My re-response? I concede with respect to Wilson & his "Bureaucracy" & quite possibly more. I anticipate conceding with respect to early-period (not late-period!) Huntington, but want to read "The...
This debate is about conservatives in the Harvard government department. But during my time as a Gov major at Harvard (1966-70), the context is worth noting too.
First, Samuel Huntington was in the early stage of his career, and absolutely brilliant and inspiring as a lecturer and author. His analysis of developing societies and which types of cultures would allow them to modernize/Westernize was not only original and insightful, but there are plenty of examples that prove it accurate. I was shocked, decades later, by his "Clash of Civilizations." Didn't seem like the same man who'd mesmerized us in the 1960s.
Second, the true stars of the Government Department were professors like Richard Neustadt. He was a titan. Although he served some Democratic presidents, I don't think you would have great success trying to find his spot on a liberal-conservative spectrum. He was an institutionalist and a keen observer and theoretician. It happened that Republican presidents (and Jimmy Carter) didn't call on him much, but they could have done so with confidence, had they wished.
Third, if you were a student in the Gov Department you also got exposed to other professorial titans of the time -- Stanley Hoffman (France), John King Fairbank (China), Edwin O. Reischauer (Japan), etc. You also had Ernie May, Sam Beer, and Doris Kearns, among other greats. And because of the General Education (distribution) requirements, you also could take courses by Irven Devore (baboons and the implications of their behavior), Roger Revelle (oceans), and more. It was a great time, academically at least. (A difficult, war-torn time in other respects.)
Fourth, there is a reason why no one seems able to come up with the name of any clearly conservative professor whose work is not junk. It has to do with the nature of conservatism, pre-Trump. The famous conservatives of the time did *not* follow Eisenhower, who said that in matters of the people government should be liberal, and in matters of spending the people's money it should be conservative. The famous conservatives (Wm Buckley, for example) didn't go along with that first part of Eisenhower's message. It is true that in Congress and the Nixon White House there were examples of bipartisanship and many (not all) Republicans were willing to support environmental and some other social legislation, for example. But for Republican politicians to be "liberal" on some matters is a phenomenon detached from conservatism as theory and in academia. There, conservatism basically boiled down to resistance to societal change, an unwillingness to see government involved in matters of the general welfare, etc. And if that attitude was not prompted by unexpressed racism, it was certainly consistent with racism and clung to by racists.
So one reason there were not more conservative professors of high value was that there were no conservative ideas of high value. If conservatives had accepted what Eisenhower expressed (whether he always practiced what he preached is a different question), then they might have had ideas that could withstand rigorous analysis. And then we might have had worthy conservative professors. But they didn't do that. And so their ideas were crap.
God I feel like an idiot stepping into this contretemps, but seeing as this is the *2nd* email ...
What is the point of arguing about whether Wilson wrote a great book? The claim was that academia is becoming ever more close-minded and that it is in dire need of an infusion of conservative thought to rescue its *plurality of vision*. (And also that short-sighted liberal institutionalists are in danger of being overwhelmed by the red tide, and ought therefore to ally with conservatives to preserve themselves before it's too late. I can see why Brad doesn't want to touch this argument; I sure don't.)
The necessary corollary is that it is worthless just to show that Wilson did something of value; it needs to be something that could only be done by a conservative. And if that is your project - to demonstrate that Bureaucracy could only have been written by a conservative - well, bon chance et bon chemin.
I dunno. I think that the conservatives have some valuable things to say about the corporatization and vocationalism of modern undergraduate schools. Not many other folk are defending the humanities with any passion or any perspective.
> The modern history of Europe is littered with the projects of Rationalism. The most sublime of these... Robert Owen for 'a world convention to emancipate the human race from ignorance, poverty, division, sin, and misery'--so sublime that even a Rationalist (though without much justification) might think it eccentric. But not less characteristic... the common disposition to believe that political machinery can take the place of moral and political education.... The notion of founding a society... on the Declaration of the Rights of Man... 'national' or racial self-determination... re-union of the Christian churches... open diplomacy... a civil service... [with] "no qualifications other than... abilit[y]"... the Beveridge Report, the Education Act of 1944, Federalism, the destruction of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Votes for Women...
Oakeshott on rationalism is just warmed-over Burke: more systematic perhaps, but less nutritious. Hifalutin anticommunism. Meh. (Disclaimer: I adore Burke, although Regicide Peace is old-man-yelling-at-clouds. Judge thinkers by their best stuff.)
