Tuesday, July 19, 2011

Discussions of neo-liberalism at Crooked Timber. Henry Farrell
Doug Henwood has a go at Matthew Yglesias.
Duncan Black, in a game of telephone, linking to someone linking to CT.
Leaving aside policy disagreements, and for sake of discussion assuming good intentions, I think the group being discussed are basically not fans of democracy.
Atrios seems not to understand they're talking about a friend of his.
Posts continue with Henry again, responding to Yglesias, and then Bertram
Well not content with his inaccurate digs at Henry, Brad DeLong is having another go at me.
For discussions of Crooked Timber as neoliberal, go here, and here and (why not) here
Chris Bertram from the second of the three above
The right frame, in my view, is to think of the state as “we, the people” and to ask what conditions need to be in place for the people, and for each citizen, to play their role in effective self-government. Once you look at things like that then various speech restrictions naturally suggest themselves.
Various references to Yglesias on this site over the years
My inbox (email): "And for the record (don't post this), Yglesias as an individual has a great, self-aware sense of humor and is much more starkly honest (if also unapologetic) about his own elitism than most liberals. Take him out for a beer and I think you'd find that."

Yglesias: "At the appropriate level of abstraction, the neocons couldn't be more right about this stuff, but when it comes to actually getting it done their policies have been a miserable failure."

Yglesias: "After the last depressing news from the Middle East I think we have to start asking just how inhumane it would be for Israel to just expel the Palestinians from the occupied terroritories. [sic] The result would probably be out-and-out war with the neighboring Arab states, but Israel could win that.
All forced population transfers are humanitarian disasters, of course, but so is the current situation. It's not like there's not any room in the whole Arab world for all these Palestinian Arabs to go live in, it's just that the other Arab leaders don't want to cooperate."
Doug Henwood recently (facebook)
There's a Marc Jacobs boutique in Ho Chi Minh City??
20 years since I first quipped that Nike won the Vietnam War. Henwood's ignorance surprised me. It shouldn't have.

The choices above are between the authoritarianism of the market, the authoritarianism of intellectuals, and utopian fantasy.

Tyler Cowen and DeLong are no longer favorites at Crooked Timber, though they were once. Allegiances have drifted, as they have for Duncan Black, but though there's change, most of them don't acknowledge it and none of them are capable of describing it.  They'd put it up it to a reasoning process, but the data isn't new, even to them. Change in their awareness came slowly because they had to acculturate to the data, and that takes time. Liberalism, neoliberalism, and modernism itself have no concept of time, more specifically of its effects. Authors may model the world as dynamic but they model themselves as static. As I've said, individualism is textual originalism read into the self, as author and actor, and read forward. They all claim to write as Scalia claims to read.
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Someone googling "academic neoliberalism" found this: the jackass Bourdieu. Click through to T.J. Clark.

All summer repeats. And repeats of repeats.

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