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If you’re already familiar with my work, then you know I do Black feminist sociology that draws on Black feminist thought as conceptual framework for the mixed methods study of digital society. In this blog post, I want to discuss one of the predecessors of the field: Black sociology.
Black sociology analyzes society from the standpoint of Black people to highlight how historical social structures affect them today. It offers a non-eurocentric perspective to address the interrelatedness of racial and economic inequality affecting society, making its practitioners scholar-activists who bridge the gap between academia and the masses. White sociology contradicts its purported tenets of humanism and objectivity through anti-Black scientific racism that manufactures claims of racial inferiority to justify subordination. In contrast, Black sociology argues the social problems Black people experience, such as higher rates of poverty or lower rates of educational attainment, are indicative of the interdependency between racism and capitalism.
This framework seems poignant at a time when state and local governments across the United States aim to eliminate the presence of Black intellectual thought from the halls of academia. For this reason, this blog post explores the historical roots, evolution, key figures, and current state of Black sociology as a field.
From the very beginning, Black scholars have navigated sociological negation characterized by varying patterns of exclusion that can be summed up in three distinct periods: exclusion and segregation (1895-1930), accommodation and assimilationism (1931-1964), and co-optation and containment (1965-Present). These periods also produced three distinct groups of Black sociologists respectively: the Beginning School, the New School, and the New Black Sociologists. Contra to notions of liberalism rife within sociology, the experiences of Black sociologists throughout indicate they have consistently faced persist oppression and racism.
In 1895, William Edward Burghardt Du Bois earned the first Ph.D. awarded to a Black person from Harvard University from the Department of History. Despite this disciplinary background, he is now widely considered a founding father of sociology. Consequently, the awarding of his degree is considered the genesis of Black people’s involvement in sociology. Du Bois used his training to research the lives of Black people in America as did several other early Black sociologists, including George E. Haynes, Richard R. Wright Jr., and Kelly Miller. Anti-Black racism from white sociologists fostered academic segregation within the profession, making it difficult for their contributions to be recognized and acknowledged.
The New School of Black sociologists was initiated by DuBois and developed by E. Franklin Frazier, Charles S. Johnson, and others. Through applied research and social reform orientation, they drew on prevailing sociological methods on the immediate effects of urbanization, integration, rural poverty, and segregation on the Black community. Yet, they still faced racism including having their work labeled propaganda and other discriminatory practices. Their inclusion necessitated adhering to positivism to compete for rewards that were often defined by standards of the white dominant group. Despite this challenge, they performed social science research as a form of protest. Thus, they had to balance advocating for freedom, justice, and Black people while also submitting themselves to standards of merit based on research principles defined according to white norms.
The New Black Sociologists experienced increased professional visibility due to racial integration, which has also drained Black institutions and threatens their existence and that of the Black sociological tradition dependent upon them. In integrated spaces, a caucus structure often constrains Black sociology, leaving little promise of parity while it dismantles the Black sociological tradition. Additionally, predominantly white universities often hire a token number of Black sociologists solely as race relations experts, which negates the diversity of Black intellectual traditions. Into the present day, whiteness defines the substance and epistemology of sociology.
Overall, the historical roots of Black sociology created a framework of social science based on self-definition and self-determination that reinforces Black identity. Still, the dynamics of negation from the broader discipline create a precarious reality for a tradition that rejects its scientific racism.
The evolution of Black sociology has been shaped by an extension beyond the study of race to incorporate intersectionality; an emphasis on social justice and activism; and an incorporation of diverse perspectives, methodologies, and approaches rooted in the standpoint of Black people. Black sociology continues to amplify marginalized voices and expand our understanding of power, resistance, and liberation
The framework of Black sociology has evolved due to the transformative role of intersectionality, particularly in the field of Black feminist sociology. The paradigm highlights the interconnectedness of race, gender, and other social identities in shaping the social inequalities that affect individuals’ experiences. This concept also expands Black sociology beyond the single-axis framework of racism to explore the complexity of multiple systems of oppression intersecting and mutually reinforcing each other. Black feminist sociology therefore deepens our understanding by providing a more nuanced analysis of power, inequality, and resistance in society.
Black sociology’s evolution also includes a growing emphasis on social justice and activism. By emphasizing the link between theory and praxis, this emphasis fosters transformative research agendas, community engagement, and collective resistance in pursuit of liberation and Black self-determination. Based on this activist-theorist orientation, Black sociologists have also challenged traditional notions of objectivity and neutrality in sociological research, arguing these ideals often serve to perpetuate the status quo. Instead, they advocate for a more applied approach to research that acknowledges how Black social scientists develop interpretations rooted in their experience of oppression. This approach therefore acknowledges the importance of centering the voices and experiences of marginalized communities, rather than relying on dominant sociological interpretations about how race relates to social inequalities.
The field of Black also evolved through the incorporation of perspectives such as critical race theory, which provides nuanced understandings of power relations and racial inequality. Adopting such frameworks enables it to challenge dominant narratives and foster a more comprehensive understanding of social phenomena. Such a liberatory approach to sociology develops new areas of research, such as Black feminist digital sociology, which studies of digital technologies and their impact on Black social life primarily from the perspective of Black women.
W.E.B DuBois’s study of race and social inequality in The Souls of Black Folk provides the groundwork of the sociological examination of Black American life as conceptualized by his theory of double consciousness. Double consciousness describes the social psychological experience of Black Americans who must constantly navigate between their own cultural identity and the norms of a white-dominated society. In addition to DuBois, numerous scholars have done work that exemplifies Black sociology, but I will focus on three: Oliver Cromwell Cox, Orlando Patterson, and Patricia Hill Collins.
I chose Oliver Cromwell Cox because I intend to delve deeper into Black sociology from the Caribbean perspective in my future writing. Cox was born in August 1901 in Port of Spain, Trinidad. He moved to the United States during his childhood and later received degrees in economics and sociology from the University of Chicago, including a Ph.D. in Sociology in August 1938. Cox went on to teach at Wiley College, Tuskegee Institute, Wayne State University, and Lincoln University.
Cox’s scholarship primarily challenged dominant theories of race relations from a diasporic perspective that recognized the interrelations of racism and capitalism. He rejected biological determinism, instead arguing that race was a social construction of the power relations of a white supremacist society. His writing also characterized racism as the foundation of the capitalism system and that this system had global implications. Cox’s most influential works include Caste, Class, and Race; Capitalism as a System and Foundations of Capitalism. Overall, Oliver Cromwell Cox’s contributions to sociology have been invaluable in advancing our understanding of race relations both in the United States and globally.
Orlando Patterson, born in Westmoreland, Jamaica, is another Caribbean sociologist whose work has contributed heavily to Black sociology. He studied economics at the University College of the West Indies in Kingston, Jamaica before completing his doctorate in sociology at the London School of Economics, where he graduated in 1962. He has served as faculty at both schools and now works at Harvard University as the John Cowles Professor of Sociology since 1971.
Patterson’s scholarship challenges mainstream sociological theories of racial relations through an emphasis on the impact of slavery on contemporary society. His seminal work published in 1982, Slavery and Social Death, argues slavery was both a social and economic insinuation that profoundly shaped the lives of enslaved people and their descendants. Other publications include Freedom in the Making of Western Culture; Modern Trafficking, Slavery, and Other Forms of Servitude; and The Ordeal of Integration. In addition to his rigorous research and insightful analysis, Patterson co-founded Cultural Survival, which demonstrates his commitment to social justice for all indigenous people of the Americas, Asia, and Africa.
