THERE MAY BE HOPE FOR HARVARD YET

Seventy students walked out of Greg Mankiw's Economics 10 course at Harvard [this is the basic intro econ course] to protest the rightwing pro-rich bias of the course. One needs to recall that Martin Feldstein, when teaching the course years ago, told students that the aim of the course was to explain that the market works -- not how the market works, but that it works! This is the same Economics Department that denied tenure more than thirty years ago to young, brilliant Samuel Bowles, who then joined the UMass Economics Department and became the leading radical economist in the United States.

Harvard is always behind the curve, of course, inasmuch as it is essentially an intellectual backwater, but it is lovely to see students even there responding to the new winds that are blowing in America. Now if they would only find somewhere better to aim for after graduation than Wall Street!

FUNERARY MUSINGS

I am now in the seventh week of my diet. Since dieting is, for me, a kind of little death, it is perhaps not surprising that I have been ruminating lately on old age. I have already told the story of my life in three volumes, like a nineteenth century novel, but when I had brought the story up to the present and concluded it, I spent very little time reflecting on what I might have learned from the undertaking. Now, as my stomach grumbles and my nights are filled with nakedly wish-fulfilling dreams of banquets, I find my usually idle thoughts turning to the lessons of almost seventy-eight years.

One thought that struck me with particular force this morning as I was taking my four mile walk was that there is now in this world one and only one person who has known me for my entire life -- my big sister Barbara. Since she and I are the oldest of the cousins, and inasmuch as our parents and all of the uncles and aunts have long since passed away, it is only in her memory that I exist as a unified whole. If I may speak in Kantian fashion, the integrity of my life exists in the unity of Barbara's consciousness. My wife, Susie, has known me since I was fourteen, and that fact grounds the extraordinary bond between us, but even she only met me after I was in large part formed. My children, of course, have known me their entire lives, but since they are forty-three and forty-one, there are three decades and a half to which they were never witness. It is in my consciousness that their unity resides.

It is lonely to go through life without someone whom you have welcomed into the inner circle of your life, past the billboards and fences and false faces that we all erect to keep out strangers. But it is far lonelier still to know that you are the sole witness to the totality of your life. Autobiographies are works of art, and therefore deliberately constructed realities, a fact that bedevils literary scholars trying to make sense of the lives that autobiographers have fashioned from the chaos and detritus of their memories, so the readers of my autobiography know only a more or less artfully devised version of my life.

Susie and I, like many couples our age, hold hands when we walk. This is of course partly so that each of us may steady the other through those unpredictable moments that can so easily lead to hip replacements. In our case, and that of many other couples, holding hands is also an expression of old and settled affection. But something else is at work in this familiar practice, I think. We are reassuring each other, and ourselves, that someone can affirm the temporal unity of our existence.

As I was writing these lines, Susie received a call telling her of the passing of a much loved aunt, the last of the old guard in her deceased mother's extended family. Even though Claire, who died at ninety-four, had not really been present with us in recent years, Susie nevertheless felt the loss keenly.

Old age comes to those of us who are fortunate, and death to all of us, lucky or not. The most we can strive for is to approach the end of our lives with what Erik Erikson called integrity -- the awareness of coherence and hence some measure of meaning in "the accidental coincidence of but one life cycle with but one segment of history."

Very soon, I promise, I shall have something to eat, and shall regain my usual sunny temperament.

AN INTERESTING QUESTION

An old friend, Howard Berman, prompted by the Weber mini-tutorial, asks the following question:

"How much is Weber's thesis on the Protestant ethic generalizable: in the sense that an other-worldly group, usually religious, breaks out into the wide world, and has a secular impact?
Your familiarity with historical examples may exceed mind; but today's Republican Right comes to mind. As does Islam: Mohammed was a prophet who wielded an Empire. The early Christians were an otherworldly sect. I'm sure there are examples in Jewish History. We can play a parlor game all night dreaming up examples. Perhaps Buddhism; which started from asceticism and which grew into (I think) Ashoka's Indian Empire and became a state religion in China. Have scholars before us investigated this line of thought?"

I don't know the answer. One would think Weber might have prompted specialists in a vareiety of historical and cultural fields to think about this. Does anyone have any idea?

