SOCIAL NOTES FROM THE GALAXY

I do not customarily attend to the news from the social pages, but certain events simply demand that notice be taken.  I have just learned that Captain Picard of the Enterprise will be married, and the ceremony will be presided over by Gandalf.  The reports did not indicate whether Counselor Troi would offer prenuptial advice, or whether Frodo would be the ring bearer.

Those who are sticklers for the literary formalities will of course protest that Captain Picard and Gandalf inhabit two entirely different fictional worlds, and can therefore no more meet than can Phineas Fogg and Sherlock Holmes, or Samuel Pickwick and the aging Elizabeth Bennett.  But it really is true, apparently, that Patrick Stewart will marry his long time partner, and Ian McKellan will officiate.  One of the charming quirks of Massachusetts is that anybody can preside over a marriage, just once, simply by applying for permission -- no clerical collar required.  I know because one of my sons did precisely that.

These are dark days for those of a progressive bent, and I think we need any little emotional lift we can come by.  I for one will lift a glass in silent toast to the happy couple this evening.

PROGRESS

Today, I finished proofreading Volume I of my collected papers.  This volume contains my writings on Hume and Kant and on higher education, including education i South Africa.  It will be available on Amazon as soon as we get the permissions, which as usual are slow in coming.

Tomorrow, I will start Volume II, my writings on Marx and Classical Political Economy.

The volume containing the Use and Abuse of Formal Methods in Political Economy, and a series of applications, is done but is awaiting a cover.

All in all, there will be six volumes of material, including my Memoir, some of it never before seen by anyone but me.

This is a very large project, but I rather suspect it may be completed by the end of the summer.  Then I will have to find something to occupy myself with.

Any suggestions?

CATCHING UP

I have been so deeply involved in preparing the first volume of my collected papers for e-publication that I have been neglecting this blog.  [I am now proof-reading the final version of volume I, and when all the permissions are in and a cover is produced, it will go up on Amazon.]  I will simply note with sadness that Mark Sanford won his by-election.  Oh well.  It was a good try.  As for the simply incredible story of the escape and rescue of three women held captive for ten years, there is obviously nothing I can add to the breathless rapportage of the cable news commentators.

On a very much more serious note, the escalation of calls for American military intervention in Syria frightens me, but it scarcely surprises me.  There is no question that the slaughter under way in that country is appalling, but to my uninformed eye, there is no plausible intervention that would have any hope of success, however one defines that.  Too many powerful and influential people in this country are eager for us to go to war anywhere, at any time, for any purpose whatsoever.

Since I am by nature a cheerful soul, my attention naturally turns to the most delightful conspiracy fantasy conjured up by the loonies of the right in quite some time.  I refer to the theory, now being urged on the floor of the Senate and the House, that the U. S. government is deliberately buying up all the bullets in America in order to deprive gun owners of the ammunition they need for their constitutionally protected guns.  This really is precious.  Can it possibly be an advertising ploy by the ammunition manufacturers?  Perhaps, but that would introduce far more rationality into the story than it deserves or can support.

I leave for Paris in ten days, and advance reports from that lovely city indicate that my sunny hopes for the new Socialist government of Francsois Hollande have already been dashed.  Intellectual honesty compels me to acknowledge that in many respects this really is an awful world.  Sigh.  At least there is a new Tom cruise/Morgan Freeman action movie.  Maybe I should try that. 

BIG NEWS

Volume I of my collected papers has now been assembled, and once we line up and check all permissions, get a cover for the book, and proof-read it, it will go up for sale on Amazon.com.  The first volume contains Juvenilia [including some fun items], a large section devoted to my writings on the philosophy of David Hume and Immanuel Kant, and another large section of my writings on higher education.  Both of the major sections of the book include materials never published in any form, and never before available.

As always, my thanks to Michael Hemmingsen of the McMaster philosophy department for his invaluable role in this project, and also my thanks to Megan Kelly Mitchell of the UNC Chapel Hill philosophy department, who has been my research assistant on other projects as well and has done her usual outstanding work.

SHAMELESS COMMERCE DIVISION OF THE PHILOSOPHER'S STONE

I am delighted to announce that my seemingly endless autobiography, A Life in the Academy, is now available as an e-book on Amazon.com for the bargain price of $9.99, with a cover even.  All proceeds go to the Society for Philosophy and Culture, run by Mr. Michael Hemmingsen of McMaster University, who is responsible for this and five of my out of print books being available on Amazon.

I am now preparing the first of what will be several volumes of my published and unpublished papers.  What is more, The Use and Abuse of Formal Methods in Political Philosophy, together with my essays on Rawls, Strasnick, Nozick, the Prisoner's Dilemma, and the use of formal methods in military strategy and foreign policy, will be available shortly.

The perfect summer reading!  And a splendid present for that special person in your life.

