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Swann's Medical Philosophy
Richard Moran
https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190921576.003.0006

Exorbitance A Grammar of Overdoing Steven Connor

 

https://www.sup.org/books/literary-studies-and-literature/exorbitance

Captive Minds

A Study of Manipulation

Avishai Margalit, Assaf Sharon

https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674303102

The Splendid things we planned: A family portrait

Canceled lives: My father, my scandal, and me

Blake Bailey

https://www.skyhorsepublishing.com/9781510771215/the-splendid-things-we-planned/

https://www.skyhorsepublishing.com/9781510783317/canceled-lives/

 

The Melville Effect: A Literary Afterlife across the Arts.

Joseph Allen Boone

Columbia University Press 2026

https://cup.columbia.edu/book/the-melville-effect/9780231222198/

Prof. John Lurz (Tufts University)

The Barthes Fantastic: Literature, Criticism, and the Practice of Language 

University of Chicago Press

https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/B/bo246540373.html

 

 

Peter E. Gordon

Walter Benjamin: The Pearl Diver.

 

https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300289459/walter-benjamin/

Roderick Frazier Nash

Wilderness and the American Mind

 

https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300190380/wilderness-and-the-american-mind/

Katie Ebner-Landy

The Character Sketch as Philosophy: Manners, Mores, Types

 

https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674294127

Susan Stewart

Poetry's Nature

Joshua Landy (Stanford University) 

Proust: A very short introduction  

Caleb Smith

Thoreau's axe: Distraction and discipline in American culture

 

Today, we're driven to distraction, our attention overwhelmed by the many demands upon it—most of which emanate from our beeping and blinking digital devices. This may seem like a decidedly twenty-first-century problem, but, as Caleb Smith shows in this elegantly written, meditative work, distraction was also a serious concern in American culture two centuries ago. In Thoreau's Axe, Smith explores the strange, beautiful archives of the nineteenth-century attention revival—from a Protestant minister's warning against frivolous thoughts to Thoreau's reflections on wakefulness at Walden Pond. Smith examines how Americans came to embrace attention, mindfulness, and other ways of being "spiritual but not religious," and how older Christian ideas about temptation and spiritual devotion endure in our modern ideas about distraction and attention.

Smith explains that nineteenth-century worries over attention developed in response to what were seen as the damaging mental effects of new technologies and economic systems. A "wandering mind," once diagnosed, was in need of therapy or rehabilitation. Modeling his text after nineteenth-century books of devotion, Smith offers close readings of twenty-eight short passages about attention. Considering social reformers who designed moral training for the masses, religious leaders who organized Christian revivals, and spiritual seekers like Thoreau who experimented with regimens of simplified living and transcendental mysticism, Smith shows how disciplines of attention became the spiritual exercises of a distracted age.

Henry David Thoreau A Very Short Introduction
Lawrence Buell

The first concise account of Thoreau's life, thought, work, and impact in more than half a century
Builds upon the explosion of new scholarship on Thoreau during the decade of the bicentennial of his birth

Treats Thoreau's two most famous and influential works - Walden and "Civil Disobedience" - both as an interdependent pair and as a window into the evolution of his thought and writing as a whole

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Man-Devil: The Mind and Times of Bernard Mandeville, the Wickedest Man in Europe

John J. Callanan 

A lively and provocative account of Bernard Mandeville and the work that scandalized and appalled his contemporaries—and made him one of the most influential thinkers of the eighteenth century

In 1714, doctor, philosopher and writer Bernard Mandeville published The Fable of the Bees, a humorous tale in which a prosperous hive full of greedy and licentious bees trade their vices for virtues and immediately fall into economic and societal collapse. Outrage among the reading public followed; philosophers took up their pens to refute what they saw as the fable's central assertion. How could it be that an immoral community thrived but the introduction of morality caused it to crash and burn? In Man-Devil, John Callanan examines Mandeville and his famous fable, showing how its contentious claim—that vice was essential to the economic flourishing of any society—formed part of Mandeville's overall theory of human nature. Mandeville, Callanan argues, was perfectly suited to analyze and satirize the emerging phenomenon of modern society—and reveal the gap between its self-image and its reality.

Callanan shows that Mandeville's thinking was informed by his medical training and his innovative approach to the treatment of illness with both physiological and psychological components. Through incisive and controversial analyses of sexual mores, gender inequality, economic structures, and political ideology, Mandeville sought to provide a naturalistic account of human behavior—one that put humans in close continuity with animals. Aware that his fellow human beings might find this offensive, he cloaked his theories in fables, poems, anecdotes, and humorous stories. Mandeville mastered irony precisely for the purpose of making us aware of uncomfortable aspects of our deepest natures—aspects that we still struggle to acknowledge today.

"Entertaining. . . .[Callanan] has convinced me that exposing Mandeville and his writings to a new generation of readers is indeed worthwhile."---Howard Davies, Literary Review

"John Callanan's Man-Devil: The Mind and Times of Bernard Mandeville, the Wickedest Man in Europe (Princeton University Press) is by far the best discussion we have of this paradoxical, and immensely influential thinker, and everyone interested in the history of moral, social, or economic theorising should read it."---David Wootton, Engelsberg Ideas

"[A] superb book."---Joseph Hone, History Today

"Callanan, a philosopher at King's College, London, has produced an engaging, expansive and effortlessly erudite study of a man who today too few people know. Man-Devil is a fascinating and welcome corrective, not least because Bernard Mandeville was amongst the first to argue that we don't really know ourselves."---Peter West, The Critic

"Bernard Mandeville was one of the most controversial writers of early eighteenth-century England, famed for coining the paradox 'private vices, publick benefits' as the subtitle to his major work, The Fable of the Bees. While John Callanan never loses sight of this satirical, even mischievous, bent, he convincingly shows the reader why Mandeville became such an influential figure in eighteenth-century thought, taken up by David Hume and Adam Smith among others. Well-researched and original in its approach, his book is highly recommended."—Malcolm Jack, historian and Mandeville scholar

"Mandeville is the first great social theorist, and everyone who comes after him—Rousseau, Smith, Marx, Hayek—is deeply in his debt. But he is slippery and paradoxical. John Callanan at last makes Mandeville's core doctrine clear and brings out his continuing importance for understanding human beings as sociable animals. This is an important, long-needed book."—David Wootton, author of Power, Pleasure, and Profit: Insatiable Appetites from Machiavelli to Madison

"Callanan sensibly and sensitively places the infamous Fable of the Bees in the wider context of Mandeville's other writings and intellectual context and, thereby, illuminates him as a diagnostician of human self-concealment and satirist of human pride. He reveals the Dutch physician with a successful London medical practice as an original pilferer of other people's useful ideas and with a relish for the urbane. And for those who recognize a good bargain when they are offered one, this book also instructs in the art of living, even points the way to the path of wisdom."—Eric Schliesser, author of Adam Smith: Systematic Philosopher and Public Thinker

"John Callanan's enjoyable account of Mandeville explains clearly both why the author of The Fable of the Bees was notorious in his own day and why major figures such as Hume, Rousseau, and Smith felt the need to engage with him so closely. It tells the reader what we know about Mandeville's life, and explores the full range of Mandeville's writings. Mandeville's ideas are put in context, but are also brought to philosophical life. This is the best account in English of Mandeville's thought as a whole."—James Harris, University of St Andrews

"This is the book on Mandeville I've long hoped for, and it is even better than I could have hoped. It is beautifully and engagingly written, as befitting a book on a great, extremely funny—not a common virtue of philosophers—and often scurrilous prose stylist. The Mandeville which emerges in Callanan's book is provocative and subtle, a humane exponent of Terence's dictum "nothing human is alien to me" but also a sharp-witted critic of hypocrisy possessing a medical remove from which to examine our paradoxical species."—Aaron Garrett, Boston University

"John Callanan's Man-Devil strikes a balance between a 'forensic' investigation of Mandeville's engagement with reactions to his ideas in his own time and an examination of the Mandevillean tendency to cross disciplinary boundaries and enrich contemporary controversies in human and social sciences. 'Nothing human is alien' to Mandeville, including the human animal's wondrous potential of being in denial about its own bottomless self-deception."—Spyridon Tegos, University of Crete

John Callanan is reader in the history of philosophy, Department of Philosophy, at King's College London. He is the author of Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals and the coeditor of Kant and Animals.

Dan Zahavi

Phenomenology: The basics, 2nd Edition

Two footnotes to the podcast.

1. Walter Hopp's beloved Boston University course is distilled in his Phenomenology: A Contemporary Introduction (2020), an excellent companion to Zahavi's text that focuses on philosophical phenomenology. 

2. Paul Møller's Psychosis risk and experience of the self (2023) is the text mentioned in the podcast that uses phenomenological experience to predict psychosis risk. 

Description of Phenomenology: The basics, 2nd edition.

Phenomenology: The Basics is a concise and engaging introduction to one of the important philosophical movements of the twentieth century and to a subject that continues to grow and diversify. Yet it is also a challenging subject, the elements of which can be hard to grasp.

This lucid book provides an introduction to the core ideas of phenomenology and to the arguments of its principal thinkers, including Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty. Written by a leading expert in the field, Dan Zahavi examines and explains key questions such as:

What is a phenomenological analysis?
What are the methodological foundations of phenomenology?
What does phenomenology have to say about intentionality, embodiment, intersubjectivity, and the lifeworld?
How do ideas from classic phenomenology relate to ongoing debates in qualitative research and the cognitive sciences?

This second edition has been thoroughly revised and expanded. It contains a new chapter on critical phenomenology and updated discussions of the application of phenomenology in psychiatry, psychology, and qualitative research.

Including a glossary of key terms and suggestions for further reading, Phenomenology: The Basics is a superb starting point for anyone seeking a concise and accessible introduction to this rich and fascinating subject.

Table of Contents

Preface to the second edition

Introduction

Part I: Foundational issues

1. The phenomena

2. Intentionality

3. Methodological considerations

4. Science and the lifeworld

5. Digging deeper: From surface to depth phenomenology

6. Merleau-Ponty's preface to Phenomenology of Perception

Part II: Concrete analyses

7. Spatiality and embodiment

8. Intersubjectivity and sociality

9. Critical and political phenomenology

Part III: Applied phenomenology

10. Classical applications: Psychology, psychiatry, sociology

11. Current debates in qualitative research and the cognitive sciences

12. A method, an attitude, a theoretical framework

Conclusion

Glossary

References

Index

Author(s) Biography

Dan Zahavi is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, and Director of the Center for Subjectivity Research in Copenhagen. His book The Phenomenological Mind (third edition, 2021), coauthored with Shaun Gallagher, is also available from Routledge.

Critics' Reviews

"Clear, engaging and insightful, there is no better introduction to the past, present and future of phenomenological philosophy than this new edition of Zahavi's book." - Dave Ward, University of Edinburgh, UK

"Nuanced, problem-driven, and accessible, this is simply the best introduction to phenomenology. Lucidly written, it presents clear explanations of key concepts and theories while covering the breadth of the phenomenological tradition. The revised edition now also provides an introduction to Critical Phenomenology, likely the most-discussed trend in phenomenology today." - Tobias Keiling, University of Warwick, UK

Praise for the previous edition:

"For the one seeking a way into phenomenological thinking today, or a way to help others find one, it has not been obvious, in the English context, what resource should serve as the best point of entry. The first great merit of Dan Zahavi's book, Phenomenology: The Basics, is to change this calculus for good. Offering English readers an entry point into phenomenology that is accessible, lucid, and engaging, presents key concepts and insights faithfully (but not ploddingly), along with their pertinence in multiple fields of contemporary research, and doing this without obvious error or negligence, is no small achievement." - Karl Hefty, Reading Religion

"A lucid and authoritative introduction to phenomenology including its practical applications in sociology and psychology from one of the world's leading phenomenologists." - Dermot Moran, Boston College, USA

"Zahavi's Phenomenology: The Basics will guide several generations of philosophers and scientists in the study of consciousness, embodiment, communality and normality." - Sara Heinämaa, University of Jyväskylä, Finland

"Dan Zahavi, one of the most prolific and insightful phenomenologists of his generation, has provided a concise, clear and intellectually stimulating introduction to the study of phenomenology."- Alessandro Duranti, University of California, Los Angeles, USA

"This lucid book gets to the core of what phenomenology is all about, and is essential reading for any students of that tradition." - Piet Hut, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, USA

 

https://www.routledge.com/Phenomenology-The-Basics/Zahavi/p/book/9781032396378?

 

 

Owen Flanagan

James B. Duke University Professor Emeritus of Philosophy & Professor of Neurobiology Emeritus 

What Is It Like to Be an Addict?: Understanding Substance Abuse

"A brilliant and unparalleled synthesis of the science, philosophy, and first-person phenomenology of addiction. Owen Flanagan is a distinguished philosopher who ... is also an ex-addict. This book is beyond excellent. It is wise. Everyone who wants to understand addiction must read it."  -- Hanna Pickard, Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Bioethics, Johns Hopkins University   "This elegant and clear book ... deserves to be a landmark in the study of addiction."  -- Carl Erik Fisher, M.D., Assistant Professor of Clinical Psychiatry, Columbia University, author of The Urge: Our History of Addiction  

Owen Flanagan is an internationally acclaimed philosopher of mind, consciousness, ethics, and comparative philosophy and author of 12 books translated into many languages. 

A powerful and important exploration of how addiction functions on social, psychological and biological levels, integrated with the experience of being an addict, from an acclaimed philosopher and former addict.

What is addiction? Theories about what kind of thing addiction is are sharply divided between those who see it purely as a brain disorder, and those who conceive of it in psychological and social terms. Owen Flanagan, an acclaimed philosopher of mind and ethics, offers a state-of-the-art assessment of addiction science and proposes a new ecumenical model for understanding and explaining substance addiction.

Flanagan has first-hand knowledge of what it is like to be an addict. That experience, along with his wide-ranging knowledge of the philosophy of mind, psychology, neuroscience, and the ethics and politics of addiction, informs this important and novel work. He pairs the sciences that study addiction with a sophisticated view of the consciousness-brain/body relation to make his core argument: that substance addictions comprise a heterogeneous set of "psychobiosocial" behavioral disorders. He explains that substance addictions do not have one set of causes, such as self-medication or social dislocation, and they do not have one neural profile, such as a dysfunction in dopamine system. Some addictions are fun and experimentation gone awry. Flanagan reveals addiction to be a heterogeneous set of disorders, which are picked out by multifarious cultural, social, psychological, and neural features.

Flanagan explores the ways addicts sensibly insist on their own responsibility to undo addiction, as well as ways in which shame for addiction can be leveraged into healing. He insists on the collective shame we all bear for our indifference to many of the psychological and social causes of addiction and explores the implications of this new integrated paradigm for practices of harm reduction and treatment. Flanagan's powerful new book upends longstanding conventional thinking and points the way to new ways of understanding and treating addiction.

Agnes Callard

Open Socrates

"[C]harming, intelligent…Open Socrates encourages us to recognize how little we know, and to start thinking." —Jennifer Szalai, New York Times

An iconoclastic philosopher revives Socrates for our time, showing how we can answer—and, in the first place, ask—life's most important questions.

Socrates has been hiding in plain sight. We call him the father of Western philosophy, but what exactly are his philosophical views? He is famous for his humility, but readers often find him arrogant and condescending. We parrot his claim that "the unexamined life is not worth living," yet take no steps to live examined ones. We know that he was tried, convicted, and executed for "corrupting the youth," but freely assign Socratic dialogues to today's youths, to introduce them to philosophy. We've lost sight of what made him so dangerous. In Open Socrates, acclaimed philosopher Agnes Callard recovers the radical move at the center of Socrates' thought, and shows why it is still the way to a good life.

Callard draws our attention to Socrates' startling discovery that we don't know how to ask ourselves the most important questions—about how we should live, and how we might change. Before a person even has a chance to reflect, their bodily desires or the forces of social conformity have already answered on their behalf. To ask the most important questions, we need help. Callard argues that the true ambition of the famous "Socratic method" is to reveal what one human being can be to another. You can use another person in many ways—for survival, for pleasure, for comfort—but you are engaging them to the fullest when you call on them to help answer your questions and challenge your answers.

Callard shows that Socrates' method allows us to make progress in thinking about how to manage romantic love, how to confront one's own death, and how to approach politics. In the process, she gives us nothing less than a new ethics to live by.

 

 

Wouter Kusters

A Philosophy of Madness: The Experience of Psychotic Thinking

MIT Press: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262044288/a-philosophy-of-madness/

See https/://CorriganIPU.com for updates on Human Rights Complaint submitted to Mass DMV regarding alleged human rights violations in this Fall River, MA facility.

 

Corrigan IPU patients deserve a real, substantive right to access the outdoors.

It is gross really to see the Corrigan IPU patients staying inside day after day, week after week, and in some cases month after month.  And it is still more alarming when Corrigan staff blithely and complacently point to the four times a day when a minority subset of patients (youthful patients) can go outside.  (Roughly 25% to 50% of patients [depending on the patients on unit at a particular time) can access the outdoors because, for example, they do not suffer neither obesit], paranoia exacerbated in groups, social anxiety, catatonia, or dementia, and do not present fall risks).  For the other patients (the majority [especially when weighted by length of stay]). they are inside constantly, and it is disgusting to see.  Their skin can be as white as white-out.  The outdoors breaks are valued by the employees, but the employees aren't able to extend the courtesy to their fellow humans. 

It is a case of domination of the medical professionals over the neurodiverse. Some Corrigan staff no doubt get off on this.  Most would get off on it indirectly and subliminally.  Maybe a few get off on it consciously and directly. 

On the other hand, there is also another factor at play: the way we can get used to things that are odious, simply because others aren't clamoring about it, and we simply stop paying attention.  If you went to Corrigan IPU, you would be appalled by the majority of patients who never go outside.  But I venture if you shunned it for a year or so, you would eventually get used to it.  You would be able subconsciously to suppress how disgusting it is for these humans (who happen to be patients) to be tortured by not having a real substantive, right of access to the outside. How does this happen?  Rousseau in his Confessions said it was human nature. 

"I have derived an important moral principle, perhaps the only one of any real practical use, which is that we should avoid situations that bring our duty into conflict with our interests … since I am certain that in such situations, … we will sooner or later weaken, without noticing it, and become unjust and wicked in deed without having ceased to be just and good in spirit" 

I first raised this issue with Corrigan in October 2024 to Larry Weiner who is the Director of Human Rights at Corrigan.  He simply ignored me.  Danielle Keogh, LICSW, actively resisted my efforts.  I then decided to make a formal Human RIghts Complaint.  I assumed this would get a response.  However no one from Corrigan would even acknowledge they received it.  I sent it to:

Jose Afonso ("provider" where a "provider" is sometimes called a "prescriber". It is essentially someone who can prescribe, so it is a nurse practitioner, DO, etc.)

Maxwell I. Mayer (provider)

Larry Weiner

and Jeanne Crespi, social worker.

Nb: I have invited each of these people to come on to this podcast or contact me in writing to correct me where I am wrong. 

To work at Corrigan you need to develop the ability to shun. You shun recognition of how many patients don't get to go outside.  You shun the nausea you probably had when you first saw this.  You also learn, it seems, to shun other people, people such as me who are raising the issue.  A social worker or mental-health counselor would in fact claim that such shunning constituted "self care" or "an adaptive coping mechanism."

Until they correct me, I would attribute Afonso and Mayer's non-response to their occupational or characterological contrariness and sense of superiority.  They are "providers."  They also have a vested interest (which is subliminal [see Rousseau]) as they possess the big swinging dicks at Corrigan IPU, are used to being kowtowed to, and, on information and belief, seem to use the Corrigan IPU as the IPU for their personal (presumably middle-class, white) patients.  (The nurses will hold a bed open when they know that one of the providers' patients will soon be needing a bed.  On information and belief, they also keep their own patients there longer ceteris paribus. 

Also as the golden goose: Corrigan IPU apparently requires an MD be on call all the time in case of an admission. 

The upshot is that it is good to have one of them as a provider.  From the perspective of their patients' families, keeping this small (16-bed) unit open is a godsend.  It only starts to look sketchy when you think of the anonymous payers of taxes and insurance premia.

Why did I send it to Jeanne Crespi?  She is the interim "Person in Charge," meaning she is the person you are supposed to contact with a Human Rights Complaint.  It was thus quite surprising to me that neither she nor Larry Weiner even acknowledged my Complaint, or were willing to indicate to me that my Complaint would be taken seriously.  I mean: that is one of their official, professional duties, as the Human Rights Officer and Person in Charge.

In each case I was specifically--and increasingly plaintively--asking that they person please acknowledge receiving my Complaint, as a matter of simple courtesy.  

