Do Political Science Departments Ignore Conservatism?
Peter Berkowitz offers some old whine in a slightly new bottle:
The political science departments at elite private universities such as Harvard and Yale, at leading small liberal arts colleges like Swarthmore and Williams, and at distinguished large public universities like the University of Maryland and the University of California, Berkeley, offer undergraduates a variety of courses on a range of topics. But one topic the undergraduates at these institutions — and at the vast majority of other universities and colleges — are unlikely to find covered is conservatism. [...]
But most students will hear next to nothing about the conservative tradition in American politics that stretches from John Adams to Theodore Roosevelt to William F. Buckley Jr. to Milton Friedman to Ronald Reagan. This tradition emphasizes moral and intellectual excellence, worries that democratic practices and egalitarian norms will threaten individual liberty, attends to the claims of religion and the role it can play in educating citizens for liberty, and provides both a vigorous defense of free-market capitalism and a powerful critique of capitalism’s relentless overturning of established ways.
Since Berkowitz specifically calls out Harvard, and since I went there and no how to navigate its course catalogue, I thought I’d look into this.
In the coming year, the Harvard Government (i.e., political science) department is offering exactly six courses on “Political Thought and Its History.” Two of the six courses (Gov 1060 “Ancient and Medieval Political Philosophy” and Gov 1061 “The History of Modern Political Philosophy”) are taught by Harvey Mansfield and so I trust the right won’t be slighted in his presentation. One is Eric Nelson’s Gov 1074 “Political Thought of the American Founding” which name checks John Adams in its three-sentence course description. There’s also Gov 1094 “The Jewish Political Tradition,” Gov 1092 “The Past and Future of the Left,” and finally Gov 1072 “Moral Issues in Contemporary Politics” which promises to “weigh both sides of arguments over such issues as economic redistribution, the rights of women and racial minorities, the political status of the family, the regulation of the beginning and end of life, and the conduct of foreign policy.” That doesn’t seem to me as if conservative thought is being ignored. Now you could fairly say that Harvard simply isn’t offering an especially large quantity of courses on the history of political thought in general but that’d be a very different complaint.
Meanwhile, the course with the most students and the most direct policy relevance is the introductory economics course that was taught by economist and Republican Party operative Martin Feldstein in my day and is currently taught by economist and Republican Party operative Greg Mankiw.
No doubt there is some college or university somewhere for which Berkowitz’s complaint is valid, but he specifically cited Harvard as an example and it doesn’t stand up to even cursory scrutiny. My initial impulse on reading his article was to crack a joke about how people don’t study conservative ideas because conservative ideas are of such low quality. I’ll restrain myself from saying that, but suffice it to say that the research methods and evidentiary standards being employed by Berkowitz and the WSJ op-ed page don’t exactly make a strong case for inculcating young people with the conservative approach.
96 Responses to “Do Political Science Departments Ignore Conservatism?”
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July 13th, 2009 at 11:32 am
Classic Matt: good post rebutting some conservative piece that contains not only a reference to Harvard but has an awesome homonym: no for know. heh.
July 13th, 2009 at 11:33 am
It seems as if the success of Conservatism has been to convince people that it represents about half of the opinion on any given issue when it’s really just a narrow ideology. As a consequence, every other approach gets labeled “liberal” and thereby gets squeezed into the other 50 percent of allowed opinion.
July 13th, 2009 at 11:34 am
So the guy who opposed slavery head-on, whose son and grandson were arguably the most prominent abolitionists of their time, and whose family’s political career got destroyed by slave states, twice; and the guy who decried the “malefactors of great wealth,” who broke up his Republican Party in order to run on the Progressive ticket, and only avoided looking like a flaming radical because a no-shit Socialist ran for President aren’t taught about?
Gee, at UChicago, where we’re ultra-conservative, including and indeed especially in our poli-sci dept (Strauss, Tarcov, and the list goes on), I definitely learned about those guys.
And could this jackass explain what the two first guys have anything to do with the Republicans? I mean all the Roosevelts voted for Obama
July 13th, 2009 at 11:35 am
Berkowitz wasn’t talking about real conservatism –he was talking about Fox News /Christian Right conservatism.
In which people like Berkowitz choose to “emphasize moral and intellectual excellence” and ” worries that democratic practices and egalitarian norms will threaten individual liberty” by misleading and inciting mobs of some of the most stupid fucking people on the planet.
July 13th, 2009 at 11:42 am
I’m with Greg.
Theodore Roosevelt was not a conservative. Adams could arguably be called a New England conservative (in that he was a Federalist, was quite hostile to the Shays Rebellion, and didn’t like the French Revolution), but he also believed that speculators should be shot.
Of course, the irony is that the history of conservativism is actually a hot topic in History atm, although conservatives might not like what they find.
July 13th, 2009 at 11:45 am
Adams could arguably be called a New England conservative (in that he was a Federalist, was quite hostile to the Shays Rebellion, and didn’t like the French Revolution), but he also believed that speculators should be shot.
And to head off the inevitable states’ (and eventually Southron) rights bullshit that tends to come out of discussing Adams – namely that he allowed the Alien and Sedition Acts – it should be pointedly mentioned that Jefferson and Madison and the rest of the Dem-Reps supported identical acts, just passed by state legislatures rather than Congress.
July 13th, 2009 at 11:45 am
My initial impulse on reading his article was to crack a joke about how people don’t study conservative ideas because conservative ideas are of such low quality. I’ll restrain myself from saying that
Matt, this is very terrible lying. We remember from the beginning of the sentence that you, in fact, did not restrain yourself from cracking that joke.
July 13th, 2009 at 11:45 am
Nice restraint.
July 13th, 2009 at 11:50 am
Where are all the PhD theses devoted to the works of O’Reilly or Glenn Beck?
July 13th, 2009 at 11:51 am
You’d think, for as much as conservatives publicly decry the supposed Left’s Cult of Victimology, that they’d be a little more cautious about bitching and moaning about this stuff like a bunch of victims… HA HA. No. Clearly not. You could hold a Victim’s Special Olympics with the quality of whine that pours out of Libertarians, siege mentality christians, and the current batch of in-office repubs. That’s right – repubs. I said it. Go whine about it, repubs, in that manly patriotic way you whine.
People on the left also whine a lot, but I think we’re proud of it – it’s called making our voices heard and a bunch of other tedious rah-rah stuff.