Born in May 1948, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Patricia Hill Collins is one of the founders of the field of Black feminist sociology. She earned her bachelor’s degree in sociology from Brandeis University in 1969. Her academic journey continued at Harvard University, where she completed her master’s degree in teaching in 1970. After a career in education, Collins returned to Brandeis where she completed a Ph.D. in 1984. Collins’s career as faculty include the University of Cincinnati and the University of Maryland, College Park, where she is now Distinguished University Professor Emerita.
One of the key contributions of Collins’s work is her exploration of the concept of the matrix of domination. The groundbreaking work Black Feminist Thought uses this concept within sociological research to illuminate the intersectionality of race, gender, and class in an investigation of the unique experiences of Black women. Additionally, Collins’s scholarship has also explored the importance of Black feminist activism and community organizing as tools for social change in movements for justice and liberation.
Currently, the field of Black sociology faces several challenges that affect scholars within the discipline. Despite progression, Black sociologists remain underrepresented in academic spaces and receive less recognition for their contributions to the field. Their careers often encounter barriers such as limited access to resources, scholarly networks, and funding opportunities due to biased evaluation criteria. Moreover, the eurocentric quality of white sociology undervalues the experiences and perspectives of marginalized communities, particularly Black people.
Nevertheless, Black sociology remains a crucial component of the discipline due to how it continues to center the experiences and perspectives of the African diaspora. Centering Black people in sociological analysis enables a more comprehensive understanding of social dynamics and power structures. Furthermore, this approach also cultivates more inclusive and equitable approaches to the social sciences. Should the academic racism Black sociologists navigate ever got resolved, the field of Black sociology can actively contribute to dismantling systemic inequalities and fostering social justice.
By centering the experiences and perspectives of Black people, Black sociology challenges dominant explanations of societal phenomena. It addresses the interrelatedness of racism and capitalism affecting the experiences of Black Americans to emphasize social justice and activism guided by a paradigm of intersectionality.
Key figures in the field, such as W.E.B Du Bois, Oliver Cromwell Cox, Orlando Patterson, and Patricia Hill Collins, have made significant contributions to our understanding of how social systems such as racism and capitalism affect the experiences of Black people. Still, Black sociology continues to face challenges, including underrepresentation and the undervaluing of marginalized communities’ perspectives. Despite these challenges, Black sociology remains a crucial area of the discipline.
To learn more, check out the hyperlinks in the essay above.
The post Black Sociology:Race and Power Dynamics in Society appeared first on Blackfeminisms.com.
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Dr. Oumar Ba of Cornell University visits the Hayseed Scholar podcast. Dr. Ba grew up in Senegal, attending his first school at an early age near the Senegal-Mauritania border. He developed an interest in politics in high school and at his first university (Cheik Anna Diop in Dakar) where he pursued Geography. Oumar moved to the United States in early 2001, taking a Greyhound Bus from New York to Ohio. Following a series of jobs, including one at an auto manufacturing plant, he would return to academia pursuing a Master’s in International Affairs and Political Science at Ohio University. It was there he worked on his thesis, exploring topics in International Law under the guidance of Professor Andrew Ross. He then went to Gainesville to pursue his PhD, and where he met friend of the pod Professor Aida Hozic. Dr. Ba reflects on his time at Morehouse College, an HBCU where he worked in his first tenure track job, and the interview (during the pandemic) and then recent move to Cornell. He reflects upon his experience of his book being the subject of the 2019 ISA-Northeast circle, discusses his approach to writing (‘chaos’), and what he does to recharge and unwind. Dr. Ba and Brent conclude with a discussion on the World Cup.
Professor Rita Abrahamsen joins the Hayseed Scholar podcast. Rita grew up on a small island off the coast of Southern Norway. She was a good student, very interested in the world with parents who had been the Merchant Marines, and a father who had served during World War II. She talks about the subjects she enjoyed in school, the decision to go to university and pursue journalism, and her career in journalism, especially radio, working including serving as an anchor for the Norwegian Broadcasting Company. Her purpose in graduate school was to get more training to become a foreign correspondent, but at Swansea she pursued a PhD with training in both African politics and International Relations. She tried out the market, and after a few interviews, landed a Lecturer position at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. She reflects upon those years at Aber and its dynamic intellectual environment, the British academy, and her rapidly expanding research profile throughout that time. She concludes by talking about her move to Canada and helping build out the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at Ottawa, her approach to writing, what she does to recharge (and how she's hoping to get back to running), and more!
After months, and perhaps years, of cajoling and haranguing the Hayseed Scholar, friend of the pod (episode14) Matt McDonald finally convinced Brent to turn the tables and become a guest on the podcast.
Matt interviewed Brent at the end of the International Studies Association conference in Montreal, in Matt’s hotel room.
Over a few beers and with much good cheer, they chat about Brent’s growing up in Iowa, attending Chicago Bears games as a kid, having two teachers as parents, and how golf shaped his college decision-making. They discuss Brent’s journey through graduate school, the PhD, and his positions at the University of Kansas and now the University of Utah.
Often pounding the table like some 1930s-era dictator, Brent talks about what the tenure process was like for him at KU, the difficult (but also life-changing) move to Utah, walking with Chase pups for all kinds of reasons, how he approaches writing, and how he unwinds and recharges by going back to Iowa and seeing his family.
Matt and Brent first connected in 2010 when Brent reached out to Matt about his IPS article. That leads to a discussion about how and why Brent sent those complimentary emails to scholars.
A number of F-bombs were dropped. Razzing of Jelena Subotic, Tony Lang, and Chris Agius ensued. Friend of the pod and special guest Cian O’Driscoll made an appearance towards the end of the conversation. It’s a whirlwind discussion, and one Brent remains self-conscious about. But it was also a rewarding experience.
Judged by the course of events of the last century, rather by the avowed aim of Mill and Marx, there is much for reversing the stereotyped roles assigned to the two men. If collectivism ultimately triumphs over individualism, it will be in no small measure a result of the influence of the ideas first popularized and made respectable by Mill; whereas, if individualism ultimately triumphs, it will be in no small measure a result of the ultimate effects of the belief in revolutionary action to which Marx and Engels gave such vivid expression in the Manifesto…
The great defect of the Benthamite liberals among whom Mill grew up was the absence of any theory or doctrine of the positive role of the state in the organization of economic activity. Benthamism was at bottom a fervent belief in the possibility of improving the condition of mankind through legislative enactment devoted to achieving the “greatest happiness of the greatest number.” These central premises do not themselves prescribe any particular content for legislative action. They are, in strict logic, consistent equally with fargoing collectivism and paternalism or with the ”laissez faire” doctrines with which they were in fact combined. The acceptance of laissez faire as a guiding principle was far less the product of explicit analysis or comparison of any exhaustive set of alternatives[;] prohibited were largely assaults on person or property overwhelmingly regarded as clearly indefensible and the appropriate subject for punitive legislation. In this way, the success of laisses faire removed one of the chief factors responsible for the initial acceptance of laissez faire. By the end of John Mill’s life, the state was no longer what it was during his father’s or Bentham’s time—a corrupt, inefficient instrument whose enactments were widely held in low repute. It had become a relatively honest and efficient body, whose enactments were held in high esteem by the body politic.