To no avail.  Repeatedly shunned, I felt myself in full Karen mode.  I went up the chain of command until, finally, I reached Star Sims, JD, Director of Human Rights for all of DMH.  I appreciate attorney Sims responding quickly and professionally, acknowledging receipt of my complaint. 

Below are:

(I) my exchange with Attorney Sims

(II) timeline dates, factoids, and gossip mentioned in the podcast

(III) my letters to Corrigan staff (each of which was met with the silent treatment) 

 

(I) my exchange with Attorney Sims

  On Tue, Feb 18, 2025 at 9:38 AM Sims, Startese (DMH) wrote:

Good Morning Mr. [sic] Baker,

I am acknowledging that I have received your email. I have forwarded your email/complaint to the DMH Office of Investigations for processing. The Human Rights Office does not investigate complaints.

Thank you,
Star

Star Sims, J.D. Director of Human Rights Department of Mental Health 25 Staniford Street Boston, MA. 02114

From: August Baker 
Sent: Friday, February 14, 2025 6:58 PM
To: Sims, Startese (DMH) 
Subject: Human Rights Complaint

Startese Sims, JD/ Director of Human Rights / Massachusetts Department of Mental Health

Dear Attorney Sims,

It is well-known that all detainees should be provided at least one hour daily of outdoor air and outdoor light.  This is for example the longstanding and well-established position of the United Nations (as codified in the Nelson Mandela Rules).  If a facility does not provide daily outdoor access, that is considered a form of torture (e.g., the Association for the Prevention of Torture). 

Massachusetts state law and state regulations concur. A patient of a facility must be provided daily access to the outdoors, individually or in groups.  104 CMR §27.13(6)(f)

I hereby make this Human Rights Complaint regarding the Acute Inpatient Unit at Corrigan Mental Health Center ("Corrigan IPU"). Although the percentage varies depending on the current patient load, a significant portion of the patients at Corrigan IPU are not provided a substantive right of daily access to the outdoors. As a result, based on information and belief, many patients at Corrigan IPU can go a whole week without accessing the outdoors.  Some can go even an entire month without access.  The staff at Corrigan IPU do not even keep track of when was the last time that a patient accessed the outdoors.

I have the right to make this Complaint and have it be taken seriously.  Under Massachusetts state law and regulations, any person may make a Human Rights Complaint regarding a condition involving DMH clients which he or she believes to be dangerous, illegal, or inhumane. 104 CMR, § 32.04 

That is precisely the situation here I am complaining about a condition involving DMH clients which I believe to be both illegal and inhumane. Yet I have attempted several times to bring this condition to the attention of Corrigan personnel, and their response has been to ignore my complaint. I first brought the issue to the attention of Human Rights Officer Lawrence Weiner in October 2024.  I recently made my complaint known to Facility Medical Director Jose Afonso, and staff member Maxwell Mayer.  I also made it known to Jeanne Crespi, who, according to the January 2025 DMH Resource Directory, is the current Person in Charge.

In addition, I have made public records requests regarding this issue. (I asked, specifically, for any information regarding a Plan as defined in 104 CMR 27.13(6)(f)5.  I also contacted the Ombudsman.  In all cases, there has been no response at all.  

It appears that DMH has a policy of ignoring correspondence. I have no reason to believe that my Complaint is being taken seriously.  Could you please acknowledge receipt of this email? Could you also please be sure that someone is taking this complaint seriously?

Thank you so much,

Sincerely, 

August Baker, PhD

 

(II) timeline dates, factoids, and gossip mentioned in the podcast

We start with the Kennedy Administration Mental Health Centers Act. The first MHC in the state was in Lowell, and the second was the Fall River Mental Health Center.  It started out in 1961 as an annex of Taunton State Hospital and was located within Charlton (then known as Union) hospital.  In August 1962, it moved to a remodeled laundry building at 680 Maple St., adjacent to its future location on Hillside Ave, which was then under construction. The Hillside Ave building originally had a 40 bed IPU on the top floor. It was renamed after a cardiologist, Dr. John C. Corrigan, in 1970.

From 1992 to 1995, the Weld administration attempted unsuccessfully to privatize Corrigan.  In 1992, most Emergency Services provision was privatized in the state, but Corrigan and Pocasset remained under DMH control. 

2010 press reports indicated that a closure of Corrigan was prevented by the efforts of legislator David B. Sullivan, who started his career as a social worker at Corrigan. It was said then that 16 beds would be lost.  I infer that the reduction to 16 beds occurred prior to 2010.

2015 Southcoast Behavioral in Dartmouth opened as a joint effort of South Coast Health and Acadia Healthcare of Franklin Tennessee.  It opened as a 77,000 square foot, 5-unit hospital with 24 beds per unit. Thus, initially, it had 120 beds.  It has since opened three more units. Thus, it is up to 192 beds. As noted in the podcast, what is striking is to compare the professional staff at Southcoast Behavioral (with its 200 patients) compared to 16-bed (!) Corrigan.  Southcoast Behavioral no doubt has many more techs than Corrigan IPU, but it has far fewer techs per bed. It is run entirely by nurses.  That is, nurses do all the work, compared with Corrigan which has redundancy between OT, Social work and the nursing staff.  Even the OT staff at Corrigan feel the need to insert themselves into treatment planning generally (not simply with respect to OT).  Southcoast Behavioral is built ranch-style, we might say.  Every unit has direct same-floor access to the outside.  It is in this respect much more humane than Corrigan.

It also pays market wages and salaries, compared to Corrigan which pays labor-market rents to its unionized, public-sector workforce.  That might sound like a good thing, but with labor-market rents comes discrimination.  The Corrigan professional staff has zero African Americans.  The Corrigan blue-collar staff is entirely white and male at the higher pay grades.  There are a handfull of African Americans on the lowest end of the payscale.  

On January 7, 2015, the Fresh Air law (S.911, H.3805) was signed by Gov. Deval Patrick. [See https://malegislature.gov/Bills/188/H3804 ] At the time, it was estimated that 25 to 30 percent of psychiatric hospitals would be unable to pass even the 2016 regulations which DMH promposed to operationalize the law.  However those hospitals which were unable to comply were required to provide a plan to DMH indicating how they would remedy the situation.  It is now 10 years later, and Corrigan has still not provided meaningful outdoors access to its most physically and mentally compromised patients.  (It offers only nominal outdoor access.  These are taken advantage of by its youthful patients and enjoyed also by the staff.  Nothing wrong with that, but what about the compromised patients?) It is this plan that I have been trying to get.  I originally asked Larry Weiner for it in 2024.  He shunned the entire topic.

2017 Emergency Services at Corrigan were privatized resulting in savings of $6.4 million in the first year alone without a reduction in the level of services. Unlike the early 1990s, employees did not succesfully organize resistance to the move. 

Kennard C. Kobrin was a psychiatrist at Corrigan until 1998. His background was in San Francisco, not Hollywood. He was married to the actress Joanna Cassidy, who described Kobrin as a "wonderful duality," "with doctors on one side and Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and people who were selling clothes to Jefferson Airplane on the other." https://www.southcoasttoday.com/story/news/1999/04/11/trying-dr-kobrin/50529926007/

[IN PROGRESS]

(III) my letters to Corrigan staff (each of which was met with the silent treatment) 

[IN PROGRESS]

 

See CorriganIPU.com for updates on Human Rights Complaint

 

The IPU at Corrigan Mental Health Center. This is a psychiatric IPU in Fall River, MA.  It's a DMH facility.

Best parts:

1) there are some excellent staff members (excellent both for patients and for co-workers), (e.g., OT Kyle, providers Max and Allison, nurses Christian and Jill, tech Sean, Social Worker Nicole).

2) As a public-sector, unionized shop, the staff can be their authentic selves.  For those who don't like their jobs, they can express that openly.  They are not pressured to dissimulate.  

3) for patients, if you are looking for a place to stay a while, (i.e., if you are okay with being detained longer than the usual 72 hours), and if you are young and hence able to access the outdoors space, it may be a good place.  If you are a patient of one of the Corrigan doctors (like Mayer, then an advantage of having Mayer as a doctor is that he is able to use this unit as an IPU for his regular outpatient clients.  He can keep them there in an emergency and thus provide a respite for the patient and their family, a chance to return to stabilization)

Worst parts:

(a) Approximately half of the patients do not have actual access to the outside.  The staff will tell you they provide four outdoor opportunities per day.  But for practical purposes, many of the patients cannot--orwould not be reasonably expected to--access the outdoors as provided by Corrigan.  (To go outside requires negotiating a steep set of stairs [it can be possible to take elevators but the elevators are difficult to operate, the techs don't make them readily available, and even when the techs are asked to take someone down in the elevator, they may choose not to. ).  In addition, accessing the outside can only be done in a large group.  Many of the patients are anxious in groups and would love to access the outside if they were able to do so individually, but prefer not to go down in the crowded group, long-stair, way with chains and locks, and authentically depressed staff). 

(b) Taxpayers lose big time.  This is an extremely cost inefficient IPU.  It is staffed 24/7/365, (including always an on-call provider apparently), and the staffing levels are such that, during the day shift alone, there are more staff than patients!!!

At one time, Corrigan IPU had 40 patients.  The folklore is that a patient there hung themself and, as a result, the beds were dropped all the way to 16.  But there are more than 16 staff working the day shift alone (not even counting the evening shift or nighttime shift).  During the daytime, there are

5 nurses (a charge nurse, another unit nurse, a med nurse, and two nurses in an administrative role (not on unit). 

2 occupational therapists

2 providers

4 techs 

and 3 social workers

That is for 16 beds, and often a bed or two is empty, so let's say 15 patients on average.

In addition, there are other staff who are not full time (or who work full time, but divide their time across the IPU and other operations): a pharmacist, a nutritionist (she may be full time), a peer advocate, a human rights officer, and more layers of admin.

In addition, Corrigan tends to keep people longer than other inpatient units--- much longer (e.g., instead of 72 hours, one stays for months or even, for two patients, 2 years and counting).  Because of this, there are more court proceedings compared to units which churn more on a 72 hour cycle.  Few if any patients bring their own counsel.  So whenever there is a hearing, the taxpayers are paying for the DMH attorney, the Corrigan Staff, the patient's attorney, and the judge or magistrate.

(c) 

Danielle Keogh, LICSW is a reckless individual. 

You would think that social workers would be people who will talk directly to anyone they have issues with.  SW Keogh was incapable of doing this and, instead, recklessly tries to railroad subordinates by going behind their back and trying to squeeze them. 

You would think that she, as a social worker, would be patient-centered.  In fact, she claims the patients at Corrigan are not well enough for a patient-centered approach. Her priority appears to be her career and her title / her status.  (How, one might ask did she get promoted to her current position after only a few years on the job?  Pretty privilege?  Who was making the hiring decision?  Why do they like working with her?)  Her focus is entirely on appearances and, in particular, looking good to bureaucrats.  Her direction to her subordinates is to lie on MIS because her main priority is to do well in audits.  That is, she wants to do well when she is evaluated from above.  Her going behind subordinates' back and trying to clamp them down is the sign of someone who thinks that social work is about being a tool in a hierarchy.

You would think that she, as a social worker, might view social work as a place to create change and fight social injustice.  But in reality, she deals with personnel matters unprofessionally--as a matter for gossip.  Her view of what social work is about is doing whatever has no effect.  For example, it is essential that social workers spend hours and hours--not actually talking with patients--but arranging post-discharge PCP appointments which, if you know anything about the patients, you know they will never attend. 

She acts friendly to your face while going behind your back, and she lies to your face about it.  She is unprofessional and insecure.  She is reckless because she is dysregulated.  It seems she holds anger inside, unwilling to talk with the person she is angry with.  Instead, she takes it out by interfering with their lives.  She is the sort of social worker who is essential a Karen.  She thinks her role is to interfere in the lives of everyone around her because of her insecure attachment to some bureacratic rules she got somewhere.   Very little integrity.  She is not to be trusted.  She is really disappointing.  Or it is disappointing that whoever hired her and has been reviewing her has made her think the way she is in professional situations is ok.  

Very disappointing to have met such a disingenuous, dishonest, insecure, unprofessional, disregulated person.

Overall.  somehow when Southcoast Behavioral was created, Corrigan was not folded in.  A staff of 50 to oversee 15 non-violent patients who don't have medical issues.  The unit doesn't even track which patients actually get outside for outdoor air and outdoor light.  On information and belief, about half of the patients never get outside, yet no accommodations are made.  (Frequently, the reason given for not being able to make changes is, of course, "we don't have the staff."  It should not be surprising that not one member of the professional staff is African American, and Dr. Mayer's patients (who comprise 20% of the population) are disproportionately if not entirely middle-class. 

Be thankful you don't get the government you pay for.

Alenka Zupančič

Disavowal

This book argues that the psychoanalytic concept of disavowal best renders the structure underlying our contemporary social response to traumatic and disturbing events, from climate change to unsettling tectonic shifts in our social tissue. Unlike denialism and negation, disavowal functions by fully acknowledging what we disavow. Zupancic contends that disavowal, which sustains some belief by means of ardently proclaiming the knowledge of the opposite, is becoming a predominant feature of our social and political life. She also shows how the libidinal economy of disavowal is a key element of capitalist economy.

The concept of fetishistic disavowal already exposes the objectified side of the mechanism of the disavowal, which follows the general formula: I know well, but all the same, the object-fetish allows me to disregard this knowledge. Zupancic adds another twist by showing how, in the prevailing structure of disavowal today, the mere act of declaring that we know becomes itself an object-fetish by which we intercept the reality of that very knowledge. This perverse deployment of knowledge deprives it of any reality.

This structure of disavowal can be found not only in the more extreme and dramatic cases of conspiracy theories and re-emerging magical thinking, but even more so in the supposedly sober continuation of business as usual, combined with the call to adapt to the new reality. To disrupt this social embedding of disavowal, it is not enough to change the way we think: things need to change, and hence the way they think for us

 

 

1.  

Stijn Vanheule

Why Psychosis Is Not So Crazy

A Road Map to Hope and Recovery for Families and Caregivers

An expert's guide to humanizing psychosis through communication offers key insights for family and friends to support loved ones during mental health crises.

Are we all a little crazy? Roughly 15 percent of the population will have a psychotic experience, in which they lose contact with reality. Yet we often struggle to understand and talk about psychosis. Interactions between people build on the stories they tell each other—stories about the past, about who they are or what they want. In psychosis we can no longer rely on these stories, this shared language. So how should we communicate with someone experiencing reality in a radically different way than we are?

Drawing on his work in psychoanalysis, Stijn Vanheule seeks to answer this question, which carries significant implications for mental health as a whole. With a combination of theory from Freud to Lacan, present-day research, and compelling examples from his own patients and well-known figures such as director David Lynch and artist Yayoi Kusama, he explores psychosis in an engaging way that can benefit those suffering from it as well as the people who care for and interact with them.

Peter Singer

Consider the turkey

Why this holiday season is a great time to rethink the traditional turkey feast.

Maria Balaska

Anxiety and wonder

On being human

Description
At times, we find ourselves unexpectedly immersed in a mood that lacks any clear object or identifiable cause. These uncanny moments tend to be hastily dismissed as inconsequential, left without explanation. Maria Balaska examines two such cases: wonder and anxiety – what it means to prepare for them, what life may look like after experiencing them, and what insights we can take from those experiences.

For Kierkegaard anxiety is a door to freedom, for Heidegger wonder is a distress that opens us to the truth of Being, and for Wittgenstein wonder and anxiety are deeply connected to the ethical. Drawing on themes from these thinkers and bringing them into dialogue, Balaska argues that in our encounters with nothing we encounter the very potential of our existence. Most importantly, we confront what is most inconspicuous and fundamental about the human condition and what makes it possible to encounter anything at all: our distinct capacity for making sense of things.

Table of Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations

Introduction

1. What Makes Us Anxious?

2. Anxiety and the Origin of Human Existence

3. Wonder and the Origin of Philosophy

4. The Paradox of Anxiety and Wonder

5. After Anxiety and Wonder

Notes
Bibliography

 Editorial Reviews
Review
"In this astute analysis of anxiety and wonder, Maria Balaska argues that understanding ourselves requires more than natural causal explanations and resists psychopathological approaches to overpowering experiences. With Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and Lacan, she insightfully elucidates the deeply human desires to feel at home in the world and find meaning in it-and the possibility of their fulfilment." ―Kate Kirkpatrick, Regent's Park College, University of Oxford, UK

"Maria Balaska presents the best treatment to date of wonder and anxiety in Kierkegaard and Heidegger. Focused on the objectlessness of both experiences – what Kierkegaard calls the ambiguous power of spirit and Heidegger terms "the nothing" – the book draws as well on Freud, Lacan, Plato, and Wittgenstein to argue that living authentically means embracing the liberating power of one's mortal open-endedness. Capacious, insightful, and written in lucid prose, Prof. Balaska's text will enrich both lay and professional readers.'" ―Thomas Sheehan, Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies, German Studies and Philosophy, Stanford University, USA

"Maria Balaska facilitates a conversation between Heidegger, Kierkegaard, Lacan and Wittgenstein that presents philosophy as embodying an anxious wonder at our capacity to make sense of things. She thereby deepens our understanding of all four thinkers, and illuminates not only the distinctive nature of philosophy, but its ineliminable role in the perennial human task of making sense of ourselves and our place in the universe." ―Stephen Mulhall, Professor of Philosophy, University of Oxford, UK

"This is an excellent book … A must-read for specialists interested in how continental philosophy can contribute to the thriving discourse on the experience and place of anxiety and wonder in our lives." ―Philosophical Investigations

About the Author
Maria Balaska is a Research Fellow at Åbo Akademi University, Finland, and a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Hertfordshire, UK. She is the author of Wittgenstein and Lacan at the Limit: Meaning, and Astonishment (2019) and editor of Cora Diamond on Ethics (2020).

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Bloomsbury Academic (May 2, 2024)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 168 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1350302937
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1350302938

Deirdre Nansen McCloskey

Liberalism

By revealed preference, Prof. McCloskey is our favorite scholar to talk with.  This is our third conversation with her. Today, we discuss two working papers on liberalism.

Sharon Patricia Holland

an other

 

In an other, Sharon Patricia Holland offers a new theorization of the human animal/divide by shifting focus from distinction toward relation in ways that acknowledge that humans are also animals. Holland centers ethical commitments over ontological concerns to spotlight those moments when Black people ethically relate with animals. Drawing on writers and thinkers ranging from Hortense Spillers, Sara Ahmed, Toni Morrison, and C. E. Morgan to Jane Bennett, Jacques Derrida, and Donna Haraway, Holland decenters the human in Black feminist thought to interrogate blackness, insurgence, flesh, and femaleness. She examines MOVE's incarnation as an animal liberation group; uses sovereignty in Morrison's A Mercy to understand blackness, indigeneity, and the animal; analyzes Charles Burnett's films as commentaries on the place of animals in Black life; and shows how equestrian novels address Black and animal life in ways that rehearse the practices of the slavocracy. By focusing on doing rather than being, Holland demonstrates that Black life is not solely likened to animal life; it is relational and world-forming with animal lives.

"With her characteristic brilliance and speculative flair, Sharon Patricia Holland breaks new ground in an other, a book that will prove to be her most philosophical and speculative text yet. Holland pulls at the ways that blackness as ontology and epistemology undoes and ethically remakes the bio/zoopolitical distinction between animals and humans. She remakes the very ideas that underline life itself as a human project that both denies and relies on animality: love, death, knowing, being, and ultimately revolution as it happens on the scale of the ordinary and the everyday. An essential volume." — Kyla Wazana Tompkins, author of Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the Nineteenth Century

"Sharon Patricia Holland's an other is a beautiful, expansive, rich, and genius gift to a world that could not have anticipated it. Her work at the level of the animal and cohabitation and about relationality and comportment is assuredly a necessary and brilliant offering. Holland's enormous intervention cannot be overstated. Black studies will not be the same after this book." — Sarah Jane Cervenak, author of Black Gathering: Art, Ecology, Ungiven Life

Sharon Patricia Holland is Townsend Ludington Distinguished Professor of American Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and author of The Erotic Life of Racism and Raising the Dead: Readings of Death and (Black) Subjectivity, both also published by Duke University Press

Stephanie Li

Ugly White People: Writing Whiteness in Contemporary America

White Americans are confronting their whiteness more than ever before, with political and social shifts ushering in a newfound racial awareness. And with white people increasingly seeing themselves as distinctly racialized (not simply as American or human), white writers are exposing a self-awareness of white racialized behavior—from staunch antiracism to virulent forms of xenophobic nationalism. Ugly White People explores representations of whiteness from twenty-first-century white American authors, revealing white recognition of the ugly forms whiteness can take.

