6/18 It's getting worse and worse.
---
A simple explanation of why the "seminar" is sinking like a rock.
The titles of four posts, the first and last are in response to Danielle Allen's book.

Reading Our Declaration in Support of Black Radicalism
To help poor people, give them money (Draft excerpt from Economics in Two Lessons)
Justice for Janitors Day
The craft of interpreting the Declaration of Independence

Theorizing at Crooked Timber is rigorous even of the formalism is only that: they're skillful engineers of air castles. When they get down to practical matters they like to keep things simple. They want to help. And why would you want to undermine the good intentions of the best and brightest? The first post above is getting the drubbing it deserves. At the same time the whole thing reminds me how the language of concern at CT is almost always the language of us and them. And although I've used many different examples of where their self-described enlightenment is illusory, the best example, for them as for liberals in general, is the relation of Zionism and Palestine.
---
A political theorist discovers constitutional law. And Henry does too?
Heather Gerkin (Yale and Balkinization)

The craft of interpreting the Declaration of Independence

In Our Declaration, Danielle Allen writes neither as a philosopher’s philosopher, a historian’s historian, nor as a textualist’s textualist. She writes instead a dazzling scholar in the midst of a full-blown academic obsession. And, strangely enough, she writes like a lawyer.

Lawyers, not philosophers

Drift

Gordon S Wood in the NYRB

Allen, who is a professor of social science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, came to this extraordinary conclusion when she was teaching for a decade at the University of Chicago. But it was not the young bright-eyed undergraduates whom she taught by day who inspired her. Instead, it was the much older, life-tested adults whom she taught by night who created “the single most transformative experience” of her teaching career.

A philosopher changed by experience. I thought of linking to to Healy's wife directly, but roundabout is better

Also relevant to recent discussion of research vs teaching.
Also this: "Not the idea of democracy, or the meaning of democracy, but democracy."

The geek rediscovery of humanism continues apace.
---
more, 6/24