STEP 'N FETCHIT

For some while now, I have been gaping in awe and befuddlement at the campaign of Herman Cain. I feel some obligation as a blogger to comment on what is surely the most bizarre presidential candidacy in my lifetime, but for the life of me I have been unable to find the appropriate standpoint from which to launch my commentary. Last night, Rachel Maddow devoted a segment of her nightly show to the subject, and with what I am compelled to believe was a brilliant satirical thrust, skewered Cain and his campaign, and along with him the entire commentariat -- mainstream, Off-Broadway, Off-Off-Broadway, and Underground.

Her shtick can be found here: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26315908/ns/msnbc_tv-rachel_maddow_show/

Maddow chose to portray Cain's campaign as a piece of satirical performance art that has grown broader and more daring, more or less out of desperation, as the entire Republican Party has persisted in taking him seriously, despite his truly heroic efforts to tip them off, to let them -- and the rest of us -- in on the joke.

Her literary critical analysis begins with the very first Debate, at the end of which, when it came time for the two minute concluding statements, Cain quote several lines from what he identified as "a great poet," but which were actually taken from a song in the Pokemon movie.

Well, no one got that joke, so next he unveiled his now famous 9-9-9 tax plan, which, it seems comes straight out of the interactive computer game Sim City. When this was pointed out, both to him and to the world, the Republican voters did not applaud the comedy routine and usher Cain from the political arena. Instead, they drove his poll numbers up, eclipsing Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann, Newt Gingrich, and the egregious Rick Santorum.

Getting desperate now for his audience to catch on [there is nothing worse than being a stand-up comic in a cold house], Cain uttered his notorious line about one of America's Central Asian allies: "If someone asks me who the President is of Uzbeki-beki-beki-stan-stan, I will say, I don't know, do you?" That is not a flubbed answer, or a poorly handled foreign policy question. It bears no relation to Sarah Palin's inability to respond to Katie Couric's softball question, "Which newspapers do you read?" Cain's line is patently a comic throwaway, a rib-tickler, a gut-buster, a bit of tomfoolery. The pundits just stroked their chins and allowed as how Herman did not seem to be up on his foreign policy.

When Cain got to the top of the polls, how did he respond? He released a "campaign" ad in which his Campaign Manager blew smoke into the camera, after which the "candidate" himself slowly and deliberately exhibited a Cheshire Cat smile that as much as said, "Get it?"

Whereupon, Cain took off on a month long book tour!

The only thing Cain has done that looks remotely like the action of a serious candidate is to screw up his response to the revelations of his past history of sexual harassment charges. Now that really does look like the behavior of a political candidate --like a Newt Gingrich, a Bill Clinton, a Mark Sanford, a Gary Hart, a John Edwards.

Cain's latest bit of comic foolishness? His enthusiastic embrace of the Koch billionaires with a line right out of the 'hood: "I am their brother by another mother."

There are two questions that force themselves on us, the second even more interesting than the first: Is Maddow right that Cain is engaged in a deliberate bit of "performance art"?, And Why are the Republican voters buying it?

The first goes to motive, as they say in the law courts, and since I have never so much as seen Herman Cain in person, I cannot form a sound judgment about what he thinks he is doing. But I do have some opinions.

Herman Cain, I suggest, is only the most recent in a long, long line of Black comedians who placate, flatter, and reassure White racists by presenting themselves as caricatures of African-American men and women. Quite often these performances are deliberately and deeply ironic, a way of laughing at Whitey without getting lynched. Sometimes they are compromises made by gifted Black actors who can only get work by conforming their self-presentations to the prejudices of their audiences ["I don' know nothing about birthin' babies, Mis Scarlet."] And in some instances, alas, they are uncomplicatedly complicit in those prejudices.

I simply cannot tell which sort of minstrel Cain is playing. But I suspect he is not stupid, and it is just not possible to be Black in America, especially for one of his generation, without understanding these things viscerally.

The appeal to White Republicans? For years, they have been berated as racists. Although the charge is true, they hate it. their reaction is a of a piece with their deeply resentful sense that the educated, the successful, the Liberal, are looking down on them. By embracing Cain, they are giving the collective finger to the powerful, the successful, the ascendant, in their own Republican Party as well as in the Democratic Party. Ann Coulter, who can always be relied upon to say out loud what more cautious bigots will only mutter sotto voce, gave the game away when she said "Our Blacks are so much better than their Blacks." [I suspect Coulter is unaware of the famous 1859 Harriet Wilson novel Our Nig.]