Stephanie Li argues that much of the twenty-first century has been defined by this rising consciousness of whiteness because of the imminent shift to a "majority minority" population and the growing diversification of America's political, social, and cultural institutions. The result is literature that more directly grapples with whiteness as its own construct rather than a wrongly assumed norm. Li contextualizes a series of literary novels as collectively influenced by changes in racial and political attitudes. Turning to works by Dave Eggers, Sarah Smarsh, J. D. Vance, Claire Messud, Ben Lerner, and others, she traces the responses to white consciousness that breed shared manifestations of ugliness. The tension between acknowledging whiteness as an identity built on domination and the failure to remedy inequalities that have proliferated from this founding injustice is often the source of the ugly whiteness portrayed through these narratives.

The questions posed in Ugly White People about the nature and future of whiteness are vital to understanding contemporary race relations in America. From the election of Trump and the rise of white nationalism to Karen memes and the war against critical race theory to the pervasive pattern of behavior among largely liberal-leaning whites, Li elucidates truths about whiteness that challenge any hope of national unity and, most devastatingly, the basic humanity of others.

 

Ugly White People is not about the 'racists' but about the way whiteness shapes the subjectivity of all white people. Relying on an elegant and parsimonious textual analysis of the work of contemporary authors, Stephanie Li shows how whites manage to evade while they acknowledge their whiteness, how they consume people of color through racist love, and how they accept whiteness in a way that neglects addressing racism. I highly recommend this book to readers interested in understanding contemporary whiteness.

—

 Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Duke University

The best writing critically studying whiteness today intensely engages imbrications of race with other identities, especially class, gender, nationality, and disability. No one does all of that better than Stephanie Li. Addressing literary moments with a sure grasp of history and an adventuresome readings of texts, Ugly White People speaks compellingly to the persisting strength of Trump and white nationalism and to the desire for social media celebrity as something authors both explore and share.

—

 David Roediger, author of The Sinking Middle Class: A Political History of Debt, Misery, and the Drift to the Right

 

Stephanie Li is Lynne Cooper Harvey Distinguished Professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis. She is author of Pan-African American Literature, Playing in the White, and Signifying without Specifying.

Gilligan, Carol

In a Human Voice

Carol Gilligan's landmark book In a Different Voice – the "little book that started a revolution" – brought women's voices to the fore in work on the self and moral development, enabling women to be heard in their own right, and with their own integrity, for the first time.

Forty years later, Gilligan returns to the subject matter of her classic book, re-examining its central arguments and concerns from the vantage point of the present. Thanks to the work that she and others have done in recent decades, it is now possible to clarify and articulate what couldn't quite be seen or said at the time of the original publication: that the "different voice" (of care ethics), although initially heard as a "feminine" voice, is in fact a human voice; that the voice it differs from is a patriarchal voice (bound to gender binaries and hierarchies); and that where patriarchy is in force or enforced, the human voice is a voice of resistance, and care ethics is an ethics of liberation. While gender is central to the story Gilligan tells, this is not a story about gender: it is a human story.

With this clarification, it becomes evident why In a Different Voice continues to resonate strongly with people's experience and, perhaps more crucially, why the different voice is a voice for the 21st century.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

During the podcast, Mary Gaitskill's piece on Anna Karenina, from Fassler, Joe. Light the Dark: Writers on Creativity, Inspiration, and the Artistic Process (pp. 69-73). Penguin, excepted here: 

MARY GAITSKILL
"I Don't Know You Anymore"

I READ ANNA KARENINA for the first time about two years ago. It's something I'd always meant to read, but for some reason I didn't expect to like it as much as I did. ... I found one section in particular so beautiful and intelligent that I actually stood up as I was reading. I had to put the book down, I was so surprised by it—and it took the novel to a whole other level for me.

Anna's told her husband, Karenin, that she's in love with another man and has been sleeping with him. You're set up to see Karenin as an overly dignified but somewhat pitiable figure: He's a proud, stiff person. He's older than Anna is, and he's balding, and he has this embarrassing mannerism of a squeaky voice. He's hardened himself against Anna. He's utterly disgusted with her for having gotten pregnant by her lover, Vronsky. But you have the impression at first that his pride is hurt more than anything else—which makes him unsympathetic. 

Then he finds out Anna is dying, and he goes to visit her.]  He hears her babbling, in the height of her fever. And her words are unexpected: She's saying how kind he is. That, of course, she knows he will forgive her. When Anna finally sees him, she looks at him with a kind of love he's never seen before. ...

Throughout the book, he's always hated the way he's felt disturbed by other people's tears or sadness. But as he struggles with this feeling while Anna's talking, Karenin finally realizes that the compassion he feels for other people is not weakness: For the first time, he perceives this reaction as joyful, and becomes completely overwhelmed with love and forgiveness. He actually kneels down and begins to cry in her arms; Anna holds him and embraces his balding head. The quality he hated is completely who he is—and this realization gives him incredible peace. He even decides he wants to shelter the little girl that Anna's had with Vronsky (who sits nearby, so completely shamed by what he's witnessing that he covers his face with his hands). You believe this complete turnaround.

You believe it's who these people really are. I find it strange that the moment these characters seem most like themselves is the moment when they're behaving in ways we've never before seen. I don't fully understand how this could be, but it's wonderful that it works.

But then the moment passes. Anna never talks about the "other woman" inside of her again. At first, I was disappointed. But then I thought: No, that's actually much more realistic. What Tolstoy does is actually much better, because it's more truthful. We feel a greater sense of loss, knowing it will never happen again.

I very much saw that as the core of the book. Everyone says Anna Karenina is about individual desire going against society, but I think the opposite perspective is stronger: the way social forces actively go against the soft feelings of the individual. 

 

Merav Roth

A Psychoanalytic Perspective on Reading Literature

Reading the Reader

(Art, Creativity, and Psychoanalysis Book Series) 1st Edition
What are the unconscious processes involved in reading literature? How does literature influence our psychological development and existential challenges? A Psychoanalytic Perspective on Reading Literature offers a unique glimpse into the unconscious psychic processes and development involved in reading. The author listens to the 'free associations' of various literary characters, in numerous scenarios where the characters are themselves reading literature, thus revealing the mysterious ways in which reading literature helps us and contributes to our development.

The book offers an introduction both to classic literature (Poe, Proust, Sartre, Semprún, Pessoa, Agnon and more) and to the major psychoanalytic concepts that can be used in reading it – all described and widely explained before being used as tools for interpreting the literary illustrations. The book thus offers a rich lexical psychoanalytic source, alongside its main aim in analysing the reader's psychological mechanisms and development. Psychoanalytic interpretation of those literary readers opens three main avenues to the reader's experience:

the transference relations toward the literary characters;
the literary work as means to transcend beyond the reader's self-identity and existential boundaries; and
mobilization of internal dialectic tensions towards new integration and psychic equilibrium.
An Epilogue concludes by emphasising the transformational power embedded in reading literature.

The fascinating dialogue between literature and psychoanalysis illuminates hitherto concealed aspects of each discipline and contributes to new insights in both fields. A Psychoanalytic Perspective on Reading Literature will be of great interest not only to psychoanalytic-psychotherapists and literature scholars, but also to a wider readership beyond these areas of study.

William Egginton

Alejandro Jodorowsky

Filmmaker and philosopher

Alejandro Jodorowsky is a force of nature. At 95 years old he is still making films and is a cultural phenomenon who has influenced other artists as disparate as John Waters and Yoko Ono. Although his body of work has long been considered disjointed and random, William Egginton claims that Jodorowsky's writings, theatre work and mime, and his films, along with the therapeutic practice he calls psychomagic, can all be tied together to form the philosophical programme that underpins his films.

Incorporating surrealism and thinkers including Lacan, Kant, Hegel, and Žižek into his interpretation of Jodorowsky's work, Egginton shows how his diverse films are connected by interpretive practices with a fundamental similarity to Lacanian psychoanalysis. Using case studies of Jodorowsky's cult films, El Topo, Fando y Lis and Holy Mountain and more, this book provides a unique perspective on a filmmaker whose work has been notoriously difficult to analyse.

 

Peter Singer and Shih Chao-Hwei

The Buddhist and the Ethicist: Conversations on effective altrusism, engaged Buddhism, and how to build a better world 

ABOUT THE BUDDHIST AND THE ETHICIST
Eastern spirituality and utilitarian philosophy meet in these unique dialogues between a Buddhist monastic and a moral philosopher on such issues as animal welfare, gender equality, the death penalty, and more

An unlikely duo—Professor Peter Singer, a preeminent philosopher and professor of bioethics, and Venerable Shih Chao-Hwei, a Taiwanese Buddhist monastic and social activist—join forces to talk ethics in lively conversations that cross oceans, overcome language barriers, and bridge philosophies. The eye-opening dialogues collected here share unique perspectives on contemporary issues like animal welfare, gender equality, the death penalty, and more. Together, these two deep thinkers explore the foundation of ethics and key Buddhist concepts, and ultimately reveal how we can all move toward making the world a better place.

"A remarkable and historical meeting of minds between one of the greatest philosophers of our times and a leading proponent of Buddhist ethics, grounded on utilitarianism and guided by compassion and insight, which aims at preventing and relieving all kinds of suffering, whatever they might be, and doing as much good as possible to all sentient beings without discrimination."
—Matthieu Ricard, author of Altruism and A Plea for Animals

"Few things are more enlightening than good dialogue, and this engrossing conversation between a Western philosopher and an Asian Buddhist is a case in point. Their probing exploration of each other's worldviews illuminates key concepts in the Buddhist and utilitarian traditions and reveals an underlying unity; these two schools of thought, though quite different in cultural ancestry, exhibit much commonality of purpose and spirit as they address some of life's most important and challenging questions."
—Robert Wright, author of Why Buddhism Is True

"The Buddhist and the Ethicist is a fascinating exchange between two brilliant and wide-ranging thinkers who were originally brought together because of their shared interests in animal welfare. Their conversations cover a staggering array of topics, and I truly enjoyed seeing what came out of their extremely active brains and hearts and how much they got mine going in many different directions. I guarantee you, too, will rethink some views you have on different ethical questions and will be exposed to many situations and dilemmas about which you've rarely or never thought. I know I'll be returning to this valuable collection time and time again."
—Marc Bekoff, University of Colorado, author of The Animals' Agenda: Freedom, Compassion, and Coexistence in the Human Age (with Jessica Pierce) and A Dog's World: Imagining the Lives of Dogs in a World Without Humans (with Jessica Pierce)

"This gem of a book invites readers to listen in as two brilliant contemporary moral philosophers talk about what it means to be a good person and live an ethical life. The Buddhist and the Ethicist offers us a living encounter between Western and Eastern moral traditions. We have the honor of sitting in as Peter Singer, one of the West's most innovative and influential utilitarian philosophers, and Shih Chao-Hwei, a prominent Buddhist scholar, monastic, and activist, talk some of the most contentious and significant moral issues of our time, including human-animal relations, equality, sexuality, and effective altruism. Singer and Chao-Hwei show us how to have constructive, respectful dialogue about values—a skill more vitally important now than ever before. They remind us that it is possible to begin from seemingly conflicting points of view and, through open-minded conversation, to find and expand common ground."
—Jessica Pierce, author of Who's a Good Dog? And How to Be a Better Human

"This timely and stimulating dialogue between Professor Peter Singer and Venerable Chao-Hwei Shih takes place at the intersection between altruism and engaged Buddhism. Their many conversations through the intervening years have examined diverse and relevant social issues during the twenty-first century. Their incisive examination of ethical considerations for all life-forms, while ages old, are brought together in this book through candid discussions about ending life and killing from in utero, to euthanasia, suicide, and killing during wartime. At the same time, their dialogue integrates the crosscutting themes of women and equality, sexuality, animal rights, and more. I invite you to become a part of their dialogue through which you can revisit these topics that transcend cultures and countries."
—Sulak Sivaraksa, author, activist, and cofounder of the International Network of Engaged Buddhists

"An enlightening exploration of ethics, altruism, and social justice through the engaging dialogue between a prominent philosopher and a great scholar of Buddhism. A must-read for those seeking to expand their understanding of these traditions and the pressing issues of our time."
—Netiwit Chotiphatphaisal, student activist, author, and engaged Buddhist

"A wonderful book that does what philosophy and religious teachings are supposed to do: challenge us to think better, to live better, and to be better."
—Ryan Holiday, podcast host and author of The Daily Stoic

"Their dialogues unfold in rigorous detail and probe rich and trenchant ethical questions. . . . Plenty of insight in these thought-provoking and challenging investigations."
—Publishers Weekly

"In this fascinating book, Singer and Chao-Hwei explore dynamic topics, including animal welfare, capital punishment, gender equality, and the foundations of both Buddhism and ethics."
—Tricycle

"Particularly illuminating is Chao-Hwei's clarification of terms, often misunderstood in the West, such as karma, rebirth and nirvana, as well as the central role and nature of compassion in Buddhist ethics. For those interested in how nuanced philosophical thought can inform our daily lives and actions, this accessible meeting of minds is a good place to start."
—The Sydney Morning Herald (Non-fiction pick of the week)

 

Peter Brooks

Seduced by story: The use and abuse of narrative

 

 

Chosen by New York Magazine/Vulture as a Best Book of 2022

"There's nothing in the world more powerful than a good story. Nothing can stop it. Nothing can defeat it." So begins the scholar and literary critic Peter Brooks's reckoning with today's flourishing cult of story. Forty years after publishing his seminal work Reading for the Plot, his important contribution to what came to be known as the "narrative turn" in contemporary criticism and philosophy, Brooks returns to question the unquestioning fashion in which story is now embraced as an excuse or explanation and the fact that every brand or politician comes equipped with one. In a discussion that ranges from The Girl on the Train to legal argument, Brooks reminds us that among the powers of narrative is the power to deceive.

 

Praise

A potent defense of attentive reading and its real-world applications.
—Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times

Brooks spent most of his career trying to impress upon readers the particular power of narrative…In his most recent book, "Seduced by Story," he describes the horrifying feeling of having succeeded all too well.
—Parul Sehgal, The New Yorker

A succinct account of narrative persuasion, offering a solid case for the ambivalent power that stories can have in shaping us as individuals and nations.
—Caterina Domeneghini, Los Angeles Review of Books

Brooks explores various fields – including psychoanalysis, legal practice and modern political discourse – in which the distinction between narrative and "reality" has been eroded, or even collapsed. . . . It is in this context that a critical faculty – the ability to understand and critique narrative – is of vital importance.
—Jonathan Taylor, TLS

Brooks built an influential career arguing that stories are key features of how we all experience 'human temporality' and strive to articulate 'meaning in general.' This new book is, therefore, a kind of personal as well as intellectual reckoning with narrative turns and what may be their less salubrious legacies.
—Killian Quigley, Australian Book Review

Society's obsession with résumé, and its use to construct an aura of credibility, is such a pervasive element of contemporary life that it inevitably implicates even the author and his own field of "literary humanities." But that dynamic is exactly what Brooks parses in his terrific critical survey: the essential differences between surface stories and the ways in which they're constructed.
—J. Howard Rosier, New York Magazine/Vulture

A bracing and insightful look at the downsides of reducing everything to storytelling. . . A thoughtful and revelatory analysis of what's lost when story trumps all.
—Publishers Weekly

For writers, readers, and citizens of the story-addled world.
—Emily Temple, Lit Hub

A rhapsody to the partial suspension of disbelief that allows us to immerse ourselves in novels, but simultaneously and most crucially, a brilliant intervention against the complete suspension of disbelief that allows a citizenry to succumb to conspiracy theories, false-flag narratives, authoritarian fictions. An eloquent and triumphant culmination of Peter Brooks's lifelong inquiry into the aesthetic and ethical intersection of literature, psychoanalysis, law, and politics. Impossibly good.
—David Shields

Stories are everywhere—shaping us, shocking us, showing us what really happened (or making it up). Peter Brooks invites us to step to one side of our over-storied surroundings to think about all the ways they work. . . . In the process, he tells a gripping tale of his own.
—Rachel Bowlby

This is an amazing book, crossing back and forth between literature and politics, illuminating each side by the other. It is written without fuss, continually evocative and surprising.
—Richard Sennett

Daniel C. Dennett

I've been thinking

Description

"How unfair for one man to be blessed with such a torrent of stimulating thoughts. Stimulating is an understatement." —Richard Dawkins

A memoir by one of the greatest minds of our age, preeminent philosopher and cognitive scientist Daniel C. Dennett.

Daniel C. Dennett, preeminent philosopher and cognitive scientist, has spent his career considering the thorniest, most fundamental mysteries of the mind. Do we have free will? What is consciousness and how did it come about? What distinguishes human minds from the minds of animals? Dennett's answers have profoundly shaped our age of philosophical thought. In I've Been Thinking, he reflects on his amazing career and lifelong scientific fascinations.

Dennett's relentless curiosity has taken him from a childhood in Beirut and the classrooms of Harvard, Oxford, and Tufts, to "Cognitive Cruises" on sailboats and the fields and orchards of Maine, and to laboratories and think tanks around the world. Along the way, I've Been Thinking provides a master class in the dominant themes of twentieth-century philosophy and cognitive science—including language, evolution, logic, religion, and AI—and reveals both the mistakes and breakthroughs that shaped Dennett's theories.

Key to this journey are Dennett's interlocutors—Douglas Hofstadter, Marvin Minsky, Willard Van Orman Quine, Gilbert Ryle, Richard Rorty, Thomas Nagel, John Searle, Gerald Edelman, Stephen Jay Gould, Jerry Fodor, Rodney Brooks, and more—whose ideas, even when he disagreed with them, helped to form his convictions about the mind and consciousness. Studded with photographs and told with characteristic warmth, I've Been Thinking also instills the value of life beyond the university, one enriched by sculpture, music, farming, and deep connection to family.

Dennett compels us to consider: What do I really think? And what if I'm wrong? This memoir by one of the greatest minds of our time will speak to anyone who seeks to balance a life of the mind with adventure and creativity.

 

Reviews and endorsements

A delightful memoir from one of our deepest thinkers. Kirkus (starred review)

Always an enthusiastic learner with an insatiable curiosity, Dennett's amiable autodidacticism illustrates a life of the mind intertwined with the rich home life of a true Renaissance man. Highly recommended. Booklist (starred review)

 

About the author

Daniel C. Dennett is University Professor Emeritus at Tufts University and the author of numerous books, including Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking, Breaking the Spell, Darwin's Dangerous Idea, and Consciousness Explained. He lives with his wife in Cape Elizabeth, Maine.

Christopher Bollas

Conversations

Transcript erratum: The director of the film "Zone of Interest" is Jonathan Glazer. 

Christopher Bollas presents us with a new literary form in his Conversations: twenty-three unique dialogues to captivate, amuse, and inspire. The psychoanalyst Paula Heimann asked: 'Who is speaking? To whom? About what? And why now?' We speak with the voice and position of many others - mothers, fathers, siblings, teachers - and ordinary conversation therefore stages the history of our interpersonal engagements. Heimann's questions also apply when we talk to ourselves, and our inner dialogues reveal the hidden genius of our private world in which we are both actor and audience, poet and reader, politician and electorate. It's quite a ride, and an art form all of its own.

"Do you know my mom?"  The court-appointed monitor says that's off limits.

 

In this episode, Anna (pseudonym) tells her story.  Her son is 1yo, in diapers, when the police come to arrest her, while she attempts to contact her dealer for drugs before prison.  From there, she loses custody of her son, enters treatment, and tries to re-gain contact with her son.  

 

Strong mom love, Anna shares her hard-earned wisdom.

Howard Kirschenbaum

The life and work of Carl Rogers

Twenty years after his death, PCCS Books celebrates the life and work of Carl Rogers with the long-awaited second edition of the much-acclaimed biography by Howard Kirschenbaum, On Becoming Carl Rogers. This completely re-written and re-titled edition extends to over 700 pages and includes a more detailed personal and professional history, an evaluation of the Wisconsin years and a full account of the last decade of Rogers' life.The years that followed the publication of the first edition of Carl Rogers' biography in 1979 turned out to be one of the most important periods of his career. Until now this work has not been widely known. Now, more than a quarter of a century after the first edition, Kirschenbaum has added deeper understanding of Rogers' contributions to psychology, the helping professions and society. On a personal level, access to recently revealed private papers tells us much more about Carl Rogers the man than was known to many of his closest associates.

Lauren Levine

Risking Intimacy and Creative Transformation in Psychoanalysis

Note: I had planned to interview Dr. Levine about her book.  Leading up to the date we had agreed on, I was struggling with what to talk to her about.  Timothy Williamson notes the gladitorial or adversarial nature of philosophical discussion.  I certainly had some critical commentary on Dr. Levine's book, but I also prefer to be reparative, as opposed to carpy-suspicious, as a reader (Sedgwick).  And it was my sense that in Dr. Levine's particular intellectual culture, sharp-edged criticism can be considered inappropriate, and even lead to cancellation (cf. Jon Mills's criticism of relational psychoanalysis). 