Anyway, I’ve watched a ton of lectures from both Berkeley and Yale, many covering political science, and they do a fine job of covering conservatives. Worse still, for this little song and dance number linked to, they also tend to paint the better aspects of the movements in a respectful way that leaves the me wondering what the hell decimated the movement, taking away certain useful conservations and leaving the festering coulter rind we have now. If anything is clear from listening to those lectures, it’s that someone needs to hold a pillow firmly over the head of what is left of the conservative movement, do it a favor, and wait for it to be reborn.
These professional victims are clearly bad for america. The left might have invented our current version of grievance based identity politics, but leave it to moneyed truth-indifferent nihilists of the right and their massive army of book-allergic followers to elevate it to a choking artform.
July 13th, 2009 at 11:52 am
The notion that American universities are somehow the breeding ground for the next Bakunin is risible.
Business is the single most popular undergraduate major, and while there are 568 members of the Association to Advance College Schools of Business, there are less than one-tenth as many places where you can major in labor studies, or industrial relations, or anything like that. And not an Ivy undergrad program on the list.
July 13th, 2009 at 11:54 am
Matt, if you want to answer this question, at the very least you’d need syllabi, not course titles, and you’d need a larger sample size than Harvard. Or you could actually as your friends who have or are getting advanced degrees in Poli Sci what they think about how conservative ideas are treated in scholarship and teaching. (Hint: a few of these people are bloggers and I’m sure you have their email addresses.)
Or at the very least, don’t go bashing “the research methods and evidentiary standards” of others when you’re posting lazy slop like this.
July 13th, 2009 at 11:55 am
Also, considering that my Bachelor’s Honors Thesis dealt with the history of absolutism in French constitutional theory, principally Bodin’s Six livres de la république, which is conventionally depicted as the grandfather of Divine Right theory, I take a certain amount of personal offense at the idea conservatism isn’t studied.
There’s a useful four letter word for Berkowitz, and he’s full of it.
July 13th, 2009 at 11:58 am
Good to know that John Adams was a conservative. Certainly the American Revolution was a conservative enterprise.
July 13th, 2009 at 11:59 am
And to head off the inevitable states’ (and eventually Southron) rights bullshit that tends to come out of discussing Adams – namely that he allowed the Alien and Sedition Acts – it should be pointedly mentioned that Jefferson and Madison and the rest of the Dem-Reps supported identical acts, just passed by state legislatures rather than Congress.
Southron? I think Vermonters have a right to be incensed about that too, since the first person put on trial for violating them was a Vermont state legislator at the time. While serving his jail term he ran for Congress and won. What do Southerners have to do with those laws?
July 13th, 2009 at 12:01 pm
Just to add a couple data points to Matt’s report: At Wesleyan, my alma mater, there is a course on “The Rise of Conservatism since 1950″ offered roughly every other year, and this next year will feature a course on black conservatism. Perhaps less surprisingly, Princeton (where I’m now a grad student) features an annual course on conservative political thought, in addition to a seminar on “God and Politics” and Robbie George’s “Constitutional Interpretation.”
July 13th, 2009 at 12:02 pm
What do Southerners have to do with those laws?
Did you miss the second half of that sentence, mate?
July 13th, 2009 at 12:03 pm
the conservative tradition in American politics that stretches from John Adams to Theodore Roosevelt to William F. Buckley Jr. to Milton Friedman to Ronald Reagan.
…to Newt Gingrich to Sean Hannity to Sarah Palin.
July 13th, 2009 at 12:05 pm
Very poor, Al. That’s weaker tea than a cup of Boston Harbor water after the smugglers and separatists had finished with their Whiggish protest.
July 13th, 2009 at 12:06 pm
It’s preposterous for Yglesias you liberals to insinuate that there isn’t a near complete blackout in academia of true free market ideas (classical liberal, libertarian and Austrian economics). The ideas are universally ignored and/or suppressed. If the ideas were ever allowed to be discussed in “polite company”, that would be the end of the “progressive” and Keynesian economic paradigm.
Yglesias himself attempted to disparage the Austrian school here, while not having the faintest idea about the substance of Austrian economic ideas. Thomas Woods, who wrote the brilliant book “Meltdown” (#7 on the NYT best seller list, but naturally ignored by the paper), take’s down Yglesias here:
Friedrich Hayek won the Nobel Prize in economics. Austrian economists accurately predicted the current housing bubble/collapse. What’s the excuse for ignoring and/or mistating the ideas? If they are wrong, fine, refute them. It ought to be quite easy if they are as wrongheaded as you suggest. I say that you ignore them because you FEAR them and you know you have no answer to them.
More and more people are recognizing that academia and the liberal press, like Yglesias, are suppressing and distorting these ideas clearly out of fear that their own bankrupt ideas will be exposed. Wait until this “stimulus” nonsense fails and a majority of the country finally realizes that they have been scammed by the Keynesians.
July 13th, 2009 at 12:07 pm
I think Teddy Roosevelt gets lumped in as a conservative mostly because he was kind of a dick. I think that’s the basic criteria these days.
July 13th, 2009 at 12:12 pm
busker, by that measure, Woodrow Wilson was one of the greatest conservatives in American history. I mean, when people are complaining about your wife’s and your racism during the goddamn nadir of American race relations…
July 13th, 2009 at 12:14 pm
It’s preposterous for Yglesias you liberals to insinuate that there isn’t a near complete blackout in academia of true free market ideas (classical liberal, libertarian and Austrian economics). The ideas are universally ignored and/or suppressed. If the ideas were ever allowed to be discussed in “polite company”, that would be the end of the “progressive” and Keynesian economic paradigm.
Are you joking? All most students learn about Economics is that the supply curve intersects the demand in a free market and everything is perfect, and any government interference with the magical curves is an abomination with evil deadweight losses.
July 13th, 2009 at 12:14 pm
“Since Berkowitz specifically calls out Harvards, and since I went there and no how to navigate its course catalogue…” [emphasis added]
I know that spelling flames are lame, but as someone who went to a state college, I find it highly life-affirming to note when someone touts their Harvard attendance in the sentence with a homonym slip-up.
July 13th, 2009 at 12:18 pm
Dearest Bob Roddis,
Awesome! And with that post, you’ve helped put libertarians on the board for this thread! Libertarians now take the lead in the Victim Special Olympics! Nice.
