ReligiousLeftLaw.com

This is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, so ...

 I have decided to use the occasion, with the philosopher Larry May, to think about genocide more widely.

“ [….] Thinking of the Holocaust is useful as a vivid reminder of the way that genocide produces strikingly horrendous suffering of humans, most of whom are innocent and many of whom are children. It is difficult to think of genocide without thinking of the paradigm cases of genocide, and especially the Holocaust. There is ample evidence that those responsible for drafting the Genocide Convention, which occurred only a few years after the end of the Second World War, were similarly and strongly influenced by the Holocaust. If one were Jewish and living in Central Europe in the early 1940s there would surely be very few if any losses that one could experience that are worse than what would have been lost had the anticipated annihilation of the entire Jewish people by the Nazi government been successful. And even without the completion of the ‘Final Solution,’ the sheer number of deaths and untold misery caused by the Nazis in their attempt to destroy the Jewish people is nearly unparalleled in human history and stands as a stark example of all that is horrible about genocide.

Many subsequent instances of genocide have involved large-scale complicity within the larger population, where even the relatives of the victims are often complicit. Many will object that the Holocaust is different, and I will be the first to agree. As Hannah Arendt and others have argued, there was some complicity among some Jewish leaders in the Holocaust, but this was undoubtedly not on the scale that has occurred in other genocides. And the ‘evil’ that was manifest in the Holocaust did not have the same kind of ambiguity than many other genocides have had. Indeed, when people visit Auschwitz or the other death camps, many are literally sickened by what they see. The conclusion seems obvious: international law must deal directly with the perpetrators of genocides such as the Holocaust, if there are any others, in the clearest terms, for this type of wrong is certainly among the worst. Yet … it is not always clear who is responsible for what has occurred in many recent genocides.

If we … think of genocide and the Holocaust as inextricably intertwined then it will be easier to understand why many have seen genocide as the worst of all possible international crimes. In general I do not disagree … about keeping paradigm cases in mind when we examine a moral concept. Yet it is also true that the concept of genocide has been, and is currently being, used for many cases other than the Holocaust. I do not dispute that we should see the Holocaust as one of the most horrible moral atrocities of all time. But insofar as genocide covers more than one case, indeed more than even its main exemplar, we cannot rest with the easy task of explaining the moral wrong of the Holocaust alone to understand the much larger concept of genocide. The alternative … is to look first at the exemplar but then also at the whole range of phenomena that fall under the concept of genocide.

Paying too much attention to the exemplar of the Holocaust may make it difficult to understand the rest of the phenomena, especially insofar as the rest of the phenomena may not elicit the visceral condemnation that is elicited in considering the Holocaust. As I said, I am not opposed to the idea that exemplars and paradigm cases can often elucidate a concept. But if these cases are too closely associated with the concept, it becomes very difficult to know how to deal with other cases that also seemingly fall under the concept. Concepts are larger than the individual instances that fall under them. And, it should go without saying, the category of genocide is larger than the Holocaust.

There is also a problem with the way the definition of genocide was so closely tied to the Holocaust. … I [earlier] argued that the definition of genocide, with a list of only four groups than can be the object of genocide, is conceptually unsupportable. One needs to remember that, at least according to one authority [William Schabas], the four groups—racial, ethnic, national, and religious—were chosen because they best represented the constellation of groups that all intersected with the Jewish people who were the subject of the Holocaust. As various scholars and practitioners have tried to defend the definition of genocide first announced in the Genocide Convention, they have generally failed to account for why just these four groups can be the subject of genocide. Disconnecting the exemplary case from the concept of genocide again seems called for. For this and other reasons advanced earlier … the harm of genocide should not be drawn with reference to [or completely constrained by] the Holocaust.” — Larry May, Genocide: A Normative Account (Cambridge University Press, 2010): 79-81

My compilation on genocide is here. And the compilation on international criminal law is here.

Peggy Noonan's Flawed Saturday Column

In her Saturday column, Peggy Noonan scolded President Biden for unfinished sentences, for an unconvincing retreat from his prior comparisons of those who were opposed to voting rights legislation with Southern racists, for his handling of Afghanistan, and for being old and tired. She maintained that Biden’s new strategy of going over the heads of Congress to communicate with the people will be a failure.

She said: “He is misdiagnosing his problem. It isn’t that his stands and decisions haven’t been fully understood and will be embraced if comprehended more fully. It’s that his stands and decisions the past year were basically understood and disliked. It’s not a communications problem, it’s a substance problem. It would be better if he spent his second year readjusting his positions.”

Noonan’s column is embarrassing. First, it is misdescribes Biden’s strategy. Second, her claim about the popular reception of Biden’s policies is wholly at odds with the evidence.

Part of Biden’s strategy is to take the large pieces of legislation and break them up into smaller achievable pieces. He made this clear at the press conference. Where was Peggy Noonan?

When he goes to the public, he plans to criticize Mitch McConnell and the Republicans for their failure to offer a program of any kind. He asked, “What is Mitch for?” Peggy Noonan’s response? Silence.

Finally, where is the evidence for her claim that his stands were understood and disliked? Whether the issue is voting rights (including the filibuster) or the Build Back Better program), Biden’s policies have enjoyed broad popular support. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/elections/new-polls-suggest-broad-support-democrats-voting-rights-bills-n1277837 ; https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/gop-fails-dent-popularity-biden-s-build-back-better-plan-n1285656 (discussing Monmouth polls). Yes, his retreat from Afghanistan was badly bungled. But he’s not going on the road to talk about Afghanistan. He’s going on the road to build even more support for voting rights and parts of the build back better program, to energize the base for the midterms, and to put the let’s-do-nothing-Republicans on the defensive.  

Even if Putin sends troops into Ukraine and Biden cannot go on the road, it is way too early for the Republicans to break out the bubbly. The Republicans have much to fear in the coming months: The January 6^th Report, the forthcoming indictments of Republican leaders, the blizzard of lawsuits against the states’ voting restrictions, restrictions that would have a deliberate disproportionate impact on people of color, the possibility that Trump will be further disgraced by criminal and civil actions against him and his family, and the public recognition that the Supreme Court has become too extreme to command institutional respect.

Some embryonic thoughts on two facets of terrorism

In the moral and philosophical, as well as legal and political analyses and discussions of terrorism, there remain two topics or issues that still do not receive the attention due them:

First, in mass media reporting and commentary, as well as in public political rhetoric (especially among politicians of all stripes) more generally, there remains comparatively little discussion of “state terrorism.” In the U.S., there is ignorance, motivated or willful and otherwise (e.g., as a result of poor education, lack of sufficient exposure to the requisite information, etc.), of the times and places in which this country has resorted to what is in fact state terrorism (e.g., the bombing of Dresden; the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the firebombing of numerous Japanese cities in WW II; as well the napalm carpet bombing Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia during its war in Indochina). And of course the U.S. is not alone in this regard, we need only look at ample historical examples dating back to the early twentieth century. And the resort to same has not been confined to the world’s most powerful nation-states: of late, Saudi Arabia (in Yemen), Syria, and Israel come quickly to mind in the Middle East. Most of us are no doubt familiar with so-called “lone-wolf” (a horrific term, as this is the sort of violent behavior that is peculiar to human beings, not non-human animals) terrorist acts, dedicated terrorist groups (like al-Qaeda, ISIS, Boko Haram, and to some extent the Taliban), or groups like the (Provisional) Irish Republican Army (IRA) and Hamas that have used acts of terrorism as part of larger and legitimate political and military campaigns and struggles. I am not attempting an exhaustive list or categorization here but want merely to highlight the comparative breadth and depth of attention accorded non-state terrorism. There are a number of possible and plausible reasons which might help us account for if not explain this difference, but we can leave that to a later date.

