Princeton University Press Blog
Mind over chatter since 1905
New editions of works by Isaiah Berlin will be rolling out this spring into next fall! Among the works that will be reprinted is one of his quintessential collection of essays, The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy’s View of History.
Berlin’s work has influenced numerous other scholars and philosophers specifically due to his work on positive and negative liberty on the value of political freedom and value pluralism. Most recently, Berlin’s writings on hedgehogs and foxes have been utilized in a piece examining the state of British politics.
Read the piece from the Wall Street Journal below to see how Berlin’s work still relates to our current events.
The Rise of the UKIP ‘Hedgehogs’
The ‘foxes’ of European politics have presided over a still-ongoing car crash.
By DOUGLAS MURRAY
A divide has opened in British politics. It is not between north and south, or left and right, but between hedgehogs and foxes.
Isaiah Berlin first popularized the idea (taken from a fragment of the Greek poet Archilochus) that “the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” He used the notion to categorize the difference between various thinkers. But since last week’s local-election upset for the U.K.’s major political parties, it is a way to understand our changing politics.
For some years, in Britain and the rest of Europe, politics has been dominated by foxes who knew (or at least pretended to know) many things. They were of varying quality: some sleek and impressive, others akin to those mangy specimens you find in cities. But whatever their attributes, the foxes also presided over a still-ongoing, continent-wide car crash. So today, in a time of apparently endless and insoluble crises, the attraction of those who know one big thing is very considerable. And if that one big thing happens to be the big thing of your day? Well then perhaps it is right that we’ve arrived at the age of the hedgehog.
Read the complete article here: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323372504578464704081223308.html?mod=wsj_streaming_latest-headlines
This week we have a couple of PUP books for any prospective Hogwarts student seeking placement in the Slytherin house. These students certainly get a bad rap for being evil with alum like Draco Malfoy and Lord Voldemort- oops, I said his name! However, I think the more redeeming quality of these students is that they are fierce in their quest for power. What would a Slytherin read?
1. How to Run a Country: An Ancient Guide for Modern Leaders ed. Philip Freeman- Cicero’s ancient advice could help them climb to the top.
Marcus Cicero, Rome’s greatest statesman and orator, was elected to the Roman Republic’s highest office at a time when his beloved country was threatened by power-hungry politicians, dire economic troubles, foreign turmoil, and political parties that refused to work together. Sound familiar? Cicero’s letters, speeches, and other writings are filled with timeless wisdom and practical insight about how to solve these and other problems of leadership and politics. How to Run a Country collects the best of these writings to provide an entertaining, common sense guide for modern leaders and citizens. This brief book, a sequel to How to Win an Election, gathers Cicero’s most perceptive thoughts on topics such as leadership, corruption, the balance of power, taxes, war, immigration, and the importance of compromise. These writings have influenced great leaders–including America’s Founding Fathers–for two thousand years, and they are just as instructive today as when they were first written.
Organized by topic and featuring lively new translations, the book also includes an introduction, headnotes, a glossary, suggestions for further reading, and an appendix containing the original Latin texts. The result is an enlightening introduction to some of the most enduring political wisdom of all time.
2. Human Capitalism: How Economic Growth Has Made Us Smarter–and More Unequal by Brink Lindsey- Lindsey explains the growing class divide and how the rich get richer and the poor are trapped in a life of poorness… though the more evil Slytherins may want to keep it this way.
What explains the growing class divide between the well educated and everybody else? Noted author Brink Lindsey, a senior scholar at the Kauffman Foundation, argues that it’s because economic expansion is creating an increasingly complex world in which only a minority with the right knowledge and skills–the right “human capital”–reap the majority of the economic rewards. The complexity of today’s economy is not only making these lucky elites richer–it is also making them smarter. As the economy makes ever-greater demands on their minds, the successful are making ever-greater investments in education and other ways of increasing their human capital, expanding their cognitive skills and leading them to still higher levels of success. But unfortunately, even as the rich are securely riding this virtuous cycle, the poor are trapped in a vicious one, as a lack of human capital leads to family breakdown, unemployment, dysfunction, and further erosion of knowledge and skills. In this brief, clear, and forthright eBook original, Lindsey shows how economic growth is creating unprecedented levels of human capital–and suggests how the huge benefits of this development can be spread beyond those who are already enjoying its rewards.