In an email to Dr. Levine, I indicated my dilemma as we approached the date.  After mentioning that I did indeed have some potentially inappropriate (for some cultures) questions about her book, I realized there was a huge open question: she would probably want to know what they were.  Not wanting to be patronizing--and hoping that perhaps she would actually say my questions were all perfectly fine--I listed them. 

But soon thereafter, I got an email from Dr. Levine saying Dr. Levine she did not, in fact, want to participate in the podcast interview about her book.

It felt Karenesque of her and it felt like I was being canceled for daring to be critical, to engage in critique.  As Jon Mills will testify, this seems to be a problem with Levine's intellectual community: a strategy of ostracizing or refusing to speak with people who want to ask challenging questions. Stephen Mitchell himself seemed never to criticize any psychoanalytic theorist.  His mission was to affirm every psychoanalytic theorist, to show they they improved in some slight way on every previous theorist.  {Although as Barry Farber has emphasized, his validating ways did not extend outside the rich, prestigious, supposedly intellectual faction which houses themselves in psychoanalytic institutes.  Mitchell ignored Carl Rogers (probably because he never read him or certainly never took him seriously).

For "relational psychoanalysts" if you are in their group, they flatter each other; if you are outside or want to ask challenging questions, they shun and cancel.  Contrast this with Judith Butler who stresses the importance of "checking in with other perspectives [and] responding thoroughly to reasonable questions." 

So in an experiment, I did a podcast about her book, without her, without the author.  I want to do these about books (for example, books in which the author is, say, deceased.  Or the author is alive but in prioritizing their time, is unable to speak with me.  This gave me my first opportunity.  In this podcast, I review the negative, possibly out-of-bounds (as culturally defined) thoughts I had regarding Dr. Levine's book.  I'm also re-producing the offending email:

BEGIN EMAIL On Tue, Mar 5, 2024 at 11:40 AM August Baker  wrote: Thank you for sharing your thoughts. As for me, after sending my email and before getting your reply, I was feeling increasingly uncertain about whether we had enough overlap or shared reality to have a productive talk.  Your email made me feel better about it, but I am still uncertain.     My last list was based on impressions, prior to a final review of the book.  I need to do a complete, close read of the book and propose a new list.    I tried to distinguish between "practitioner" vs. "academic," but I now think those were the wrong labels. And anyway as you point out, you are an academic as well as a practitioner.  I don't know how to label what I am talking about.  Perhaps I can best express the difference by paraphrasing one of my prior interviewees, Timothy Williamson.  He describes a particular cultural approach to how people should best talk to an author about a book.  I do not think it is the same cultural approach you have ("cultural" here referring here not so much to "practitioner" but to the culture of the intellectual school or paradigm you are a part of.  What to call that school?  I don't know.  Perhaps "early 21st century psychoanalysis.")     In Williamson's cultural milieu, discussion of a book is, he admits, something like gladiatorial combat, or like the adversarial system in litigation.  It is an interlocutor's role to give their most sharp-edged responses to an author.  The interlocutor argues against the author. "A feel-good slogan is that discussion should be constructive, not destructive. It sounds like a platitude, but imagine telling city planners that they should always build houses and never knock them down."   It's not about practitioner vs. academic. I was wrong in labeling it such.  It's not about Left vs. Right either.  I interview both Left and Right. It is one of the things I explicitly try to do: get a wide range of political standpoints. It's not about philosophy versus other fields either.  I don't know a good label for it, but perhaps we could call it "critical" versus "reparative."   Some authors have this "critical" approach.  They expect me and want me to give my most sharp-edged criticisms.  This is true whether I interview a Left-leaning philosopher like Martha Nussbaum or a Right-leaning economist like Deirdre McCloskey.   On the other hand, when I interview a psychoanalyst such as yourself--or such as Christopher Bollas whom I interviewed recently--I get myself into a more reparative frame of mind. It just seems to me a matter of being culturally sensitive.   The trouble is that with your book, I fear there is not enough overlap between us.  Your strength is your clinical vignettes; yet I am not a clinician, and the one thing I know about clinical work is that I don't know enough to talk intelligently about it.  On the other hand, there are many areas where you and I have a different worldview.  Yet I don't see a way to discuss those issues in a culturally-appropriate-enough way.   I can tell you a few of the ways that we are simply on different wavelengths.  There are many, but four come to mind immediately.    (1) politics. You write: "We are currently in the midst of a terrifying sociopolitical backlash by the radical right to suppress our stories, to silence and whitewash the white supremacy and racism embedded in our history and culture. We must face our legacy of chattel slavery and the slaughter of Indigenous people on which our country was founded."   I discussed this with Peter Brooks in a podcast I am publishing online today.  I simply don't agree with you here.  In my fantasy, if I try to empathize with you, you (correctly) view yourself here as taking a strong, righteous political stance, and as a matter of personal integrity, you don't want to back down off of it.   From my perspective, and I think you will find this offensive (and hence, I don't think it is productive to talk about it) there is much more to the story of the U.S. than slavery and the slaughter of indigenous people, and what you are doing is taking recourse in paranoia and splitting.     For numbers 2 and 3, consider the following quotations:   "Julia and I begin to weave together a shared narrative history about her early life, especially with her mother ..." "the rewriting of the family narrative seemed to open psychic space ..." "creating a share narrative of his traumatic history" "Coming to terms with the "lack" in parenting and the pain it caused is allowing ... "he needed me to feel the depths of his pain, to not abandon him like his parents when he pushed me to the brink, 

(2)  Parenting.  I appreciate your narrative of your personal struggle with your son.  It gives me goosebump, and I admire and respect your parenting and your writing about it.  On the other hand, I have a very different perspective, having worked much with parents who, to my understanding, were great parents but for whom their narratives did not turn out so well.  Their children did not flourish, and they need to deal with that pain, as well as the stigma that I think is implicit in your own view. Namely, that if the parent does parenting right, the kid will turn out well and happy. This is the flip-side of the other psychoanalytic worldview, which I also bristle at, namely that if the adult is unhappy, look to the childhood and especially the parenting.     (3)  the importance of narrative.  I personally think that narrative is over-emphasized.  See my podcast with Peter Brooks.   Essentially, summing up (2) and (3), when you write to a psychoanalytic audience, is it not true that you can simply assume as a default that psychoanalysis cures by re-parenting?  That the basic story one learns in analysis is "I was a beautiful soul, but X was very bad."?   All psychoanalysts will agree that that is not the whole story, but nonetheless it is the strongest current, and exceptions seem to me to be of the sort that prove the rule.   That's fine, but many people outside of psychoanalysis do NOT share this view.  And it seems suspicious that tales of cure so often follow the same path, especially when we know that we should be suspicious of narratives.   (4) Regarding the relational school, I have two issues (again, neither of which seems suitable or appropriate for us to talk about),    (a) there is an understandable but irksome tendency to write its own narrative in an self-serving and insular way.  Barry Farber, for example, argues convincingly that much of the supposed revolutionary thoughts of relational psychoanalysis were anticipated by none other than Carl Rogers.  Yet Rogers is never given his due.  There is an intellectual arrogance to relational writing, as though Rogers were too much a lightweight to credit.   (b) Relational writing seems to neglect analytic hate in Winnicott's sense.  Relational analysts show a great deal of hate, but this doesn't seem to be talked about much.  It is talked about a little, but again as the exception that proves the rule.   I do not think that any of these four are appropriate for our conversation.  They are what I would talk about perhaps if I were adopting Williamson's cultural approach.     I will do a final read-through of your book to see if I can find some common ground for us for a productive conversation.   --August   END EMAIL       ENDORSEMENTS   As you can see below, others--indeed, those supposed to know--feel very differently than I:

'In this exquisite new book, Lauren Levine captures the finely nuanced tapestry that emerges when an analytic dyad takes shape; the interweaving of two different narratives of self that come together, engage with each other, distance each other and ultimately form the subject matter of the analysis that unfolds. With brilliant clarity, and detailed and forthrightly honest clinical examples, Levine demonstrates how the collision of the patient's and the analyst's preferred life stories demands the analyst's, at times painful emotional honesty, in re-opening dissociated pockets of enlivening engagement and creativity.' Jody Messler Davies, NYU Postdoctoral Program, Stephen Mitchell Center for Relational Studies

'In this powerful and creative volume, Risking Intimacy and Creative Transformation in Psychoanalysis, Lauren Levine explores the healing power of stories as they touch our vulnerabilities, our strengths and resilience, intrapsychic and sociocultural traumas. Levine beautifully explores the transformative value of sharing our stories with a listening, witnessing other, bearing witness to our wounds, our shame, and our collective sins.' Galit Atlas, author of Emotional Inheritance; NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis

'Risking Intimacy and Creative Transformation in Psychoanalysis is a wonder, a collection of essays whose honesty, integrity and authenticity challenge us and teach us, making us more vulnerable and hence more alive than we were before reading. It provides a relational blueprint to the intricacies of our deepest fears and fantasies about the psychoanalytic process as well as an openness to the insidious impact of racism and sociopolitical trauma. It is extremely rare that such a broad range of the human experience is taken on by any author; it is a rarity indeed for it to be done with such brilliance, thoughtfulness and creative care. This is a most welcome book, which should be read and re-read for the often painful aliveness it brings to the therapeutic encounter.' Steve Tuber, author of Attachment, Play and Authenticity: Winnicott in Clinical Context

'In this moving and incisive work, Lauren Levine reminds us that storytelling has both dangerous and curative dimensions. We often use stories to evade our own traumas and hide from self-awareness the gaps in our personal narratives. This has also been true of the field, in terms of the stories psychoanalysts feel comfortable engaging in our various models of the psyche. With an emphasis on the sharing of stories as the key to transformative mental healing, Risking Intimacy and Creative Transformation offers a powerful introduction to the insights of a relational psychoanalysis that can address the racial and cultural traumas of the 21st century.' --Michelle Stephens, founding executive director, Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice, professor of English and Latino and Caribbean Studies, Rutgers University 

'Lauren Levine explores the creative potential of what might be called story living. She captures how shared stories build relational and political transformations. But only, as Levine carefully details, when patient and analyst together confront personal inhibitions and cultural prohibitions that render stories normotic and deadening. Levine theorizes and clinically animates the ways in which we not only "tell ourselves stories in order to live," as per Didion, but also how we tell stories to change the order of living.' Ken Corbett, NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy

'Lauren Levine's highly creative work, Risking Intimacy and Creative Transformation in Psychoanalysis, marks the evolution of relational theory as a space of increasingly wonderful complexity. Her clinical and theoretical approach stresses the role of imagination and novel forms of clinical interaction. In this work, weaving film, poetry and dance into compelling psychoanalytic stories, we see both clinical and theoretical movement and expansion.' Adrienne Harris, NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis and New School for Social Research

BOOK BLURB

Risking Intimacy and Creative Transformation in Psychoanalysis

In this compelling book, Lauren Levine explores the transformative power of stories and storytelling in psychoanalysis to heal psychic wounds and create shared symbolic meaning and coherence out of ungrieved loss and trauma. Through evocative clinical stories, Levine considers the impact of trauma and creativity on the challenge of creating one's own story, resonant with personal authenticity and a shared sense of culture and history. Levine sees creativity as an essential aspect of aliveness, and as transformative, emergent in the clinical process. She utilizes film, dance, poetry, literature, and dreams as creative frames to explore diverse aspects of psychoanalytic process. As a psychoanalyst and writer, Levine is interested in the stories we tell, individually and collectively, as well as what gets disavowed and dissociated by experiences of relational, intergenerational, and sociopolitical trauma. She is concerned too with whose stories get told and whose get erased, silenced, and marginalized. This crucial question, what gets left out of the narrative, and the potential for an intimate psychoanalytic process to help patients reclaim what has been lost, is at the heart of this volume. Attentive to the work of helping patients reclaim their memory and creative agency, this book will prove invaluable for psychoanalysts and psychotherapists in practice and in training.

AUTHOR BLURB

Lauren Levine is joint Editor-in-Chief of Psychoanalytic Dialogues. She teaches and presents both nationally and internationally, and has published articles about sociocultural, racial and relational trauma, resilience, and creativity. Dr. Levine is faculty at the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis, and the Stephen Mitchell Relational Study Center, where she is codirector of the One Year Program in Relational Studies. She is visiting faculty at the Institute for Relational and Group Psychotherapy in Athens, Greece, and the Tampa Bay Psychoanalytic Society, and supervisor at the Institute for Relational Psychoanalysis of Philadelphia. Dr. Levine is a psychoanalyst in private practice in New York City.

Thoughts on a degree-granting "program" at BU, called "Mental health counseling and behavioral medicine."  I took some classes there but eventually quit because it was so ridiculous.   What is "mental health counseling"?  U.S. states wanted to regulate who could become a psychotherapist, and, given the incredible demand, a variety of academic departments wanted to be able to offer degrees that would pass legislative muster.  

Medicine was first, but also nursing.  Then schools of social work: the MSW degree suffices.  Then psychology departments created something called a PsyD, different from a PhD.  There is also pastoral counseling I believe.  Finally, there was this little field called "counseling" which was essentially career counseling, then school counseling.  Historically, it is part of the broad attempt by the middle class and managerial class to maintain order, and maintain their privileged status.  Counseling attempted to get people into jobs.  Then to keep students non-delinquent.

Well, career counseling departments wanted also to take advantage of the huge demand for psychotherapy.  So they got legislative permission to create this new "mental health counseling" program.  Soon, of course, mental health counseling dominated and over-ran career counseling.  Career counseling now consists of one course in the BU program, and it is a course that is demeaned: take it in the summer, take it over some weekends.  The BU MHCBM program apologizes for having to offer it.

What is "behavioral medicine"?  Somehow "behavior medicine" became part of the title of BU's program, but it represents only one course in the curriculum too.  A hypothesis is that it was thought that "behavioral medicine" would make the program seem more appropriately housed on the medical school campus.  Behavioral medicine teaches how counselors can assist physicians: helping physicians by taking over the work of getting people to stay on their doctor-prescribed plans (adhere to the prescribed regimen).

At BU, there are two Mental-health counseling programs: this one in the medical school campus and the other in the Charles River campus.

The version at the medical school is scientistic and run by some limited individuals, philistines.  The worldview is one of neoliberalism.  It is more than just whether people have jobs or are non-delinquent.  People are diseased if they do not cope with--are unhappy in--neoliberal society.  People need to learn to submit to authority more happily; they need to learn to follow rules.  

And the program itself embodies this worldview in parallel process.  Faculty do not themselves set the curriculum; they defer to a higher power known as CACREP, which is an accreditation service.  Whenever therer is a difficult choice, the reply is that "this is required for our accreditation."  When accreditation is not specific enough, the faculty then bring in "consultants."  When in doubt, hire a consultant to deflect any responsibility from yourself. 

Students are treated like they are in the military.  The program is more hierarchical than anything I have been a part of.  The faculty members insist on being called "doctor," and it is forbidden to treat them as anything other than Gods.  (It must be that some of the faculty have backgrounds in the military.  Or they think that they are following a medical school model of trying to break people down arbitrarily, a sort of right of passage showing one's ability to tolerate BOHICA.) 

Criticism is wholly discouraged.  One should only find the positive in whatever one's classmates say.  One should never challenge the faculty.  Any failure is judged to be a lack of the "comportment" required to be a counselor.  (The most important thing for becoming a psychotherapist in this neoliberal world is to be someone who will happily sacrifice their integrity for the sake of arbitrary rules.  You can't say they are wrong: cf. the requirement to follow insurance rules).

Faculty teach and model a polite exterior ... comportment ... professionalism ... regulated narcissism and s/m hate.  Plus there's the de rigeur "we are professional helpers; the problem with our profession is only that we tend to give too much; we have to mutually remind ourselves to remember to practice self-care!"

 

Laurie Craigen, Rachel Levy-Bell, Steve Brady, Thom Fields, Rory Berger-Greenstein, Navolta.

Deirdre Nansen McCloskey

Crossing: A Transgender Memoir

 

A New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year
 
"I visited womanhood and stayed. It was not for the pleasures, though I discovered many I had not imagined, and many pains too. But calculating pleasures and pains was not the point. The point was who I am."
 
Once a golden boy of conservative economics and a child of 1950s privilege, Deirdre McCloskey (formerly Donald) had wanted to change genders from the age of eleven. But it was a different time, one hostile to any sort of straying from the path—against gays, socialists, women with professions, men without hats, and so on—and certainly against gender transition. Finally, in 1995, at the age of fifty-three, it was time for McCloskey to cross the gender line.
 
Crossing is the story of McCloskey's dramatic and poignant transformation from Donald to Dee to Deirdre. She chronicles the physical procedures and emotional evolution required and the legal and cultural roadblocks she faced in her journey to womanhood. By turns searing and humorous, this is the unflinching, unforgettable story of her transformation—what she lost, what she gained, and the women who lifted her up along the way.

Alex Byrne

Trouble with gender: Sex facts, gender fictions

Sex used to rule. Now gender identity is on the throne. Sex survives as a cheap imitation of its former self: assigned at birth, on a spectrum, socially constructed, and definitely not binary. Apparently quite a few of us fall outside the categories 'male' and 'female'. But gender identity is said to be universal – we all have one. Humanity used to be cleaved into two sexes, whereas now the crucial division depends on whether our gender identity aligns with our body. If it does, we are cisgender; if it does not, we are transgender. The dethroning of sex has meant the threat of execution for formerly noble words such as 'woman' and 'man'.

In this provocative, bold, and humane book, the philosopher Alex Byrne pushes back against the new gender revolution. Drawing on evidence from biology, psychology, anthropology and sexology, Byrne exposes the flaws in the revolutionary manifesto. The book applies the tools of philosophy, accessibly and with flair, to gender, sex, transsexuality, patriarchy, our many identities, and our true or authentic selves. 

The topics of Trouble with Gender are relevant to us all. This is a book for anyone who has wondered 'Is sex binary?', 'Why are men and women different?', 'What is a woman?' or, simply, 'Where can I go to know more about these controversies?'

Revolutions devour their own children, and the gender revolution is no exception. Trouble with Gender joins the forefront of the counter-revolution, restoring sex to its rightful place, at the centre of what it means to be human.

Slavoj Žižek 

Freedom: A Disease Without Cure

We are all afraid that new dangers pose a threat to our hard-won freedoms, so what deserves attention is precisely the notion of freedom.

The concept of freedom is deceptively simple. We think we understand it, but the moment we try and define it we encounter contradictions. In this new philosophical exploration, Slavoj Žižek argues that the experience of true, radical freedom is transient and fragile. Countering the idea of libertarian individualism, Žižek draws on philosophers Hegel, Kierkegaard and Heidegger, as well as the work of Kandinsky and Agatha Christie to examine the many facets of freedom and what we can learn from each of them.

Today, with the latest advances in digital control, our social activity can be controlled and regulated to such a degree that the liberal notion of a free individual becomes obsolete and even meaningless. How will we be obliged to reinvent (or limit) the contours of our freedom?

Tracing its connection to everything from capitalism and war to the state and environmental breakdown, Žižek takes us on an illuminating and entertaining journey that shows how a deeper understanding of freedom can offer hope in dark times.

  Table of Contents Preface
Acknowledgements

Introduction: Move your Buridan's Ass!

Part I: Freedom As Such

Chapter 1: Freedom and its Discontents
i) Freedom versus Liberty
ii) Regulating Violations
iii) Freedom, Knowledge, Necessity
iv) Freedom to say NO

Chapter 2: Is There Such a Thing as Freedom of the Will?
i) Determinism and its Ragaries
ii) Rewriting the Past
iii) Beyond the Transcendental
iv) Pascalean Wager

Chapter 3: Indivisible Remainder and the Death of Death
i) The Standpoint of the Absolute
ii) The Death of God
iii) Suicide as a Political Act
iv)The Failed Negation of Negation

Appendices I
1 Potestas versus Superdeterminism
2 Sublation as Dislocation
3 Inventing Anna, Inventing Madeleine
4 The Political Implications of Non-Representational Art

Part II: Human Freedom

Chapter 4: Marx Invented not Only Symptom but Also Drive
i) Instead of...
ii) Progress and Apathy
iii) Dialectical Materialism
iv) Yes, but...
v) How Marx Invented Drive

Chapter 5: The Path to Anarcho-Feudalism
i) The Blue Pill Called Metaverse
ii) From Cultural Capitalism to Crypto-Currencies
iii) Savage Verticality Versus Uncontrollable Horizontality

Chapter 6: The State and Counter-Revolution
i) When the Social Link Disintegrates
ii) The Limit of the Spontaneous Order
iii) The State is Here to Stay
iv) Do not give up on your Communist Desire!