But Oakeshott wrote well about the value of a humanities education. As a conservative, he is way too elitist for my taste. Humanities for the Eloi; vocational education for the Morlocks! (He seemed to view scientists as honorary Eloi.) But it isn't hard to transfer most of his arguments to a more egalitarian frame.
I can't seem to find a reference to how the VAR framework works. Search engines seem to be blind to it. Still, I understand why Harvard might find conservatives of that particular ilk and era to be of lower value after forty years of experimentation with the application of their philosophies behind us. How valuable would a Trotskyite or Stalinist scholar be given the end consequences of the application of their philosophies? There is still merit in studying them and understanding their theories and thinking, but it isn't clear how useful they are in the educational mission of a school of government which is by its nature future oriented.
P.S. It's interesting that no one seems to have something good to say about Banfield. I mainly remember his argument that regulatory codes were the reason for the low quality of housing in cities. I suppose Jacob Riis got it backwards. (Of course, I read this a long time ago, so it is possible I recall incorrectly.)
Thanks for the reference. VORP is probably close enough to VAR. I can see how this might work for baseball since the games are played in public. I can also see how this would fail for evaluating work done in an office since the games are played in private. A toxic player would be obvious in front of a crowd but invisible in an office or factory floor.
I'm surprised they didn't use a Monte Carlo method. When I was a kid there was a baseball game based on real players' statistics. It was like fantasy football except for baseball and they didn't have fantasy football l back then. They could just run a million games with a particular player and compare the results to a million games substituting a synthetic average player. An Eastern European friend of mine once said that the Monte Carlo method was actually the American method since it relied on brute force, so maybe I'm just being "patriotic" here.
Perhaps I missed something, but I did not see any response to Prof DeLong's observation that he does not know what a conservative scholar is in the 2020s. The responses were a lot of discussion of scholars who published in the 1950s up through the early 1990s, but as noted what is a conservative in the age of Alito and Trump (in the US context at least)?
I'm just a retired English teacher of very little brain, never getting closer to Haaaaahvahd than visiting my grandkids in Somerville, but it ain't so little that I don't recognize this as stupid stuff: "What's the VAR of Louis Agassiz?" What this idiot wants to know are who are the brilliant conservatives whom Harvard should hire & whose books I should read?
Apropos The Soldier and the State: I read it my freshman year (61 years ago!), having run across it in the Stanford bookstore. I still have that copy, even though I have never reread it. As the oldest son of a career USAF officer (Signal Corps 42-46, Air Force 47-66, retired as a full Colonel), aspiring to an Air Force career myself (didn't happen), that book explained my life. Every chapter explained something I had puzzled about, or hadn't even noticed. (Why was AFROTC pushing etiquette manuals at us that were old-fashioned in 1940?) So whatever sins or virtues his later work may have had, I testify that The Soldier and the State was an accurate (if scrubbed up) description of the milieu of the post-war US military, perhaps especially of USAF staff officers.
I used "scrubbed-up" as a gentler version of "sanitized" - a characteristic, partly necessary, of the kind of analysis that's done from 35,000 feet. The human juices tend to be omitted. No mention, for instance, of the wives coping with children in the absence of professionally military husbands on long TDYs (temporary duty); social issues generally, although the institutions were dealing with them all the time. (US Navy policies and institutions on the care of dependents were the envy of Air Force and Army families.)
One could reasonably argue that such considerations don't belong in a book like Huntington's, but I agree with the Second Wave Feminist historians that leaving things like that unmentioned, much less unconsidered, is analytically and morally unsound.
Had my father read the book, he would have held up General Terhune (CINCNORAD in the story) as the epitome of what Huntington was writing about, and Curtis LeMay as an unfortunate human being, whatever his other qualifications.
Re Teles on Banfield: it seems illogical or inaccurate to term his one work “criminally undervalued” while arguing that he added VAR. Undervalued authors seem unlikely candidates for VAR.
This debate is about conservatives in the Harvard government department. But during my time as a Gov major at Harvard (1966-70), the context is worth noting too.
First, Samuel Huntington was in the early stage of his career, and absolutely brilliant and inspiring as a lecturer and author. His analysis of developing societies and which types of cultures would allow them to modernize/Westernize was not only original and insightful, but there are plenty of examples that prove it accurate. I was shocked, decades later, by his "Clash of Civilizations." Didn't seem like the same man who'd mesmerized us in the 1960s.