The sweeping away of the hindrances to the free movement of men, goods, and capital was followed by the great improvements in economic well being. Yet there obviously remained much misery and poverty to which a passionate humanitarian like Mill could not remain blind. It was perhaps not unnatural that we was willing to sanction action by an honest and much improved state administration to redress grievances. He had no principles of state action by which to test proposals for reform. He was almost certain to minimize or reject entirely the argument—if it were made—that direct interference by the state would threaten that private liberty he prized so highly. For this argument conflicted with his deep, though naïve, belief in the perfectibility of human beings through education. Once men were educated, he believed, they would become not only wise but also good.--Milton Friedman (September 10, 1948) "Discussion of Paper by V.W. Bladen The Centenary of Marx and Mill" at The Eight Annual meeting of the Economic History Association. Hoover Institution, Collection Title: Milton Friedman papers Container: box 39. [HT David M. Levy]
Bladen's paper can be found here. Originally Friedman had been invited to comment on a paper on laisser faire by J. Bartlett Brebner (which was turned into an influential article: "Laissez Faire and State Intervention in Nineteenth-Century Britain." The Journal of Economic History, 8(S1), 59-73.) From the correspondence at Hoover it's unclear what prompted the move, but Bladen's paper was the opening and keynote to the conference, and Friedman did not object. The other commentator on the program is Elizabeth Schumpeter--the schedule adds in parenthesis: "Mrs. Joseph A." And it would be lovely to locate her comments.
Bladen was late sending Friedman his paper, and this may help account for the fact that much of Friedman's discussion reads as a riff on A.V. Dicey's (1905 [1914]) Law & Public Opinion rather than a detailed criticism of Bladen (although Friedman added a passage on trade unionism that clearly is critical of Bladen). Throughout Friedman's writings Dicey is an important source, not the least his better studied (1951) “Neo-Liberalism and its Prospects” Farmand, 17 February 1951, pp. 89-93 [recall this post] and his (1962) "Is a Free Society Stable?" New Individualist Review [recall here] some other time I will return to that. (The 1962 piece draws on themes from the manuscript I am discussing today.) And while in today's post 'Marx' is clickbait in the title, I will return to Friedman's comments on Marx, too. Okay, with that in place, let me turn to the text.
Friedman attributes to Dicey (1835 – 1922) a kind of road to serfdom thesis in which Mill's good intentions lead not just to the prevailing support for collectivism that Dicey diagnoses as the effect of Mill's writing at the end of the nineteenth century, but also that the collectivist reforms proposed by Mill would (now quoting Friedman) "seriously threaten political liberty" in virtue of the gradualism that Mill advocated and the tendency to attribute difficulties consequent intervention to the "defects of the price system." Crucially, for Friedman it's the historical experience of Marx's effect on the Russian revolution that halts the English road to serfdom.
Now, in his analysis Friedman ignores the role of imperialism, and the opportunities for rents this provided, in changing the political culture of nineteenth century liberalism. Hobson, for example, argued that this undermined the pacific, free trade coalition. And while Dicey has less nostalgia for this coalition, he concurs with Hobson's diagnosis. {Of course, given Mill's own advocacy for a civilizational mission of British imperialism, it's not as if this lets Mill off the hook.} It is worth noting that Dicey thinks that imperialism (and high taxation that is the effect of it) may well have slowed the road to serfdom process that Friedman attributes to him (see, especially, the 1914 introduction to the second edition, and chapter XII).
It's a bit odd that Friedman misses the significance of (financial and military procurement) rents to imperialism. Because earlier, in describing the rise of laissez faire, Friedman argues in a public choice vein, that “The Benthamites devoted much attention to improving public administration. Their success in this connection was as great as in establishing a large measure of laissez faire, and the two achievements are not of course unrelated. The establishment of laissez fair enormously reduced the benefits which civil servants could confer on private individuals and greatly lessened the incentive or opportunity to break laws.”
As an important aside, I am pretty confident that Friedman had read Hayek's Road to Serfdom by 1948. And there is no sign in his 1948 argument that he is as critical of Hayek in the way that his later use of Dicey in 1962 suggests (recall here).
What's neat about the material I have quoted above is that according to Friedman the key defect in Mill's political economy is that "he had no principles of state action by which to test proposals for reform." That is, the central problem that Mill faces in using state action to ameliorate the plight of the poor and miserable, is that according to Friedman Mill lacks -- and now I am using terminology common to Mill, J.N. Keynes, Friedman, and Foucault -- an art of government.
In fact, (recall) we know from his correspondence with Stigler (Hammond & Hammond) that by 1948 Friedman had started working on his (1953) "Methodology of Positive Economics" paper that uses that very terminology. And that Friedman ends up echoing Mill by treating the art of economics as dependent on empirical science. For it’s this science that provides the knowledge that constitute at least part of the rules of how one gets from given ends to proper outcomes. That is, the dependence of the art on positive science is epistemic in character. And so lurking here is a more fundamental (Marshallian) criticism of not just Mill's art of government, but his political economy more generally one that attributes to Mill a kind of violation of a do no harm principle in political life. To be continued.
Yet agreement between Hayek and the dominant strand of liberal theory may not be quite so easily secured. For a great deal turns on what is understood by a modus vivendi, and thought necessary to secure it. For Gutmann and Larmore, a liberal modus vivendi may well involve the growth of the mechanisms of participatory democracy, and need not compromise egalitarian ideals. A Hayekian conception of the liberal order as a modus vivendi, however, would not be of this nature. The conclusion he draws from his social theory is that a liberal order must be ruled by a limited government whose primary task is to maintain the framework within which individuals and groups may pursue their respective aims, regardless of the shape the resulting society assumes.
Rawls, however...explicitly rejects the idea of a modus vivendi. For him, what is needed is a political conception of justice which will command the allegiance of a diversity of moral viewpoints in a pluralist society. Only such a public philosophy which was able to sustain an 'overlapping consensus' of views would ensure social unity in 'long run equilibrium'. A modus vivendi would amount to little more than a temporary truce, in which time the more powerful interests would be able to marshall their forces, later to impose their own attitudes upon all. This contrasts with Hayek who sees social stability as possible only under political institutions which removed social justice from the agenda of politics.
This lack of agreement does not, however, reduce the interest of Hayek's contribution to liberal theory. Indeed, it suggests one way liberals may approach the problem of dealing with differences that divide them: by returning to issues in social theory. His work deserves examination because he draws attention to the need to consider the nature of society and the way in which this constrains our choice of political principles. For, if Hayek is right, many kinds of principles may be ruled out as unworkable. In other words, the circumstances of justice need much more careful investigation than they have been given.
Hayek's endeavours, while they have not succeeded in establishing a coherent liberal philosophy, do push contemporary liberal theory in a promising direction. For they show, first, that the defence of the liberal order need not assume that man is an isolated, asocial, utility maximizer: the defence of liberalism can, and should, be grounded in a more plausible account of man and society. And they suggest, secondly, that, while it will prove difficult to establish philosophical foundations for liberal rights, or a liberal theory of liberty, an understanding of the nature of social processes may offer a surer guide by telling us what kinds of rights and liberties cannot be adopted if the liberal ideal is to survive.-- Chandran Kukathas (1989) Hayek and Modern Liberalism, pp. 227-228. [Emphasis in original]
[If you are impatient you can skip the first four autobiographical paragraphs of today's digression.] Because I never went through a libertarian phase (and where I grew up these barely existed then), I am not quite sure when I first encountered Hayek's name and when I first read him. I do know that when I entered graduate school at age 24, I was aware of some of the features of Hayek's 'knowledge problem' because I briefly tried -- without success -- to get others in my graduate cohort interested in Hayek as an epistemologist in light of Hayek 1945. But I am really unsure how I picked this up. Between college and graduate school I read anything that happened to come my way or encountered in bookstores so I'll leave it to chance.
