Given the worrying recent increase in the quality of public discourse (or is it just me?), it’s relieving to have found the Hottest Heads of State list. The list comes complete with a multi-author blog about, well, you know, not much of anything. It’s great fun, although I do take issue with some of the rankings. Enjoy.
Posts Tagged: politics
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Oct 09
Post Post-APSA
The American Political Science Association held its annual meeting this year in Toronto–it’s first time outside the US. Russell Arben Fox has a clever (if now slightly stale) post over at Front Porch Republic assessing the show. It hits some nice points, but then misses the big one I think. Key quote:
Political scientists–and in particular the political theorists with whom I spend most of my time, and the theoretical debates I’m most interested in following–are hardly the most expert and reliable barometers of the directions in which our shared (or at least observed) political culture may happen to be evolving at any one time. Still, it somewhat surprised me, to find that in all sorts of ways, it seemed to me that everyone was talking about, or at least opening the door to, the limits of, or the problems with, sovereignty, and centralized power, and the state.
Thus:
Still, for whatever it’s worth, if political scientists are any kind of canary in a coal mine, I can’t help but wonder if the lurking issue that may suddenly emerge to shape political thinking in the near future might simply be a sense that, well, enough is enough: that politics–state politics, national politics, to say nothing of international politics–claim too much, and try to do and to mean, too much.
Anyone see the slip there? The examples cited (especially James C Scott’s just-arrived The Art of Not Being Governed) are all well taken, but they don’t indicate disinterest in politics as such. They indicate disinterest in the politics of the nation-state. That’s a pretty revolutionary idea, on any terms–and far more so than Fox lets on. If we’re seeing political science beyond the state, and if poli-sci is the canary in the coal mine he makes it out to be, than there’s quite a ride on the horizon–and not one likely to breed the disinterest he sees coming.
1
Oct 09
Culture wars, re- re- re- redux
Because, you know, the culture wars needed a little reviving–especially where the guys on the right of it keep dropping like flies.
So far as I can tell, the Cultural Studies engagement of the culture wars has outlived the Battle of Stalingrad by, oh, about 10 to 1. Michael Berube is in the CHR here to the effect that the discipline (such as it is one, with all of three departments in the US) has had little or no impact. Assorted responses and rants here. Key graph from the original essay:
…has cultural studies transformed the disciplines of the human sciences? Has cultural studies changed the means of transmission of knowledge? Has cultural studies made the American university a more egalitarian or progressive institution? Those seem to me to be useful questions to ask, and one useful way of answering them is to say, sadly, no. Cultural studies hasn’t had much of an impact at all.
Of course, contra Berube, some of us actually wish this sort of work could be more detached from watered down mid-century Marxism. Weren’t deconstruction and its fellow traveling ideas more fun on their own, without all that baggage? Wasn’t it more fun to watch the Simpsons without having to worry about class conflict down at the power plant? Maybe it’s just me.
Hat tip: CT