Be the first person in your corner of the blogosphere to own one.

BIG NEWS FROM THE MID-WEST

Brian Leiter's blog informs me that St. Louis University, a Jesuit school, has won a three million dollar grant from the Templeton Foundation to study -- wait for it -- "intellectual humility."

Irony is not dead in Missouri.

A REPLY TO SOME COMMENTS

I have been hard at work for the past several days, editing and sorting the ninety or more published and unpublished journal articles, reviews, comments, political manifestos, letters to the editor, and blog tutorials, mini-tutorials, micro-tutorials, and appreciations that will eventually be offered on Amazon.com in a series of e-books.  In the oddly self-referential and inward-looking world that I call my life, the only thing that takes precedence over writing is reading what I have written, so I have been derelict in responding to the interesting comments posted on my blog about the future of American capitalism.  Now that I have reached a momentary stopping point in the editing, I can turn my attention to those comments.  Happily, I have also finished reading Gar Alperovitz's new book, What Then Must We Do:  Straight Talk About the Next American Revolution, which speaks directly to the issues raised by my brief blog post.

A few quick responses first.  Michael asks whether I had heard of the story about the UMass Amherst Econ grad student who exploded the reputations of the two big deal Harvard economists who have been pushing austerity.  I have indeed.  I simply love the idea that a student is handed the rather uninspiring exercise of checking some published article as a way of improving his data analysis skills and ends up blowing a hole in one of the most influential pieces of research of recent years!  How cool is that!

The article linked to by JP Smit turned out to be a quite interesting review of a lot of recent work on the question why capitalist firms do not continue to grow forever, until one firm owns everything.  The reason, apparently, is that there are costs associated with too large expansion that more than outweigh the potential gains -- information costs, management costs, and so forth.  By some measures, it seems, firms have not grown larger on average in the last twenty or thirty years.

Now to the Alperovitz book.  It is written in a chatty, breezy style that gets on my nerves, but it says some very interesting and important things.  In a nutshell, Alperovitz thinks that there are a very large number of developments on the ground in the American economy that suggest, first, that many millions of Americans are already hard at work trying to create and sustain alternative economic institutions to the dominant capitalist ones, and second that the direction of development of the American economy offers some hope and some opportunities for the growth of such alternatives.  His message is that all of us, in some way or other, need to get off our butts and get involved with those developments, while also trying to articulate a coherent, systematic analysis and set of strategies for major economic change.

Alperovitz has in mind such developments as food cooperatives, state or local partnerships with collectives in energy generation and many other areas, worker-owned firms, land trusts, and many more.  A theme he repeats several times, is "If you don't like corporate capitalism and you don't like state socialism, what do you want?"  [The implication being, once you have figured out the answer to that question, start building it.]

There is a good deal in the short book, and I recommend it to you.  Let me take a few moments to put down some thoughts that it provoked in me.

Marx wrote a great deal about the transition from feudalism to capitalism, but very little about the transition, if there is to be one, from capitalism to socialism.  We are accustomed to thinking about the latter transition as coming about by way of a revolution,  but that is not at all the way in which the transition from feudalism to capitalism occurred.  Capitalism really did grow, slowly and bit by bit, "in the womb of the old," to quote Marx's famous phrase.  The men and women who brought capitalism into existence had little or no conception of any larger project in which they were engaged.  The English, French, and American revolutions were political revolutions that ratified or codified economic changes that had already taken place on the ground.  If we try seriously to ask, as Alperovitz does, what the next American economic system is going to look like, and how it is going to come into existence, his reply, which is to look at thousands of ground-up changes already taking place, seems in many ways the right way to think about such a transition.

Alperovitz is extremely cautious about making rosy predictions, and he is painfully aware, as we all are, of the powerful forces defending the existing capitalist order and the massive obstacles in the way of change.  But he makes two points that strike me as correct:  First, changes are already being instituted and experimented with, and the only way to find out what they can amount to is for all of us, in the millions, to throw ourselves into those changes and move them along;  and Second [this is, I think, the really important message], each of these changes, all by itself, makes life a little bit better for the people who are bringing it about, so the efforts they are expending are not wasted, regardless of whether they become part of a larger movement.  A food cooperative is a good thing for its members, a land trust helps to sustain a community, a worker-owned business, however small, is a benefit to the workers who own it.

It is quite possible of course, as Alperovitz clearly understands, that all these efforts may in the end be swamped by larger forces and accumulations of wealth that stand against them.  But real change will only come as the result of the efforts of scores of millions of people;  it will never happen merely as the relentless playing out of impersonal forces independently of our efforts and commitments. 

I do not honestly know whether many, many small initiatives can ever add up to major systemic change.  But I cannot see any alternative --certainly not "armed revolution," whatever that would actually be.

Take a look at the book, and others like it.