Because I ended up writing a PhD on Hume and Smith's philosophy of science, I did end up reading some of Hayek's writings on the Scottish Enlightenment. During my PhD, I also read the Road to Serfdom (which left me unmoved) and The Sensory Order (which was astonishing, and I was shocked nobody else I knew had read). But because I was not especially interested in spontaneous order or a deep dive into libertarianism (beyond Nozick) my knowledge of Hayek was superficial.
This started to change near the end of my PhD, around 2001, when the historians of economics, David M. Levy and Sandra Peart, started to invite me to their annual workshop on the preservation of the history of economics. Peart was working on her excellent edition of Hayek on Mill. David knew his Hayek and could easily make him philosophically interesting to me. (Recently David has been sharing his excitement about the development of modal logics by nineteenth century economists who moonlight as logicians!) Through them I met Erik Angner who was very interested in Hayek's theory of cultural evolution (a topic I was then very interested in), and I eventually read his wonderful monograph on Hayek and natural law.
I mention all of this because after I did start reading Hayek, I actually thought of Hayek as a weird Kantian or neo-Kantian. When I first mentioned this to people with a philosophical interest in Hayek this was often dismissed (such people treated him as more as a follower of Hume). So, I was quite pleased back when I read Kukathas' book the first time (about two decades ago) that Kukathas argues for Hayek's Kantianism in great detail (alongside Hayek's debts to Hume). And not surprised when decades later I read Foucault (who historically precedes Kukathas by a decade) on the significance of Kant/Kantianism to Hayek and other neoliberals in his biopolitics lectures.
Anyway, above I quote the final paragraphs of Kukathas' wonderful book, which manages to juggle quite a few balls apparently effortless at once: it is a careful study of Hayek as a systematic thinker; it locates Hayek in debates within liberalism (not the least through a detailed comparison with Rawls) and between liberalism(s) and its/their critics. Along the way, readers also get a judicious account of why it is misleading to treat Hayek as an (indirect) utilitarian. And while Kukathas is respectful of Hayek, as the quoted paragraph suggests, he argues at length that Hayek is incapable of reconciling the Kantian and Humean strands of his own theory.* Okay, so much for set up.
One important contribution of Kukathas' book is to illustrate the value of social theory to political philosophy even among those who think of political philosophy as an 'ethics first' or 'justice first' enterprise. Part of that use is hinted at in the closing paragraphs quoted at the top of this post: first, a social theory provides us with the content in a feasibility or aptness constraint. Let's call this a 'negative use of social theory' in which social theory is used (with a nod to 'ought implies can' perhaps) to rule out or block certain normative theories (or the principles on which they rely) because they are literally impossible for beings like us, once we're more informed about who we are (by social theory). Of course, unrealistic or unfeasible models or theories may still be useful in some way or another -- not the least as paradigms that discipline a field --, so one should not expect to use social theory (which often blends normative and empirical features in complex ways) as a hammer to destroy viewpoints one wishes to reject.
Second, and this is a positive feature, social theory can provide one with a philosophical anthropology that allows one to recast one's political vision and/or normative theories. In Hayek's case this also (third) means that many typical criticisms of liberalism (familiar, say, from Karl Polanyi (who goes unmentioned), Alisdair MacIntyre, various communitarians and Marxists (etc.) are disarmed in advance because the anthropology supplied by Hayek's social theory actually is not the Robinson Crusoe one -- "isolated, asocial, utility maximizing" -- usually criticized by critics of liberalism; if anything Kukathas' Hayek (and I agree) is not very far from Hegel, although as Kukathas notes with some key differences.
But, unless I missed it, Kukathas does not define what he or Hayek means by 'social theory' (something on my mind due to failed efforts to do so while teaching undergrads). Hayek does give us some material to work on this. For example, in (1967) in "Notes on the Evolution of Systems of Rules of Conduct: The Interplay between Rules of Individual Conduct and the Social Order of Actions," Hayek writes the following:
The whole task of social theory consists in little else but an effort to reconstruct the overall orders which are thus formed, and the reason why that special apparatus of conceptual construction is needed which social theory represents is the complexity of this task. It will also be clear that such a distinct theory of social structures can provide only an explanation of certain general and highly abstract features of the different types of structures (or only of the ‘qualitative aspects’), because these abstract features will be all that all the structures of a certain type will have in common, and therefore all that will be predictable or provide useful guidance for action.--p. 283 in The Market and Other Orders, edited by Bruce Caldwell.
On Hayek's view social theory is, thus, engaged in conceptual construction. And it aims to construct what he calls an 'overall order.' (There are distinct resonances here with the morphological project of the ordoliberal, Eucken.) These overall orders are "systems of rules of conduct" which "will develop as wholes" and on which a certain kind of "selection process...will operate on the order as a whole." Now, clearly this conception of social theory is, while capable of objectivity, itself partial to Hayekian projects (he goes on to claim that "of theories of this type economic theory, the theory of the market order
of free human societies, is so far the only one which has been systematically developed over a long period"), so I don't mean to suggest Hayek's idea of 'social theory' ought to generalize to all social theory.
Now, crucially, Hayekian social theory provides one with functional explanations of social order(s). Hayek is very explicit about this on the following page (p. 284). It may require auxiliary sciences to do so (Hayek is discussing the rule of evolutionary social psychology in context). And one way it offers such a functional explanation is to make clear the "interaction between the regularity of the conduct of the elements [or individuals] and the regularity of the resulting structure." (289)
I call it 'Hayekian' social theory because one of the other "tasks" he ascribes to it is to explain the "unintended patterns and regularities which we find to exist in human society." (from Hayek (1967) "The results of human action but not of human design." p. 294 in The Market and Other Orders.) Obviously, that may be incompatible with a social theory that has a different focus, although Marx is clearly interested in features of such a social theory.
So, why do I mention this? Before I answer that let's stipulate that Hayek's social theory is coherent. I have two reasons. First, even coherent, it is not entirely obvious what the status of the fruits of Hayekian social theory are. What kind of impossibility is proven by social theory if it has a Hayekian cast? This is not obvious. (In part this is not obvious because the empirical basis of social theory is not easily disentangled from its normative commitments.) I don't see how Hayekian social theory can rule out orders constructed on principles very different than Hayekian social theory, even if one can suspect that these will not be functional in the way that (say) spontaneous orders will be. This depends on plasticity of humans but also on the possibility of social structures with different kinds of social rules. I don't think this paragraph undermines Kukathas' particular argument because he shows how much Rawls and Hayek agree in their commitments.
Second, Hayekian social theory inherits from 19th century historicism (and some aspects of the Scottish Enlightenment) the idea of social wholes (that are constituted by their system of rules). Now, Hayek acknowledges that (say) a historian or social scientist may well do his or her job without embracing social wholes. His is not an organicist theory, and since social pluralism is -- as Kukathas reveals -- kind of bedrock in his theory it would be odd to attribute organicism to Hayek. However, it is not obvious why in a world constituted by social pluralism of different sorts -- and with non-trivial barriers that would facilitate differential and distinct selection -- we would find such social wholes even in (say) places that share non-trivial social commonalities. If human law or force is part of the selection process we should in fact expect greater diversity. In fact, I am echoing here Hayek's friend, Eucken, who clearly thought that Hayek's expectation of such social wholes was only so in theory, but that in practice one could find a rich diversity of social orders (based on a limited number of morphological elements).
