Update on Reason Papers no. 28: The print shop is working on correcting the error I mentioned here, and I hope to be able to send out copies to the subscribers soon. Meanwhile, those of you who aren’t subscribers should feel free to start sending in your orders. Ordering info is here. Also meanwhile, with some timely tech assistance from Stephan Kinsella and David Veksler (thanks guys!), I have resolved the website maintenance problems I encountered the other day, so the main RP website has been updated. That means, also, that all of RP 26 is now available for free download.
RP 28 is a special issue on war and liberty, 90% of which was guest-edited by Carrie-Ann Biondi and Irfan Khawaja, and it looks great. It predominantly features a symposium on Angelo Codevilla's No Victory, No Peace (and a future issue will include his reply), and it also includes the proceedings of the 2003 AAPSS symposium on war and liberty, which featured papers by myself and by L&P co-blogger Roderick Long (and which I’ve been promising L&P readers I’d make available – now done!) Rounding out the war section is an essay by Timothy Sandefur on the Civil War. RP 28 also includes part 2 of the 2-part Walter Block opus which began in RP 27. The book section features reviews of Roger Kimball’s book on art and Hilary Putnam’s book on the fact/value dichotomy, plus a longer essay by Steven Sanders on Stephen Hicks’ book on postmodernism. While you’ll have to buy the issue to see most of this without waiting, there are a few pieces available for free download now. Big thanks to Stephan Kinsella for mad skillz with the PDFs.

This one is fun. An excellent demonstration of some basic economics. They start to lose me when they get to the part about why we need to pay our taxes, but then they partially redeem themselves by showing why it's bad when taxes get too high. Another minus is a sort of anti-Higgsian move: they show how government increased interference during WWII, but then claim (plainly falsely) that afterwards, all freedoms were restored. All in all though, not bad -- indeed, people today could learn a lot from this. Interesting too was how this same production company seems less sanguine about the role of government in this 1954 film than they did in the ones I blogged yesterday, which were from 1948.

(HT to one of Paul's commenters)

Reviewing Seinfeld, Master of Its Domain, edited by David Lavery and Sara Lewis Dunne, in June 19th’s The Weekly Standard, Max Watman (this link may not work)notes the lameness of some of the pomo essays, then concludes of scholars: “They have become sadly inured to the tedium of television, and with their minds dulled by it, have taken up the only topic they grasp. But since they have only television, they aren't bright enough to illuminate anything. And it dawns on the reader that the existence of this book is proof that they ought not to teach television at our universities.” Where I come from, we call that “the fallacy of hasty generalization.” I haven’t read this book. It’s possible that every essay is, in fact, terrible. I doubt it, but let’s just stipulate arguendo that they are: It would still be groundless to jump from the weakness of one particular book to the bankruptcy of an entire field.
First of all, the fact that a professor writes an essay about Seinfeld, or even makes a reference to Seinfeld in class, isn’t the same thing as “teaching Seinfeld.” Now I realize that there are college courses on TV – typically in mass comm., or lit, and even sometimes in philosophy, but I think what’s more prevalent is the incorporation of popular culture reference points into otherwise-standard courses. For instance, if I were teaching a straightforward intro-to-ethics class, using Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Mill, and the other usual suspects, I might nevertheless illuminate a particular point by referring to a Seinfeld episode. (Yes, I’ve written on this.)
Second of all, it’s not necessarily bad to teach a course involving a TV show, provided that it’s done responsibly – e.g., by using an analysis of the show as means to hook into the same universal themes and ideas that any fiction does. I myself do this infrequently, but I know folks who do it more regularly, and I can tell from their syllabi that they’re doing real work. Any particular prof could, of course, be an idiot, but that’s not an indictment of an entire methodology. Watman might have been more justified showing how pomo silliness trivializes all literary studies, but it’s not just pomo studies of TV which do this, pomo studies of any art form have this effect. In other words, the proper objection to nihilistic pomo TV studies isn’t that it’s about TV, it’s that it’s nihilistic pomo omphaloskepsis.
Even if Watman is right about this book, why should that mean that college professors should, as a rule, not discuss popular culture in the classroom or write essays about it? Often, the essays on popular culture subjects can be used to introducereaderstomoresubstantiveareasofinquiry. Other times, the popular culture item can be an excellent subject for a particular exploration. Not to get all tu quoque or anything, but Watman’s claim to fame is a book on horse racing – why is there something potentially profound and interesting about horse racing, but not TV?
Again, I haven’t read this book – maybe it’s as bad as Watman says. In that case, he would have done better to pan the book for its own flaws, rather than try to score trendspotting points by lumping together all the recent work on popular culture.
An afterthought – since he’s writing for a conservative magazine, he might have been hoping to hook into some generalized “we don’t like left-wing academics” meme among the readership, but as it happens, many of the people writing on the intersection of their disciplines with popular culture are conservatives or libertarians. So the moral of the story is: review the book you were assigned to review, and don’t think it’s necessarily part of some trend.

I’ve just returned from an exhausting yet rewarding week of teaching at an IHS summer seminar. One question which I hear a lot is, what do you enjoy about teaching these? The first thing that comes to mind is that they’re interdisciplinary: my philosophy lectures are mixed in with lectures from two economists, a historian, and a lit professor. As far as I can tell, this gives the students a far more complete picture of how the ideas work and how the disciplines relate to each other. It helps, also, that the other seminar faculty are awesome – in terms of being great teachers generally, and specifically being able to present material that makes the connections so clear to the students and enables us to hook into each others’ themes. Being on a team with excellent faculty helps bring out the best in me, so public thanks to Elizabeth Hull from Bethany College, my former USMA colleague Rob McDonald, IHS mainstay Howie Baetjer, and “Division of Labour” blogger Frank Stephenson. Frank has scooped me on blogging this – have a look. (L&P co-blogger Amy Sturgis was supposed to be joining us, but couldn’t make it – we missed you Amy!) It’s also a lot of fun to have such bright and curious and motivated students, and to help them explore the ideas of liberty. So, a big shout-out to the Institute for Humane Studies – thanks, and keep up the good work. The rest of my summer will be some combination of writing and swimming. And yard work.

Issue 28 of Reason Papers will be going to the printer next week and should be available shortly thereafter. The bulk of RP28 is a special War and Liberty section guest-edited by Irfan Khawaja and Carrie-Ann Biondi (who until a day or so ago were HNN bloggers – what on earth has happened to the “Theory and Practice” blog??). The highlights are a symposium on Codevilla’s book No Victory, No Peace, and the proceedings of the2004AAPSSsymposium on War and Liberty, featuring Roderick Long and me. Here is an advance peek at Irfan’s introduction to the Codevilla section.

To start the week on a cheery note, the Attorney General says that “The government has the legal authority to prosecute journalists for publishing classified information,” or more (less?) precisely, that “There are some statutes on the book which, if you read the language carefully, would seem to indicate that that is a possibility." Ok, you get back to us on that right away. It gets worse, both politically and logically. After the obligatory lip-service to the First Amendment, the AG said “But it can't be the case that that right trumps over the right that Americans would like to see, the ability of the federal government to go after criminal activity.” Note the circular reasoning? They need the power to prosecute criminal activity, so they need to define criminal activity as that which they want to prosecute.

This TNR essay is important, also. Unfortunately, it's registration-required. But you're savvy enough to get around that, aren't you?

Our L&P co-blogger"Protagoras" has a fantastic post up today - next time why not cross-post?

Virginia Postrel has posted a link today to this 11-year-old story that’s as relevant now as it was then. Go read.