Ayn Rand would be overcome with lust at the overpowering virility of your whining. You are truly a leader among men.
Your Friend,
Irk
July 13th, 2009 at 12:18 pm
Oh, good, we’ve got a supply-sider (#20).
Bob,
Name a single supply side President who has balanced a budget by cutting taxes and increasing defense spending beyond any savings made from gutting social programs.
Moreover, did the so-called “Austrian” school endorse financing a war of choice in Iraq by borrowing trillions from China?
July 13th, 2009 at 12:20 pm
@24: Yes, but it’s also life-affirming because one has to kind of respect MY’s determination to focus on ideas rather than production values.
July 13th, 2009 at 12:20 pm
Greg-
Come to think of it, I’m not sure why conservatives haven’t claimed Wilson yet. Maybe the PhD. disqualifies him.
July 13th, 2009 at 12:22 pm
worries that democratic practices and egalitarian norms will threaten individual liberty
There you have it.
A philosophy that is so stupid belongs only on Fox Knews.
July 13th, 2009 at 12:24 pm
Or maybe it was the presidency of an Ivy League school?
Of course, his PhD was used to write a history of the US so vile that Griffith used it as his primary historical resource for Birth of a Nation and he chose Princeton because it was the only Ivy still barring African-American students.
One would think this would grant him a special exemption.
July 13th, 2009 at 12:25 pm
It’s preposterous for Yglesias you liberals to insinuate that there isn’t a near complete blackout in academia of true free market ideas (classical liberal, libertarian and Austrian economics). The ideas are universally ignored and/or suppressed.
The irony and comedy of this school of Whiny Conservatism is more than a bit pathetic, yet the right wingnuts shamefully pursue it, anyway. Victimology and martyrdom made into a lifestyle choice, coming from a group that claims to be self-sufficient and independent.
Of everyone, you ought to know that it’s a free marketplace of ideas out there. If you sincerely believe that you don’t have enough zealous followers to appease the Wrath of Rand, then go market your ideas like a good capitalist, and use the art of persuasion (and perhaps a few sedatives) to convert the unwashed masses to your cult…er, I mean philosophy.
Trying to whine and cry your way into respectability is not particularly dignified, even if it amuses the hell out of me personally. I do appreciate the right’s efforts to promote personal responsibility…for other people.
July 13th, 2009 at 12:25 pm
It’s really quite something that you have an Austro-fellator like Bobbis coming along and saying that those ideas “are universally ignored and/or suppressed” when you have exceptionally well-endowed groups like The Liberty Fund selling deeply subsidized editions of Mises and Hayek to all-comers.
In fact, th’Austrians get far more attention than pretty much all the other wrong economists put together. Ah, but that’s all suppression and distortions, says Bobbis, because we do not understand the REAL TRUTH and FEAR the power of those ideas.
Here’s a hint: when you start to resemble a Scientologist, you’ve probably already lost the argument.
July 13th, 2009 at 12:31 pm
A better description of conservatism is one that works for America today, and as far back as recorded history goes. Conservatism is the political philosophy of the ruling class. Its objectives are to protect the privelidges of that class from those over whom they rule, and also from those among their class whom they elevate to positions of power.
Any economic, religious, governmental or political ideas are only details subject to change as circumstances warrant.
July 13th, 2009 at 12:31 pm
Re Bob Roddis at 20 quoting Thomas Wood: “What matters for right now is that the theory, which won F.A. Hayek the Nobel Prize in 1974, exonerates the free market of blame for the boom-bust cycle. Instead, the culprit is the government-established central bank (in the American case, the Federal Reserve System), whose activities lead the economy into an unsustainable configuration that can seem like prosperity for a time, but which inevitably collapses in a bust when the accumulated resource misallocations reveal themselves.”
————-
Yes — we were free of boom and bust cycles in the decades before the Fed was created, no?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panic_of_1857
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panic_of_1893
July 13th, 2009 at 12:32 pm
“more and more”?? some numbers, attributions? And some evidence that academia and the liberal press, like Yglesias, are suppressing and distorting these ideas clearly out of fear that their own bankrupt ideas will be exposed
of this suppression? and that it is being done “out of fear”? (I gather it is “clear” to you, but it really looks like … well, you are just “stating” it and assuming it is clear. There is a difference).
July 13th, 2009 at 12:34 pm
It’s preposterous for Yglesias you liberals to insinuate that there isn’t a near complete blackout in academia of true free market ideas (classical liberal, libertarian and Austrian economics)
Now, granted, it’s been a decade since I was last at the University of California, and my graduate work is in clinical psychology and public policy, but I seem to recall absolutely every last one of my professors being a neoliberal or a libertarian, with nary a Keynesian to be found. Though I do seem to recall one professor referring to von Mises as “a crackpot,” so they weren’t all bad, were they?
July 13th, 2009 at 12:35 pm
So, and I have been hearing this complaint across the curriculum for some time, are conservatives asking for Affirmative Action hires in higher education for themselves? It’s true, they probably need a leg up, though it would be a propaganda spoiler should any conservative be nominated to the Supreme Court. Anyway, just asking.
July 13th, 2009 at 12:38 pm
Since conservatism can be summed up in a sentence, what is there to teach?
Once you absorb “Government is bad – they shouldn’t be allowed to take my money”, everything else is tactics, obfuscation and diversion.
July 13th, 2009 at 12:41 pm
political science != philosophy of government
I’m not in the field, but my guess would be that most poli sci scholars don’t actually spend a lot of time with Rousseau or Nietzsche, any more than they do with Aristotle or Locke, and concentrate rather on questions that can be modelled and for which confirming or rebutting data can be found; and moreover, that this quantitative and empirical emphasis has spilled over into the classroom.
July 13th, 2009 at 12:42 pm
It’s preposterous for Yglesias you liberals to insinuate that there isn’t a near complete blackout in academia of true free market ideas (classical liberal, libertarian and Austrian economics). The ideas are universally ignored and/or suppressed.
Hilarious! I first learned about Milton Friedman in my freshman year of college, during my into to political science course. The professor who made all of us read Friedman was (wait for it) Paul Wellstone.
July 13th, 2009 at 12:44 pm
Or at the very least, don’t go bashing “the research methods and evidentiary standards” of others when you’re posting lazy slop like this.