Let me stop there. I don't mean to suggest these are fatal objections to Hayek's theory. But if we look forward to Kukathas' Liberal Archipelago it helps explain Kukathas' non-trivial distance from using Hayekian social theory despite Kukathas and Hayek sharing a deep debts to Hume.
*I should say while I agree with Kukathas' analysis of Hayek, there is wiggle room for a Hayekian. Kukathas acknowledges that Hayek is not especially interested in 'moral justification.' (p.3) But on my reading of Kukathas' argument the Kantian parts that cause trouble for the coherence of Hayek's system (those in his account of the rule of law that enter into his normative claims (p. 19)) all involve such justification.
The latest addition to HAY’s offerings is the relaunched Crate Collection, designed by Gerrit Rietveld in 1934. Today, along with Rietveld Originals, the brand has released their take on the original. Based on Rietveld’s Crate Chair, the whole of the collection is distinguished by wide planks and a low silhouette.
“The Crate Chair is a wonderful example of a product designed by an architect who was seeking harmony between architecture and interior,” said Rolf Hay, co-founder of HAY. “It’s hard to imagine something which is closer to our core design values, because it was really Rietveld’s mission to create a super cool, affordable, open-source furniture range for everybody – taking an incredibly democratic approach to design, which of course fits HAY extremely well.”
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First of all, it is important to recognize that the basic liberties must be assessed as a whole, as one system. That is, the worth of one liberty normally depends upon the specification of the other liberties, and this must be taken into account in framing a constitution and in legislation generally. While it is by and large true that a greater liberty is preferable, this holds primarily for the system of liberty as a whole, and not for each particular liberty. Clearly when the liberties are left unrestricted they collide with one another. To illustrate by an obvious example, certain rules of order are necessary for intelligent and profitable discussion. Without the acceptance of reasonable procedures of inquiry and debate, freedom of speech loses its value. It is essential in this case to distinguish between rules of order and rules restricting the content of speech. While rules of order limit our freedom, since we cannot speak whenever we please, they are required to gain the benefits of this liberty. Thus the delegates to a constitutional convention, or the members of the legislature, must decide how the various liberties are to be specified so as to yield the best total system of equal liberty. They have to balance one liberty against another. --John Rawls A Theory of Justice, p. 203. {Emphasis added--ES}
At one point, in his marvelous (1989) Hayek and Modern Liberalism, Chandran Kukathas quotes from Rawls' A Theory of Justice in order to illuminate the point that "conflicts among different pursuers of values are best regulated according to principles which respect (the right to) liberty." (p. 147) Kukathas quotes the part I have highlighted and italicized. I want to call this part Rawls' "ordered conception of free speech" stance. (One might also call it 'the rule governed conception of free speech' or the 'transcendental conception of free speech' etc.) And its that highlighted and italicized material that triggered this post.
While Rawls goes on to discuss Mill's On Liberty in the next sections (on freedom of conscience), he does not comment on the fact that the ordered conception of free speech is at variance with the more tumultuous conception of free speech that is usually ascribed to On Liberty. I put it like that because I don't want to perpetuate the error that Mill holds 'a free market in ideas that will lead to truth view' although the marketplace of ideas view is even more frequently (and, as Jill Gordon persuasively argues, mistakenly) attributed to Mill (recall this post); recall also see, for example, here; here, and here.)
One reason to call it Rawls' account an 'ordered conception' of speech is that the value he ascribes to it is articulated in functional terms. One might say that for Rawls the intelligibility of freedom of speech presupposes that it has a certain function namely to produce 'intelligent and profitable' speech (which he may have inherited from Knight--see the second picture). Leaving aside the elitist commitments on display here (and, if one wishes, the generosity toward profit if we read him over-literally), lots of emotionally significant expressive speech clearly is not like that even if it falls short of the vituperative speech that Mill worries about. In fact, this contrast between expression and discussion is explicit on p. 346 in Frank Knight's treatment of some such contrast, and is one of the heavily annotated passages in Rawls' copy of The Ethics of Competition.*
The following is from p. 352 in Knight:
Now, before I continue, I do not want to claim that Rawls thinks governments have very broad scope to regulate speech to make it 'intelligent and profitable' or to promote the ordered conception. He may well also believe that this would be imprudent or, that the enforcement of speech restrictions, would generate concerns about violations of other liberties (privacy, assembly, freedom of conscience, etc.). And he may also think that when the government regulates speech it really is interested in content and not order (and so cannot be trusted to get this right). In fact, in A Theory of Justice Rawls is by and large not that interested in freedom of speech. But one can see why the functional significance of the ordered conception lends itself well to the rather extensive speech restrictions (in selling financial instruments, in selling pharmaceuticals, in selling tobacco, etc. ) which are quite common in the contemporary administrative state (and often ignored in recent public debates over woke and freedom of speech).
As an aside, I don't mean to satirize the ordered conception of speech. It clearly has debts to Knight's and Buchanan's diverging conceptualizations of liberalism as involving "democracy as government by discussion" that was, as I have suggested above, have been familiar to Rawls. (I also think one can extract the ordered conception from Mill's writings on representation.) I am myself not immune to the pull of the ordered conception of speech in some contexts. For example, it informs my own views on academic freedom which fundamentally involves ordered speech of different kinds (in journals, the seminar room, etc.) I also tend to suspect (echoing Iris Marion Young) that advocates of deliberative democracy and (closer to Rawls' own heart) public reason tend to be (dangerously) enthralled by the ordered conception of speech.
Be that as it may, if one works with the revised (1990) edition of A Theory of Justice, the ordered conception is less pronounced. In fact, the passage is re-written in non trivial ways. Among the most significant changes, the revised version of the passage removes 'intelligent and profitable" and the distinction between rules of order and rules on content altogether:
First of all, one must keep in mind that the basic liberties are to be assessed as a whole, as one system. The worth of one such liberty normally depends upon the specification of the other liberties. Second, I assume that under reasonably favorable conditions there is always a way of defining these liberties so that the most central applications of each can be simultaneously secured and the most fundamental interests protected. Or at least that this is possible provided the two principles and their associated priorities are consistently adhered to. Finally, given such a specification of the basic liberties, it is assumed to be clear for the most part whether an institution or law actually restricts a basic liberty or merely regulates it. For example, certain rules of order are necessary for regulating discussion; without the acceptance of reasonable procedures of inquiry and debate, freedom of speech loses its value. On the other hand, a prohibition against holding or arguing for certain religious, moral, or political views is a restriction of liberty and must be judged accordingly. Thus as delegates in a constitutional convention, or as members of a legislature, the parties must decide how the various liberties are to be specified so as to give the best total system of liberty. They must note the distinction between regulation and restriction, but at many points they will have to balance one basic liberty against another; for example, freedom of speech against the right to a fair trial. The best arrangement of the several liberties depends upon the totality of limitations to which they are subject.--John Rawls A Theory of Justice, Revised edition, p. 178. {emphasis added--ES}
I suspect part of the change of wording is due to that it is easy to abuse a purported restriction on order as a restriction on content. For, while officially dropping the distinction, the revised version leans into denying the government any significant content restrictions, by adding the point that "a prohibition against holding or arguing for certain religious, moral, or political views is a restriction of liberty." But as the highlighted part suggests, even so, the crucial element of the ordered conception of speech does remain in the revised version.