Second, and with some notable exceptions (e.g., Scott Atran and his research collaborators), there has been little work devoted to the socio-psychological motivations, contexts, and variables that help us make some sense or provide some kind of social scientific understanding and perhaps even explanation of the political and psychological motivations and socialization of those who commit terrorist acts. We prefer to vociferously and self-righteously moralize, judge, or condemn before engaging in sincere or well-intentioned attempts at understanding. At the very least, we could be more modest or circumspect in our moralizing and judgments until we have undertaken the arduous task of understanding.¹ Atran exemplified the seeds of such an attempt in a piece he wrote some years ago in Foreign Policy:

“… terrorist plotters against Western civilian populations tend not to be parts of sophisticated, foreign-based command-and-control organizations. Rather, they belong to loose, homegrown networks of family and friends who die not just for a cause, but for each other. Jihadists pretty much span the population’s normal distribution: There are very few psychopaths and sociopaths, few brilliant thinkers and strategists. Jihadi wannabes today are mostly emerging adults in transitional stages of their lives—students, immigrants, in search of jobs or companions—who are especially prone to movements that promise a meaningful cause, camaraderie, adventure, and glory. Most have a secular education, becoming ‘born again’ into the jihadi cause in their late teens or 20s. The path to radicalization can take years, months, or just days, depending on personal vulnerabilities and the influence of others. Occasionally there is a hook-up with a relative, or a friend of a friend, who has some overseas connection to someone who can get them a bit of training and motivation to pack a bag of explosives or pull a trigger, but the Internet and social media are usually sufficient for radicalization and even operational preparation.”

Related but distinguishable from this concern is the paucity of evidence and knowledge we have about the actual and possible “de-radicalization” of terrorists, one exception to the rule being in the case of “jihadist” Islamists: please see Omar Ashour, The De-Radicalization of Jihadists: Transforming armed Islamist movements (Routledge, 2009).²  In addition to Irish Republicans, I suspect there are instances of this among former Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist) members and Naxalite-Maoist insurgents in India as well as among Communists who have resorted to terrorist acts in Nepal.

One should keep in mind that the endeavor to understand and in some measure explain this kind of political violence at the individual level is not at all equivalent to proffering a moral justification, ideological rationalization, or legal excuse for putative or real terrorist acts.

Notes

1. For a brilliant attempt to address some of the facets of this problem, please see: G.A. Cohen’s essay, “Casting the First Stone: Who Can, and Who Can’t, Condemn the Terrorists?” in Cohen’s posthumously published volume edited by Michael Otsuka, Finding Oneself in the Other (Princeton University Press, 2013): 115-142.

2. Further reading along these lines:

• Atran, Scott. Talking to the Enemy: Faith, Brotherhood, and the (Un)Making of Terrorists (Ecco/Harper/Collins, 2010).
• Bjørgo, Tore and John Horgan, eds. Leaving Terrorism Behind: Individual and Collective Disengagement (Routledge, 2009).
• Boulden, Jane and Thomas G. Weiss, eds. Terrorism and the UN: Before and After September 11 (Indiana University Press, 2004).
• Gambetta, Diego, ed. Making Sense of Suicide Missions (Oxford University Press, 2005).
• Horgan, John. Walking Away from Terrorism: Accounts of Disengagement from Radical and Extremist Movements (Routledge, 2009).
• Sageman, Marc. Understanding Terror Networks (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004).

Relevant Bibliographies

• The American War in Indochina (see too Bombing French Indochina during the U.S. War in Vietnam: a précis)
• International Criminal Law
• Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
• Terrorism
• Violent Conflict and the Laws of War

Preamble to the Constitution: “constitutional goods” and the pursuit of justice ... in light of “the Good”

The Preamble to the U.S. Constitution was signed in convention September 17, 1787 and ratified June 21, 1788.

“We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

It is commonly acknowledged that the Preamble “is a brief introductory statement of the Constitution’s fundamental purposes and guiding principles. Courts have referred to it as reliable evidence of the Framers’ intentions regarding the Constitution’s meaning and what they hoped the Constitution would achieve.”

And yet, constitutional theorists, lawyers and law professors, much of Congress, the Executive branch, and the Supreme Court have, by and large, not accorded sufficient recognition, legal deference and democratic realization to forming “a more perfect union,” “establish[ing] justice,” and “promot[ing] the general welfare,” at least in comparison with the deference paid to and preoccupation with “provid[ing] for the common defense” and “secur[ing] the blessings of liberty,” the last (especially of late) in a largely libertarian Liberal sense which grants social and economic supremacy to capitalist markets (hence the hypnotic and ideological focus on what are termed ‘negative liberties’). As for “insuring domestic tranquility” (this is related to the Rawlsian concern for social stability) the next few decades, if not years, should inform us to what extent that can be achieved within the boundaries of Liberal egalitarian rights and duties as well as democratic participation, deliberation and representation more broadly (that is, if the U.S. can salvage what is left of its constitutional commitments and democracy).

In brief, several of the “fundamental purposes and guiding principles” of the Constitution are deserving of far more attention, elaboration, and fulfillment by all three branches of government, as well as more citizens on the Right side of Mirabeau’s “geography of the Assembly,” many if not most of whom tend not to possess even a decent understanding of their own “self- interests,” let alone evidence a basic appreciation of common and public goods, equal liberties and rights, and the pursuit of justice in light of “the Good.” The term “the Good” is here open-ended and not beholden to any one particular metaphysical doctrine or moral theory, although it has aspirational or perfectibilist (distinguishable from ‘perfectionist’) and cosmopolitan connotations that assume if not cohere with something closely akin to or perhaps even identical with the Rawlsian ideas of “reasonable pluralism” and an “overlapping consensus” under the Liberal constitutional conditions of “democratic law.” Thus one might call it a “thin” theory or model of “the Good,” the “thick” conceptions being peculiar to individual worldviews. Accordingly and ideally, it should be able to capture the particular “truths” or vantage points, or the conceptions of “public reason” peculiar to three distinct Liberal constitutional models or frameworks: libertarian, egalitarian, and communitarian. After Alan Brudner, the “model” or best theory of the Liberal-democratic constitution is one that, by way of critique, subsumes and transcends each model or framework while incorporating aspects of their fundamental principles and values as constituent components of a whole that is sensitive to the pursuit of justice through the means and ends, principles and purposes, provided by Liberalism and democratic law. Being on the Left, I cannot help but point out that this Liberalism in the widest and deepest sense is perfectly consistent with (although not necessarily circumscribed by) ideas of democratic or Liberal socialism as found in the writings of J.S. Mill, John Dewey, and John Rawls, and to some extent, B.R. Ambedkar. And it is, I would argue, consistent with Marx’s vision of a post-capitalist democratic and socialist society.*

* I wholeheartedly agree with the arguments of R.G. Peffer that, in spite of his well-known “anti-moralism” and tendency on occasion to conflate morality and ideology, Marx nevertheless held firmly to (an often implicit) normative moral theory that was part and parcel of his social scientific theory. Please see Peffer’s Marxism, Morality, and Social Justice (Princeton University Press, 1990).