Appendices II
5 "Generalized Foreclosure"? No, Thanks!
6 Shamelessly Ashamed
7 A Muddle Instead of a Movie
8 How to Love a Homeland in our Global Era

Finale: The Four Riders of the Apocalypse
i) De-Nazifying… Ukraine, Kosovo, Europe
ii) The End of Nature
iii) DON'T Be True to Yourself!
iv) Whose Servant Is a Master?

Bence Nanay

Mental Imagery: Philosophy, Psychology, Neuroscience

Mental Imagery: Philosophy, Psychology, Neuroscience is about mental imagery and the important work it does in our mental life. It plays a crucial role in the vast majority of our perceptual episodes. It also helps us understand many of the most puzzling features of perception (like the way it is influenced in a top-down manner and the way different sense-modalities interact). But mental imagery also plays a very important role in emotions, action execution, and even in our desires. In sum, there are very few mental phenomena that mental imagery doesn't show up in--in some way or other. The hope is that if we understand what mental imagery is, how it works and how it is related to other mental phenomena, we can make real progress on a number of important questions about the mind.

This book is written for an interdisciplinary audience. As it aims to combine philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience to understand mental imagery, the author has not presupposed any prior knowledge in any of these disciplines, so any reader can follow the arguments.

Clancy Martin 

How not to kill yourself: A portrait of the suicidal mind.

FINALIST FOR THE KIRKUS PRIZE FOR NONFICTION • A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK • An intimate, insightful, at times even humorous blend of memoir and philosophy that examines why the thought of death is so compulsive for some while demonstrating that there's always another solution—from the acclaimed writer and philosophy professor, based on his viral essay, "I'm Still Here."

"A deep meditation that searches through Martin's past looking for answers about why he is the way he is, while also examining the role suicide has played in our culture for centuries, how it has evolved, and how philosophers have examined it." —Esquire

"A rock for people who've been troubled by suicidal ideation, or have someone in their lives who is." —The New York Times

"If you're going to write a book about suicide, you have to be willing to say the true things, the scary things, the humiliating things. Because everybody who is being honest with themselves knows at least a little bit about the subject. If you lie or if you fudge, the reader will know."

The last time Clancy Martin tried to kill himself was in his basement with a dog leash. It was one of over ten attempts throughout the course of his life. But he didn't die, and like many who consider taking their own lives, he hid the attempt from his wife, family, coworkers, and students, slipping back into his daily life with a hoarse voice, a raw neck, and series of vague explanations.

In How Not to Kill Yourself, Martin chronicles his multiple suicide attempts in an intimate depiction of the mindset of someone obsessed with self-destruction. He argues that, for the vast majority of suicides, an attempt does not just come out of the blue, nor is it merely a violent reaction to a particular crisis or failure, but is the culmination of a host of long-standing issues. He also looks at the thinking of a number of great writers who have attempted suicide and detailed their experiences (such as David Foster Wallace, Yiyun Li, Akutagawa, Nelly Arcan, and others), at what the history of philosophy has to say both for and against suicide, and at the experiences of those who have reached out to him across the years to share their own struggles.

The result combines memoir with critical inquiry to powerfully give voice to what for many has long been incomprehensible, while showing those presently grappling with suicidal thoughts that they are not alone, and that the desire to kill oneself—like other self-destructive desires—is almost always temporary and avoidable.

 

Clancy Martin, a Canadian, is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Missouri in Kansas City and at Ashoka University in Delhi, India. He divides his time between Kansas City and India. He is married to the writer Amie Barrodale, and has five children: Zelly, Margaret, Portia Ratna and Kali, and an unruly labradoodle, Simha. A Guggenheim Fellow, his work has been translated into more than thirty languages. He writes fiction, nonfiction and philosophy. He is a contributing editor for Harper's magazine and Vice magazine, and has published academic and popular articles, essays and Op-Ed pieces in such diverse places as New Yorker, The New York Times, Harper's, New Republic, 1843/The Economist, Lapham's Quarterly, The Atlantic, Ethics, The Wall Street Journal, The Journal of the History of Philosophy, Elle, Details, Men's Journal, The London Times, The London Review of Books, De Repubblicca, and many others. He is a contributor to the Teaching Company's "Great Courses" series. His work has been optioned for television/film development by Sony, HBO, Anonymous Content and other production companies. His most recent work is on suicide, failed suicide and suicidal ideation. He is a recovering alcoholic, and has written and been interviewed extensively about alcoholism, addiction and suicide.

Lorraine Daston

Rules: A Short History of What We Live By (The Lawrence Stone Lectures) 

A panoramic history of rules in the Western world

Rules order almost every aspect of our lives. They set our work hours, dictate how we drive and set the table, tell us whether to offer an extended hand or cheek in greeting, and organize the rites of life, from birth through death. We may chafe under the rules we have, and yearn for ones we don't, yet no culture could do without them. In Rules, historian Lorraine Daston traces their development in the Western tradition and shows how rules have evolved from ancient to modern times. Drawing on a rich trove of examples, including legal treatises, cookbooks, military manuals, traffic regulations, and game handbooks, Daston demonstrates that while the content of rules is dazzlingly diverse, the forms that they take are surprisingly few and long-lived.

Daston uncovers three enduring kinds of rules: the algorithms that calculate and measure, the laws that govern, and the models that teach. She vividly illustrates how rules can change―how supple rules stiffen, or vice versa, and how once bothersome regulations become everyday norms. Rules have been devised for almost every imaginable activity and range from meticulous regulations to the laws of nature. Daston probes beneath this variety to investigate when rules work and when they don't, and why some philosophical problems about rules are as ancient as philosophy itself while others are as modern as calculating machines.

Rules offers a wide-angle view on the history of the constraints that guide us―whether we know it or not.

 

Wendy Brown (Princeton)

Nihilistic Times: Thinking with Max Weber (The Tanner Lectures on Human Values)

One of America's leading political theorists analyzes the nihilism degrading―and confounding―political and academic life today. Through readings of Max Weber's Vocation Lectures, she proposes ways to counter nihilism's devaluations of both knowledge and political responsibility.

How has politics become a playpen for vain demagogues? Why has the university become an ideological war zone? What has happened to Truth? Wendy Brown places nihilism at the center of these predicaments. Emerging from European modernity's replacement of God and tradition with science and reason, nihilism removes the foundation on which values, including that of truth itself, stand. It hyperpoliticizes knowledge and reduces the political sphere to displays of narcissism and irresponsible power plays. It renders the profound trivial, the future unimportant, and corruption banal.

To consider remedies for this condition, Brown turns to Weber's famous Vocation Lectures, delivered at the end of World War I. There, Weber himself decries the effects of nihilism on both scholarly and political life. He also spells out requirements for re-securing truth in the academy and integrity in politics. Famously opposing the two spheres to each other, he sought to restrict academic life to the pursuit of facts and reserve for the political realm the pursuit and legislation of values.

Without accepting Weber's arch oppositions, Brown acknowledges the distinctions they aim to mark as she charts reparative strategies for our own times. She calls for retrieving knowledge from hyperpoliticization without expunging values from research or teaching, and reflects on ways to embed responsibility in radical political action. Above all, she challenges the left to make good on its commitment to critical thinking by submitting all values to scrutiny in the classroom and to make good on its ambition for political transformation by twinning a radical democratic vision with charismatic leadership.

Timothy Williamson

Philosophical method: A very short introduction

From thought experiments, to deduction, to theories, this Very Short Introduction will cause you to totally rethink what philosophy is.

• Assuming no previous knowledge of philosophy, this is a highly accesible account of how modern philosophers think and work
• Presents a distinctive view of philosophy, arguing that it is far more scientific than many philosophers think
• Includes a wealth of examples from history charting the successes and failures of philosophical thinking
• Offers a timely and much needed intervention in the current hot debate on philosophical methodology

What are philosophers trying to achieve? How can they succeed? Does philosophy make progress? Is it in competition with science, or doing something completely different, or neither?

Timothy Williamson tackles some of the key questions surrounding philosophy in new and provocative ways, showing how philosophy begins in common sense curiosity, and develops through our capacity to dispute rationally with each other. Discussing philosophy's ability to clarify our thoughts, he explains why such clarification depends on the development of philosophical theories, and how those theories can be tested by imaginative thought experiments, and compared against each other by standards similar to those used in the natural and social sciences. He also shows how logical rigour can be understood as a way of enhancing the explanatory power of philosophical theories. Drawing on the history of philosophy to provide a track record of philosophical thinking's successes and failures, Williams overturns widely held dogmas about the distinctive nature of philosophy in comparison to the sciences, demystifies its methods, and considers the future of the discipline.

ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

Previously published in hardback as Doing Philosophy

Preface
1. Introduction
2. Starting from common sense
3. Disputing
4. Clarifying terms
5. Doing thought experiments
6. Comparing theories
7. Deducing
8. Using the history of philosophy
9. Using other fields
10. Model-building
11. Conclusion: the future of philosophy
References and Further Reading

Timothy Williamson is the Wykeham Professor of Logic at the University of Oxford, and A. Whitney Griswold Visiting Professor at Yale University. Previously he was the Professor of Logic and Metaphysics at Edinburgh University. He has published books and articles on many branches of philosophy, some of which have been translated into German, Spanish, French, Italian, Hungarian, Serbian, Turkish, Chinese, Korean, and other languages. He frequently writes on philosophy in the Times Literary Supplement, the New York Times blog The Stone, and newspapers in various countries.

   

Clara E. Mattei (New School)

The capital order: How economists invented austerity and paved the way to Fascism

A Financial Times Best Book of the Year

"A must-read, with key lessons for the future."—Thomas Piketty

A groundbreaking examination of austerity's dark intellectual origins. 

For more than a century, governments facing financial crisis have resorted to the economic policies of austerity—cuts to wages, fiscal spending, and public benefits—as a path to solvency. While these policies have been successful in appeasing creditors, they've had devastating effects on social and economic welfare in countries all over the world. Today, as austerity remains a favored policy among troubled states, an important question remains: What if solvency was never really the goal? 

In The Capital Order, political economist Clara E. Mattei explores the intellectual origins of austerity to uncover its originating motives: the protection of capital—and indeed capitalism—in times of social upheaval from below. 

Mattei traces modern austerity to its origins in interwar Britain and Italy, revealing how the threat of working-class power in the years after World War I animated a set of top-down economic policies that elevated owners, smothered workers, and imposed a rigid economic hierarchy across their societies. Where these policies "succeeded," relatively speaking, was in their enrichment of certain parties, including employers and foreign-trade interests, who accumulated power and capital at the expense of labor. Here, Mattei argues, is where the true value of austerity can be observed: its insulation of entrenched privilege and its elimination of all alternatives to capitalism. 

Drawing on newly uncovered archival material from Britain and Italy, much of it translated for the first time, The Capital Order offers a damning and essential new account of the rise of austerity—and of modern economics—at the levers of contemporary political power.
480 pages | 3 halftones, 8 line drawings, 3 tables | 6 x 9 | © 2022

Economics and Business: ECONOMICS--HISTORY, ECONOMICS--INTERNATIONAL AND COMPARATIVE

History: EUROPEAN HISTORY, HISTORY OF IDEAS

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction

Part I: War and Crisis
1 The Great War and the Economy
2 "A Wholly New School of Thought"
3 The Struggle for Economic Democracy
4 The New Order

Part II: The Meaning of Austerity
5 International Technocrats and the Making of Austerity
6 Austerity, a British Story
7 Austerity, an Italian Story
8 Italian Austerity and Fascism through British Eyes
9 Austerity and Its "Successes"
10 Austerity Forever
Afterword
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index

 

https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/C/bo181707138.html

Deirdre Nansen McCloskey (Cato Institute)

Beyond positivism, behaviorism, and neoinstitutionalism in economics

A penetrating analysis from one of the defining voices of contemporary economics.

In Beyond Positivism, Behaviorism, and Neoinstitutionalism in Economics, Deirdre Nansen McCloskey zeroes in on the authoritarian cast of recent economics, arguing for a re-focusing on the liberated human. The behaviorist positivism fashionable in the field since the 1930s treats people from the outside. It yielded in Williamson and North a manipulative neo-institutionalism. McCloskey argues that institutions as causes are mainly temporary and intermediate, not ultimate. They are human-made, depending on words, myth, ethics, ideology, history, identity, professionalism, gossip, movies, what your mother taught you.  Humans create conversations as they go, in the economy as in the rest of life.

In engaging and erudite prose, McCloskey exhibits in detail the scientific failures of neo-institutionalism. She proposes a "humanomics," an economics with the humans left in.  Humanomics keeps theory, quantification, experiment, mathematics, econometrics, though insisting on more true rigor than is usual. It adds what can be learned about the economy from history, philosophy, literature, and all the sciences of humans. McCloskey reaffirms the durability of "market-tested innovation" against the imagined imperfections to be corrected by a perfect government. With her trademark zeal and incisive wit, she rebuilds the foundations of economics.

REVIEWS

"A compact discussion of some crucial issues economists should be contemplating." The Enlightened Economist.

"Beyond Positivism [presents] a criticism and reshaping of economic thought that departs from neoinstitutionalism and other non-'humanomical' movements, promoting the ethics of liberalism as the ideal foundation for an adequate economic science." Journal of Economic Literature

"The manuscript is a collection of writings for various forums, many reviews of others and many replies to critics. One unifying theme is a critique of neoinstitutional economics. But yet another theme is a defense of the bourgeois trilogy against its critics. This book is well worth a read." Richard Langlois, University of Connecticut

"This new book deepens the continuing conversation in Humanomics. It's essentially about discovering Adam Smith and resuming a path that McCloskey has so magnificently helped to reinvigorate in the last half century." Vernon Smith, Chapman University and 2002 Nobel Laureate in Economics

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction The Argument in Brief

Part I. Economics Is in Scientific Trouble
Chapter 1. An Antique, Unethical, and Badly Measured Behaviorism Doesn't Yield Good Economic Science or Good Politics
Chapter 2. Economics Needs to Get Serious about Measuring the Economy
Chapter 3. The Number of Unmeasured "Imperfections" Is Embarrassingly Long
Chapter 4. Historical Economics Can Measure Them, Showing Them to Be Small
Chapter 5. The Worst of Orthodox Positivism Lacks Ethics and Measurement

Part II. Neoinstitutionalism Shares in the Troubles
Chapter 6. Even the Best of Neoinstitutionalism Lacks Measurement
Chapter 7. And "Culture," or Mistaken History, Will Not Repair It
Chapter 8. That Is, Neoinstitutionalism, Like the Rest of Behavioral Positivism, Fails as History and as Economics
Chapter 9. As It Fails in Logic and in Philosophy
Chapter 10. Neoinstitutionalism, in Short, Is Not a Scientific Success

Part III. Humanomics Can Save the Science
Chapter 11. But It's Been Hard for Positivists to Understand Humanomics
Chapter 12. Yet We Can Get a Humanomics
Chapter 13. And Although We Can't Save Private Max U
Chapter 14. We Can Save an Ethical Humanomics

Acknowledgments
Notes
Works Cited
Index

https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/B/bo145786166.html

192 pages | 6 x 9 | © 2022

Economics and Business: ECONOMICS--GENERAL THEORY AND PRINCIPLES

 