Let me close with a sociological observation. Despite the fact that advocates of public reason and deliberative democracy, which lean heavily on conceptions of ordered speech, have thriving research programs (and the former is very indebted to Rawls), it is safe to say that Rawls' conception of freedom of speech has not been as influential as other parts of his project. I have three kinds of evidence for this claim: first, in Katrina Forrester's In the Shadow of Justice, freedom of speech barely figures. (Of course, civil disobedience does!) Second, the emphasized and italicized parts of the passages are quoted very rarely in the secondary literature (although I found it in a few dissertations especially). Third, it is my perception that in scholarly and more public intellectual discussions of free speech, Rawls' shadow has not, displaced Mill. Obviously my perception counts for nothing, but I would be amazed if data crunchers could show otherwise.
*PS After reading an earlier draft of the post, David M. Levy was kind enough to share some marking up of Rawls' personal copy of Knight's The Ethics of Competition (which has Knight's earliest use of 'government by discussion' as I learned from the paper by Ross Emmett linked above). The fact that Knight treats the rules of discussion as game is important evidence for Forrester's argument on the early Rawls' interest in what is now known as neoliberalism. For some other salient to the present post's passages see these pix:
From p. 343:
Professor Debbie Lisle of Queens University, Belfast, grew up in North Vancouver, in an environment of 'liberal feminism' which gave her a sense of possibility in life, but it was an interesting journey thereafter. Debbie chats with Brent about her decision to go to McGill for college, playing soccer throughout her undergrad and Master's years, and an in-between period of working at a lumber store and then traveling the world including to Southeast Asia and South Africa. Those months of traveling in her early 20s shaped for Debbie the major threads of research she would pursue throughout her academic career. This started at Victoria, where 'chance played a role' when she took a seminar with Rob Walker that would get her thinking of academia as a career. She went to Keele in the UK for PhD, working initially with David Campbell and then, when he left for Newcastle, finishing with Andrew Linklater. She talks about how critical IR, especially in the UK, had a different dynamic back in the late 90s and early 2000s, before it 'exploded' onto the scene and branched into different streams of research. Debbie reflects on getting a job at Queens, being a working parent, how she handled the criticism of a harsh review of her first book, incorporating it for her second book, and her approach to writing. She closes the conversation discussing her recent health challenge and how she has worked through it in the past year.
You would not be completely wrong considering an analog wall clock as a bit of an anachronism. Even luddites are prone to wake up to the alarm chime of a phone, regularly glance at the passing hours from a mobile device, and perhaps occasionally rely on the aid of a smartwatch to provide an update of the time. Even so, there’s something unobtrusive and ultimately comforting about a non-digital display wall clock – its simplicity focused upon singularly displaying the time is a “quiet technology” we will always have room (or wall space) for.
And if so, why not with a timekeeping device that nods to yesterday’s notification-free lives with a design with its feet (and hands) securely placed in the present?
That’s exactly how we’d describe the Wall Clock by Jasper Morrison. Introduced in 2008, HAY retains the Wall Clock’s gently curved aluminum design paired with its minimalist clock face typography, resulting in what is considered an iconic timepiece. What’s new is HAY has given the Wall Clock four fresh colorways retaining the silent, non-ticking design and handsome functionality.
Morrison’s Wall Clock may operate silently, but the British designer is not hesitant to let it be known what he thinks about the incursion of technologies into every corner of the home. No surprise such an elegant and timeless design was imagined by someone who is attributed to saying that the smartest use of smart home technology is “by us using it less maybe.”
Available in Black, Dark Green, Light Blue, and White for $95, the updated palette is noticeably complementary to HAY’s greater catalog of home furnishings and accessories in hue and form. Our personal preference skews toward the two, more colorful options – both silently loud(er) – but we imagine the adaptability of the refreshed original monochromatic options will prove appealing to many.
Each Wall Clock weighs less than a pound, measuring 12.63″ H 12.63″ W 2.2″ D, operating with one single AA battery.
Those with a long memory may recognize the black face colorway as strong evocative of Morrison’s 2007 Wall Clock Watch for Muji, the same company the original Wall Clock was designed for.
To get your minutes and hours hands on your own Wall Clock, visit HAY.
This post contains affiliate links, so if you make a purchase from an affiliate link, we earn a commission. Thanks for supporting Design Milk!
Don’t question Angela Davis’ manuscript, Toni Morrison warned her publishing colleagues. Davis was not “Jane Fonda” but, rather, “Jean d’Arc.”
The post Morrison and Davis: Radicalizing Autobiography appeared first on Public Books.
Perhaps eventually an overall Big Picture will emerge—and perhaps not: Hegel thought that the Owl of Minerva would take wing only at dusk (i.e., that we will only achieve understanding in retrospect, after it’s all over), but maybe the Owl’s wings have been broken by hyperspecialization, and it will never take to the air at all. What we can reasonably anticipate in the short term is a patchwork of inference management techniques, along with intellectual devices constructed to support them. One final observation: in the Introduction, I gave a number of reasons for thinking that our response to the Great Endarkenment is something that we can start working on now, but that it would be a mistake at this point to try to produce a magic bullet meant to fix its problems. That turns out to be correct for yet a further reason. Because the approach has to be bottom-up and piecemeal, at present we have to suffice with characterizing the problem and with taking first steps; we couldn’t possibly be in a position to know what the right answers are.
Thus far our institutional manifesto. Analytic philosophy has bequeathed to us a set of highly refined skills. The analytic tradition is visibly at the end of its run. But those skills can now be redirected and put in the service of a new philosophical agenda. In order for this to take place, we will have to reshape our philosophical pedagogy—and, very importantly, the institutions that currently have such a distorting effect on the work of the philosophers who live inside them. However, as many observers have noticed, academia is on the verge of a period of great institutional fluidity, and flux of this kind is an opportunity to introduce new procedures and incentives. We had better take full advantage of it.--Elijah Millgram (2015) The Great Endarkenment: Philosophy for an Age of Hyperspecialization, p. 281
There is a kind of relentless contrarian that is very smart, has voracious reading habits, is funny, and ends up in race science and eugenics. You are familiar with the type. Luckily, analytic philosophy also generates different contrarians about its own methods and projects that try to develop more promising (new) paths than these. Contemporary classics in this latter genre are Michael Della Rocca's (2020) The Parmenidean Ascent, Nathan Ballantyne's (2019) Knowing Our Limits, and Elijah Millgram's (2015) The Great Endarkenment all published with Oxford. In the service of a new or start (sometimes presented as a recovery of older wisdom), each engages with analytic philosophy's self-conception(s), its predominate methods (Della Rocca goes after reflective equilibrium, Millgram after semantic analysis, Ballantyne after the supplements the method of counter example), and the garden paths and epicycles we've been following. Feel free to add your own suggestions to this genre.
Millgram and Ballantyne both treat the cognitive division of labor as a challenge to how analytic philosophy is done with Ballantyne opting for extension from what we have and Millgram opting for (partially) starting anew (about which more below). I don't think I have noticed any mutual citations. Ballantyne, Millgram, and Della Rocca really end up in distinct even opposing places. So, this genre will not be a school.