3. Niccolò Machiavelli: An Intellectual Biography by Corrado Vivanti, Trans. by Simon MacMichael- This is the biography of the man behind The Prince which was about how a prince’s aims such as glory and survival can justify the immoral means to get those ends. (Okay, so maybe I think Slytherins are a bit corrupt…)
This is a colorful, comprehensive, and authoritative introduction to the life and work of the author of The Prince–Florentine statesman, writer, and political philosopher Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527). Corrado Vivanti, who was one of the world’s leading Machiavelli scholars, provides an unparalleled intellectual biography that demonstrates the close connections between Machiavelli’s thought and his changing fortunes during the tumultuous Florentine republic and his subsequent exile. Vivanti’s concise account covers not only Machiavelli’s most famous works–The Prince, The Discourses, The Florentine Histories, and The Art of War–but also his letters, poetry, and comic dramas. While setting Machiavelli’s life against a dramatic backdrop of war, crisis, and diplomatic intrigue, the book also paints a vivid human portrait of the man.
Vivanti’s narrative breaks Machiavelli’s life into three parts: his career in a variety of government and diplomatic posts in the Florentine republic between 1494 and 1512, when the Medici returned from exile, seized power, and removed Machiavelli from office; the pivotal first part of his subsequent exile, when he formulated his most influential ideas and wrote The Prince; and the final decade of his life, when, having returned to Florence, he wrote The Art of War, The Florentine Histories, the satirical play The Mandrake, and other works. Along the way, the biography presents unmatched accounts of many intensely debated topics, including the precise nature of Machiavelli’s cultural and intellectual background, his republicanism, his political and personal relationship to the Medici, and his ideas about religion.
Keep coming back to get your reading list for your Hogwarts house!
Top 3 Nightmares of my life:
Princeton author Daniel Drezner penned an essay for the Wall Street Journal about our fascination with zombies. With all the recent movies and television shows about zombies, Drezner tries to pinpoint some possible reasons why we’re so enamored with these flesh-eating monsters.
And because a zombiepocalypse is (probably) possible, Drezner applies zombie-mania to international politics to show what the political world will look like on the eve of the end of the world in his book Theories of International Politics and Zombies. Thanks to Drezner, we can sleep soundly knowing that our political infrastructure will probably pass the war-on-zombies test. So at least I’m not afraid of that.
Theories of International Politics and Zombies by Daniel W. Drezner
What would happen to international politics if the dead rose from the grave and started to eat the living? Daniel Drezner’s groundbreaking book answers the question that other international relations scholars have been too scared to ask. Addressing timely issues with analytical bite, Drezner looks at how well-known theories from international relations might be applied to a war with zombies. Exploring the plots of popular zombie films, songs, and books, Theories of International Politics and Zombies predicts realistic scenarios for the political stage in the face of a zombie threat and considers how valid–or how rotten–such scenarios might be.
Drezner boldly lurches into the breach and “stress tests” the ways that different approaches to world politics would explain policy responses to the living dead. He examines the most prominent international relations theories–including realism, liberalism, constructivism, neoconservatism, and bureaucratic politics–and decomposes their predictions. He digs into prominent zombie films and novels, such as Night of the Living Dead and World War Z, to see where essential theories hold up and where they would stumble and fall. Drezner argues that by thinking about outside-of-the-box threats we get a cognitive grip on what former U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld famously referred to as the “unknown unknowns” in international security.
Correcting the zombie gap in international relations thinking and addressing the genuine but publicly unacknowledged fear of the dead rising from the grave, Theories of International Politics and Zombies presents political tactics and strategies accessible enough for any zombie to digest.
Philip E. Tetlock, author of Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?, is heading into Year 3 of the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Agency’s forecasting tournament. The competition began in fall 2011 to see what team could best predict a series of short-term foreign affairs issues. The competition is based on Tetlock’s book which evaluates expert opinion and ways to make better decisions.
Check out this feature on the New York Times to learn more about the tournament.
Forecasting Fox
By DAVID BROOKS
In 2006, Philip E. Tetlock published a landmark book called “Expert Political Judgment.” While his findings obviously don’t apply to me, Tetlock demonstrated that pundits and experts are terrible at making predictions.
But Tetlock is also interested in how people can get better at making forecasts. His subsequent work helped prompt people at one of the government’s most creative agencies, the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Agency, to hold a forecasting tournament to see if competition could spur better predictions.
In the fall of 2011, the agency asked a series of short-term questions about foreign affairs, such as whether certain countries will leave the euro, whether North Korea will re-enter arms talks, or whether Vladimir Putin and Dmitri Medvedev would switch jobs. They hired a consulting firm to run an experimental control group against which the competitors could be benchmarked.
Five teams entered the tournament, from places like M.I.T., Michigan and Maryland. Tetlock and his wife, the decision scientist Barbara Mellers, helped form a Penn/Berkeley team, which bested the competition and surpassed the benchmarks by 60 percent in Year 1.
How did they make such accurate predictions? In the first place, they identified better forecasters. It turns out you can give people tests that usefully measure how open-minded they are.
For example, if you spent $1.10 on a baseball glove and a ball, and the glove cost $1 more than the ball, how much did the ball cost? Most people want to say that the glove cost $1 and the ball 10 cents. But some people doubt their original answer and realize the ball actually costs 5 cents.