Indemnification of Slaveowners and Black Reparations

I would like to draw your attention to the updated entry on “Black Reparations” in the Stanford Encyclopedia (SEP) by Bernard Boxill and J. Angelo Corlett.* Here is the introduction (and of course I urge you to read the entire piece):

“States have long demanded reparations from other states at the end of wars. More recently non-state actors such as the Aborigines of Australia, the Maori of New Zealand, and many American Indian nations of North America are demanding the return of their tribal lands from Europeans as reparations; Eastern Europeans dispossessed by socialist governments are demanding the return of their property as reparations; and U.S. blacks (black people whose genealogy traces back to slavery within the U.S.) are demanding reparations from the United States of America for the harmful wrongdoings to them caused by U.S. slavery and its aftermath. The last of these demands is our subject.”

*          *          *

In thinking about reparations to blacks we should recall, with our authors, indemnification for slaveowners with the abolition of slavery (‘abolition’ is not equivalent to ‘emancipation, the former being a necessary but not sufficient condition of the latter):

“Demands for compensation related to slavery frequently arose during the U.S. Civil War, but [did] not do so in the way present day U.S. citizens would expect. The demands were not to compensate the black slaves for the injuries of slavery, but to compensate the white slaveholders for the anticipated loss of their slaves. These demands were voiced in the South when they faced the prospect of having to free their slaves, but they were also voiced in the North, and from the highest sources. President Abraham Lincoln, for example, repeatedly urged compensated emancipation, which meant paying the slaveholders for the loss of their slaves who would then be deported from the U.S. Indeed, at one time he appeared to be ready to propose paying the South $400,000,000, for the loss of their slaves. As W.E.B. Du Bois observed dryly: ‘Lincoln was impressed by the loss of capital invested in slaves, but curiously never seemed seriously to consider the correlative loss of wage and opportunity of slave workers, the tangible results of whose exploitation had gone into the planters’ pockets for two centuries.’ (Du Bois 1992 [1935]: 150) And Lincoln did not even sugar coat his deportation proposal with the suggestion that the freedmen were a nation and therefore needed a separate territory on which to govern themselves.”

Here are two more vivid examples of indemnification of slaveowners outside the U.S., from England and France respectively, courtesy of Thomas Piketty:

The British Parliament passed the Slavery Abolition Act in 1832, but the actual elimination was gradual, not taking full effect until some 10 years later. Moreover, it involved the “complete indemnification of slaveowners,” while “[n]o funds were appropriated to compensate slaves for the damages they or their ancestors had suffered, whether serious physical harm or mere loss of wages for centuries of unpaid labor.” While no amount of tort damages could amount to full justice for the harms suffered, for the denial of human dignity and loss or diminution of fundamental liberties and corresponding loss of human welfare and well-being, significant reparations would have been a step in the right direction. In fact, racist discrimination and unequal treatment continued, as “former slaves, once emancipated, were obliged to sign relatively rigid and undercompensated long-term labor contracts, which left most of them in semi-forced labor for long periods after their official liberation. By contrast, in the British case slaveowners were entitled to full compensation for their loss of property.”** The quoted material is from Thomas Piketty in Part Two, “Slave and Colonial Societies,” of his book Capital and Ideology (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2020).

And now France, with even more deleterious consequences:

 “The Haitian case is emblematic, not only because it was the first abolition of the modern era following a victorious slave revolt and the first independence secured by a black population from a European power but also because the episode ended with a gigantic debt that did much to undermine the development of Haiti over the next two centuries. If France finally agreed to recognize Haitian independence in 1825 and to end its threat to invade the island with French troops, it was only because Charles X extracted from the Haitian government a promise to pay 150 million gold francs to compensate slaveowners for loss of their property [‘the figure was based on the profitability of the plantations and the value of slaves prior to the Haitian revolution’]. The government in Port-au-Prince really had no choice given France’s obvious military superiority, the embargo imposed by the French fleet pending a settlement, and the real risk of an occupation of the island. [....]

Recent research has shown that the sum of 150 million gold francs represented more than 300 percent of Haiti’s national income in 1825—in other words, three years of production. The treaty also provided that the entire amount should be paid within five years to the Caisse des Dépôts et Consignation (a public banking institution created during the French Revolution and still in existence today), where it would be paid out to the despoiled slaveowners (which was done), while the Haitian government was required to refinance the loan from the Caisse with new loans from private French banks so as to spread the payments over time (which was also done). It is crucial to recognize the magnitude of the sums involved. With refinancing at an annual interest of 5 percent, typical for the time—not even counting the juicy commissions that the bankers did not fail to add on in the course of numerous partial defaults and renegotiations over the subsequent decades—this meant Haiti was obliged to repay the equivalent of 15 percent of its national product every year, indefinitely, simply to pay the interest of the debt without even beginning to pay down the principal. [….]

The 1825 debt was not definitively repaid and officially wiped from the books until the early 1950s. For more than a century, from 1825 to 1950 [!], the price that France insisted Haiti pay for its freedom had one main consequence: namely, that the island’s economic and political development was subordinated to the question of the indemnity....” — Thomas Piketty, “Slave and Colonial Societies,” in Part II of his book Capital and Ideology (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2020).

* I was surprised to learn that Alfred L. Brophy’s book, Reparations: Pro & Con (Oxford University Press, 2006), was not included in the bibliography for this entry.

** The indemnity was roughly equal to the “market value” of the slaves.

Relevant Bibliographies

• Democratic Theory and Praxis
• The Haitian Revolution
• Human Rights
• Slavery
• After Slavery and Reconstruction: The Black Struggle in the U.S. for Freedom, Equality, and Self-Realization

Democracy & Liberty, Part 3

The previous parts of our series: 1(a), 1(b), 2(a), and 2(b). The first two focus on democracy, the next two concern liberty.

This is our fifth and final installment on “democracy and liberty” from Raghavan Iyer’s book, Parapolitics: Toward the City of Man (Oxford University Press, 1979), specifically, from the beginning of the chapter on “Democracy and Liberty in Emerging Polities.” Iyer’s aim was to “show the complexity of the concepts of democracy and liberty, the variety of concrete conditions, and the specificity of theoretical assumptions upon which they are usually based.” This is a necessary but not sufficient condition for an appreciation of “some of the telling features and immediate problems of the emerging polities [often called ‘developing countries’ and usually and not helpfully grouped together as the ‘third world’], many of which have colonial histories and most of which are “victims of imperialistic domination,” although Iyer notes that these are “not all new countries or new democracies or even newly independent entities,” the salient point remaining that “the world-wide demand for national self-determination and sovereignty has now become essentially irresistible.” Geographically, most of these new States belong to the continents of Asia and Africa, which have given to humanity its chief religions, and now comprise the great majority of the world’s people ….” (Bracketed comments here and below are from yours truly.)