Millgram's book, which is the one that prompted this post, also belongs to the small category of works that one might call 'Darwinian Aristotelianism,' that is, a form of scientific naturalism that takes teleological causes of a sort rather seriously within a broadly Darwinian approach. Other books in this genre are Dennett's From Bacteria to Bach and Back (which analyzes it in terms of reasons without a reasoner), and David Haig's From Darwin to Derrida (which relies heavily on the type/token distinction in order to treat historical types as final causes). The latter written by an evolutionary theorist.* There is almost no mutual citation in these works (in fact, Millgram himself is rather fond of self-citation despite reading widely). C. Thi Nguyen's (2020) Games: Agency as Art may also be thought to fit this genre, but Millgram is part of his scaffolding, and Nguyen screens off his arguments from philosophical anthropology and so leave it aside here.
I had glanced at Millgram's book when I wrote my piece on synthetic philosophy, but after realizing that his approach to the advanced cognitive division of labor was orthogonal to my own set it aside then.++ But after noticing intriguing citations to it in works by C. Thi Nguyen and Neil Levy, I decided to read it anyway. The Great Endarkenment is a maddening book because the first few chapters and the afterward are highly programmatic and accessible, while the bulk of the essays involve ambitious, revisionary papers in meta-ethics, metaphysics, and (fundementally) moral psychology (or practical agency if that is a term). The book also has rather deep discussions of David Lewis, Mill, and Bernard Williams. The parts fit together, but only if you look at them in a certain way, and only if you paid attention in all the graduate seminars you attended.
Millgram's main claim in philosophical anthropology is that rather than being a rational animal, mankind is a serial hyperspecializing animal or at least in principle capable of hyperspecializing serially (switching among different specialized niches it partially constructs itself). The very advanced cognitive division of labor we find ourselves in is, thus, not intrinsically at odds with our nature but actually an expression of it (even if Millgram can allow that it is an effect of economic or technological developments, etc.). If you are in a rush you can skip the next two asides (well at least the first).
As an aside, first, lurking in Millgram's program there is, thus, a fundamental critique of the Evolutionary Psychology program that takes our nature as adapted to and relatively fixed by niches back in the distant ancestral past. I don't mean to suggest Evolutionary Psychology is incompatible with Millgram's project, but it's fundamental style of argument in its more prominent popularizations is.
Second, and this aside is rather important to my own projects, Millgram's philosophical anthropology is part of the account of human nature that liberals have been searching for. And, in fact, as the quoted passages reveal, Millgram's sensibility is liberal in more ways, including his cautious preference for "bottom-up and piecemeal" efforts to tackle the challenge of the Great Endarkenment.+
Be that as it may, the cognitive division of labor and hyperspecialization is also a source of trouble. Specialists in different fields are increasingly unable to understand and thus evaluate the quality of each other's work including within disciplines. As Millgram notes this problem has become endemic within the institution most qualified to do so -- the university -- and as hyper-specialized technologies and expertise spread through the economy and society. This is also why society's certified generalists -- journalists, civil servants, and legal professionals -- so often look completely out of their depth when they have to tackle your expertise under time pressure.** It's his diagnosis of this state of affairs that has attracted, I think, most scholarly notice (but that may be a selection effect on my part by my engagement with Levy's Bad Beliefs and Nguyen's Games). Crucially, hyperspecialiation also involves the development of languages and epistemic practices that are often mutually unintelligible and perhaps even metaphysically incompatible seeming.
As an aside that is really an important extension of Millgram's argument: because the book was written just before the great breakthroughs in machine learning were becoming known and felt, the most obvious version of the challenge (even danger) he is pointing to is not really discussed in the book: increasingly we lack access to the inner workings of the machines we rely on (at least in real time), and so there is a non-trivial sense in which if he is right the challenge posed by Great Endarkenment is accelerating. (See here for an framework developed with Federica Russo and Jean Wagemans to analyze and handle that problem.)
That is, if Millgram is right MacAskill and his friends who worry about the dangers of AGI taking things over for rule and perhaps our destruction by the machine(s) have it backwards. The odds are more likely that our society will implode and disperse -- like the tower of Babel that frames Millgram's analysis -- by itself. And that if it survives mutual coordination by AGIs will be just as hampered by the Great Endarkenment, perhaps even more so due to their path dependencies, as ours is.
I wanted to explore the significance of this to professional philosophy (and also hint more at the riches of the book), but the post is long enough and I could stop here. So, I will return to that in the future. Let me close with an observation. As Millgram notes, in the sciences mutual unintelligibility is common. And the way it is often handled is really two-fold: first, as Peter Galison has argued, and Millgram notes, the disciplines develop local pidgins in what Galison calls their 'trading zones.' This births the possibility of mutually partially overlapping areas of expertise in (as Michael Polanyi noted) the republic of science. Millgram is alert to this for he treats a lot of the areas that have been subject of recent efforts at semantic analysis by philosophers (knowledge, counterfactuals, normativity) as (to simplify) really tracking and trailing the alethic certification of past pidgins. Part of Millgram's own project is to diagnose the function of such certification, but also help design new cognitive machinery to facilitate mutual intelligibility. That's exciting! This I hope to explore in the future.
Second, as I have emphasized in my work on synthetic philosophy, there are reasonably general theories and topic neutralish (mathematical and experimental) techniques that transcend disciplines (Bayesianism, game theory, darwinism, actor-network, etc.). On the latter (the techniques) these often necessetate local pidgins or, when possible, textbook treatments. On the former, while these general theories are always applied differently locally, they are also conduits for mutual intelligibility. (Millgram ignores this in part.) As Millgram notes, philosophers can make themselves useful here by getting MAs in other disciplines and so facilitate mutual communication as they already do. That is to say, and this is a criticism, while there is a simultaneous advancement in the cognitive division of labor that deepens mutual barriers to intelligibility, some of this advance generates possibilities of arbitrage (I owe the insight to Liam Kofi Bright) that also accrue to specialists that help transcend local mutual intelligibility.** So, what he takes to be a call to arms is already under way. So, let's grant we're on a precipice, but the path out is already marked.
*Because of this Millgram is able to use the insights of the tradition of neo-thomism within analytic philosophy to his own ends without seeming to be an Anscombe groupie or hinting darkly that we must return to the path of philosophical righteousness.
+This liberal resonance is not wholly accidental; there are informed references to and discussions of Hayek.
** Spare a thought for humble bloggers, by the way.
++UPDATE: As Justin Weinberg reminded me, Millgram did a series of five guest posts at DailyNous on themes from his book (here are the first, second, third, fourth, and fifth entries.) I surely read these, and encourage you to read them if you want the pidgin version of his book.
Professor Ann Towns of the University of Gothenburg visits the Hayseed Scholar podcast.
Professor Towns grew up in Sweden, and was interested in playing music and especially performing classical music as a child. But by the time she was in high school, she wanted to broaden her horizons, and get out of not only her town but Sweden. That led her to Kansas, where she finished high school in an exchange program. She lived outside of a small town, and she reflects on the different contexts in the rural US compared to Sweden — religion, expectations on teenagers, and the social environment of that time and place.
She went to Nebraska for undergraduate, and she talks about the classes she took, the music scene in Lincoln, and what she wanted to do after college. Professor Towns traveled to Peru after college, and ended up working for an NGO that helped those who suffered from political violence. She talks about going to the University of Minnesota for graduate school, some post-docs she took after her PhD, going on the market and working at the University of Delaware, her experience at the ISA-Northeast Circle in 2009, and then eventually going back to Sweden where she is now.