TRANSCRIPT

August Baker:
Hello and welcome to Philosophy Podcast. I'm August Baker. Today I have the distinct pleasure of speaking with Professor Deirdre McCloskey. I'd say that her book The Rhetoric of Economics is one of the pop five books that influenced my understanding of economics. And it was such a great, exciting read, really.Deirdre McCloskey:
Thank you.August Baker:
You know her as the Distinguished Professor Emerita of Economics and of History, and Professor Emerita of English and of Communication at the University of Illinois, Chicago. However, after 34 years of praying for the Bears and the Cubs in Chicago, she has a new title now, which is a great title, Distinguished Scholar, Isaiah Berlin Chair in Liberal Thought at the Cato Institute. Welcome, Professor McCloskey.Deirdre McCloskey:
Thank you, dear. I'm here in my home, which is right next door to Cato, so I'm three minutes away from my office.August Baker:
Okay, good. How has the move been?Deirdre McCloskey:
Well, if you've moved, you know how it is.August Baker:
Yeah, I know.Deirdre McCloskey:
It's really rough.August Baker:
I know.Deirdre McCloskey:
It's starting to come to together.August Baker:
Good.Deirdre McCloskey:
It'll be another week or so before everything's put away.August Baker:
Gotcha. Okay. Okay, so today we're talking about your newest book Beyond Positivism, Behaviorism and Neoinstitutionalism in Economics, University of Chicago Press. And I would say that it's got some economics, it's got some philosophy of economics, sociology of economics. It's got some great nuggets and some gossip, and it's got some saying of things that you aren't supposed to say, but she says them. I thought maybe we could start with the economics, which I think to me is the great enrichment, which I had not heard of before, but what is that and what are the various schools of thought on that?Deirdre McCloskey:
Well, the great enrichment is simply the amazing change in world income per head since 1800. In places like the United States, it's a factor of, I don't know, 40 places, and worldwide, a factor of 25 or 30 in the increased amount of goods and services that the average person could buy. And recently as 1960, about four out of the five billion people on the planet lived at $2 a day. Imagine living where you live on $2 a day. And now the average of the seven billion people on the planet, the average has gone up to about $50 a day and the same prices. And of that seven billion, one billion are still at this horrible $2 a day. So there's this enormous quantitative change, and it's so large that it's a qualitative change. It's a change in the character of life. I take it that you, like me, are a descendant of peasants or urban workers, unspeakably poor.August Baker:
Right.Deirdre McCloskey:
Here we are. So it's an amazing change, and the two usual explanations are exploitation from the Left. Europe is rich because it stole from the Third World or because of slavery or something. And on the other hand, savings accumulation, which is embodied in the very misleading word, capitalism, that piling up factories and roads and so on is how we get rich. Neither of those is correct, I would argue. And what actually caused our amazing increase in human scope since 1800 is the idea of liberalism, understood as equality of permission, allowing people, as the English say, to have a go. And this having a go has just been amazing. You look around your room and everything you see is someone's smart idea. So it's ideas that caused the modern world, not one group of people stealing from another or some people piling up capital. So that's that. And to just-August Baker:
Yeah, please.Deirdre McCloskey:
Connected with the theme of the book, the main thing of the book, the materialist suppositions in economics are ill-suited to understanding ideas. The ideas were philosophical, political, sociological, and it's those ideas that made us rich.August Baker:
So did the idea of liberalism occur in 1800?Deirdre McCloskey:
Yeah. It occurred, and although it sounds kind of single-minded to say it that way, it did occur. It's not ancient. It's not from, I don't know, Christianity or the Indo-European race. Not Indo-European, the European race, something like that. That's not what caused it. It happened in Northwestern Europe in the 17th and especially in the 18th century, starting in Holland and then transferred and translated to Britain, and then the North American colonies, such as Pennsylvania, Massachusetts. Now, these societies were not perfectly liberal by any means. The American founders were largely slave holders.Even Benjamin Franklin had owned slaves. But the idea was implanted and that idea that all people are created equal, and their equality consists of being allowed to do things, to have a go, keeps... It's very appealing to most people, although some people don't like to be adults, but it's appealing to most people. And it's extremely powerful, it inspirits people to invent in institutions, such as the modern university invented in 1910 at the University of Berlin, or the field of analytic or continental philosophy, just to speak of here ideas. And then ideas such as internal combustion engine or the computer, a zillion other things.August Baker:
And so I guess one comment would be it doesn't seem to be necessary to let everyone have a go, but it's necessary to have a lot of people, enough people to have a go.Deirdre McCloskey:
That's a very wise comment, because it's obvious that in the United States, for example, until 1865, substantial part of the population, all women, for example, and all Black enslaved people were not allowed to have a go. So it's this gradual increase, and as you said, if there are enough people?August Baker:
Yeah.Deirdre McCloskey:
Now, it can't be confined to a tiny, tiny class. That's not going to work and does not work. But in places like Hong Kong after the Second World War, or Ireland since the 1960s, you relieve people of obstacles to having a go, and they keep having a go. They keep trying things. That doesn't mean they succeed, but they're allowed to try.August Baker:
And part of it is also, I think, for economists, the baker does not bake our bread out of a sense of benevolence. It's for a reward.Deirdre McCloskey:
Yeah.August Baker:
Now, I'm sure that people who are inventing things are not doing it solely for the money, but that would be part of it. People can have a go and they can get monetary rewards for doing so.Deirdre McCloskey:
Yeah, it's true. But of course, it's always been so that if you allow people to invent, they would make money out of it. But there were very strong forces against invention. The very word innovation in English, and I think in French and so forth, is a bad word until the 19th century, because it suggests you're going to change religious conventions. "Oh, no, let's not do that." So there are these conservative forces that were temporarily overcome places, as I said, like Holland or Scotland, and immediately resulted in astonishing innovation. And then the innovation just got completely wacko. It got crazy. We're inventing all the time, new apps for our cell phones and so forth.August Baker:
Yeah, right.Deirdre McCloskey:
And yes, it's profit, but you and I know that in, say, academic life-August Baker:
Right. Sure.Deirdre McCloskey:
Money, profit is not where it's coming from.August Baker:
Right.Deirdre McCloskey:
And that's surprisingly true, I believe, if you actually talk to people in business, it's true in business, too.August Baker:
Sure.Deirdre McCloskey:
People like to found companies and to pursue their American dream, and it's not all material.August Baker:
They like to work with other people for a common goal and compete and win and rise in the hierarchy and all of these things.Deirdre McCloskey:
Exactly. And there are all kinds of other coin in which ones paid. And indeed, that passage from Adam Smith that you paraphrased.August Baker:
Yeah.Deirdre McCloskey:
Where you said it's not from the love of the butcher or the baker that we expect our dinner. It's actually an appeal to take the viewpoint of the other person to walk in his shoes. He called it the impartial spectator. It's very theatrical metaphor. And the impartial spectator, kind of substitute for God, is watching you. And in order to do well by your fellow humans, you have to be able to have moral empathy, fellow feeling, it means of course in Greek. And that's what he's talking about. It's not so much he's saying, "Oh yeah, everyone's driven by money. You got to give them money, or they won't do anything." That's not Adam Smith. It's some of his followers, I admit, but not Adam Smith.August Baker:
You see, the way I think of that quote is, if you think of a new economic system and that economic system is, well, we're all going to work together and we're all going to do the best we can, and we're going to share with each other because we're going to all love each other, you think, "No, I don't believe it."Deirdre McCloskey:
Well-August Baker:
That's not going to happen.Deirdre McCloskey:
But it works in a family.August Baker:
True.Deirdre McCloskey:
It works in a small group of friends, and I love it. It's wonderful. A bunch of colleagues, most academic departments don't behave like that. But still, that's the idea. And it works fine in a small group. The problem is it doesn't work at arm's length. You order something on Amazon, you're not depending on the love of the person at the other end. Although, indeed, in a odd way, you're depending on their sense of professionalism and so on.August Baker:
Sure.Deirdre McCloskey:
So in a large society, love doesn't work. And in fact, it's worse than that, because appeals to the love model in a large society, we have seen in the 20th century especially, are extremely dangerous.August Baker:
Yeah.Deirdre McCloskey:
The Germans loved the folk, the German people. And Hitler's vision of a thousand year Reich and people loved the Communist Party. And arousing this king and country passion in which you can do these things, you can also do terrible things.August Baker:
Right.Deirdre McCloskey:
So it's much better, it works for human flourishing to let people make deals between the smith and the baker.August Baker:
Right. Now, if I were to... Excuse me. Go ahead.Deirdre McCloskey:
You have a last words habit of thinking before you speak.August Baker:
No, I just... Well, okay. Thank you.Deirdre McCloskey:
Well, that's a good habit.August Baker:
I appreciate that. Appreciate that. If I were to take a Marxist response, I would say... Well, I think two things, compound question. Sorry. One of them is, when you say ideas, a Marxist might say ideology. I think you actually pointed that out in your book.Deirdre McCloskey:
Yeah. And I say I actually use the word ideology a lot. I think it's just fine.August Baker:
Right. Okay.Deirdre McCloskey:
Marx particularly adopted it from French where the word ideology, when he adopted it, didn't have the Marxist meaning, which I approve of. I was once a Marxist, so I'm very familiar with the German ideology and so forth.August Baker:
Well, there's a funny... I think that the feel of your writing has something of Marxist, he's sarcastic with people.Deirdre McCloskey:
I know. I'm sorry about that.August Baker:
No, no.Deirdre McCloskey:
It annoys people, and I don't mean to be mean.August Baker:
Hey.Deirdre McCloskey:
Yes, I do. I mean to be mean with stupid people who are not doing it right.August Baker:
Right. The other thing, though, I would say is, okay, so the Marxist it's going to say, "Well, the ownership of means... what is required is ownership of the means of... Private ownership of the means of production."Deirdre McCloskey:
That's what they'd say.August Baker:
And they'd say-Deirdre McCloskey:
That causes the ideas.August Baker:
Right.Deirdre McCloskey:
Ideas are merely the superstructure of the froth on top of the great waves and tides of material history.August Baker:
Right.Deirdre McCloskey:
It's the business of turning Hegel on his head.August Baker:
And then I think they might also say, "Look, it's true that maybe even if we grant you that it wasn't capital accumulation or exploitation, which enabled this. Still, the exploitation, if you just think of it in sense of the worker is not going to be paid everything they protect, that would be required to accumulate large..."Deirdre McCloskey:
Yeah. Except that accumulation is not where it's at. You accumulate once you have a new idea. You open a hairdressing salon in the neighborhood, and if it was a good idea to do so, and if you do good work or have some innovation in organizing a hairdressing salon, then it'll have success. And then you'll be able to buy more machines and you'll be able to... The big mistake in modern economics is that we can't get away from the conviction that capital accumulation is creative. But it's not, unless there's a smart idea behind it. I just wrote a column for a Brazilian newspaper in which I made this point. I said, "Look, just spending doesn't generate anything." You say, "Oh, we'll spend a lot on the northeast of Brazil, and that'll make it better off." If the ideas are stupid, if the spending is bad, and it's not doing new things or organizing things in a better way, then all it does is shuffle resources around without making the resources, namely people better off.August Baker:
Right. That makes perfect sense. There's a lot more to talk about on this, but I want to go to the next part of your book. I would say, we'll talk about the critique of economics.Deirdre McCloskey:
Sure.August Baker:
You've got the... Very well shown that the scientism, the contempt for the humanities, the creepy behaviorism. I loved your discussion of that. The creepy is such a great word. The idea of incentives and these policies, economists, policymakers controlling these levers to control people for their own good. The ones that... You could speak to any of those if I misrepresented them. The other two that were so new to me was what you called the unmeasuring silliness.Deirdre McCloskey:
Yeah.August Baker:
And then the idea that the way economics is done is you spend the first week, if you think of economics as being a microeconomics course in graduate school, the first week is on the first and second welfare theorem, and the rest of the year are on the 108 imperfections.Deirdre McCloskey:
Yeah.August Baker:
My camera.Deirdre McCloskey:
Those two are closely connected. Are you there?August Baker:
I am. I'm going to fix my camera, but just go ahead.Deirdre McCloskey:
It's okay. I'll go ahead. The justification for the social engineering that economists have gotten more and more enthralled by in the last century, since the 1920s, is that, oh my word, there are so many imperfections in this economy. But my first response as an economic historian is, have you heard of the great enrichment? Don't you know that this highly imperfect economy with monopoly and externalities and all kinds of terrible things going on, consumer ignorance, meanwhile has been producing an increase in human scope by a factor of 25 or 30 or higher? So there's a kind of strangeness about this claim that all things are really imperfect. And my scientific... Well, that's a scientific criticism of the argument, but the other scientific criticism is that they don't measure it. Surprisingly, since economists are, as Edmund Burke said, economists and calculators are well known in the culture as being quantitative. But they're not.August Baker:
No, they're not. You're right.Deirdre McCloskey:
Their quantification is phony in all kinds of ways.August Baker:
I thought that was pastime. Yeah, go ahead.Deirdre McCloskey:
I've done books and articles up the kazoo on the technique. They're called tests of statistical significance. Correlation, R square, E tests, anything you want to call it. And it's just nonsense. It's the belief, which if we were to say about words, we would know it's false, the belief that numbers have their own interpretation, that inside a number is its meaning. And that would be like saying the American constitution has of 1789 has inside it its own interpretation, which is ridiculous. Everyone agrees on that. They don't get that the same is true of numbers. So anyway, there are all kinds of assertions of Krugman and so on, shows all their imperfections, and they're informationally symmetries and blah, blah, blah.And in some fields, like environmental studies, there are serious attempts to measure it. The advantage in those fields is the economists are sitting right beside people who actually do measure things, like climatologists. So they're led to actually do quantitative science in that field, and in agricultural economics, the economists are serious about magnitudes. And that's, again, because they're right next door to agronomists and practical farmers who want to know how big is big. But in many other fields, like this informationally symmetry stuff or monopolies increasing their monopolies. Google is a monopoly. It's complete nonsense and it's silly. And it's not backed by numbers. So I think that's a major scientific failure for a field that claims to be a policy science. I wish it wouldn't, but claims to be a policy science, and I'm from economics, and I'm going to run your life from now on.August Baker:
Right.Deirdre McCloskey:
If a doctor came to you and said, "Well, I'm going to bleed you because I think that's what you need," and had no evidence at all that bleeding was good for you, I would run from doctors.August Baker:
Sure. Yeah. One of these quotes that I love, you're right, "Mostly in economic theory, it has sufficed to show the mere direction of an imperfection on a blackboard. The quantitative theorems recommended by Samuelson in 1941, and then await the telephone call from the Swedish Academy early on a Monday in early October."Deirdre McCloskey:
I could attach names.August Baker:
Irreverence.Deirdre McCloskey:
If you wanted me to be really mean, I could tell you the economists for whom that is true.August Baker:
Right. No, I don't. I'm not as brave as you. But I did want to ask you... Well, first of all, two things, and I think this comes from Rhetoric of Economics, but I might be wrong. If we're trying to understand economists, then we would say, "Well, it's not that..." Well, okay. Why is this? It's because what are economists doing, academic economists, what are they doing? They're trying to self-actualize, they're trying to do interesting things, come up with interesting ideas. And that's what other economists find interesting, ar these.Deirdre McCloskey:
Yeah, that's true.August Baker:
And that's what journal editors want. And you might also say there's a little prestige in measuring. I don't know.Deirdre McCloskey:
Yeah, there is. Oh, boy is there. It was amazing that Simon Kuznets actually got the Nobel Prize. Yeah, that's right. There's a little prestige because of a absurd idea that economists have about physics, which since the war, everyone admires for the second one, because they think, "Well, there are these people called theoretical physicists who do a lot of math, so that must be what I could do as an economist. I'll just sit here and make up theorems," as though they're in the math department. And the other reason this happens is that economists, when they take math courses, take them from mathematicians.August Baker:
That was a good point also.Deirdre McCloskey:
They don't take them from engineers or physicists meteorologists or other people who use math. And this is not really how physics operates. The theoretical physicists are disdained who don't propose quantitative measures. And necessarily, the theorist makes them now. They hand that over to another group of physicists. But I was at a conference in South Africa about string theory, and who was the English physicist who ended up in a chair with-August Baker:
Hawkings?Deirdre McCloskey:
Yeah, Hawkings. He was there. I was within a couple of yards of him listening to his machine talking and so on. He was there, a whole bunch of famous physicists. And then there were these string theorists from Santa Barbara and so forth, and you could tell that the other physicists just hated them because it was all theory. It was airy-fairy, it's the strings. I mean, it's consistent. It's good math. The strings are so small that according to most physicists, there is never going to be a way of testing this hypothesis. Never. So they hated it. And that's the way physicists or geologists. Look, if a geologist proposed a theory of the origin of mountains and didn't have quantitative simulations, so to speak, that showed how big was big, and look, you can see that these plates are moving around, that could raise the Andes.August Baker:
Right.Deirdre McCloskey:
No one would paying any attention to it, whereas economists who in this airy-fairy way say, "Oh, there's imperfections in the capital market. Trade causes distortion."August Baker:
Behavioral finance.Deirdre McCloskey:
Behavioral finance is a good case in point because the only test of a financial model is can you make money from it?August Baker:
I love that quote in your-Deirdre McCloskey:
And if you can't, shut up, go home. The idea that you do econometrics that shows there's a glitch in the foreign exchange market, give me a break.August Baker:
Right. Here's from your book, page 60, "When I used to eat lunch daily in the seventies at the Quadrangle Club at the University of Chicago with Merton Miller, Gene Fama, Myron Soles, and Fisher Black, I would hear, without quite grasping it import, that the Journal of Business did not accept tests of statistical significance of an alleged irrationality in the stock market, but would instead demand to see the author's bank account."Deirdre McCloskey:
And that's, of course, sensible. And it's true of a lot of things. It's true of art. Show me your painting, I'll evaluate it. You say you're a great artist. Okay, show me. And if it is true, there are payoffs. And to keep asserting that we're going to just do things because numbers have intrinsic meaning is just silly. They have external meaning. When I say the temperature in Washington today is a disappointing 45 degrees, that means something because you can compare it with other numbers.August Baker:
So I think that one of the comparisons with physics is when we look at physics, I heard a lecture about this that Daniel Robinson, that we forget how... We know that there are these mathematical laws underlying the natural world, but it wasn't known before Newton.Deirdre McCloskey:
Sure.August Baker:
But there's this assumption that there must be some mathematical laws underneath the social economy.Deirdre McCloskey:
That's right. That's Adam Smith's conviction.August Baker:
And that would be an assumption in becoming an economist, that you're going to believe that.Deirdre McCloskey:
Yep. And it's got this problem that if you're so smart, why aren't you rich?August Baker:
Right.Deirdre McCloskey:
We know that there's an inverse square log for gravitation. It doesn't make anyone... There's no profit to be gotten from that because everyone knows it. And when you don't know it, you can't follow a cannonball very well. But when you do know it, then you can derive the parabola of the cannonball. But if there were similar tricks in economics that would aid people to buy low and sell high, they would already be exploited for one thing. And it would be... This is the problem with modern finance. If it were easy to do, then we'd all be multi-billionaires. So there's this big difference. A great economist named Fritz, an Austrian, in 1941 review said, "Imagine what physics would be like or chemistry if molecules could talk to each other. I mean, actually persuade each other to do stuff by saying, no, no. Why don't you not repel me this time because I do love you so much?" This would be very hard to do and would have this deep uncertainty that consciousness and social life creates.August Baker:
Right. Yeah. And in fact, once you make a rule and it seems to work, if people find out about it, they'll say, "I'm going to prove it wrong."Deirdre McCloskey:
Exactly. Exactly. And if that's an opportunity for profit, it'll happen. Now, I was trained as a transportation economist, and there are some transportation engineering formulas that work. For example, the famous gaper's delay. There's an accident on the left side of the highway, and yet people slow down on the right side to have a look. And that adds up. And you can actually simulate that rather easily and show how long the queue is going to be, how much delay in total there's going to be so there. And I don't deny that there are, what can you say-August Baker:
Regularities.Deirdre McCloskey:
Important and true regularities such as that if you raise the relative price of something, the quantity demand of it will go down pretty much. And that's true for all kinds of things. And it's not a dumb thing that economists say. It's appropriate. But the idea that you could run an economy, like a machine, like a car, you'll hear an awful lot about the Federal Reserve steering the economy, and it puts on the brake and it puts on the accelerator. And these mysterious people in Washington are doing this, and it's just baloney. They can't do it. They're driving in a dense fog. The instruments are no good, they're not sure what speed they're going. They're not sure if the brake works. The accelerator is very unreliable. The steering wheel doesn't work very well, and they're in a crowd of people. What do you do? Stop the car and get out of it. Stop trying to steer it.August Baker:
I guess the counter would be, if we had a case of laissez-faire, really had one, then we could say that's true. But all we really do is have laissez-faire with a substantial government.Deirdre McCloskey:
That's true. That's certainly true. We have a massive government. Look, before the First World War sophisticated modern countries, their state took 10% of national income for its purposes at all, from local to federal. Now, in most of these countries, well, for all of them, actually, it's 40% or somewhat higher. In France, it's 57%, actually. And that's in the last century that's gone up. And not only spending, but then they regulate the rest. Childcare is regulated. In the United States, when I was a kid, moms would say, on Saturday, "Go out and play. Come back when the streetlights come on." So we played. And if we wanted to play football, we played football. We didn't have adult supervision.August Baker:
Ride your bike.Deirdre McCloskey:
We wandered around and we did stuff and learned how to deal with each other. And now, if you do that, child protection will come, the state will intervene and take your child away from you. So even childcare is now under strict state supervision. I think it's terrible. And I wish we could get... You have to have some state. I don't disagree with that, but it doesn't have to be this leviathan.August Baker:
Right.Deirdre McCloskey:
James Robinson and Daron Acemoglu write books in favor of the leviathan, and they keep saying that bigger and bigger state, such as we have now, and getting even bigger is good for, shockingly, they say for liberty, by which they mean, Mama and Papa State will take care of you. I assure you, they'll be nice parents.August Baker:
So therefore you can-Deirdre McCloskey:
Therefore, just allow yourself to be a child. Go back to being a child in your household, and that's fine. You'll be happy as a lark. Not like a lark, more like a worm.August Baker:
Let me go now to some of these great nuggets. I've always felt that Friedman's The Methodology of Positive Economics, well, everyone can criticize it. I really have always thought that it captured a lot of what economists do or the way they think.Deirdre McCloskey:
Or what they think they're doing, at least.August Baker:
The idea to me, from what I recall, was that you're supposed to make assumptions which are contrary to reality. That's what a good assumption is. So then how would you judge a good assumption? It's based on what other economists find is an interesting assumption.Deirdre McCloskey:
Yeah. But if that's all, then we're back to a bad aspect of the Rhetoric of Economics, where the kind of academic agreement that, well, we're going to suppose there are tremendous imperfections in a modern economy, and so we need state intervention on a massive scale. That just gets assumed as the basis for public policy, as Milton would say, without serious inquiry. Milton was an empiricist. He was not much of a theorist, to tell the truth.August Baker:
Yeah, I understand that.Deirdre McCloskey:
He was a fact guy and he kept wanting to test things. Now, I think some of his tests were silly, and some of them were wonderful. His greatest book is a book called A Theory of the Consumption Function, which he wrote in the 1950s. And no economist can read that book without knowing that he's in the presence of a master.August Baker:
Yeah.Deirdre McCloskey:
It's extraordinary book. And it's got some theory, but mainly it's got, okay, now let's see, cross section savings rate and time series savings rate. What's going on here? They're not the same. And so he was an empiricist.August Baker:
Well, this is the quote I wanted to get at, the sort of gossip. You say that... You refer to The Methodology of Positive Economics, 1953. You say, "A paper Friedman told me that he later regretted." I wanted to ask you about that.Deirdre McCloskey:
Yeah. I have it somewhere in my files. I'm going to be going... Having moved, I had to move all my files, because we didn't have time to go through them and throw most of them away. But there is a letter in some file. I've shown it to some people, but it hasn't got into the public sphere very much. It's not that I'm secretive about it. It's there somewhere. Where he wrote to me when I had sent out a... I guess it was after the publication of the original article on The Rhetoric of Economics that Milton wrote to me and said, "I agree with what you say mostly. And I have regretted doing that methodological paper." His lifetime enemy, they didn't hate each other or anything, but opponent is a better word, Paul Samuelson, had the same methodology and wrote at the same time, circa 1950, wrote in favor of this kind of methodology.August Baker:
Right.Deirdre McCloskey:
Paul Anthony Samuelson, by the way, was my mother's longtime mixed doubles tennis partner. A fact that everyone should know.August Baker:
Yes. No, it's important. How did that happen?Deirdre McCloskey:
Well, they were in the same tennis club. I didn't know Samuelson.August Baker:
Okay.Deirdre McCloskey:
I think when I was undergraduate, he came to Adams house and I heard him talk to us. But yeah, that's all I ever knew of Samuelson. But my parents were close friends of him and Marion, his first wife.August Baker:
Interesting. Then the last part I wanted to get to were some of these things that you say that one is not supposed to say. I'll just read off some of them.Deirdre McCloskey:
I'm in Washington, and the great Washington hostess of an earlier generation, Alice Roosevelt Longworth, had a pillow on her settee embroidered with, "If you haven't got anything nice to say about anyone, come and sit beside me."August Baker:
I love it. All right. "I await testing refutations, but it seems to me on the basis of existing empirical studies," and I won't read all of them, but some of them, "that the following propositions are factually true, inequality since 1800 has fallen, not risen." Another one, "Imperialism was not profitable for the countries conquering others."Deirdre McCloskey:
Yeah.August Baker:
"Unemployment is caused as much by government interference, such as interference in the wage bargain as it is by inherent flaws in market economies." Here's one, "That consumers are irrational does not imply that markets are."Deirdre McCloskey:
Yep.August Baker:
"China and India broke out of the vicious and allegedly unbreakable cycle of poverty. Foreign aid has not saved the poor of the world, but has enriched elites and financed impoverishing projects." And then the last one, "Global warming is a... Or the last one I'll mention, "Global warming is a crisis, but not an existential one."Deirdre McCloskey:
Yeah. I think all those are true, and there's a lot of evidence for each of them. I could go... You can choose one and I'll at least be able to refer to.August Baker:
Yeah. How about the global warming? Can you do that?Deirdre McCloskey:
Well, the most famous calculation within the little group of economists about this is one that Bill Nordhaus at Yale did, where he pointed out that if income per head continues to grow at the rate that it is now and has been for 40 or 50 years, as the World Bank, for example, thinks it is, about 2% a year, if that's the case, then in a century, income per head in the United States, I mean in the world, in the world now, will be four times what it is now in the United States. And there's no good reason from a technological point of view that that can't go on happening. Some people say, "Oh, we've made all the inventions we can." Bob Gordon says this, and I don't believe it. But anyway, suppose. In that case, the reduction of income from bad climate will, for one thing, have millions, billions of engineers working on it, engineers and entrepreneurs from this immensely enriched world. And the hurt will reduce income, what, 20%?August Baker:
Fascinating.Deirdre McCloskey:
Well, out of 400%, 20% is not that much. So this idea that we're doomed and so on is not terribly plausible. Now, look, I'm not a climate scientist. But I do know, as everyone knows that looks into it at all, that these climate models are very uncertain. And that doesn't mean they're stupid or shouldn't be done, or these people are liars, but it does mean that we can't panic and do terrible things that impoverish the world now. We should probably have a certain optimism about the enriching world that we face if we don't screw it up. Now, we're very good at screwing it up, so maybe we will. If we follow the advice of Swedish schoolgirls instead of very wise, 80-year-old economic historians we're going to get in trouble.August Baker:
There you go. I'm with on that. Well, Professor Deirdre Nansen McCloskey, Beyond Positivism, Behaviorism and Neoinstitutionalism in Economics, and a lot of other great books, including the great Rhetoric of Economics, it's been such a pleasure to speak to you today. Thank you so much for joining me.Deirdre McCloskey:
Thank you. I've enjoyed it. I love speaking to philosophers. It often gives me a headache, but I love...August Baker:
There's a lot of similarities between economics and philosophy, really.Deirdre McCloskey:
There are. And some of them are not too flattering to the economists. There's this phrase that Bob Heilbroner made famous, worldly philosophers.August Baker:
Yes.Deirdre McCloskey:
And that's right. We are worldly philosophers. Sometimes we're too much philosophers and not enough worldly.August Baker:
No, I remember in the worldly philosophers, he was speaking about how he came up with that word. It was going to be the money philosophers or something. And his editor said, "Worldly. That's the word you want." Perfect.Deirdre McCloskey:
Yeah. Well, I became an economist because of that book.August Baker:
Interesting.Deirdre McCloskey:
I was a history major, and I found that as a history major, you had to read a lot of tiresome long books. And I found this very irritating.August Baker:
Well, you said-Deirdre McCloskey:
And now I write boring, long books.August Baker:
Right. No, not boring at all, fascinating.Deirdre McCloskey:
But still, I look, and my father was in government at Harvard. That's political science. So I couldn't do that. That would've been a natural major for me.August Baker:
Right, right.Deirdre McCloskey:
I think Dad even told me, "No, you can't major in government." So I said, "Oh, well." Over the summer after freshman year, I read Bob's book and it just fascinated me. And ever since, I've been in love with economics. Then I tried to use the book, and of course, I went back to it, this is, I don't know, 40 years later. But gee, maybe I should assign it in my... I was assigned to teach the history of economic thought, which I hadn't done. So that was nice. So I looked at Bob's book and it's terrible.August Baker:
Yeah. It didn't age well.Deirdre McCloskey:
It's not good history. It's not good intellectual history. It's very bad. It's charming and well-written. But I grew to admire Bob on other grounds. For example, and this is one test I use, he was smooth as silk about my gender change. No problem. So was Milton Friedman, for that [inaudible 00:53:26] Rose.August Baker:
Of course. Yeah. I would've expected that. Right.Deirdre McCloskey:
That's right, but even from Bob. And Bob, late in his life said, "Capitalism has won." He said, "Look, if you want to have a rich country, you better adopt capitalism." Now, as you know, in orthodox Marxism, that's actually orthodox Marxism.August Baker:
Right.Deirdre McCloskey:
That the fruit of the bourgeois era will be taken by the dictatorship of the proletariat and the withering of the state. And then we'll have this wonderful anarchist situation. But you need to go through the capitalism.August Baker:
Right.Deirdre McCloskey:
But still, he was a charming man.August Baker:
Yeah. No, I thought it was interesting that you listed him among your favorites. And also that you talked about wishing you had worked at the new school since he did. Not because of that, but...Deirdre McCloskey:
The reason for that is that new school kids don't learn what we called in Chicago price theory.August Baker:
Price theory, yeah.Deirdre McCloskey:
So Mariana Mazzucato is a completely incompetent economist because she doesn't know supply and demand. Now, you can be a Marxist and know supply and demand. I know people that do who are, and that's fine.August Baker:
Right. Sure.Deirdre McCloskey:
I don't blame David Harvey because he doesn't claim to be an economist, but Mazzucato does.August Baker:
Well, thank you so much for speaking with me. It's really been a pleasure.Deirdre McCloskey:
Okay, dear.August Baker:
I'm a big fan of yours for a long time.Deirdre McCloskey:
Thank you very... Well, don't be a fan. Send money.August Baker:
I buy the books. That's something.Deirdre McCloskey:
Buy the books. Buy the books. Okay, dear.August Baker:
Goodbye.Deirdre McCloskey:
Bye-bye.