What a dumbass you are, Philly. Yglesias was calling out *Berkowitz’s* lack of evidence.
Berk: “Whine with no evidence!”
Yglesias: “Well, the evidence I find doesn’t support Berk.”
Philly: “Not enough evidence, Matt! You can’t refute ZERO EVIDENCE with the paltry evidence you’ve presented.”
July 13th, 2009 at 12:46 pm
Wow! Mountains of hysterical juvenile ad hominem attacks and no calm, scholarly substantive refutation. Who would have expected that?
I’m shocked. Seriously.
With all your strutting and bullying, I would have thought you’d have some insightful responses on the tips of your collective tongues.
July 13th, 2009 at 12:52 pm
Go and preach your Austro-gospel to another blog, Bobbis. Your martyr complex isn’t working on us.
July 13th, 2009 at 12:54 pm
Very poor, Al. That’s weaker tea than a cup of Boston Harbor water after the smugglers and separatists had finished with their Whiggish protest.
Now, now. You seem to forget Gordon Wood’s classic book The Conservatism of the American Revolution. So clearly Matthew is correct that John Adams was a conservative.
July 13th, 2009 at 12:56 pm
What they mean is they don’t teach conservatism like they do at Bob Jones and Liberty. They are not interested in education, they are interested in indoctrination. I am sure the teaching of “John Adams to Theodore Roosevelt to William F. Buckley Jr. to Milton Friedman to Ronald Reagan” is the last thing these guys want. They want people to learn the dumbed down, inaccurate and facile versions of these men’s lives. To men like Mr. Berkowitz, education exists to promote their agenda or tear down yours.
July 13th, 2009 at 12:57 pm
I would have thought you’d have some insightful responses on the tips of your collective tongues.
Whiny, whiny, whiny, whiny, whiny. Now that’s the kind of self-reliance that would make Ayn proud.
All I ask is that you make your crucifix out of recycled materials. Since you’re intent on displaying yourself on a cross, all I can ask is that you make it eco-friendly.
July 13th, 2009 at 12:57 pm
I myself am fascinated by a “conservative” faction that can extoll BOTH Fredrich Hayek AND Milton Friedman as Economic Gods while being UNAWARE that Milton Friedman concluded that Hayek was full of shit.
When that same Faction claims it is competent to discuss economic policy, I unfortunately collapse into helpless gales of laughter.
from http://www.auburn.edu/~garriro/hayek%20and%20friedman.pdf
[ Friedman’s account of his differences with Hayek puts the “fine points of abstruse theory” into perspective: “I am an enormous admirer of Hayek, but not for his economics. I think Prices and Production (1935) is a flawed book. I think his
capital theory book [The Pure Theory of Capital (1941)] is unreadable. On the other hand, The Road to Serfdom (1944) is one of the great books of our time”
(Ebenstein, 2001, p. 81) In Friedman’s view, the alliance is based on their adherence to the principles of classical liberalism; their economics—and especially
their macroeconomics—is quite another matter. ]
July 13th, 2009 at 12:57 pm
Bob, when your very first salvo is a paranoid rant asserting that your beloved Austrian economics is excluded from college curricula due to “suppression”, and that said ideas are suppressed because they would automatically win any academic argument, it’s hard to take you seriously when you whine about “juvenile” attacks.
Twenty five years of real life statistics will demonstrate that supply-side economics simply doesn’t produce the results its boosters insist that it will.
In a few decades, supply side economics will be viewed by economics majors with the same disdain that psychology students view phrenology.
July 13th, 2009 at 12:57 pm
Wow! Mountains of hysterical juvenile ad hominem attacks and no calm, scholarly substantive refutation. Who would have expected that?
It’s hard to scholarly refute a post that didn’t contain a single substantive claim. Perhaps if you’d like to post some data on how oppressed the Austrian school is in college economic departments (or hell, some data on anything at all you claimed), then we can issue such a refutation.
July 13th, 2009 at 1:02 pm
In contrast, here is what Milton Friedman said about John Maynard Keynes:
“MILTON FRIEDMAN: Let me emphasize [that] I think Keynes was a great economist. I think his particular theory in The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money is a fascinating theory. It’s a right kind of a theory. It’s one which says a lot by using only a little. So it’s a theory that has great potentiality.
And you know, in all of science, progress comes through people proposing hypotheses which are subject to test and rejected and replaced by better hypotheses. And Keynes’s theory, in my opinion, was one of those very productive hypotheses — a very ingenious one, a very intelligent one. It just turned out to be incompatible with the facts when it was put to the test. So I’m not criticizing Keynes. I am a great admirer of Keynes as an economist, much more than on the political level. On the political level, that’s a different question, but as an economist, he was brilliant and one of the great economists. ”
Ref: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/commandingheights/shared/minitextlo/int_miltonfriedman.html#4
July 13th, 2009 at 1:03 pm
Hilarious! I first learned about Milton Friedman in my freshman year of college, during my into to political science course.
Ah, you forget that Uncle Miltie is a HERETIC because he pointed out the limitations of Mises and Hayek, and noted that the political consequences did great harm to the world.
(John Quiggin’s critique is a good read, especially for his point about how ABCT has ossified into dogmatism, as demonstrated above.)
July 13th, 2009 at 1:11 pm
I know that spelling flames are lame, but as someone who went to a state college, I find it highly life-affirming to note when someone touts their Harvard attendance in the sentence with a homonym slip-up.
It’s also lame to suggest that Matt is touting his Harvard attendance when he’s actually just noting it. But I suppose the presumption of elitist arrogance is also life-affirming for someone who went to a state college.
July 13th, 2009 at 1:11 pm
“Mountains of hysterical juvenile ad hominem attacks and no calm, scholarly substantive refutation.
I’m a professor of economics, and my teaching and research interests are in environmental economics, which is certainly one of the more “left-leaning” fields of economics. I spend a week on Hayek and a huge chunk of time on Coase because they have some very important things to say. To say that “academia” ignores free-market theories is preposterous.
My scholarly opinion is that you’re full of it. Besides, the Keynesian macro “paradigm” has been dead for decades, and it’s been monetarism that’s ruled the roost. It’s only after we’ve snapped off our monetary policy levers and the trolley is still hurtling down the hill that Keynes is being seriously reconsidered. I mean honestly, when did you last take an econ or business course?