She concludes with how she approaches writing, what she does to decompress, and more!
I don’t love January for the usual reasons: holiday festivities are over, work resumes, and the weather is gray and cold and depressing. In January the year in front of me feels like a void. Confronted with a blank calendar, my instinct is to fill everything in, to make it mean something, to schedule my life into being busy and full and loud.
I’m trying to cope with my January existential crisis, and the way I cope is to read. Lately, my favorite author is French writer Annie Ernaux, winner of the 2022 Nobel prize in literature. I’d always had a book or two of hers lying around, always meant to read her in earnest, but it took me until this fall to get into her work — and now I’m obsessed. As she explores her memory and its reliability, Ernaux relaxes my melancholy into something closer to curiosity. As Sheila Heti writes in the New York Times: “Most memoirs operate as if the past were right there and can be looked at, like a painting on the wall. But Ms. Ernaux understands that one’s 18-year-old self is a stranger to one’s 70-year-old self.”
In Happening, Ernaux is haunted by an illegal abortion during her youth. She sets out to transcribe “an event that was nothing but time flowing inside and outside of me.” She writes, “I shall try to conjure up each of the sentences engraved in my memory which were either so unbearable or so comforting to me at the time that the mere thought of them today engulfs me in a wave of horror or sweetness.” Ernaux’s works foreground the difficulty of writing about the self, showing memory as just another way to cope with the void: the blank page, the unknown future, the open calendar squares that haunt me. Reading her work exposes the futility of my efforts to force things to mean something just to stave off the blankness of a new year. But there’s a glimpse of hope for me: Ernaux reminds me that sometimes things find their meaning only in hindsight, not in the present. You can relax and return to something later, able to see anew what it was all about.
This reading list brings together essays that question the stories we hold about ourselves, how we make our lives meaningful. There’s love, sex, heartbreak, returns to childhood, and deep grief that structure how we see ourselves and our lives. These writers, like Ernaux, travel into their own memories and sensations, confronting old versions of themselves and dredging up hidden habits, to see what makes sense.
Of course there’s one thing that makes our lives so meaningful: desire. Noor Qasim’s essay considers the narrative potential of desire — the stories we tell ourselves about it — by placing Annie Ernaux alongside the genre of the millennial sex novel, including books by Sally Rooney, Raven Leilani, and Alyssa Songsiridej. Qasim contrasts Ernaux’s novel Simple Passion, which appeared in 1991, with her recently published journals, Getting Lost, which she kept during the same period. What emerges is a picture of how desire moves us, how it makes our mind work, and how we might start to write about it.
As Ernaux lived the affair, she was aware of the sort of novel one might write — perhaps one rather similar to the novels of desire examined here. But she chose, instead, to craft a different story of desire, one based in fact, yes, though not in the particularities of her fraught and ultimately commonplace experience. In eschewing the logics of narrative, in refusing to even attempt to pin down the object of her desire and opting instead for something that might resemble a ‘testimony,’ Ernaux abdicates any responsibility to plot and its repetitive motions, freeing herself to focus fully on the phenomenon of desire instead. Getting Lost evokes the experience of desire through the mess of life; Simple Passion pares away context to reveal desire’s shape. And while the journals’ primary interest is as a supplement to the novel that arose from them, they also help to preserve a sort of elemental agony, the anxious movements of a mind that desires, and desires seriously.
I credit this essay by Alexandra Molotkow for introducing me to psychologist Dorothy Tennov, whose 1979 book Love and Limerence was quite a read. “Limerence” names an obsessive infatuation, and Molotkow examines how this infatuation can both bring us out of ourselves — “Limerence is a program running in the background of your days and nights, arranging your impressions in the shape of your fixation” — and how it also operates as a form of selfishness. We get drawn out of ourselves into the idea of another, but we only know that person through our own mind. Molotkow takes the messiness and ambivalence of a crush seriously, paying attention to how much we want to pay attention to someone.
I was born limerent, and my relationship to limerence itself is ambivalent. Crushes map life over with meaning and joy, and I’d always choose heartbreak over boredom. They can also gain on me like a frightening, unpredictable force that lifts me out of my life and drops me back, months later, with a lot of mess to clean. They feel disruptive and wasteful — a misallocation of emotional energies, a source of outsize pain for stupid reasons — and, though it’s partly the point, they alienate me from myself: crushing involves adopting a set of hypothetical standards against which I’m necessarily lacking.
Sarah Chihaya writes about reading Anne Carson in the wake of a devastating breakup. Every day for one summer in Oxford, she reread Carson’s poem “The Glass Essay” in the same spot every day. Her experience of rereading makes her question her own investment in reading as an academic and as a self-described “professional reader.” The practice of rereading Carson is both comforting and challenging, alienating and unifying all at once: It makes a stretch of time make sense, and Chihaya’s account of her own story reminds us what reading can do when it knits into the fabric of our lives.
After you walk away from a last good-bye, the terrain of everyday life is suddenly overlaid with the haunted geography of an entire relationship. Every space is layered with the fine sediment of recollection. Any time you trip and reach out for balance, your hand might accidentally slip “down // into time” and dredge up something beautiful or awful from those years or months or weeks past.
I love this Substack newsletter by Berkeley journalism student Kate Raphael, which reflects on the uncanny experience of being in your childhood bedroom, brushing up against the many past versions of yourself. Like Ernaux, Raphael’s access to the past is more complicated, more difficult to reach — until it’s not. She writes “I keep my distance from my younger self; I return home with my guard up,” but after sliding back into her past self, Raphael leans in. She rereads her childhood journals alongside watching the film Aftersun, which is set mostly within a child’s perspective and highlights a fragmented memory. Both the film and Raphael’s experiences foreground what returning to the past can give us, what meanings we can find there.
When I slip back into myself as a kid, when I snap at my parents or fall into an old pattern, I often think I am reverting to someone worse. I expect to react better and understand more now that I’m older, and I find that much of the time, I do not. In so many ways, I am still my younger self—a girl who surprises me by how much she understood, how deeply she felt things, while my current self surprises me by how much she still doesn’t understand.
In this essay for The Point, Elisa Gonzalez reflects on the death of her brother alongside artwork depicting resurrections, meditating largely on the biblical story of Lazarus. She considers the difficulty of writing about the dead, the pull the story of resurrection has on us, and the way grief reorders a life. Her attention to the way mourning morphs time takes on a distinctly Ernaux-like quality, Gonzalez reflecting that “Time, I suspect, will never move as it did before, even after I step back into it.”
Being thrown out of time or immured in a fixed point within it is a way of dying with the one who has died, an unwilled and yet welcome journey that brings us nearer to being dead. My brother was shot in the chest three times, and every day I shape a gun out of my hand and press it three times to my chest. This ritual is a way of entering the event that I can never live, though I survive it: his dying, not mine. That I go on living while he does not still surprises me. Yet I now think the living hasn’t been continuous. If I have found any resurrection for sure, it’s mine, not my brother’s: as soon as I said, to another sister, “Stephen is dead,” it was as if I, like Barthes, were one dead—and then I came back to life, changed, like Lazarus always and probably until my final death glancing at that vast distracting orb beyond.
***
Bekah Waalkes is a writer and PhD candidate at Tufts University. Her work has appeared in Electric Literature, Cleveland Review of Books, Bon Appétit, and more.
Editor: Krista Stevens
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