This last snippet from the aforementioned chapter treats “the assumptions underlying the traditional models and modern systems of democracy and liberty [emphasis added]:”

“Both these concepts were conditioned by the intellectual climate of early scientific metaphysics, the ethical flavor of secularized religious values, and the social and economic context of expanding industrial capitalism, as well as the noble but somewhat naïve optimism and enthusiasm of the [European Enlightenment] philosophes and revolutionaries. We cannot trace the details here of the lineage and background of these concepts, but merely indicate a few of the more fundamental assumptions. Political power is assumed to be a finite quantity of storable and distributable force which resides in individuals or in the social system. When it is evenly divided among the crucial agencies of decision-making or when its concentration at a single point is prevented by a complicated machinery of checks and balances, the stable equilibrium of the system is achieved [this ‘equilibrium’ later becomes, for John Rawls, transformed into a more explicitly Liberal and democratic concern for the ‘stability of a well-ordered society of justice as fairness’]. Individuals are motivated by the attractions and repulsions of self-interest [this term has a complicated and a fairly wide range of meanings within the history of political and economic thought in the West; see, for example, the discussion in Stephen Holmes’ Passions and Constraint: On the Theory of Liberal Democracy (University of Chicago Press, 1995)]. Given an atomistic view of actions, interests, and individuals, the pulls and pressures in different directions throughout the system can be seen as reconcilable only in terms of a central harmony carried over from the ancient world into a mechanistic picture of nature and the finite universe. The stress in politics as in science is on regularity, predictability, and manufacturability. This simple model was modified and generalized into a doctrine of political pluralism and the interplay of autonomous centers in our own century.

The pace of change should be slow, measured, and self-regulating, except for inevitable explosions in the system at infrequent intervals [these ‘explosions’ would soon include the ‘manias, crashes, and panics’ endemic to capitalism]. The needs of social life and of State action are generally not so compelling or immediate as to require rapid legislation or even a very strong and expanding government and administration [an essential premise of conservatism and libertarianism]. There should be opportunities for revision and readjustment at all levels of activity, so that the number of irrevocable changes in the system is reduced to a minimum [this is what I have elsewhere described, after Jon Elster and Robert E. Goodin, as the obdurate ideological doctrine of ‘piecemeal (trial-and-error) social engineering and incrementalism,’ which has strong family resemblance to the inordinate fondness for and fealty to tradition, custom or convention and, in common law, a rather strict rendering of stare decisis (precedent)]. A purely utilitarian but cautious conception of government may be combined with a contractual and relatively static picture of society. There is presumed to be a majestic movement in history toward better democracy and greater freedom, toward spontaneous [if not inevitable] social progress. The struggles of the past—between Church and State, Society and State, Government and State, the King and his Barons, Kind and Parliament and the Courts, Government and the Courts, the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat—have all been regarded as essential and ordered phases in a grand sequence, aspects of the folklore of the political odyssey of liberal democracy. The notion of sovereignty, theories of the State, and many other preoccupations of the political theorists of democracy and liberty were doubtless stimulated by such factors as the bitter struggle between Church and State, which has no parallel in the history of many of the emerging polities of today. The acceptance of the System by all classes and groups through a series of struggles resulted in considerable cultural [and especially in the U.S., racist] homogeneity and a common political consciousness. The dissolution of traditional loyalties and local bonds led to a general concern for common rights and wider loyalties. The growth of a civic spirit and of social solidarity thus came to be taken for granted.

A crucial assumption is the unique efficiency of a competitive mechanism of politics, open to all and regulated by its own code [hence ‘self-regulating’], marked by considerable mobility between rival groups and the equalization of risks if not rewards, destined to maximize general satisfaction. [….] The method of arriving at decisions is assumed to be more important than whether the right decision is taken in any situation [‘proceduralism’]. It could be contended that the subordination of democratic theory to rationalist ends and utilitarian procedures is not so much the corruption as the culmination of democratic ideas. However, many critics of democracy complain that there is no real competition, that there are non-competing groups and a collusion between different sections of the ruling class, that the élite in power becomes the Establishment by absorbing potential rivals and by alienating the incurably discontented until they are regarded as the common enemies of the entire System. At the worst the System is a social or economic monopoly, and at its best it is a form of monopolistic competition in which there are clandestine coteries pulling strings behind the scenes and reaching compromises in the hope of deferred if not immediate profits. Apologists and critics of democratic competition share many common assumptions and play into each other’s hand by their respective exaggerations. Mill and Montesquieu as well as Mosca and Marx spoke some truth[s] about democracy and liberty.

An even less pleasant assumption is the uniqueness of particular democratic systems [as in, say, the U.S. or Great Britain, perhaps even in France], which fosters a mystical faith in the inevitability and invulnerability of democracy and liberty in a given country and an obstinate belief in the dubiousness of democracy and liberty elsewhere. The greater the prevailing cynicism, the more the assumption has been cherished. The tragedy of democracy and liberty in the older States, like that of religion and culture, has been their prostitution and desecration in the service of individual and national egotism. A less harmful assumption is the magical potency of political ritual, with its ideal as well as symbolic elements, its capacity to bolster up failing morale and to allay persisting anxieties. Like all ritual, it is impersonal, dramatized, and solemn, an equalizer and a tranquilizer, a medium of expression as well of communication, a substitute for the sense of mystery of the supernatural. When ritual is outmoded and decaying we have democracy at a low temperature. There is, finally, the admirable assumption that political freedom and responsibility could be developed through exercise; that all social problems are soluble by the good sense of every citizen; that every individual is endowed with integrity, conscience, and reason; that the potentialities of individuals are more important than their present capacities; that it is better to reform society than to accept or reject it; that people have the power of grading loyalties as well as being moved by them; that the citizen knows when to resist and how to compromise; that the leader knows how to listen and when to lead; that, in short, it is better to trust than to fear others and ourselves” [emphasis added].  

Relevant bibliographies for this series of posts:

• Beyond Capitalist-Attenuated Time: Freedom, Leisure, and Self-Realization
• Beyond Inequality: Toward Welfare, Well-Being and Human Flourishing
• Capitalist and Other Distortions of Democratic Education
• Constitutionalism
• Criminal Law: Municipal and International
• Democratic Theory and Praxis
• Elections and Voting
• The European Enlightenment
• Global Distributive Justice
• Human Rights
• Immigration & Refugees: Ethics, Law, and Politics
• International Law
• The Political Philosophy of Liberalism
• Marxism
• Toward a Marxist Theory of International Law
• Philosophy of Law and Legal Theory
• Mass Media: Politics, Political Economy, and Law
• Public Health: Social Epidemiology, Ethics, and Law
• Punishment and Prison
• Social Security and the Welfare State
• Transitional Justice
• Utopian Imagination, Thought, and Praxis
• Workers, the World of Work, and Labor Law

Justice Department and the Next Election

Many are criticizing the Justice Department for not indicting those political leaders who had a role in bringing about the January 6^th insurrection. Perhaps, the Department does not want to interfere with the 1/6 Committee and believes time is on its side. Perhaps the Department is already investigating and has managed to avoid leaks.

My hope is this: There has been widespread reporting of Republican plans to steal the future elections by installing ideologues to make decisions about which votes to count and which not. In other words, when Donald Trump or his ilk asks a local official to come up with a few thousand extra non-existent votes, they will already have installed a willing stooge. You might think that no crime has yet been committed because the midterm election and the next Presidential election has yet to take place. But, if the reporting is correct, a crime has already taken place. A conspiracy to commit an illegal act against the United States is already a crime if there is an agreement to do so and an overt act in furtherance of the conspiracy. The Justice Department should be investigating this. To my mind, it is the most important threat to our democracy and the conspiracy should be stopped in its tracks.