Tetlock and company gathered 3,000 participants. Some got put into teams with training, some got put into teams without. Some worked alone. Some worked in prediction markets. Some did probabilistic thinking and some did more narrative thinking. The teams with training that engaged in probabilistic thinking performed best. The training involved learning some of the lessons included in Daniel Kahneman’s great work, “Thinking, Fast and Slow.” For example, they were taught to alternate between taking the inside view and the outside view.
According to Martin Gilens in his book Affluence and Influence: Economic Inequality and Political Power in America, with great wealth comes great influence on the policies that are enacted in this country. While many believe that though there is economic difference in society there is still political equality, Gilens shows that an individual’s amount of affluence mirrors their level influence on policies. In a recent article by Chrystia Freeland for New York Times, the affluent are described as “supercitizens” because of their more extensive influence when it comes to policy changes. Freeland explains why this is the case in the article.
When Supercitizens Pull Up the Opportunity Ladder
MIAMI — Louis D. Brandeis, the American jurist, famously warned: “We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.”
randeis’s cri de coeur was inspired by an indignant observation of the shenanigans of America’s robber barons during the Gilded Age. Today, we live in a data-driven age, and some careful students of the connection between money and politics have now amassed a powerful body of evidence to support Brandeis’s moral claim. A lot of it is assembled in a report by the progressive research organization Demos, published this week.
One of the most striking findings is the extent to which economic power translates into political power.
Institutionally, this is an era of unprecedented democracy — one of the triumphs of the 20th century has been the extension of voting rights to all adults in a lot of the world.
But even in the United States, the country that thinks of itself as being the world’s leading democracy, it turns out that those rights do not translate into much actual political power. David Callahan, co-author of “Stacked Deck,” the Demos report, describes the superrich as “supercitizens, with an outsized footprint in the public square.”
“I think most Americans believe in the idea of political equality,” Dr. Callahan told me. “That idea is obviously corrupted when in 2012, one guy, Sheldon Adelson, can make more political donations than the residents of 12 states put together.”
The Demos study draws in part on the quantitative research of Martin Gilens, a professor of politics at Princeton University, in New Jersey, and author of “Affluence and Influence: Economic Inequality and Political Power in America.” Dr. Gilens, who focused on the divide between the top 10 percent and everyone else, found a high degree of what he calls political inequality.
Read the FULL article here.
In an ideal life we would all have everything we could ever dream of. Sports cars, model spouses, and mansions in a swanky neighborhood would all be ours in our ideal life. However, reality says this probably will not all come to us as picture perfectly as we hoped, so we must settle for what we have. This may mean settling for your 1999 Honda Accord, your non-existent significant other, and the house you rent in Trenton. When we settle on something, whatever that may be, it becomes fixed. But as Robert E. Goodin explains in his book On Settling and as an article in The New Republic reiterates, settling does not mean completely giving up. Cass Sunstein for The New Republic says, “fixity is not forever.” Instead, settling is a way to put one’s mind to rest on one matter in order to be able to strive for other things. He writes:
When we settle, we hold something—a job, a relationship, a place, an activity—as fixed. He contrasts settling with “striving.” But his most striking claim is that settling is not an alternative to striving, but its complement. The reason is that human beings cannot strive unless they keep a number of aspects of their life fixed. In that sense, settling is a precondition for striving.
Settling should not necessarily be seen pejoratively. Instead, the positive value of settling should be acknowledged and used to one’s advantage. When you settle on one aspect of life, you free up your mind to strive for another. Settle for some things now so you can strive for bigger and better things, and who knows, somewhere down the line you may be able to trade in that pre-millennium make for something from this decade.
Read the full article here.
In a culture that worships ceaseless striving, “settling” seems like giving up. But is it? On Settling defends the positive value of settling, explaining why this disdained practice is not only more realistic but more useful than an excessive ideal of striving. In fact, the book makes the case that we’d all be lost without settling–and that even to strive, one must first settle.
We may admire strivers and love the ideal of striving, but who of us could get through a day without settling? Real people, confronted with a complex problem, simply make do, settling for some resolution that, while almost certainly not the best that one could find by devoting limitless time and attention to the problem, is nonetheless good enough. Robert Goodin explores the dynamics of this process. These involve taking as fixed, for now, things that we reserve the right to reopen later (nothing is fixed for good, although events might always overtake us). We settle on some things in order to concentrate better on others. At the same time we realize we may need to come back later and reconsider those decisions. From settling on and settling for, to settling down and settling in, On Settling explains why settling is useful for planning, creating trust, and strengthening the social fabric–and why settling is different from compromise and resignation.
So, the next time you’re faced with a thorny problem, just settle. It’s no failure.
Robert E. Goodin is professor of government at the University of Essex and distinguished professor of philosophy and social and political theory at Australian National University.