How will this all play out? I simply cannot tell. Will Cain actually go through with the charade and allow people to choose convention delegates committed to him? Will he, God help us, win enough delegates to be competitive at the convention? The mean spirited gutter fighter in me hopes the answer is "yes," but the serious political philosopher shrinks from the prospect.

THE RETURN OF THE HOT STOVE LEAGUE

Now that the official baseball season is ended, the NBA season has been postponed, and the end of Daylight Savings Time is only a few days away, it is time to throw a few coals on the fire and convene the political Hot Stove league once more. In the off moments when I have not been brooding about Marcuse or Weber, I have been trying to make sense of what is surely the most bizarre presidential primary race in living memory. My overseas readers will perhaps find these musings considerably more arcane than the subtleties of the relationship between religious faith and the advent of capitalism, but as the late, great Tip O'Neill of Massachusetts famously observed, all politics are local. [I think he actually said "is," but I have regularized his grammar so as not to tarnish his memory.]

At the moment, all attention is focused on the charges of past acts of sexual harassment leveled against front-runner Herman Cain. However, as a registered, certified, credentialed intellectual, I am of course obliged to look beneath this surface appearance to reveal deeper trends and structural realities. Had I been trained in Literary Criticism rather than Philosophy, I would refer to my idle remarks as an "intervention" and several times describe myself as "gesturing at" the political scene. I might even be moved to place the initial letters of words in parentheses, as though astonished at the fact that some English words have prefixes. Oh well, I am too old to change, so I shall simply offer these observations for your amusement, rather than for your edification. I figure I have done enough edifying for a while.

On the surface, the race for the Republican presidential nomination gives the appearance of constant flux. Trump is up. Trump is out. Bachmann soars. Bachmann crashes. Perry inflates like a soufflé. Perry collapses. Cain is able. Cain is disabled. But the polls, taken more frequently than a hypochondriac takes his pulse, reveal an unexpected stability. The seemingly unchanging reality can be described simply as 25-25-50. For upwards of a year now, roughly a quarter of Republican voters polled have expressed a preference for Romney, roughly a quarter have described themselves as undecided, and the remaining fifty percent have opted for Trump, Pawlenty, Bachmann, Perry, Cain, Paul, Santorum, Gingrich, or Huntsman.

The ceaseless flux in the distribution of that fifty percent has captured all the media attention, but the overall shape of the race has remained surprisingly constant. Sometimes Romney slides to 21%, at other times he claws his way up to 29%, but with impressive homeostatic constancy, his numbers keep returning to the roughly 25% mark. Sometimes, too, the undecideds shrink a bit, although there too, the size of the officially uncertain seems pretty stable.

I am going to make an assumption for which I have no actual evidence, but which seems to me to be very likely true, namely that it is the same quarter of the probable Republican primary voters who name Romney as their choice each time a poll is taken. [Not the same individuals, of course, since the sample is different each time, but rather that the group of the voters represented in the sample by the Romney supporters is stable.] It just strikes me as intuitively unlikely that people who say "Romney" today would have said "Cain" or "Bachmann" a week earlier, or would say "Perry" or "Paul" a week later. In other words, I think there really is a stable quarter of the Republican primary electorate who are Romney voters.

The same cannot, I think, be said of the quarter who in any poll are undecided. Many of them, I would imagine, supported Bachmann or Trump or Perry during their brief moments of glory and now are hanging back, saying "undecided" when asked. And of course the poll numbers make it obvious that most of the 50% have shifting allegiances, backing first one darling of the Right Wing and now another. The exception to this generalization is the loyal, devoted, unmovable claque of Ron Paul acolytes. They will be with him to the end, I am sure.

I predict that this situation will continue at least for another month, and perhaps longer, until right before the real delegate selection begins on January 3rd with the Iowa Caucuses. Cain may swoon [although he does not yet show any signs of doing so] and Gingrich may benefit from Cain's discomfiture [appalling and inconceivable as that may be]. Perry may rise again. Even the egregious Santorum, victim of the most cruelly brilliant internet joke ever played on a political candidate, may experience an ego-soothing bump. Only poor old Huntsman will, in all likelihood, never see so much as a blip in his level of support, which at the moment is within the margin of error of zero.