Second, the true stars of the Government Department were professors like Richard Neustadt. He was a titan. Although he served some Democratic presidents, I don't think you would have great success trying to find his spot on a liberal-conservative spectrum. He was an institutionalist and a keen observer and theoretician. It happened that Republican presidents (and Jimmy Carter) didn't call on him much, but they could have done so with confidence, had they wished.
Third, if you were a student in the Gov Department you also got exposed to other professorial titans of the time -- Stanley Hoffman (France), John King Fairbank (China), Edwin O. Reischauer (Japan), etc. You also had Ernie May, Sam Beer, and Doris Kearns, among other greats. And because of the General Education (distribution) requirements, you also could take courses by Irven Devore (baboons and the implications of their behavior), Roger Revelle (oceans), and more. It was a great time, academically at least. (A difficult, war-torn time in other respects.)
Fourth, there is a reason why no one seems able to come up with the name of any clearly conservative professor whose work is not junk. It has to do with the nature of conservatism, pre-Trump. The famous conservatives of the time did *not* follow Eisenhower, who said that in matters of the people government should be liberal, and in matters of spending the people's money it should be conservative. The famous conservatives (Wm Buckley, for example) didn't go along with that first part of Eisenhower's message. It is true that in Congress and the Nixon White House there were examples of bipartisanship and many (not all) Republicans were willing to support environmental and some other social legislation, for example. But for Republican politicians to be "liberal" on some matters is a phenomenon detached from conservatism as theory and in academia. There, conservatism basically boiled down to resistance to societal change, an unwillingness to see government involved in matters of the general welfare, etc. And if that attitude was not prompted by unexpressed racism, it was certainly consistent with racism and clung to by racists.
So one reason there were not more conservative professors of high value was that there were no conservative ideas of high value. If conservatives had accepted what Eisenhower expressed (whether he always practiced what he preached is a different question), then they might have had ideas that could withstand rigorous analysis. And then we might have had worthy conservative professors. But they didn't do that. And so their ideas were crap.
God I feel like an idiot stepping into this contretemps, but seeing as this is the *2nd* email ...
What is the point of arguing about whether Wilson wrote a great book? The claim was that academia is becoming ever more close-minded and that it is in dire need of an infusion of conservative thought to rescue its *plurality of vision*. (And also that short-sighted liberal institutionalists are in danger of being overwhelmed by the red tide, and ought therefore to ally with conservatives to preserve themselves before it's too late. I can see why Brad doesn't want to touch this argument; I sure don't.)
The necessary corollary is that it is worthless just to show that Wilson did something of value; it needs to be something that could only be done by a conservative. And if that is your project - to demonstrate that Bureaucracy could only have been written by a conservative - well, bon chance et bon chemin.
I dunno. I think that the conservatives have some valuable things to say about the corporatization and vocationalism of modern undergraduate schools. Not many other folk are defending the humanities with any passion or any perspective.
Who, eggzackly? & what?
Much of the faculty of St. Johns College, for starters. Michael Oakeshott.
I'm not talking about the Trumpazoids, of course.
Never much warmed to Oakeshott:
> The modern history of Europe is littered with the projects of Rationalism. The most sublime of these... Robert Owen for 'a world convention to emancipate the human race from ignorance, poverty, division, sin, and misery'--so sublime that even a Rationalist (though without much justification) might think it eccentric. But not less characteristic... the common disposition to believe that political machinery can take the place of moral and political education.... The notion of founding a society... on the Declaration of the Rights of Man... 'national' or racial self-determination... re-union of the Christian churches... open diplomacy... a civil service... [with] "no qualifications other than... abilit[y]"... the Beveridge Report, the Education Act of 1944, Federalism, the destruction of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Votes for Women...
Oakeshott on rationalism is just warmed-over Burke: more systematic perhaps, but less nutritious. Hifalutin anticommunism. Meh. (Disclaimer: I adore Burke, although Regicide Peace is old-man-yelling-at-clouds. Judge thinkers by their best stuff.)
But Oakeshott wrote well about the value of a humanities education. As a conservative, he is way too elitist for my taste. Humanities for the Eloi; vocational education for the Morlocks! (He seemed to view scientists as honorary Eloi.) But it isn't hard to transfer most of his arguments to a more egalitarian frame.