Democracy & Liberty, Part 2(b)

This is our fourth installment in this this series, with the fifth and final post, Part 3, to follow anon. Here are Parts 1(a), 1(b), and 2(a).  

Before we proceed with Professor Iyer’s conceptual and political introduction to liberty and liberties in a democracy, I need to get something off my chest: in the U.S. today, millions of Americans demonstrate an impoverished and often implausible knowledge (be it philosophical, political or constitutional) of liberty and liberties (as well as freedom more fundamentally and generally), an ignorance that encompasses democratic constitutionalism, political philosophy and theory, as well as basic morality and ethics. This is evidenced most conspicuously with regard to their beliefs and behavior during the COVID-19 pandemic, when those primarily on the Right believe they have a constitutionally grounded thus a legally protected “right” not to wear a mask to protect themselves and others from getting sick and/or dying (the liberty in question thought to arise from this right). In a future post, we will speak to the topic of “police powers” that are indispensable to explaining why no such liberty exists (as Steve Shiffrin earlier stated, the ‘government has a compelling state interest in requiring its citizens to wear masks in appropriate circumstances’). In Liberal democratic constitutional law, liberties are not absolute, even if they sometimes come close, as with the liberty of conscience or freedom of religion (or, as I would prefer, ‘worldviews’ and ‘lifeworlds’). And Professor Shiffrin also recently reminded us that constitutionally enumerated liberties are invariably “qualified,” and thus not absolute. In the history of political philosophy and politics, even with the most ardent or extreme libertarians, with few exceptions, understood that one’s liberties must be consistent with the liberties of others, and that liberties are limited or end when they interfere with the equal liberty or others or effectively if not predictably deny liberty or liberties to others, most vividly and importantly, when the exercise of one’s liberty directly causes some sort of unreasonable or unacceptable harm or enhances the risk of such harm such as, in our case, severe illness (including the ill effects of ‘post-COVID’) or death. This is but one reason why we rightly speak of the necessity for “equal liberties.”

Raghavan Iyer continues:

“The immediate implications of liberty must be seen in the context of a constellation of factors favorable to the maintenance of a system of liberties. These pertain to a free country, a free society, and a free people in contrast with and enslaved country, and authoritarian society, and a powerless people. Some favorable factors are readily seen and could be easily listed—the existence of a non-political civil service and a non-military police, the former mainly and the latter entirely an instrument of law rather than of policy; checks on delegated legislation and delegated jurisdiction; a considerable area of autonomy for individuals and organizations, with evident exemption from central control or pressure; a tolerance of novelty and a willingness to experiment; intellectual objectivity and a critical spirit; safeguards against conformity, dogmatism, and persecution; adequate avenues for the development of individual talents and capacities; the fearless performance of civic and personal duties; the criticism and correction of existing social institutions, traditions, and conventions; widespread concern for the promotion of tolerance and moderation, plurality, and flexibility in communal life; the general acceptance of rules to regulate competition between individuals and groups, within and between parties and other power-centers; the role of the State in hindering hindrances to the enjoyment of liberties by the weaker sections of society. [….]

Historically, liberties become the foundation of liberty, although liberty is not merely the fortuitous occurrence of liberties. Liberty can only thrive in an atmosphere of creative activity in which there are reasonable restraints on individual judgment so that all moral failures do not become legal crimes, and in which the power of self-determination and freedom of choice are sufficiently cherished for the individual to function as a person and a citizen, not as a mere subject or as a slave except in name. It is not always noticed by libertarians, all too conscious of the bitter struggles that led to formal liberties and their social sanctions, that real liberty, like true democracy, is inimical to any form of intimidation, manipulation, or coercion even to secure the most exalted ends. [….]

In totalitarian countries the Leviathan has almost swallowed up the right of the individual to his own soul, habeas animum, while in democratic countries there has been a growing tendency for the small man, habeas homunculum, to be sacrificed to raison d’état. There is no doubt that democracy is more conducive to liberty than any other system of government yet devised. It provides the necessary link between liberty and equality, though a democratic government is sometimes required by the people at large to promote equality even at the expense of liberty. Bergson assigned to democracy the role of the reconciler between égalité and liberté under the banner of fraternité. Historically, the struggle for liberty, the quest for equality, and the movement toward fraternity have been stressed almost as successive phases in the development of democracy. [….] Ideally, a proper democratic system can be effectively established only in a society of equals in which every citizen has the full liberty to realize his own ends and the moral responsibility to serve the purposes of the community. This being unattainable at present, we must consider the extent of freedom from executive restraint as the test of democratic efficiency and rely on various forms of voluntary association to safeguard liberty in a democracy. We can secure neither democratic ends through undemocratic means nor liberal aims through illiberal methods. If this is understood, it will be easier to see why democratic ends cannot be secured through illiberal means and why liberal aims cannot be achieved by undemocratic methods. Those who postpone or destroy present liberties in the name of future freedom are the friends of neither liberty nor democracy.”

Our fifth and final installment—Part 3—in this series will speak to some of the questionable when not troubling or dated assumptions “underlying the traditional models and modern systems of democracy and liberty.”

Democracy & Liberty, Part 2(a)

We continue our conceptual and political if not philosophical introduction to democratic theory and praxis provided by the late Professor Raghavan Iyer from a chapter in his book, Parapolitics: Toward the City of Man (Oxford University Press, 1979), with the material on “liberty” and liberties within democratic societies. Part 1(a) is here. Part 1(b) is here, and Part 2(b) is forthcoming.

“While the concept of freedom is both broader and deeper than that of democracy [cf., for example, its metaphysical and ontological meanings in Kant’s philosophy, Sartrian existentialism, or Indian philosophies and, most recently, a book on the subject by the inimitable Raymond Tallis] the concept of liberty is narrower but no less significant. Although it has positive as well as negative aspects, it means, strictly and etymologically, exemption from tutelage and tyranny, from external restraint and arbitrary power. Every notable instance of such an exemption is called from medieval times a liberty, or, in more modern jargon, the establishment of a claim or right. Some of these are often see as natural or fundamental and implicit in the definition of man [here is where liberty merges with freedom]. While these and other rights may be sanctified by notions of natural law, they are safeguarded by sanctions of man-made law. Liberty is the product rather than the sum of particular liberties; it stands for a system rather than a set of rights, as the interrelations of all affect the implications of each. These liberties may be seen as pertaining to different spheres of activity—religious, civil, political, and personal; or to various human functions—thought, conscience, speech, movement, association; or the other things most men value—life, education, happiness, property, power, reputation, conviction, intellectual and social intercourse; or to institutions and organizations—schools, trade unions, parties, the courts, local bodies, reform societies, vocational groups, business firms, the media. Individual liberty seems always to have to run faster to keep in the same place, despite the nostalgia for a simpler and purer world of the past.