But it is an indisputable truth that once the voting starts, one hundred percent of those who show up at the polls or caucuses will choose somebody. "None of the above" is not on the ballot in any of the primaries, so far as I have been able to ascertain. At that time, there are really only three plausible outcomes. Here they are:

1. Romney picks up most of the "undecided" voters, and begins to collect close to 50% of the votes. Paul gets his reliable 10%, and the remaining 40% is distributed in some way or other among the other six candidates. If that happens, Romney wins, and the presidential race will be an Obama/Romney contest.

2. Romney snags maybe two-fifths of the undecideds, or even half of them, and sees his share of the votes rise to 35-40%. Paul gets his 10%, and the remaining 50% go to the rest of the field. In this case, I think, pretty quickly one of that group of six will emerge as the candidate of the non-Romney non-Paul voters, and will start getting as much as 40% or even more in this or that state. There will be states, especially in the South, in which this person gets an absolute majority, while Romney is lucky to hold his original 25%. As the primary season rolls on, Romney and this non-Romney -- maybe Perry, maybe Cain, probably not Gingrich, almost certainly not Bachmann or Huntsman or Santorum -- keep splitting the delegates as they are selected. Since Paul will win delegates under the new Republican rules [which call for some measure of proportional allocation], it is not clear whether anyone will have an actual majority when the primary season is over.

At this point, the group of unelected delegates [Governors, Reps, Senators, Party chairpersons, and so forth] may try to decide the race one way or the other by throwing all their votes to either Romney or the emergent non-Romney. If they choose Romney [because, perhaps, the non-Romney is Cain, whom they consider unelectable], this will very possibly trigger a revolt at the Convention from the majority of delegates who are really unhappy at the thought of Romney being the nominee.

3. Romney manages to hold his 25% but gets very few additional votes as the primaries begin. In this case, Romney and Paul between them account for perhaps 40% of the votes, and 60% are up for grabs. Once again, one of the non-Romney non-Paul candidates will emerge as the real vote-getter, maybe Perry, maybe Cain, and that person will be on a glide path to the nomination. If the non-Romney is Cain, all hell will break loose, as the wise old heads in the Republican Party stare at an Obama victory of Reaganesque proportions in a year when they should have been able to waltz into the White House. Their efforts to derail Cain will trigger a split in the Republican ranks that will transform the party. If the non-Romney is Perry, my best guess is that the Party will fall in line, and the race will be between Obama and Perry.

Which of these three futures is most likely? The mainstream media commentators who are all confidently predicting a smooth Romney victory must be assuming that Number One is the odds-on favorite, and yet I really do not think that is true. Remember, for that scenario to play out, Romney must snag all or most of the undecideds, and I see no evidence that he will do so. If that were the case, you would expect his numbers to have started to rise already. My own view is that Scenario Number Two is actually the most likely, although Number Three is also surely a genuine possibility.

In any case, there are going to be a great many disappointed, even bitter, Republican voters if Romney somehow manages to get the nomination.

If this analysis is correct, Obama's chances for reelection may be brighter than the unemployment numbers suggest.

RIP VAN WINKLE

I do not wear suits -- the last time was the tux I rented for my son, Patrick's, wedding nine years ago. But I do wear sweaters. Some time ago, maybe when most of the readers of this blog were in grade school, I bought a couple of sweaters. And then there are the sweaters I bought on my honeymoon in Wales, twenty-four years ago. So I think I need one or two new sweaters, ones without holes in the elbows. Since I wear them for warmth, I thought to myself that I might even go big, and spend a hundred bucks for a cashmere sweater.

Then I did a little on-line shopping. Wool/Cashmere mix sweaters start at $350 0r $400! When did this happen? How long have I been asleep? I could feed Susie and myself for three weeks for that, and even have swordfish every so often.

I think I better go back to sleep.

THE PROTESTANT ETHIC AND THE SPIRIT OF CAPITALISM A MINI-TUTORIAL CONCLUSION

Weber repeatedly uses the term "rational" to describe the approach to every aspect of life of the Puritans and other Reformed sects. "Rationalization" is the central concept of Weber's Sociology, informing and shaping his discussion not only of religion and the economy but also of politics, art, and science. To the philosophical ear, the term suggests conformity to the principles of formal logic, or perhaps guidance by the faculty of Reason alone, but that is not quite what Weber has in mind. The term "bureaucratization" sometimes carries the same meaning for him. A few words about "rational" and its cognates "rationalization" and "rationality" might be in order.