July 13th, 2009 at 1:13 pm
To: Biff McLargeHuge
1. Supply-side economics is not Austrian economics. Your statement proves my point. The “opponents” of Austrian economics have no clue regarding its substance. How can one reject a theory (for which a Nobel Prize was awarded) with no understanding of it? If it’s is so off-the-wall, it should be easy to address fairly and if it is so wrong, we’d all be done with it.
2. Yglesias insinuated that colleges actually cover “conservative” and free market ideas fairly and that to say otherwise is absurd. You and Yglesias prove that. I don’t have to prove a negative. You guys show where Austrian and classical liberal ideas are thoroughly taught in academia and where they are seriously debated in the press. Or simply where the ideas are seriously addressed and have then been refuted. This never happens. Thus, you cannot make this showing. The ideas are like Kryptonite to a Keynesian. The ideas will either be mocked or avoided and ignored at all cost by Keynesians.
July 13th, 2009 at 1:13 pm
Oh, Al, you really can’t recover after farting out such a lazy opener.
I’m certainly not going to waste time with you, other than to note Burke’s call for conciliation with an America “not only devoted to liberty, but to liberty according to English ideas and on English principles”. There’s another old Whig whose grave has been repeatedly defiled by Al’s cohorts in hack conservatism.
July 13th, 2009 at 1:14 pm
Re pseudo at 51: “Uncle Miltie is a HERETIC because he pointed out the limitations of Mises and Hayek, and noted that the political consequences did great harm to the world.”
———–
Ah well — laissez faire. Let the leaders burn a few million Jews alone with millions of Reichmarks. That’s why they call it the AUSTRIAN School of Economics.
July 13th, 2009 at 1:17 pm
Pseudo touches on the real issue here. When Milton Friedman is no longer considered a true conservative, what the hell are you supposed to study? Friendman was the ultimate intellectual conservative, he could make persuasive arguments for things that I would sometimes find initially repulsive.
Undergrad at Rutgers my political philsophy classes were dominated by conservative thinkers. Burke and Hobbes in particular, with Locke running close behind (Locke’s conservatism up for a little debate?). But as far as the study of 18th and 19th century political philosophy went, our classes were far more grounded in conservatism than liberalism.
The problem is in todays climate, Burke might be labeled a communist by the right in the U.S. When the label “conservative” in the U.S. more and more substitutes for the label “batshit insane,” you probably won’t be studying a lot of “conservative” ideas in your political science classes
July 13th, 2009 at 1:18 pm
The “opponents” of Austrian economics have no clue regarding its substance.
Let the record show that Bobbis has yet to discuss said “substance” even while preaching the Austro-gospel on this blog. He has engaged in nothing but proselytizing. Funny, that.
July 13th, 2009 at 1:19 pm
You seem to forget Gordon Wood’s classic book The Conservatism of the American Revolution.
Gordon Wood who was trained at Harvard, BTW. Berkowitz is looking shakier by the minute (though of course his point was about poli sci not history)…
July 13th, 2009 at 1:19 pm
Of course, it should be noted that Milton Friedman was a SOCIALIST.
At least, according to von Mises:
“INTERVIEWER: Some of those debates became very, very heated. I think [Ludwig] von Mises once stormed out.
MILTON FRIEDMAN: Oh, yes, he did. Yes, in the middle of a debate on the subject of distribution of income, in which you had people who you would hardly call socialist or egalitarian — people like Lionel Robbins, like George Stigler, like Frank Knight, like myself — Mises got up and said, “You’re all a bunch of socialists,” and walked right out of the room. (laughs) But Mises was a person of very strong views and rather intolerant about any differences of opinion. ”
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/commandingheights/shared/minitextlo/int_miltonfriedman.html#4
July 13th, 2009 at 1:21 pm
But I suppose the presumption of elitist arrogance is also life-affirming for someone who went to a state college
Bravo
July 13th, 2009 at 1:29 pm
“Gordon Wood who was trained at Harvard, BTW. Berkowitz is looking shakier by the minute (though of course his point was about poli sci not history)…”
Berkowitz himself taught at Harvard and is (or at least was) a close ally of Mansfield.
“Locke’s conservatism up for a little debate?”
Locke isn’t a conservative. Locke specifically attacks Filmer’s defense of monarchy. Filmer’s defense of monarchy is, boiled down, that monarchs have been around forever. Thus, Filmer is the conservative (what is ancient is good) and Locke bases an entire book on undermining that idea.
July 13th, 2009 at 1:31 pm
Yglesias insinuated that colleges actually cover “conservative” and free market ideas fairly and that to say otherwise is absurd. You and Yglesias prove that. I don’t have to prove a negative.
I find this line particularly amusing. You make the absurd claim that there’s a massive conspiracy to repress Austrian economics, then say that you don’t have to prove (or apparently offer any evidence for) your claim because other people should have to prove you wrong. This isn’t high school debate, son.
July 13th, 2009 at 1:36 pm
I think that the biggest issue with Austrian economics is that it just isn’t particularly useful for things for which people other than economists might want economics.
Let’s say that I’m a businessman, in an electronics retail business. I’m considering making a decision — say, cutting prices on cameras by 5% for a two-week sale. Will it increase my profits?
Since Austrians believe that, for instance, gathering empirical data only leads to confusion and that true “praxeologists” should derive things exclusively from first principles, and that taking partial derivatives is evil because it implies continuity of what ought to be discrete preference rankings, they’re unlikely to be of very much use to me-the-businessman.
That’s not to say that the mainstream economist will be perfect — her models might be unrealistic and inaccurate in some respects, in spite of her best efforts to the contrary. Her projections of the profits or losses associated with the decision to hold a sale might be off. Still, at least mainstream economics concerns itself with things that people like businessmen, policymakers, etc, find useful, while Austrians don’t except at a very high, abstract level.
July 13th, 2009 at 1:40 pm
As a thinker, Harvey Mansfield is at best a clown. Just one word: “Manliness.” And he’s Billy Kristol’s mentor. What a joke.
July 13th, 2009 at 1:41 pm
Burrito, you’re right. But I’m not sure that I’m wrong (though I could be!). I was using the term conservative in terms of where his ideas stand on the modern political spectrum. Clearly he’s a liberal thinker for his time. But much of his work centers on a strong advocacy of private property rights, as well as devoting some serious effort of things like advocacy for the death penalty.