The essential elements in the concept of liberty remain unaffected by its ever-expanding application to an expanding social universe. There has always been a commitment to fewer restraints, wider choices, and greater self-determination, although these have been viewed in the varied historical struggles for liberties by master and slave, feudal lord and serf, the rural aristocracy and the urban bourgeoisie, worker and peasant, producer and consumer, landlord and tenant, the intelligentsia and the proletariat, the imperialist and the revolutionary, the haves and the have-nots in every sphere. In Athens, the idea of liberty was incarnated into particular forms such as isegoria or equality of speech, isonomia or equality before the law, isocratia, or political equality, and parrhesia or equality and freedom of speech. It is no doubt a far cry from the claims and concessions of the Magna Carta to William Blackstone’s statement in the eighteenth century concerning the absolute rights that belong to every citizen under a system of law which reduced the natural liberty but increased ‘civil liberty of mankind.’ Today we can see more clearly and state more explicitly the essential elements in the idea of liberty:

1. All men are equally entitled to liberty, for liberty without equality of rights is meaningless in the social context.
2. Liberty for all means equal restrictions and reciprocal obligations for all. There is a contractual as well as an egalitarian element in the idea of public liberty.
3. The restrictions imposed on citizens by the laws of the State must be laid down specifically so that may never be increased without adequate justification in the eyes of those subjected to them.
4. Certain liberties are regarded as inviolable but they need to be supplemented by new liberties.
5. These liberties must be guaranteed by constitutional or statutory law and safeguarded by impartial courts of justice.
6. It must be possible to effect changes in the social and political system to increase the amount of liberty available to all classes of people as well as to secure a better implementation of existing liberties.
7. There must be adequate means to prevent the overthrow or exploitation of the system by the internal and external enemies of liberty.

Implementation of these essential elements  in the concept of liberty through suitable institutional and constitutional devices is not enough for a liberal society. There must also emerge an awareness of their rights among all the members of a community, together with a deep-seated respect for the dignity and worth of the individual. There must be free legal aid and equal access to the law. Every citizen must be competent to claim his own rights and have adequate opportunities to claim and maintain his liberties. This implies a commitment to a minimum standard of social and economic security as well as basic and civic education [emphasis added].

Part 2(b) on liberty and liberties should be our final installment. Part 3 will be our fifth and final installment.

Democracy & Liberty, Part 1(b)

This is the second in a series of posts on this subject by the late Professor Raghavan Iyer that was introduced here.

“The essential elements in the everyday concept of political democracy must be appreciated if we are to lay down the minimally necessary institutional conditions [emphasis added].

1. Even if all cannot govern, all citizens must be allowed to choose who can govern. [Of course here what is important is that we have a definition of citizenship that includes all who have reached, as we say, “the age of reason” or are deemed adults, regardless of their ethnicity, worldviews, gender, and so forth. Given the nature of human judgment and political judgment in particular, we will endeavor to provide sufficient forms of formal and informal education and socialization or enculturation such that it is less likely that these citizens will not have malformed judgments or judgments distorted or trumped by those forms of well-known debilitating psychological and emotional phenomena that tend to make mincemeat of rationality and the voice of reason.]
2. Those who are chosen as eligible to govern must represent those who cannot govern. [This may seem obvious, but history has shown us how elusive this often can be.]
3. Those who are eligible must in turn choose those who will govern. [In a footnote Iyer writes: ‘If the word “choose” here is taken literally, the entire model would be applicable in parliamentary democracy. If taken in a looser sense to apply widely to all those who fulfill important political roles, the model can cover many types of democracy.’]
4. Those who do govern must be responsive and responsible to the people through representative and also behave as if they were themselves the foremost trustees and representatives of the people, including those who are opposed to their policies and positions [emphasis added].
5. All citizens must be allowed to replace or re-elect those who may and those who do govern.
6. Those who are chosen as eligible to govern must be able to remove or replace those who do govern when they no longer enjoy their confidence or the support of the people.
7. There must be adequate opportunities for all these choices to be made and to be realized, as also for the enlargements of the area of choice and the capacity to choose, thus tending to equalize the chances of all to secure their choices and to be chose as representatives or as rulers.

These essential requirements of the concept of democracy can only be realized through appropriate institutions and arrangements. Power must be diffused as widely as possible and not concentrated in a few centers if democracy is to secure unity without loss of freedom, equality without mediocrity, variety without sacrificing unity, progress without endangering either unity or liberty [emphasis added].  

If democracy is viewed mainly as a social theory, there is a natural tendency to think of it in terms of a metaphysical, sociological, or psychological archetype, abstracted from a historical and cultural context. In fact, democracy is a system of government which is determined not only by minimal institutional conditions but also by varying constellations of supporting and sufficient conditions. A democratic society, like a developed economy, has its own infrastructure conducive to political democracy as to economic development. It is not feasible to describe exhaustively the elements in this infrastructure, or even to decide definitively which are necessary and which are sufficient conditions. [J.S.] Mill mentioned two necessary conditions—the popular willingness to receive, defend, and preserve democracy, and to discharge the functions it imposes on its supporters. Tocqueville pointed to a variety of factors that supported and reinforced democracy: the application of the federal principle; the vitality of local institutions; the strength and scope of judicial power; the role of a healthy religious spirit in a secular polity; social equality; expanding opportunities; a restless and enterprising, and independent temper; the capacity for and the quality of self-legislation; the existence of numerous non-governmental associations [today we might term these ‘reference groups’ and ‘communities’ of one kind or another]; and a variety of avenues of social cooperation. Three others are stressed by James Bryce: the reforming zeal of citizens and their readiness to assume responsibility for public institutions; the role of intellectual and cultural élites in the formation of opinion and the stimulation of thinking on public questions; and the prevailing sentiment of national unity. [….]

There are many more stabilizing factors and dynamic forces favorable to democracy, some so obvious that they are mistakenly believed to be universally necessary, others so subtle and intangible that they are often overlooked. The latter include the following factors, which can only be listed here: the existence of independent institutions respected for their integrity and fearlessness in the face of the State; the ability of people in general to distinguish between the men in power and the System; a nationwide structure of democratic education; the adoption of democratic methods within nonpolitical bodies wherever possible [emphasis added; the last two italicized items call to mind such different individuals as John Dewey, Paolo Freire, Septima Clark, and Myles Horton, as well as models of education found in anarchist thought and experiments]; sufficient diversity of desires and expectation to reduce the stress and strain of competition [the most troubling forms of which are intrinsic to capitalist societies]; intellectual resilience, cultural flexibility, and social mobility; the continual narrowing of the gap between privileged and weaker groups so as to reduce the intensity of conflicts of interest in society; the ability of leaders to influence and be influenced by the widest possible range of public opinion; the sense of responsibility and the self-denying role of élites; a steady rise in the ethical and cultural level of the community; a spirit of trusteeship and a capacity for admitting and correcting errors among those who constitute the administration; a climate of thought and conduct that fosters intellectual honesty and individual initiative. It is only the essentials—conceptual and institutional—of democracy that can help us to identify a democratic regime, although its evolution cannot be understood except in terms of the infrastructure of the society in which it functions. Much intellectual and practical harm has been caused by ignoring these caveats.”

Part 2(a) will cover Iyer’s succinct introductory and incisive discussion of liberty as it is (like equality and fraternity or solidarity) an integral part of democratic theory and praxis.

Democracy & Liberty, Part 1(a)

I want to share some material from a book by one of my late professors at UC Santa Barbara, Raghavan Iyer, from whom I took several undergraduate classes in political philosophy (including one on anarchist thought) back in the 1980s. I am copying some of Iyer’s passages on “democracy and liberty” from the chapter, “Democracy and Liberty in Emerging Polities,” in his book, Parapoltics: Toward the City of Man (Oxford University Press, 1979), in particular his conceptual and political introduction to democratic theory and praxis, leaving out the incisive material on its relevance to actual, necessary and possible roles in emerging democratic states (at least at the time this was written) outside of Western Europe and North America, however germane his perceptions, analysis, and suggestions remain, even today.