When Weber describes a person, a practice, or an institution as rational, he means to contrast it with the habitual, the natural, the haphazard, the unorganized, and, as he often says in this essay, the "magical." A government agency with defined roles, written regulations, and officials appointed on the basis of examinations or qualifications rather on the basis of family connection is, in Weber's sense of the term, "rational." An army organized into companies brigades, and divisions, led by professional soldiers who have been schooled in the art of war, rather than a collection of undisciplined bands each loyal to a different charismatic or traditional leader, is, in Weber's sense of the term, "rational." An economic enterprise that keeps written records of its purchases and sales, carefully calculates profit and loss, and makes economic decisions on the basis of spreadsheets and double entry bookkeeping is, in Weber's sense of the term, "rational."

Weber's repeated allusions to "magic," by the way, refer to such Catholic rituals as the Mass, in which the miracle of transubstantiation takes place. For those of you who are not clued in to Catholic theology, the Mass is intended as a repetition of the Last Supper that Christ took with his disciples. As a consequence of the miraculous intervention of God during the ritual of the mass, the wafer and wine are transformed. The accidents of the bread and wine -- smell, taste, feel, weight, shape, etc. -- remain the same, but the substance of the bread and wine is changed into the substance of the Body and Blood of Christ. Hence "transubstantiation." Marx, by the way, has great fun with this notion in Capital. He describes capitalist commodity exchange mockingly as a kind of inverted transubstantiation. The accidents change during commodity exchange -- wheat is exchanged for linen, shoes for coats -- but the substance, which is to say Value, or embodied socially necessary labor, remains the same, for in a capitalist marketplace, equals are exchanged for equals.

The "regular orders" of monks and nuns exhibited, in their cloistered devotions, many of the marks of this sort of rationality, but what sharply distinguishes the early Protestants from their Catholic lay brothers and sisters is the fact that they exhibit the same rigorous systematization of every aspect of their lives, even though they pursue their calling "in the world." The core of Weber's thesis in this essay is that this secularization of what is initially a religious rationality is the differentia specifica that explains the transformation of medieval economic activity into what we now know as capitalism.

Let me repeat here, as I conclude this mini-tutorial, something that I said as I began: You must not make the mistake of supposing that Weber is unaware of, or even is denying the importance of, all the other pre-conditions, causes, historical particularities, legal institutions, political circumstances , and economic factors that played a role in the emergence of distinctively Western capitalism. He is well aware of them and many times insists on their importance. But he is trying to explain why capitalism developed in seventeenth and eighteenth century Europe, and did not develop at other times and places where so many of these cooperating factors seemed to be present. [If I may make a philosophical allusion, we might compare what Weber is doing to Francis Bacon's "Tables of Presence and Absence" in the Novum Organum.]

Weber's emphasis on the distinctive Protestant ethic of the secularized calling might be called by some Marxists "idealist" rather than "materialist," but I myself do not put much store in those kinds of classifications. It seems to me that Weber is right to focus attention on the mentality, as it were, of the early capitalists, to observe how strikingly if differed from that of their predecessors or contemporaries, and to ask where it came from. Now, Marx [and many others] might object that the forces of competition would drive anyone seeking to survive in the marketplace to adopt the most efficient techniques of production and use the best available methods for calculating profitability. Weber agrees, and indeed says just that in his essay. But that is an explanation of the forces compelling new entrepreneurs to adopt the intensively rationalized mode of economic activity that they find in operation when first they launch their enterprises. It cannot also be an explanation of the choice of such novel and unusual modes of economic activity by the first men to enter the field.

The fate of Weber's thesis has been complicated, as one might expect, and much has been written either revising or even rejecting the central claim of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. But I believe that it remains a highly original, brilliantly argued work that demonstrates the great strength of the work that was done in the first generations of Sociology. If I were asked what more recent works exhibit a like scope and power, I think I would cite Barrington Moor Jr.'s The Origins of Democracy and Dictatorship: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World,"

With that, I bring this mini-tutorial to a close. I hope you have found it useful, and that some of you perhaps will be stimulated to consult Weber's writings directly.