I can't seem to find a reference to how the VAR framework works. Search engines seem to be blind to it. Still, I understand why Harvard might find conservatives of that particular ilk and era to be of lower value after forty years of experimentation with the application of their philosophies behind us. How valuable would a Trotskyite or Stalinist scholar be given the end consequences of the application of their philosophies? There is still merit in studying them and understanding their theories and thinking, but it isn't clear how useful they are in the educational mission of a school of government which is by its nature future oriented.
P.S. It's interesting that no one seems to have something good to say about Banfield. I mainly remember his argument that regulatory codes were the reason for the low quality of housing in cities. I suppose Jacob Riis got it backwards. (Of course, I read this a long time ago, so it is possible I recall incorrectly.)
I think this might be what Brad was thinking of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_over_replacement_player
Thanks for the reference. VORP is probably close enough to VAR. I can see how this might work for baseball since the games are played in public. I can also see how this would fail for evaluating work done in an office since the games are played in private. A toxic player would be obvious in front of a crowd but invisible in an office or factory floor.
I'm surprised they didn't use a Monte Carlo method. When I was a kid there was a baseball game based on real players' statistics. It was like fantasy football except for baseball and they didn't have fantasy football l back then. They could just run a million games with a particular player and compare the results to a million games substituting a synthetic average player. An Eastern European friend of mine once said that the Monte Carlo method was actually the American method since it relied on brute force, so maybe I'm just being "patriotic" here.
Perhaps I missed something, but I did not see any response to Prof DeLong's observation that he does not know what a conservative scholar is in the 2020s. The responses were a lot of discussion of scholars who published in the 1950s up through the early 1990s, but as noted what is a conservative in the age of Alito and Trump (in the US context at least)?
Well...
* Someone who says: where we can, we should repurpose our old furniture as we try to rearrange our common home for liberty and prosperity?
* Someone who stands athwart history, yelling “STOP!!!!”?
* Someone who goes the extra mile for bigots—race, class, gender, ethnicity, religion?
* Someone who goes two extra miles for plutocrats?
* Someone who goes three extra miles for kleptocrats?
* Someone who thinks that democracy was a huge mistake—that “if god had not meant them to be sheared, he would not have made them sheep”?
I'm just a retired English teacher of very little brain, never getting closer to Haaaaahvahd than visiting my grandkids in Somerville, but it ain't so little that I don't recognize this as stupid stuff: "What's the VAR of Louis Agassiz?" What this idiot wants to know are who are the brilliant conservatives whom Harvard should hire & whose books I should read?
Apropos The Soldier and the State: I read it my freshman year (61 years ago!), having run across it in the Stanford bookstore. I still have that copy, even though I have never reread it. As the oldest son of a career USAF officer (Signal Corps 42-46, Air Force 47-66, retired as a full Colonel), aspiring to an Air Force career myself (didn't happen), that book explained my life. Every chapter explained something I had puzzled about, or hadn't even noticed. (Why was AFROTC pushing etiquette manuals at us that were old-fashioned in 1940?) So whatever sins or virtues his later work may have had, I testify that The Soldier and the State was an accurate (if scrubbed up) description of the milieu of the post-war US military, perhaps especially of USAF staff officers.
Interesting. How was it scrubbed up?
I used "scrubbed-up" as a gentler version of "sanitized" - a characteristic, partly necessary, of the kind of analysis that's done from 35,000 feet. The human juices tend to be omitted. No mention, for instance, of the wives coping with children in the absence of professionally military husbands on long TDYs (temporary duty); social issues generally, although the institutions were dealing with them all the time. (US Navy policies and institutions on the care of dependents were the envy of Air Force and Army families.)
And this extends to the officers themselves and their careers. As an example, I offer "Col Okie in the Lion's Den" <https://www.reddit.com/r/MilitaryStories/comments/45bvz4/colonel_okie_in_the_lions_den/>, an extract from my father's autobiography, anonymized for a subreddit for combat veterans working out their PTSD.
One could reasonably argue that such considerations don't belong in a book like Huntington's, but I agree with the Second Wave Feminist historians that leaving things like that unmentioned, much less unconsidered, is analytically and morally unsound.
Had my father read the book, he would have held up General Terhune (CINCNORAD in the story) as the epitome of what Huntington was writing about, and Curtis LeMay as an unfortunate human being, whatever his other qualifications.
Thanks much! Brad
Re Teles on Banfield: it seems illogical or inaccurate to term his one work “criminally undervalued” while arguing that he added VAR. Undervalued authors seem unlikely candidates for VAR.
Touché...