This will serve as a necessary backdrop to a forthcoming post on recent articles alerting us to the immanent fact that democracy in the U.S. is but a simulacrum of what it can or should be, and what is more, what is left of “democracy” in this country is under imminent threat for a number of reasons and in several ways which have combined to mutually reinforce their destructive potential through the precipitous rise of populist and authoritarian forces that have, in turn, come to a head with the Presidency and cult of Donald Trump. Of course these forces have a generative history on multiple fronts that cannot be recounted here so suffice to say that they did not arise spontaneously or unexpectedly, as cultural, economic, and political trends and factors (both national and global) have recently coalesced (as if on a slippery slope) so as to be amenable to ideological expression and political action and mobilization on the Right, a Right that is no longer aptly circumscribed and defined by principles of a largely Liberal “conservativism,” even if it represents the logical and immoral extension or deformation of some of those principles. The principal vehicle and (de facto and de jure) leadership of this mobilization is provided by congressional Republicans in both the House and Senate and by party members and supporters in mass and social media that have largely given themselves over to blatantly regressive and fascist methods and politics, having reached the tipping point of authoritarianism. But more on that anon.

In what follows, and in part for reasons of length, I will pay more attention to democracy than liberty, so please do not infer anything about their comparative worth or importance from that fact. In Part 2 we will examine what Professor Iyer wrote about liberty (and liberties) in conjunction with democracy.

As a prelude to the principal passages copied here, Iyer reminds us that “[e]very political idea casts its ideological shadow,” and that even among the most sincere and ardent democrats and libertarians there are three “illusions that die hard and have culminated in corresponding myths, these illusions falling under the headings of “political arithmetic,” “political algebra” and “political geometry” (which we will not here address), all of which contribute, among other things, to a failure to appreciate that, “[d]emocracy and liberty, like all political concepts, have a high degree of open-endedness and inevitable imprecision,” while being “conspicuous for their enormous emotive flavor and hortatory [and thus rhetorical] functions.” That said,

“Democracy may be viewed as an ideal, a method, and a process. From all three standpoints, it has a fundamental purpose which gives it a value of its own that makes it seem—like liberty—an end in itself. This purpose is political education in the widest and best sense, a strong commitment to training the populace in the arts of individual citizenship and collective coexistence. As an ideal, it is a system of self-rule that makes no distinction between the government and the governed on the personal, local, or national planes of decision making. This ideal being unattainable on a large scale or at the existing level of individual development, pure democracy remains [in several respects, like utopian thought], a notional norm, a conceptual model. The reconciliation of this remote yet powerful frame of reference with existing realities has necessitated popular myths and political fictions as well as a host of pragmatic devices and social conventions. The myth of popular sovereignty, the fiction of the general will, the device of representative government, and the convention that distinguishes the State from the government, are obvious examples.

As a method, democracy is a peaceful mode of securing agreement through free discussion, of settling disputes through various types of arbitration, and of civilizing the procedures of expressing and maintaining disagreement in an atmosphere of amiable tolerance, self-restraint, and mutual respect between person, parties, and groups. As this method is elusive and subtle, there has been in practice a fetishistic tendency toward formalism, toward the exaltation of conventional procedures and known precedents. As a process of political activity, democracy is a system of popular consent as well as responsible government, of dialogue and dialectic. To use the language of Lenin, it is a talking-shop as well as a working-shop. The dialogue is open to all, ceaseless in operation, and assumes a variety of forms and channels as well as periodic opportunities for the articulations of the wishes and will of the populace [reduced by rational choice oriented economists and political scientists to ‘preferences’]. The dialectic provides for the periodical replacement as well as the perpetual replaceability of the existing rulers, while at the same time enabling them during their tenure to exercise power effectively on behalf of their electors. This process contains within itself its own contradiction consequent tensions, as it is not easy for any government to remain both responsive and responsible to those who brought it into existence as well as those who desire its downfall. How to secure intelligent popular participation and to safeguard against indifference and inertia, how to preserve freedom and to prevent anarchy, how to obtain strong and popular leadership and to avoid demagogic or despotic tendencies—these problems face every democracy in the context of its own internal contradictions and inner tensions. It is helpful to remember that democracy, in its present form, is of relatively recent origin [the late 18^th century] and is frequently in a state of internal crisis, or of emergency caused by external forces. Democracy in wartime or under the stress of an economic crisis or national emergency, in the face of bankruptcy or breakdown, demands so many restraints on itself as a process or as a method that it remains chiefly an ideal that lives by the faith of votaries in itself, its past, and its future. Thus democracy may be seen as a faith as much as anything else [although that particular description may have rubbed them the wrong way, it was no less true of the radical republican democrats of the European Enlightenment and French Revolution]. It presupposes faith in the possibility of securing responsible government through representative institutions, of reducing arbitrary action and achieving equity and equality through legislative and judicial means, and of inducing voluntary cooperation and popular support in a free society. Democracy has its own distinctive approach to the three crucial problems of politics, centered on social power and human wisdom—the problem of authority, the problem of law, and the problem of obligation. The democratic approach must be governed by genuinely democratic conceptions of welfare, justice, and freedom.”

I hope to post Part 1(b) in a day or two, after which Part 2 on Liberty (with two or three installments) will follow. Then, as noted above, we will address recent analyses of what forces are responsible for degrading—and may eventually destroy—what counts for democracy these days in the U.S. After that, I want to share the main arguments from Seana Valentine Shiffrin’s profound and timely book, Democratic Law [The Berkeley Tanner Lectures, ‘reworked,’ 2017] (Oxford University Press, 2021). Standing on the shoulders of others, I may add some comments as well so as to locate her argument within the body of literature on democratic theory and praxis and jurisprudence as it relates (or might or should relate) to same.  

C.L.R. James (4 January 1901 – 19 May 1989), Marxist humanist, Afro-Trinidadian socialist, historian, journalist, and essayist

Today is the birthday of C.L.R. James (4 January 1901 – 19 May 1989), the remarkable Marxist humanist and Afro-Trinidadian socialist, historian, journalist, and essayist. 

Here are two of my posts from the archives on James: From “Cricketing in Compton” to the “Cricketing Marxist,” and The Marxist Spirituality of C.L.R. James. The following works help illuminate the life and writings of C.L.R. James, the “cricketing Marxist” and “urbane revolutionary:”

• Bennett, Gaverne and Christian Hogsbjerg, eds. Celebrating C.L.R. James in Hackney, London. London: Redwords, 2015.
• Bogues, B. Anthony. Caliban’s Freedom: The Early Political Thought of C.L.R. James. London: Pluto, 1997.
• Buhle, Paul. C.L.R. James: The Artist as Revolutionary. London: Verso, 1988.
• Buhle, Paul, ed. C.L.R. James: His Life and Work. London: Allison & Busby, 1986.
• Douglas, Rachel. Making The Black Jacobins: C.L.R. James and the Drama of History. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019.
• Featherstone, David, et al., eds. Marxism, Colonialism, and Cricket: C. L. R. James’s Beyond a Boundary. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018.
• Gair, Christopher, ed. Beyond Boundaries: C.L.R. James and Postnational Studies. London: Pluto Press, 2006.
• Glaberman, Martin, ed. Marxism for Our Times: C.L.R. James on Revolutionary Organization. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1999.
• Grimshaw, Anna, ed. The C.L.R. James Reader. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1992.
• Henry, Paget. Caliban’s Reason: Introducing Afro-Caribbean Philosophy. New York: Routledge, 2000.
• Høgsbjerg, Christian and Charles Forsdick, eds. The Black Jacobins Reader. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017.
• Renton, Dave. C.L.R. James: Cricket’s Philosopher King. London: Haus, 2007.
• Robinson, Cedric J. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. London: Zed Books, 1983.
• Rosengarten, Frank. Urbane Revolutionary: C.L.R. James and the Struggle for a New Society. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2008.
• Smith, Andrew. C.L.R. James and the Study of Culture. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
• Webb, Constance. Not Without Love: Memoirs. Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 2003.
• Worcester, Kent. C.L.R. James: A Political Biography. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1996.