So from a historical perspective he’s a liberal. But politically speaking, he’d fall somewhere in the center right of the American political spectrum, which is significantly farther to the right on a Western or European political spectrum.
Is that a reasonable stance?
July 13th, 2009 at 1:50 pm
Re Al at 44: “Now, now. You seem to forget Gordon Wood’s classic book The Conservatism of the American Revolution.”
—————–
Al, you need to distinguish between the bullshit the Founders fed to the rabble versus how they actually felt. Charles Beard kinda let the cat out of the bag with his “Economic Interpretation of the US Constitution”. The Founders were more fucking Tory than the ones they had in Britain.
If you don’t believe me, follow Milton Friedman’s advice and look at the data. After 220 years under the Constitutional mechanisms designed by the Founders, roughly 2 percent of the US population own most of the wealth and get most of the income.
What was Henry Knox’s screech to George Washington re the threat of Shay’s Rebellion?
“The creed is, that the property of the United States has been protected from the confiscations of Britain by the joint exertions of all, and therefore ought to be the common property of all; and he that attempts opposition to this creed is an enemy to equality and justice, and ought to be swept from the face of the earth. In a word, they are determined to annihilate all debts public and private, and have agrarian laws, which are easily effected by the means of unfunded paper money, which shall be a tender in all cases whatever.”
Note that Henry Knox fails to note that Shay’s Continental Soldiers fought the British while the bankers in Boston were getting rich trading with the British enemy. George Washington patriotism was always closely aligned with his property interests on the Ohio River. And, as the US Army’s American Military History notes, ole George was often far from the decisive battles of the Revolution. Did make a nice figurehead to impress the Frenchies, however.
July 13th, 2009 at 2:08 pm
To: TheF79
1. The last time I took an economics course? 1973. I was assigned “Man Economy and State” by Murray Rothbard and ceased being a McGovernite. I still hate Nixon, the war (and the Iraq and Afghan wars) and the draft, however.
2. Monetarism is not Austrian Business Cycle Theory (ABCT) so it doesn’t sound to me like you are teaching ABCT. Friedman always proposed a central bank to dilute at a slow and steady pace to keep prices “stable”. The Austrians claim that any monetary dilution is inherently unstable and will lead to malinvestment and a boom/bust cycle. The Austrians have always been at odds with monetarists. The ABCT is the idea that’s Kryptonite to the “progressives” and Keynesians. Here’s the very short version:
A short power point presentation is found here.
If you want the 2,000 page version, read Ludwig von Mises’ “Human Action” and Murray Rothbard‘s “Man Economy and State” which can be downloaded for free.
*”[T]he Fed’s dramatic interest rate cuts helped keep housing strong even as business investment plunged”.
July 13th, 2009 at 2:09 pm
Who knew that it would be this difficult to convince a bunch of left-wingers that the Founders were actually liberals and not conservatives?
July 13th, 2009 at 2:11 pm
This worked with the media. With academia, though, it is a harder sell. Berkowitz isn’t, of course, trying to send a message with a truth content – the audience here are the alumni and the rich givers. And the point is, by sheer bullying, to bring about changes in academia making it conform with to the ideology praising our oligarchs.
It is interesting that, for all the liberal affection for quotas, liberals don’t say things like: there aren’t enough liberals on the boards of directors of oil companies. They should. Oil companies, perhaps the most pernicious organizations ever to crawl across the earth, have been essential to American conservatism – essentially, they paid for it. And their blind, earth hostile business is leading the world into one of its great disasters, viz. global warming. Given this, shouldn’t liberals be pressing for laws that would require oil company boards of directors to include representatives from environmental groups?
Where are the Exxon liberals? Let’s force them down exxon’s throat.
July 13th, 2009 at 2:17 pm
my political philsophy classes were dominated by conservative thinkers. Burke and Hobbes in particular, with Locke running close behind (Locke’s conservatism up for a little debate?)
burritoboy’s sketched out some of the objections, but the real issue here is that any attempt to back-reference current ideological or partisan thinking is flawed from the outset. The labels need to be pinned to a time and a place.
Locke was an early Whig, writing in the context of the legitimacy crisis that resulted in 1688 and all that. I’m happy to consider him the intellectual progenitor of a wide and scattered spectrum of Anglo-American political thought from left to right. He was sufficiently “un-conservative” to support the dethroning of a monarch. Burke was an old Whig, regarding the American separatists as the true inheritors of the spirit of ‘88, but blanching at the radicalism of the French revolution.
Point is, I’m not sure exactly what the tradition of liberty, property rights and the functioning of markets in Anglo-American political philosophy has to do with the kind of “conservative thought” that manifests itself in contemporary American politics, and which regularly ends up in the editorial section of the Wall Street Journal.
July 13th, 2009 at 2:51 pm
Regarding the courses, in addition to Mansfield, for whatever it’s worth Eric Nelson was a serious, committed, thoughtful conservative as an undergrad and I would be shocked if that has changed.
July 13th, 2009 at 2:55 pm
I don’t know current academia, but 10 years ago our daughter was force fed Chicago-school economics as part of her major. Maybe things have changed in 10 years. Maybe Bush, torture, the suppression of science, Iraq, the gutting of the 4th amendment, and the 2008 collapse of the economy have revealed conservative thought to be wrong and pernicious.
July 13th, 2009 at 2:58 pm
I remember my entry level economics book was written be Greg Mankiw.
July 13th, 2009 at 3:02 pm
For about four decades now what passes for political philosophy on the right has almost exclusively been based in economics and the neoliberal economic faith. To some degree it has also hid itself inside religious faith, but for the most part its been about a march back to a quasi-feudal oligarchy.
July 13th, 2009 at 3:09 pm
At Brown University, where I’m an undergrad, I was able to take two courses my freshman year alone that dealt extensively with the work of von mises, hayek, etc., one of which is a class virtually all political science majors here end up taking. You could certainly make an argument that college students should make a greater effort to expose themselves to these ideas and think about them, but I really struggle to understand how I could be taking these courses (which by the way are far from the only ones available in our department that deal with conservative thought) if my school, often the target of right-wing attacks, was actively trying to suppress conservative ideas.