 

Elijah Anderson Black in White Space The Enduring Impact of Color in Everyday Life

Elijah Anderson

From the vital voice of Elijah Anderson, Black in White Space sheds fresh light on the dire persistence of racial discrimination in our country.

A birder strolling in Central Park. A college student lounging on a university quad. Two men sitting in a coffee shop. Perfectly ordinary actions in ordinary settings—and yet, they sparked jarring and inflammatory responses that involved the police and attracted national media coverage. Why? In essence, Elijah Anderson would argue, because these were Black people existing in white spaces.
 
In Black in White Space, Anderson brings his immense knowledge and ethnography to bear in this timely study of the racial barriers that are still firmly entrenched in our society at every class level. He focuses in on symbolic racism, a new form of racism in America caused by the stubbornly powerful stereotype of the ghetto embedded in the white imagination, which subconsciously connects all Black people with crime and poverty regardless of their social or economic position. White people typically avoid Black space, but Black people are required to navigate the "white space" as a condition of their existence. From Philadelphia street-corner conversations to Anderson's own morning jogs through a Cape Cod vacation town, he probes a wealth of experiences to shed new light on how symbolic racism makes all Black people uniquely vulnerable to implicit bias in police stops and racial discrimination in our country.
 
An unwavering truthteller in our national conversation on race, Anderson has shared intimate and sharp insights into Black life for decades. Vital and eye-opening, Black in White Space will be a must-read for anyone hoping to understand the lived realities of Black people and the structural underpinnings of racism in America. 

Tommie Shelby (Harvard) 

The idea of prison abolition

An incisive and sympathetic examination of the case for ending the practice of imprisonment

Despite its omnipresence and long history, imprisonment is a deeply troubling practice. In the United States and elsewhere, prison conditions are inhumane, prisoners are treated without dignity, and sentences are extremely harsh. Mass incarceration and its devastating impact on black communities have been widely condemned as neoslavery or "the new Jim Crow." Can the practice of imprisonment be reformed, or does justice require it to be ended altogether? In The Idea of Prison Abolition, Tommie Shelby examines the abolitionist case against prisons and its formidable challenge to would-be prison reformers.

Philosophers have long theorized punishment and its justifications, but they haven't paid enough attention to incarceration or its related problems in societies structured by racial and economic injustice. Taking up this urgent topic, Shelby argues that prisons, once reformed and under the right circumstances, can be legitimate and effective tools of crime control. Yet he draws on insights from black radicals and leading prison abolitionists, especially Angela Davis, to argue that we should dramatically decrease imprisonment and think beyond bars when responding to the problem of crime.

While a world without prisons might be utopian, The Idea of Prison Abolition makes the case that we can make meaningful progress toward this ideal by abolishing the structural injustices that too often lead to crime and its harmful consequences.

Review "In this sharp and provocative book, Tommie Shelby shines new light on the misguided logics and harmful practices that structure the entire criminal legal system in America. He engages the political philosophy of Angela Davis to advance our understanding of the legacy of slavery, the impact of racism, the morality of punishment, the limits of reform, the meaning of justice, and other important questions that have been central to Davis's work and the growing movement to abolish prisons. No matter where you stand on the issue, The Idea of Prison Abolition is essential reading that will frame debates about the purpose and function of incarceration for decades to come."―Elizabeth Hinton, author of From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America

"Should our manifestly unjust prison system be abolished or radically reformed? With characteristic philosophical acumen, and by way of a careful, nuanced engagement with Angela Davis's powerful and influential defense of prison abolition, Tommie Shelby's answer to this question is an indispensable contribution to ongoing debates about the function of incarceration within a racially stratified capitalist society. The Idea of Prison Abolition is worldly philosophy at its best, a book from which all parties to these debates stand to benefit, whether they agree with Shelby or not."―Robert Gooding-Williams, author of In the Shadow of Du Bois: Afro-Modern Political Thought in America

"With characteristic clarity and analytical precision, Tommie Shelby offers a probing discussion of the idea of prison abolition. Drawing on philosophy, intellectual history, and the social sciences, he zeroes in on the complex moral meaning of violence. Arguing for much more than incremental reform of the prison system, this indispensable book asks whether prisons must be abolished for justice to be served."―Bruce Western, author of Homeward: Life in the Year After Prison  About the Author Tommie Shelby is the Caldwell Titcomb Professor of African and African American Studies and of Philosophy at Harvard University. He is the author of Dark Ghettos: Injustice, Dissent, and Reform and We Who Are Dark: The Philosophical Foundations of Black Solidarity.   Transcript   This is August Baker. Welcome to Philosophy Podcasts, where we interview leading philosophers about their recent books. Today I'm happy to be speaking to Professor Tommie Shelby about his 2022 Princeton University press book, The Idea of Prison Abolition. He is the Caldwell Titcomb Professor of African and African-American Studies and a philosophy at Harvard University. His previous books include Dark Ghettos, Injustice, Dissent and Reform. And the book, We Who Are Dark, the Philosophical Foundations of Black Solidarity. Welcome, Professor Shelby. Thank you for speaking to me today.

  Prof. Tommie Shelby:


Thanks so much for having me August. I'm looking forward to our conversation.

  August Baker:


Great, thank you. I wanted to start with a quote from Heidegger 1926, the Logic: The Question of Truth. He says, "To philosophies means to be entirely and constantly troubled by, and immediately sensitive to the complete enigma of things that common sense considers self-evident and unquestionable." It seems to me that in this book, you are in line with that definition of philosophy. You're questioning something that common sense seems self-evident and unquestionable.

  Prof. Tommie Shelby:


Yeah, I think I approach philosophy very much in that spirit. I think of, at least those of us who see ourselves in the broadly Socratic tradition of philosophy, see that it's important for us to be disposed to question the taken for granted, the basic common sense things, that are long established and revered, to be willing to turn a critical eye toward it, and think about whether this is something we should continue, or something that we should endorse, despite the fact that perhaps even ages have found it fit to hold onto, or even cherish.

  August Baker:


And in this fascinating book, you... I know the answer, but what is the common sense thing that you're questioning here?

  Prof. Tommie Shelby:


Well, I think a lot of people regard imprisonment as a practice that is obviously required, justified, maybe even something that it would be ludicrous to question. And so, I am taking up the question of, here motivated by prison abolitionist thinkers and activists, of whether we should allow ourselves to just treat the prison as something that has always been with us, will always be with us, can't be questioned, to really ask a question about that practice in much the same way the philosophers have asked similar questions about other practices that are ostensibly for purposes of law enforcement.

The question of death penalty, say just for example, will be a similar question, existed for a really long time, much longer than prison. But yet, philosophers and many others have saw fit to question that practice as a way of enforcing the law. And I think here, we find ourselves interesting moment, where a number of abolitionist have even broken out into the mainstream, to force us in the broader public sphere to take up the question of whether this is a practice that's fully justified. And I think philosophers are well equipped to... Not to settle the matter or anything, but at least to contribute to thinking through that, I think, critical question for our time.

  August Baker:


Absolutely. And it was, I think, one of the reviewers says that... It says that... Well, I'll just go ahead and read the review. This is from Robert Gooding-Williams. This is an endorsement or review of Professor Shelby's book, The Idea of Prison Abolition. "Should our manifestly unjust prison system be abolished or radically reformed, with characteristic philosophical acumen, and by way of a careful, nuanced engagement with Angela Davis's powerful and influential defense of prison abolition. Tommie Shelby's answer to this question is an indispensable contribution to ongoing debates about the function of incarceration within a racially stratified capitalist society. The idea of prison abolition in this book, is worldly philosophy at its best. A book from which all parties to these debates stand to benefit, whether they agree with Shelby or not.@ That's Professor Robert Gooding-Williams.

He raises a number of things I wanted to talk about. One was that whether one agrees with you or not, it's interesting or fascinating to go through your reasoning. Two other things are, well, first of all, the fact that part of what's going on here is you're engaging with the work of Angela Davis. Could you tell us about that aspect of the book, what she means, certainly as an icon, and how you're engaging with her in this book?

  Prof. Tommie Shelby:


Yes. Angela Davis, so many reasons to focus on Davis's work. One reason is that she's been reflecting on and engaging in resistance to the prison system for more than 50 years. In many ways, she became internationally famous as a political prisoner. At least that's how she would've thought of herself. And who famously in part defended herself, against a range of allegations and was acquitted fully and released. And so, she came on the scene in a way as a person who was engaged in anti-prison activism, trying to free political prisoners, was herself political prisoner. And has been for years working in that space among others. That firsthand experience within imprisonment, I think lends a certain credibility, and uses firsthand experience to enliven what could be some rather abstract and dry theoretical how pros, which probably I could be accused of largely engaged in. And through her autobiography, is also very well known autobiography. She kind of tells that story, and her story in the movement in the late 60s and early 70s. So, she's critical in that way.

And she's a touchstone in the abolitionist movement. For those of us who come to the question within the context of the black radical tradition as I do, she's going to be your first stop if you're interested in the question of prison. And for many people made her last stop. And for me in particular, I am a philosopher by training and by disposition, and she's a fellow philosopher. And so, she approaches the questions in a ways that are familiar to me. We often speak the same language around this, which is not always true with others who write about this topic. So, she's a great interlocutor for me.

And so, I decided I would structure the book around, and almost in conversation with her thinking over the years. So, she's principal interlocutor, if you like. And I hope that people will find a better productive way to engage the book, particularly those who have learned about abolition as many people have from reading her work, particular her Are Prison Obsolete?. But of course she's written many other things besides that. So, I hope it'll be a way for people to take the book in the spirit in which I mean it, which is to be in conversation with people who I think are like-minded about many things, but want to think through critically the question about whether the appropriate stance to take here is one of abolition rather than say a more radical reform position, which is my preferred stance.

  August Baker:


Yes. In my case, it was a way for me to be introduced to Angela Davis' work. I think you describe it well, a conversation. And so I, of course, knew the name, but I hadn't never read Angela Davis. But it was a great way to be introduced to her work, to see you in conversation with her. And one of the things you said was that, I'll quote here, "Too often, Davis is treated as a mere symbol of black radicalism and militancy, like a raised fist or an Afro, as she herself laments. As one of our most original and influential philosophers, she deserves the same critical but respectful engagement that distinguished white or male philosophers regularly receive." Can you elaborate on that? I just thought that is what you're doing here, is critically engaging with her. And I thought it was interesting that it seems to be, this is of course in the way she wants to be treated, not as a mere symbol.

  Prof. Tommie Shelby:


Yes. That was very important to me. I think for those of us in the field of philosophy broadly, it's rare to have a person of African descent taken seriously as a philosophical thinker. Even when they are taken seriously, they usually are seen as at best, a popularizer of the thought of some major white male thinker rather than as someone who has original things to say and to teach us. And so, it was important to me to engage her in that way of something I've done in a lot of my work, in engaging other black thinkers, but I had not engaged a black woman philosopher at length in any of my writings. And that's a failing on my part. And I thought it was really important to take a thinker, especially of this stature, and really grapple with her thinking about something she spent a lot of time thinking about.

And so, that was important to me. I think a lot of my colleagues in philosophy would not be so inclined to engage her in that kind of detail. And I think that's a failing on their part, to not be willing to do that. So, it seemed to me important to engage her for both reasons, for the reasons I already gave about just her importance in the field of prison studies. But also just as a thinker in her own right, who has written numerous books and essays, thinking about critical questions of philosophical interest. And that was important to me, that it'd be her that I engaged, and not just people who I think are largely building on the work that she's done, extending work that she's done, that I think that should be rightly credited to her as the most important philosophical thinker on this topic.

  August Baker:


Right. Yeah, no, that was very evident, and I thought it was a great way to structure the book. Another thing that comes up in this endorsement from Professor Gooding-Williams is... And you addressed this in the book. Maybe you could touch on it for our listeners. There's one question, which is, if you had an ideal society, how would you deal with crime? Would you use imprisonment? And then there's another question about, what if you don't have an ideal society or a justice society, how does that change the question? Could you just talk about that? I thought that yeah, that's right. You can't just sit here and think, well, if we had an ideal society, what would we do?

  Prof. Tommie Shelby:


For me, I thought it was helpful to take up the question really as two questions, and you've touched on them. So one question is, can the practice of imprisonment be justified despite many well-known existing structural injustices? Or should the use of prisons be discontinued? Should we stop our use of imprisonment as a practice, wholly or in part, until these injustices have been rectified in some way? But that's a question about what to do now. It's a question about our immediate aim. So, here we are faced [inaudible 00:13:22] society where it's not just that the criminal justice system has many morally objectionable features, is that the social structure that it's embedded in has many objectionable features, and they affect how the prison system, and the [inaudible 00:13:36] system more broadly operates.

And you might think, given the background injustice that we face in the United States and elsewhere, we really can't justify the use of imprisonment to control crime against a background or that. So, that's a position you could take. Or you might think that, as I do, that we should radically reduce our reliance on prison in that kind of context, to really only the worst kinds of wrongs, the kind of wrongs that will be wrong regardless of whether they were prohibited by law, and the kind of wrongs that even though oppress can't justify engaging in. So, if we restrict ourselves to those, that we might think that prison, it could be used in that case, but it's hard to justify its use in a range of other cases against a background of somewhat structural injustice. So, that's a first question.

But as a second question, maybe somewhat more philosophical, at least more familiarly philosophical, where you're asking a question about what a fully just society would require. So, there you're trying to figure out, well, in a fully just society, or either nearly just society, is imprisonment as a practice compatible with such a society? Could you have a fully just society that had this practice of dealing with law-breaking, even of a serious sort? And so that's a question about... A traditional question in many ways, from Plato to now, if you think about, well, how do you think about what justice really requires? And I think abolitionists are interested in that question too. They're interested in the question about what to do now, but also, many of their goals are long term goals and are thinking about what should we aspire to, what should we be trying to bring about? And there the question of, is this a legitimate practice? Even in a fully justice society, I think, is one that philosophers think a pretty well situated to engage with.

  August Baker:


So, the word abolition, we're talking about the idea of prison abolition, of course, you immediately think or associate to the abolition of slavery. And one of the things that just looms so large here is this... And which you deal with and I learned a lot from, is this idea of whether imprisonment, the incredibly high rates of imprisonment of young black men and black people, generally is in a way a continuation of slavery. Can a young black man who is imprisoned, for example, not associate it, see it as a continuation of this longstanding oppression?

  Prof. Tommie Shelby:


Yeah, I think it'd be reasonable for people to focus on the legacy of slavery when thinking about imprisonment in the United States in particular, and maybe in the Americas more broadly. Part of what's going on here, I think, is you have a lot of... Not only unrectified ongoing injustices, that disproportionately affect people of African descent. You also have a large portion of the black population in the United States deeply disadvantaged because of past right brave injustices against them. So, you have a very group that's highly disadvantaged across a range of indices, and that's going to make you very vulnerable to being imprisoned, or defining yourself confronted by law enforcement agents.

And so, there's an obvious connection with the consequences of enslavement, and not only enslavement, but the many unjust practices that came in its way. Jim Crow lasted a hundred years. You have urban ghettoization, as black people try to leave the terror of the south, to find opportunity to industrialize north, and Midwest, and west. They found themselves ghettoized in urban centers, and treated almost, if not just as badly, as they were in the south where they were subject to mob violence and lynching. And so, against the background of that long history, and against the background of existing in racial inequality, it'll be natural to see the high rates of imprisonment of black people as more the same.

  August Baker:


Right, yeah. Actually right.

  Prof. Tommie Shelby:


So, I do see that point of view, and think there's something to it.