You can preview the introduction of the book here.
Anat Admati appeared on CBSNews.com’s Moneywatch to discuss the problems with the banking system and possible solutions to remedy the problems. Admati is co-author of The Bankers’ New Clothes, a forthcoming book that not only critiques big banks but also gives them advice to fix their mistakes before it is too late.
Also, read the accompanying article on CBSNews.com.
Anat Admati appeared on Fox Business Network’s Money with Melissa Francis on Tuesday to discuss the government’s regulations for the financial sector. Admati is co-author of The Bankers’ New Clothes: What’s Wrong with Banking and What to Do About It which examines the current banking system problems and how to fix them in clearly defined terms.
Watch the full interview here.
Additionally The New Yorker, Bloomberg Business Week, and Business Insider all discuss the financial situation and possible solutions as laid out by Admati and Hellwig in The Banker’s New Clothes. Admati and Hellwig say that “higher equity requirements would therefore alleviate the problem of banks being too big, too interconnected, or too political to fail. Not only would banks be less likely to fail, they would bear more of their own losses should they incur losses.” James Pethokoukis for Business Insider agrees and sums up that “capping bank size, limiting bank activities, higher equity capital requirements — all tools in the toolbox for eliminating the crony capitalist subsidy of the US financial system by government.”
Read the articles about The Banker’s New Clothes:
Anat Admati was interviewed on PBS’s Nightly Business Report on Tuesday, February 11th to talk about the size and safety of banks, and her new book The Bankers’ New Clothes. Watch the interview below.
If this video is not working, please visit the Nightly Business Report site.
Also, tune into Fox Business’s Money with Melissa Francis TONIGHT at 5:00 pm for another interview with Admati.
Whether it is a one time practice or a weekly scheduled session, gymnastic facilities have participants sign a boilerplate that relieves the gym and all their personnel of all responsibility if you get hurt while there. At a gym near my hometown, a friend of mine dislocated her elbow after an instructor did not properly spot her while she tried a new gymnastics trick. Needless to say, the gym manager at the time handed her a phone to call her mother, then wiped his hands of the situation and it was on to the next class.
In a recent op-ed for the Los Angeles Times, Margaret Jane Radin discusses how a boilerplate to attend a birthday party at a gymnastics facility forced her niece to sign that the gym was not responsible if her three year old were to sustain any injuries. Radin discusses what boilerplates mean for our legal rights in her book Boilerplate. Boilerplates are the paperwork or its electronic equivalent that must be signed in order to use the service or product. What exactly are you signing away when you sign or click “I accept”?
Read part of the op-ed below.
My niece, the mother of a 3-year-old, told me she felt blackmailed: In order for her child to attend a birthday party at a gymnastics facility for young children, she had to sign a form that included this:
“The undersigned agrees to defend, indemnify, and hold harmless [this facility], its officers, managers, members, employees, servants, agents and coaches/instructors and their successors and assigns from and against all legal liability, claims, suits, damages, losses, and expenses, including attorneys’ fees, threatened or incurred, and arising from the child’s participation, or from any cause whatsoever.”
Forms like this are called boilerplate because they are delivered to us on a take-it-or-leave-it basis. If my niece signed this one, she would relieve the gym of legal liability if her child were harmed at the party. And should she try to challenge the “hold harmless” form, she would be responsible for the facility’s legal expenses if she lost.
Lawyers know (but non-lawyers probably don’t) that such forms may be found to be legally overreaching if the matter ever reaches a court; no business or individual can “contract out” of reckless or grossly negligent or intentionally harmful behavior. When such questions do reach a judge, however, courts in many states will excuse mere negligence, such as a failure to screen employees or maintain equipment or premises properly.
Read the FULL op-ed here.
At Goodreads, enter for a chance to win Tesla: Inventor of the Electrical Age by W. Bernard Carlson.
This major biography sheds new light on Tesla’s visionary approach to invention and the business strategies behind his most important technological breakthroughs.
Enter by May 28, 2013 for a chance to win!
Good luck!
These are the best-selling books for the past week.
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The Battle of Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White, and the Making of a New World Order by Benn Steil |
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The Bankers’ New Clothes: What’s Wrong with Banking and What to Do about It by Anat Admati & Martin Hellwig |
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The Crossley ID Guide: Raptors by Richard Crossley, Jerry Liguori, & Brian Sullivan |
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The 5 Elements of Effective Thinking by Edward B. Burger & Michael Starbird |
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Higher Education in the Digital Age by William G. Bowen |
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Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman by Jeremy Adelman |
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The Golden Ticket: P, NP, and the Search for the Impossible by Lance Fortnow |
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On Bullshit by Harry G. Frankfurt |
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Einstein Gravity in a Nutshell by A. Zee |
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Tesla: Inventor of the Electrical Age by W. Bernard Carlson |
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