July 13th, 2009 at 3:11 pm
Left, Right — it’s all the same. It’s all Up politics. Where’s the Down politics? It’s totally one-sided as it’s currently taught — all about rights and morals and the rich and the poor and so on. That’s all just one side though, non-JD politics. Where are the classes on pro-JD policies? It’s totally one-sided. We need balance in our colleges, with a fair division between Up and Down, as the words suggest. All Up and no Down is plain discriminatory. We need 50% pro-JD courses starting now!
July 13th, 2009 at 3:30 pm
“So from a historical perspective he’s a liberal. But politically speaking, he’d fall somewhere in the center right of the American political spectrum, which is significantly farther to the right on a Western or European political spectrum.
Is that a reasonable stance?”
No. The hallmark of conservatism must be centered around whether “what is ancient is good” is true or not. Right / left is irrelevant in this sense; what matters is if what is ancient (whether right, left or otherwise) is better than what is new. Not only does Locke ignore the claims of tradition, his greatest book is explicitly centered around disproving the claims of tradition.
July 13th, 2009 at 3:40 pm
“As a thinker, Harvey Mansfield is at best a clown. Just one word: “Manliness.””
I didn’t much like Manliness the book, but the topic is a completely valid one within philosophy – Plato’s Laches, Xenophon’s Cyropaedia, Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics, Machiavelli’s Prince, Mandragola and Belfagor, Plutarch’s biographies, Fortescue’s Governance of England, Rousseau’s Emile and many others are about the topic.
Mansfield’s Machiavelli’s New Modes and Orders is, I think, an excellent book.
July 13th, 2009 at 4:02 pm
But one topic the undergraduates at these institutions — and at the vast majority of other universities and colleges
You notice these guys NEVER bother to include the over 225 Christian colleges, universities, and bible-colleges in the US when they’re ranting about how liberal “the vast majority” of academia is. I wonder why that is….
July 13th, 2009 at 4:09 pm
And don’t forget that Harvard also hired Niall Ferguson (joint appointment in History and HBS).
July 13th, 2009 at 4:10 pm
It should be easy to see the difficulty in classifying them. The basis of their rebellion was an appeal to liberal ideals involving universal rights. The motivation, though, was that post 1763 the crown was intruding on their right to rule the colonies. The revolution came early in a long, gradual transition in which liberalism ceased to be a struggle against a hereditarily endowed ruling class (not just the King, but the Lords also), and became a struggle against a powerful monied class.
So, were they individuals seeking liberty from a tyrant, or were they a wealthy and powerful group seeking to protect their privelidged positions? Many of the founders were certainly both.
July 13th, 2009 at 4:58 pm
It was a requirement for graduation in polysci at my alma mater.
that was the other half, the empirical data and the falsifiable arguments.
July 13th, 2009 at 5:10 pm
andy Says:
July 13th, 2009 at 4:02 pm
But one topic the undergraduates at these institutions — and at the vast majority of other universities and colleges
You notice these guys NEVER bother to include the over 225 Christian colleges, universities, and bible-colleges in the US when they’re ranting about how liberal “the vast majority” of academia is. I wonder why that is….
============================================================
Because 225 schools out of the 2,474 four year colleges in the country is only 9%.
July 13th, 2009 at 6:31 pm
I teach political philosophy in college and I think Berkowitz’s claim is mostly wrong.
Burke is really the only modern political philosopher of first-rank that conservatives can unequivocally claim, and he gets taught plenty. Nozick is a contemporary philosopher who made arguments conservatives like, and he’s probably *more* read and is *more* famous than he deserves to be. Leo Strauss was an important conservative intellectual and a decent number of political theorists around the country design their whole approach to teaching political thought around Straussian themes.
When should a student read Adams, Milton Friedman, Buckley and Ronald Reagan in a political science program? In surveys of American political history, and American political thought. And they often do get taught there! (Berkowitz should know the contents of the most popular reader in American political thought–it has plenty of conservatives in it:
http://www.cqpress.com/product/American-Political-Thought-5th-Edition.html)
But that fact remains that these are thinkers who are not philosophical enough to get billing in a political theory course.
A big fact that conservatives need to get their brains around is that the bulk of the best social and political thought over the past 200 years is an inheritance of the left, not the right. I’m not a huge fan of most feminist theory, but it’s one of the most important developments in social thought in the past couple centuries. That doesn’t mean that the left is necessarily correct about anything. Yet conservatives assume that brilliance is equal opportunity in all ages of history and so if conservatives aren’t getting taught then it must be insidious left-wing bias.
Another problem is that there are great conservative thinkers out there that American conservatives don’t like or don’t know about. De Maistre? Too monarchical. Calhoun? Pro-slavery. Catholic social teaching? Too paternalistic. Nietzsche? Too anti-Christian. Heidegger and Schmitt? Too fascist. Max Weber? Too wertfrei! In fact teaching these thinkers as “conservative” would probably raise as much of a complaint among conservatives as the current ubiquity of Rawls does.
July 13th, 2009 at 6:56 pm
“A big fact that conservatives need to get their brains around is that the bulk of the best social and political thought over the past 200 years is an inheritance of the left, not the right.”
Actually, as you yourself point out, it’s certainly plausible to argue that the greatest thought of the past 120 years or so has been on the Right rather than the Left: Nietzsche and Heidegger self-identified as men of the Right. The problem comes precisely in the incoherence of American conservatism – they wish to pursue what they claim is an overt policy of liberalism (capitalism, the democratic republic, support of generally liberal regimes like the US and the UK) but also covertly wish to utilize artifacts of Nietzschean / Sorelian thought like the cadre of the party, the political cell, the use of mass political spectacle, a certain relaxation of the ban on political violence in extreme situations and so on.
July 13th, 2009 at 7:08 pm
I’ve taught at four universities. All of them had large business programs that were little more than schools for turning out well-connected young Republicans. A friend’s younger brother entered business school(at a university where I was teaching as an apolitical youth and came out as Alex P. Keaton–celebrating Reagan’s birthday and the like.
The poly sci departments have been pretty conservative, too.
A fair bit of the humanities have been pretty liberal, and some of that actually fits the picture that Limbaugh et al. have of the entire university. (Unfortunately, though, a great deal of what my fellow travelers in those disciplines pedal is bullshit in the Frankfurtian-sense.)