  August Baker:


And I think another area I learned a lot about, I vaguely knew about this. But the way prison writings, you compare prison writings to slave narratives, which was fascinating. And you don't say they're the same, you point out really big differences. But I also hadn't been aware, or only dimly aware of how political black prison writings were. You're talking about Huey Newton Shakur, these writings which were in prison, and which were about political consciousness and activism.

  Prof. Tommie Shelby:


Yeah, I'm very interested in... Maybe one thing to say is, a lot of the work I do is philosophical engagement with black life and black letters. A lot of the things I've written of that sort. Anybody who wants to take that up as part of their vocation, you can't just solely focus on the philosophical treatise that we're all familiar with. I love the philosophical treatise, but-

  August Baker:


Then write them.

  Prof. Tommie Shelby:


But if you're interested in black philosophical thought, there are people who do write such treatises, but many people in the history of black political thought and black philosophical thinking, write in other genres. And I don't think that puts them at odds with the broader philosophical tradition, because many of the great philosophers also wrote in other forms, in other genres, including Plato who wrote in dialogues, and the people who wrote autobiographical writings, Augustine and others who sew, and so on.

So, these are familiar forms in a lot of ways, but I think in the professional philosophy now, it's probably not a lot of attention to these other genres of writing, when people are engaged in contemporary philosophical writings. Unless you're working on certain figures, [inaudible 00:20:51]. There are certain figures where it will make sense to do that, because they just don't write in a traditional academic philosophical way. So, that's one thing, and I thought it was important. And so, that's going to be true, even thinking of relatively contemporary black writing. You might find it in the form of a memoir, or even a prison memoir, or prison letters, that might be the form in which the philosophical thinking takes. So, I thought that was important to do there. Because as you already pointed out, your abolition brings to mind slavery, your title, slavery in particular in Americas, it'll be natural to think about the ant-prison movement, contemporary anti-prison movement as analogous to the abolitionist movement against slavery. And abolitionists make that connection themselves.

And so, I thought it would be interesting to think about these prison writings from interesting and highly influential thinkers, in a black radical tradition, as a starting point into the question of anti-prisons theory and practice. And that's the context, the late sixties, early seventies, where Davis forms her anti-prisons consciousness, and becomes the figure that she's known for. So, I wanted to situate her in that context amongst those writings. And she [inaudible 00:22:13] of course wrote an autobiography where a big part of it is about her experience in prison, and with law enforcement generally.

So, I thought that was important to do. There are some differences between that kind of writing and traditional slave narratives. How to point out, among probably the most important one, is that many people who were writing slave narratives engaged their audience, there would've been powerful sympathetic whites correct, who they thought might be able to persuade them to help enslavery.

And so, a lot of people they wrote in that way, they spoke to white audiences, telling their story. Douglas famously telling their story, trying to garner that sympathy to try to tap into the sense of justice of white elites, to help with the movement to enslavery. Whereas, I take it that many of the abolitionists, the radical revolutionary abolitionists from the 60s and early 70s, or later, they would've seen themselves as engaged in a much more militant project. And they were largely looking at people who were oppressed, and the downtrodden, the dispossessed, to try to raise their consciousness and get them to engage in a larger anti-prison movement, that's aimed not just at changing the prison, but changing the world. And so, there your audience is different. The way you might articulate things is going to be different. The rhetoric that you're going to use, is going to be different. So, there are differences though. There are some interesting similarities as well.

  August Baker:


I'd like to read, if you'd indulge me. Here's a prison writing that... Or this is from Martin Luther King Jr, his book, Why We Can't Wait, 1964. He talks about a young black man, I guess in the 30s, who was being put to death in prison... Or he was in prison. And his last words, or the mantra that he was saying over and over was, "Save me Joe Lewis. Save me Joe Lewis. Save me, Joe Lewis." And King writes, "It's heartbreaking enough to ponder the last words of any person dying by force. It is even more poignant to contemplate the words of this boy, because they reveal the helplessness, the loneliness, and the profound despair of Negroes in that period. The condemned young negro, groping for someone who might care for him, and had power enough to rescue him. Found only the heavyweight boxing champion of the world. Joe Lewis would care because he was a negro. Joe Lewis could do something because he was a fighter."

King says, "In a few words, the dying man had written a social commentary. Not God, not government, not charitably minded white man, but a negro who was the world's most expert fighter. In this last extremity was the last hope." There you have an example of powerful prison testimony.

  Prof. Tommie Shelby:


Extraordinary. Totally extraordinary. No, King is of course a hero. And my colleague and I, Brandon Terry, co-edited a collection, To Shape a New World, that was just 15 essays on Martin Luther King's political philosophy. Which also engaged some of these questions we've been talking about genres of writing, and he wrote books too. People don't [inaudible 00:26:13] five books, but people often focus on him as an order, because he was powerful order, and so many memorable lines constantly quoted. But yeah, very much influenced by his thinking, and in particular by that book, Why We Can't Wait, I think it's a great book. People mostly know it because it includes the Birmingham jail essay, though there's much more in there as you just found.

  August Baker:


I want to turn a little bit now to the more philosophical side. I'm not trained in philosophy, and I am often curious about this continental analytic divide. Here's the way you put it, in your own case. "I favor..." You say pluralism when it comes to philosophical method. I think different approaches, phenomenology, critical theory, conceptual analysis, pragmatism, genealogy, which you do in this book, reflective equilibrium and so on, often yield complimentary insights. And this book is an attempt at philosophical engagement across the continental analytic divide. Afro analytic Marxism, as I call it. As someone who's not a professional philosopher but is interested in it, could you speak a bit to that continental analytic divide, and how you were on both sides of it?

  Prof. Tommie Shelby:


Sure. Happy to. One thing I might mention, a couple years ago I was the president of the American Philosophical Association, so eastern division. And as a part of that, you give a presidential address. And I gave a presidential address on Afro analytical Marxism, and the problem of race. That was the title. If you want the detailed version, if you like-

  August Baker:


No, that's good to know.

  Prof. Tommie Shelby:


... how I think about that, it's there and you can find the essay version of it on my website. So, I got interested in philosophy through a course in logic and a course in political philosophy, as an undergraduate. The course in political philosophy was my first introduction to the work of Karl Marx. And I was super interested in his work, and went off to graduate school expecting to continue working on Marx and Marxism, which I, in a roundabout way came around to doing, and wrote a dissertation on Marxism and meta ethics. So, I've been engaged with the continental tradition since I was an undergraduate. In some ways the divide is not terribly helpful, philosophically to focus so much on it.

There are some broad generalizations you could make about different ways of approaching philosophy, say roughly since the influence of Hegel, where you get some people who, I think, are broadly aligned with the humanities and history as disciplines, might be more interested in literature and poetry, oracular forms of wisdom and the like. And Icano tradition has that tendency. Analytic philosophers are often drawn to the sciences, and mathematics, and formal logic, and rely on those in their own work. Tend to maybe pay more attention to the details of argumentation, rabbit in big visions of the world, or of human existence, and the way continental philosophers might be more inclined to. So, there are some very rough differences, but I think they're just really broad generalizations because you could come up with counter examples across both sides of course. So, I see myself as not a part of that fight, I a way. So, I suspect some people who identify more strong as continental philosophy, might not love the way I go at things in my own work, but I try to draw broadly on those.

So, that's another reason for engaging with Davis. Angel Davis, I think, probably would have to be positioned closer to the continental tradition than analytic tradition. Her dissertation advisors, [inaudible 00:30:45], she studied in Germany-

  August Baker:


Frankfurt School.

  Prof. Tommie Shelby:


Frankfurt School, person and very influenced by Adorno and others. And that's her broader orientation is critical theory, as an approach. Whereas I'm much more influenced by the tendencies, and an English speaking mainstream philosophy that traces itself back to people like Birch and Russell and others, who it's a largely stylistic in a lot of ways. But it also, there's some substantive dimensions, in the sense that it's... I do in this book, and maybe it'll put some people off, spend a lot of time trying to carefully explain the key arguments that abolitionists make, and pointing out where I think there are limitations to those arguments, where there might be a bad inference for instance. And that requires going slowly and carefully through the reasoning.

  August Baker:


Absolutely.

  Prof. Tommie Shelby:


So, that is an approach I take, and it is more characteristic of analytic philosophers to do that kind of work. But I'm very much interested in the broader vision. I'm not afraid of providing other genres. I'm not afraid to take up the literary or the historical. I think these are important things to do as well.

  August Baker:


That's very helpful. That makes a lot of sense to me. I appreciate that. Let's do a little of [inaudible 00:32:15]. There's a lot of careful reasoning here, but one of the questions that comes up is, what is a prison? And that's the question you raise. I'll just, the things that I saw here were involuntary confinement, enclosed space, hierarchical daily life, hierarchical institutional practice, isolated from the general public, and there's a sense of custody. And so naturally, one wants to think, well, let's think about what is close to that. And you don't say that that's everything. You say that here are some of the features.

And of course, I immediately thought of working. Going to work, and sometimes spending all of my time at this place where they also have a cafeteria. And all of my best time, certainly the time where I'm most awakened, you're confined in this place. Is it involuntary? That would be a difference. I could conceivably quit. It is an enclosed space. It certainly has a hierarchical institutional, and you are isolated.

Custody is a little bit different, but then there are some forms of occupation where, for example, the military. Well, I've never been in the military, but I imagine it would have even more. So, I think the other thing, and one of the things you raise, is the ghetto. How is the ghetto different from a prison? I think what strikes me that it also is maybe a necessary feature to call something a prison, is that it has to have some shame or public stigma attached to it. That's something where we are saying, you are bad, and you need to be expelled, and you are shunned. You are an example of someone who is not doing well and I am doing better than you. And something like that. It is another feature of that.

  Prof. Tommie Shelby:


Yeah, that's interesting. I did not include the stigmata of prison, as a part of what's constitutive of a prison though I can see why one might be inclined toward that view. I'm very much focused on incarceration, you give it the characteristics of an incarceration right there, which is a broader phenomenon of custodial confinement, and it takes various forms. And so, you mentioned some of the forms it might take or things that are resemble it, or are close to custodial confinement. But in this case the custodial confinement is used as a penalty, or common wrongdoing. That's what makes it a prison, is that it has that particular purpose, which would distinguish it from what you might do in the case of involuntary commitment of someone who's seriously mentally ill, and are dangerous to themselves or others.

  August Baker:


That's why-

  Prof. Tommie Shelby:


It's still custodial confinement, but it's not a punishment. It's not a penalty, unless they've broken the law. And that might be true in other cases too. It might be like if it's a war, and you capture people, you will also hold them in custodial confinement as prisoners of war. But again, it's not a punishment. It's a part of just war practice, to not kill the capture, the people who've surrendered. But to hold them until the dividing has ceased.

So, the practice is used for many purposes. The cadet is custodial confinement, to put it generally, or what I'm here just calling incarceration broadly. And of course, in these various cases, people might react as they do in the case of what people used to call the asylum, or a psychological psychiatric hospital. They might react to the people who spent time in there in a negative way. They might see them as permanently tainted in a way, as marked, in a way in which a prisoner who spent time in prison, even though they're not or may not be mentally ill, as permanently marked by that experience.

So, I didn't treat her as a constitutive feature, though I think it is a not uncommon reaction to the fact that people have been imprisoned, or confined in a psychiatric hospital, that they are stigmatized in this way. And I think that's something to be fought against, is to see people as permanent outsiders cause of that experience. And part of if any justification for the use of imprisonment would have to include serious efforts to allow those after they've been released, to rejoin their community with equal standing. And that's a hard thing to do. It's been hard to do many places. Some society has been more successful than others, but I think that's part of what any radical reform movement should be pushing for, is to try to persuade the public not to treat the formerly incarcerated as permanent outsiders, and no longer deserving of equal citizenship.

  August Baker:


One of the really fascinating parts of the book is when you talk about the official functions of prisons, and then the covert functions of prisons. And also, you talk about the difference between imprisoning someone as retribution versus... Or one might say vengeance as opposed to imprisoning someone for deterrence, and those mixed together because there's the official reasoning and then there's the covert reasoning.

I take it that when you're talking about a book like yours, you're talking about having a public discussion. And the covert reasons are not people are going to... Let's say that a big covert reason for prisons is Schadenfreude. You might say that people like to have an identified group that's doing worse than them, and they feel good. It takes some really, or people just are aggressive and Freud said wolf, "The man is wolf to man." Say something like that. But once you get into discussion, those covert... And you're talking to someone face-to-face, even though they may have them, those are going to fall away once you get into the actual political discussion, or the actual discussion about what are we going to do?

  Prof. Tommie Shelby:


Well, I wouldn't let them fall away exactly. A couple things. So, one of the chapters, chapter three, where I talk about just a broken system to question. And so a lot of abolitionists when they're talking about prisons, what they will say is in response to reformers, who think that, yeah, prisoners are unjust as they exist, but we could make them just. What they'll say, "Well, no, you can't, because you're assuming that they aren't operating as they were intended, or they aren't operating as you would expect them to operate given the kind of thing that they are. So, they think, look, what's happening here is, there's a covert or latent function of imprisonment, and it could be many different things. You mentioned some, but there are others. Maybe it's political repression, maybe it's racial subordination, maybe it's exploitation. And it's disguised by the fact that people present this official function of law enforcement, as a way to prevent or reduce crime.

That's the thing people offer in defense of it. We could talk about retribution in a minute if you like. They offered that, but the reality, so as to abolitionists, is that no, it's real function if you like, though it's latent, and isn't expressed openly, is this other thing. And part of what they're trying to do is to reveal that, reveal that it has that function.

And so, I don't so much dispute that prison sometimes serve these other covert ins, or that they are used for those purposes, or that they have those consequences. I agree, they often do. I take it, the question has to be whether these are inherent, inerrable, incorrigible features of the practice somehow part of the logic, the very logic or the practice that it has these functions. And it's that that I am in disputing, not so much that it often has those consequences. I think that's indisputable, that it often does.

But insofar as the debate is between, as I frame it, and I'm taking this to abolitionist, it's not my framing. That the abolitionist opposed those who think that it's possible to reform the prison, so it will be justified. The critical question is, whether these latent covert functions are features that could be removed or dispensed with, and that you could bring the practice in line with its official purpose or function, namely to prevent and reduce crime. So, I take that that's a critical question, but I wouldn't want to leave those other things off the table, because those things are real, and there are things that should give us pause and should... As I mentioned before, you separate the two questions.

When you're thinking about the first question, that is, what do we do now? It is true that prisons operate in ways that reinforce racial subordination, that exploit the poor, that are vehicle for the repression of political enemies. That these are true things, and you can't deny it. I wouldn't, at least. So, I would want to have that conversation, and that may make a difference to whether it will be legitimate in any given locale to use imprisonment or to what extent it will be justifiable to use it when these are the consequences that you can expect from its use.

  August Baker:


I guess maybe the alternate side, I don't know how to argue would be to say, I guess it's maybe what do you call the hermeneutics of suspicion, or the hermeneutics of paranoia, is that what people say is the function is just a cover story, whether they know it or not. Difficult to know how to argue with someone, or how to change someone's opinion, if they have this cover story that, oh, we're just trying to deter crime here and it's helpful, when really it's something else that they either don't admit or don't even know.

  Prof. Tommie Shelby:


Sure. The question is, how do you resolve that? So, that disagreement. So, in many ways the book is structured, as a debate amongst progressives, leftists, radicals even. So, people who are already extremely unhappy with current social arrangements. So, it's a discussion amongst, that's how I see it anyway.

  August Baker:


That's a very good point. That's helpful. Thank you.

  Prof. Tommie Shelby:


So, you're already taking a skeptical posture toward the current social arrangements. And part of the question is, what should be our stance toward this practice? It's one among many. There are other many other practices within the social structure that you might have problems with. The educational system, healthcare system, military, industrial, complex, what have you. There many other features of it that you might object to.

And there's a question here about, what should your attitude be towards prisons? Now you could, as I discussed in the first chapter, think that even if you thought that under some conditions prisons might be justified, under more just conditions, where there wasn't so much poverty, there weren't all these ghettos. You might think in this context, the important thing you could do is do everything in your power to resist this use of state power, to try to find ways to disrupt it, to weaken it. Because any attempt to try to change the society going to be thwarted, or at least inhibited, by this practice. And so on that point, you could get a lot of agreement, because here we're talking a lot about political strategy and tactics, and what's the right way to approach things. And maybe it's good in that case to de-legitimize the practice, but try to constantly draw attention to its limits, to free as many as you can and so on, because you're engaged in an ongoing struggle against the abuse of state power.

But that's a somewhat different question from the second question I'm trying to address, which is the practice sort of inherently and encouragingly unjust, like say slavery is? Or is it something that you might expect to persist in some form, even on the more just circumstances? That's a different question.

So, I think that sometimes these questions are run together, and I think it's important to see that they have different practical implications depending on how you come down on those questions. In the case of slavery, we all take it, that it's inherently unjust. There's no form of slavery that you can justify to the enslaved.

And so, if you're under unjust conditions, you do everything you can to free as many as possible. You're trying to end the practice and everybody who's in currently enslaved, you want to free them, and you do whatever you can to do that. But you don't expect that there's some form of slavery that will still persist under just conditions. So, that's part of the issue here. Is that the right view to have of imprison and is it like that or is it rather under more just C circumstances? You could justify it, but you can't really justify it under these circumstances, in which case we have to figure out, what's going to be our posture toward it, where we know many people who are unjustly disadvantaged, unfairly marginalized, are going to be caught up in it. But we also think that there are going to be some people who are a serious danger to others, and who can't justify their wrongful aggression against others. What do we do in response to that?

  August Baker:


Absolutely. That's very helpful. There are just so many different levels, and you do a really good job of saying, here's what I'm talking about in this book. Here's what I'm not. And yet, all of these questions come up to the reader so it's fascinating.

I would like to talk about retribution, but we're out of time. I wanted to just have one final thought that just one reader, I can tell you one reaction. You talk about the case in May, 2017, where Tennessee Judge, Sam Benningfield, signed a controversial court order permitting prisoners in the white county jail to receive 30 days off their sentence if they allowed themselves to be sterilized. And several imprisoned women and men agreed to the arrangement. The way you wrote about it, I think one, the reader realizes that really when you are imprisoning someone for a long time, you are in a way sterilizing them, even though they're not... When you put a bunch of men, young men in prison for a long time or for life, you have really engaged in eugenics. You've sterilized them even though you haven't done it medically. It just came to me when I was reading that section of your book.

  Prof. Tommie Shelby:


Yeah, that's super interesting. It used to be the case in the United States, and it is the case in many other places, that conjugal visits are allowed. That's a practice that was ended, for good reason. My own view is that incarceration is the penalty, but people should retain as many of their basic liberties as is compatible with incarceration. That includes the opportunities to work and get an education, practice their religion. And I think to maintain romantic relations with others, so that's possible. There are some limits to that, I get it. But certainly it used to be the case. And again, in some societies it is still the case that conjugal visits are allowed. Now you in the most extreme cases, might not allow it. There might be a person that's just so dangerous that you really do have to maintain that isolation from the general public, but that's not going to be to the vast majority of prisoners.

  August Baker:


And just in closing, I will say to the listeners, also in addition to all the theory, this is also, I felt inspiring, in terms of there are things we can do. I think this idea... That I'll let the listeners read, but this idea of their imprisonment, but it would be like a last option. And that in a way, you try to use the minimal harm to get the effect that you want, and then prison as a last resort. It seemed to me very practical and doable, not this isn't... There's a lot of philosophy, but it seems very practical and doable to me.

  Prof. Tommie Shelby:


I hope the readers will come away with that view. There is a lot of abstract reasoning, but I try to keep it grounded. And the laws of the imprison and what prisons are like, or at least could be like. Or have been in the past, and that it is that way in some places, and not so much in the United States even now to try to, because I think you can't really defend the reform position without trying to think about, well, what could you actually do?

  August Baker:


Yes.

  Prof. Tommie Shelby:


So otherwise, I think the abolitionist is going to have all over you. If you don't have any proposals about things that you might actually do, or be able to point to places where, they actually have been able to do this. We could do it too. Maybe we can't do it in a society that is so highly unequal, and where people are so unwilling to invest in public services, as is true in the United States. Somewhere just, the tax revenue is low compared to lots of other places. People aren't willing to pay for things. And that's not just prisons. They're not willing to pay for education, and healthcare, and roads, and many other things that are really important. So, in that kind of context, yeah, it's going to be very difficult to do it, but it's not that it's practically impossible to do. At least that's what I think currently.

  August Baker:


Absolutely. Well, that was a great read, really. And I really appreciate you talking with me today, professor Tommie Shelby, The Idea of Prison Abolition. Thank you so much.

  Prof. Tommie Shelby:


Thanks for having me. It's been a pleasure.