One might also read two other books that are not about James or Black Marxism as such: first, Tommie Shelby’s We Who are Dark: The Philosophical Foundations of Black Solidarity (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005) which makes a compelling argument for aiming to “achieve a robust form of black solidarity without a commitment to black identity,” a view I think has much in common with James’ Marxist humanism. And then Michael C. Dawson’s Blacks In and Out of the Left (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), which is a brief history of black radicalism in the United States toward outlining the elements of a progressive black radicalism for our own time and place. In the words of Shelby, “in the spirit of hope and possibility, it calls for utopian yet pragmatic political thinking that regards independent black political organizing not as a balkanizing force or distraction from the ‘universal’ fight for a democratic society, but as an indispensable element of any viable Left-wing politics.”

Most of the major works (books only) of C.L.R. James (for a comprehensive list, see the bibliography for ‘published primary sources’ in the Høgsbjerg and Forsdick volume above):

• James, C.L.R. Minty Alley [a novel]. London: Secker and Warburg, 1936.
• James, C.L.R. World Revolution, 1917-1936: The Rise and Fall of the Communist International. London: Secker & Warburg, 1937/ New York: Prism Key Press, 2011.
• James, C.L.R. The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. New York: Random House/Vintage Books, 2^nd, 1963/1989 (1938).
• James, C.L.R. A History of the Pan-African Revolt. Oakland, CA: PM Press, in conjunction with Charles H. Kerr Publishing Co. (Chicago), 2012 (1938).
• James, C.L.R. (Noel Ignatiev, ed.) A New Notion: Two Works by C.L.R. James (The Invading Socialist Society and ‘Every Cook Can Govern’). Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2010 (1947 and 1956, respectively).
• James, C.L.R. Beyond a Boundary. London: Stanley Paul & Co., 1963/Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 50th anniversary edition, 2013.
• James, C.L.R. The Future in the Present. London: Allison & Busby, 1977.
• James, C.L.R. Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution. London: Allison & Busby, 1977.
• James, C.L.R. Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In. Detroit, MI: Beswick, 2^nd, 1978/London: Allison & Busby, 1985.
• James, C.L.R. Notes on Dialectics: Hegel, Marx, Lenin. London: Allison & Busby, 1980.
• James, C.L.R. Spheres of Existence. London: Allison & Busby, 1980.
• James, C.L.R. At the Rendezvous of Victory. London: Allison & Busby, 1984.
• James, C.L.R. (in collaboration with Raya Dunayevskaya and Grace Lee) State Capitalism and World Revolution. Chicago, IL: Charles H. Kerr Publishing Co., 1986.
• James, C.L.R. (Anna Grimshaw and Keith Hart, eds.) American Civilization. Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1993.

Religious worldviews/lifeworlds and the spiritual dimension

(A lifeworld is the individual or idiosyncratic appropriation and understanding of a worldview that typically departs in this or that manner from the orthodox or officially prescribed or expert/authoritative doctrines of institutionalized religions. Lifeworlds may also include ideas, ideals, values, beliefs and so forth that are not in any way intrinsically connected to the worldview, such as a penchant for astrology, or the belief that life exists on other planets, or an inordinate fondness for baseball!)

When I taught a course on “world religions” at our community college I tried to get my students to appreciate the fact that it is quite difficult if not completely misleading to make (or foolish to even attempt) plausible “grandiose” empirical or sociological or historical generalizations about religious worldviews as such (especially, but not only, if they were but dimly aware of Judaism, Christianity and Islam). Instead, we need to examine, for better and worse, religious doctrines in all their plurality, the different forms of religious institutions, the different kinds of religious communities and groups, the different sorts of religious persons, the creation of “sacred” art and so forth (I have elsewhere attempted to identify the ten main characteristics or dimensions of religious worldviews).

This came to mind again when I was reading … and thinking about the Catholic Church in France during the Enlightenment and French Revolution. How different this sort of Catholicism was and is from the Catholic faith later evidenced in the Catholic Worker movement or the liberation theology that for a time flourished in the “base communities” of Central and South America, for example. Religions, I insisted in the classroom (not effectively, I suspect), are what people make of them, thus they are, from the outside looking in, constructed by all-too-human beings who are afflicted with the vices and virtues, the ignorance and illusions, the cognitive biases and vehement passions, that afflict everyone else. This is true irrespective of their various (divine or sacred) “beginnings:” in revelation, dreams, prophecy, meditation, mystical experience, what have you. Consider, for example, the differences between two well-known Christians no longer with us: the American Southern Baptist pastor, televangelist, and conservative activist, Jerry Falwell Sr. on the one hand, and the South African Anglican bishop and theologian Desmond Tutu, on the other. When the more strident atheists polemicize against religions, they frequently ignore the genuine “messiness” or complexity of religions on the ground, as we say, let alone their theological or philosophical diversity and sophistication. And very few of these folks, if any of them, are well-acquainted with (i.e., have studied in some depth) religious worldviews of both Western and Eastern provenance.

For myself, I have long been intrigued by the question of whether or not what the philosopher John Cottingham identifies as the “spiritual dimension” of religious worldviews (which partially overlaps with a secular or humanistic version of same found in non-religious worldviews, philosophies, and lifeworlds), that is, the focus on “spiritual exercises” or a spiritually (and thus psychologically) therapeutic regimen conducive to individuation, self-transformation, and self-realization (all of which assume ‘moral autonomy’) is unavoidably dependent (as a necessary condition) on religious traditions. In other words, can such spirituality ever be wholly divorced from religions as we know them? The “communitarian” response to this question has been an emphatic “no,” while a genuinely Liberal answer is more ambivalent, or at least it admits that individuals, having reached the age of reason, are free to do what they want with the worldviews or ideologies or cluster of beliefs and values in which they have been reared (such socialization and enculturation ranges from weak to strong, deliberate to inadvertent). This implies that one can, or perhaps should, fashion one’s own lifeworld, the danger here being that one will be tempted to select beliefs and values and practices that suit one’s existing temperament and biases, one’s dispositional vices and cognitive blind spots, one’s indulgence in self-deception and wishful thinking, in short, construct a lifeworld that is “comfortable,” one that provides no challenges by way of ego-transcendence, a worldview and lifeworld that becomes merely a poorly disguised form of personal identity and debilitating ego-orientation inclining us toward the pleasure principle. I imagine there might be ways out of this conundrum, but that will be material for another day.