July 13th, 2009 at 7:33 pm
So, Matt, “Since Berkowitz specifically calls out Harvard, and since I went there and no how to navigate its course catalogue, I thought I’d look into this,” eh? As always, the wonderful English skills of Harvard grads make me proud — that I got my doctorate from Yale!
July 13th, 2009 at 8:06 pm
The “no how ” jogged my memory about the title of a paper in History of Science , a title probably apt for Mr.Berkowitz’s article:
“From know-how to nowhere.”
July 13th, 2009 at 9:39 pm
For what it’s worth, I’ve been teaching an upper-level course on Conservative Political Thought at my liberal arts college for several years. The students seem to enjoy it. We cover a range of authors – from Burke, Smith and Hume, to Hayek, Oakeshott, and Strauss. I suppose a certain kind of conservative activist could get riled up by the fact that this course is not taught by a conservative. But just because the conservative movement is filled with assholes does not mean that canonical conservative thinkers don’t merit serious treatment in political science courses.
July 13th, 2009 at 11:20 pm
So Friedrich Hayek — easily one of the top 6 thinkers of the last 100 years — isn’t taught at Harvard.
Impressive.
(Hayek’s ideas in neuroscience are revolutionary, Gerald Edelman or Joaquin Fuster; Hayek in one of the two leading theorists of the Rule of Law over the last 150 years; Hayek is the 2nd most cited Nobel winner in economics by Prize winners themselves; several Nobel Prize winners in economics list Hayek as the best theorist of the market ever; much of Robert Nozick’s work was inspired by Hayek; Hayek was the 2nd most important influence on Karl Popper; and this is just scratching the surface.)
July 14th, 2009 at 12:29 am
Hayek also wrote an essay called “Why I Am Not a Conservative,” in which he said he wasn’t a conservative, and why this was the case.
July 14th, 2009 at 12:32 am
So Friedrich Hayek — easily one of the top 6 thinkers of the last 100 years — isn’t taught at Harvard.
Impressive.
I don’t see the premise from which you’ve deduced this, but for the record, circa 2000, Hayek was read in the most popular political theory course the school offers, Michael Sandel’s “Justice”.
July 14th, 2009 at 12:59 am
My scholarly opinion is that you’re full of it. Besides, the Keynesian macro “paradigm” has been dead for decades, and it’s been monetarism that’s ruled the roost.
My MBA experience at a first-tier program would confirm this. All monetarism, all the time, with some supply side from one particular guy who happened to be a supply-sider. There was a hasty dismissal of anything remotely Keynesian, without any debate. It was as if Keynes and anything related to him was to simply be ignored, due to it having no merit whatsoever.
As a liberal, I suppose that I could have filed some sort of why-let-the-right-wingnuts-have-all-the-fun-whining?-style grievance, but I felt no need. I don’t lose any sleep if my personal preferences aren’t incorporated into every graduate syllabus.
You make the absurd claim that there’s a massive conspiracy to repress Austrian economics, then say that you don’t have to prove (or apparently offer any evidence for) your claim because other people should have to prove you wrong. This isn’t high school debate, son.
I think that what you have to appreciate is that these people are primadonnas who feel offended if they aren’t at the tip of everyone’s tongue and at the center of attention. It’s just a personality disorder.
Austrian economics is at its heart an extremist political ideology with a faux-social science veneer. The premise begins from a political grounding — government is inherently bad — and everything else flows from it.
It generally isn’t credible because the economics component of it is more of a rationalization of the dominant political ideology than it is a plausible social science that stands on its own merits. And it certainly didn’t predict the housing crisis, although that sort of revisionist history certainly helps them sleep better at night. Their victimology is just precious.
July 14th, 2009 at 9:15 am
To: RW
And it (Austrian Business Cycle Theory) certainly didn’t predict the housing crisis, although that sort of revisionist history certainly helps them sleep better at night.
Au contraire. The oncoming inevitable housing crash was a daily topic of discussion among Austrian types starting in 2004 and 2005. For two of hundreds of examples, Peter Schiff, Gary North plus uncountable Ron Paul warnings on C-Span. As opposed to the nitwit Krugman who *constantly hectored the Fed to **create a housing bubble early in this decade.
[T]he economics component of it is more of a rationalization of the dominant political ideology than it is a plausible social science that stands on its own merits.
Oh, for sure. The dominant political ideology calls for abolishing the FED, abolishing the Patriot Act, legalizing heroin and crack, ending all foreign wars tomorrow and slashing the military budget? Really? So, the economics aspect is wrong simply because it rationalize the dominant political ideology which allegedly consists of dismantling the banking-military police state complex. Brilliant analysis.
By the way, monetarism is merely a “conservative” form of Keynesianism. Inherently unstable, and certainly not an example of the free market. However, it’s the gift that keeps on giving for intellectually and lazy liberals (as opposed to the other kind) so they can blame the free market when it is the government’s own central bank wreaking havoc.
July 14th, 2009 at 9:45 am
So, the economics aspect is wrong simply because it rationalize the dominant political ideology which allegedly consists of dismantling the banking-military police state complex.
Obviously, a “theory” that begins with a burning desire to produce a given answer causes the theorist to selectively ignore and cherry pick facts in order to produce a pre-determined conclusion. That’s something much closer to evangelical religion than social science.
One is supposed to begin with facts, then form a conclusion based upon those facts. It is inappropriate to first form a conclusion, then make excuses to rationalize the desired conclusion. The fact that you don’t know this is a huge hint that you’re already starting with a bankrupt premise.
The oncoming inevitable housing crash was a daily topic of discussion among Austrian types starting in 2004 and 2005.
Yes, but you got the reasons wrong, so your conclusions were mere coincidence and dumb luck.
You people simply have no clue about how lending markets work in real life. A Fed rate increase would have been met with more creative loan products, so that the consumer would have alternative payment terms available to borrow the money.
You also ignore that it is the marketplace that sets long-term interest rates. Rates were low because investors chose to underprice risk. That was their doing, not that of the central bank’s.
You might as well argue that the NYSE created the market bubble because it didn’t lower the PE ratio, where lacks the power to do that. Not only are you folks broken records, but you just don’t know what you’re talking about.
FWIW, I was talking about this problem as early as 2003-4, because I work in a related field and could see what was happening with leverage ratios. The Austrians are good for cake and coffee, but for finance theory, there are more reliable sources.