever learn? By definition, a conservative shouldn't learn. They should receive knowledge from those better than them and propagate it to their lessers.
You form a judgment -- "I don't the VAR there" -- about Wilson based on a comment by Loury. This is a waste of your time and ours. Please resist the compulsion to opine on everything under the sun, and stick to the many topics about which you have genuinely useful knowledge.
I illustrate my judgment that Wilson is **way** overrated by handing the mic to Loury. I did not form it that way. Capisce?
I guess I don’t know exactly how high Wilson is “rated,” but I thought “Bureaucracy” a pretty good book. I sort-of expected an anti-gumment
I think you are right: I had forgotten about "Bureaucracy". It is very good. Brad
I cut off the end. Of my own post. Should continued (gumment) diatribe, but instead the book offers an insightful analysis of where bureaucracy succeeds/fails, and why.
& I confess that outside of "Bureaucracy", so far I ain't getting much...