Google tells me how many times each day my blog is visited, but it does not tell me how many individual people visit. Now, it is obvious that some people check in many times each day and I would imagine that there are regular readers who do not check in every day, so taking all and all I think there must be perhaps several thousand people around the world who could be considered regular readers of this blog.
The comments section is dominated by no more than seven or
eight people, depending on how you disambiguate the anonymati. It may of course be that the rest of the readers have no
interest in commenting but every so often I catch sight of an interesting
comment that almost gets lost in the flood of MS multipart comments or S.
Wallerstein’s comments or those of LFC.
I feel like the teacher in whose classroom two or three of
the students dominate the discussion while less forward members of the class
sit quietly. I would like to give those other 2000 or so people a chance to
speak up if they wish without feeling that they must push their way into the
discussion. So I am going to ask that for one week starting today, the small
number of regular commentators simply remain silent. I am aware that I can
curate the blog and painstakingly delete all of the comments by the usual
suspects but I do not want to do that. The comments are not unwarranted or
uninteresting or inappropriate, although they do seem to be getting more
querulous and petulant, but they simply take up all the available oxygen in the
comments space.
So I will ask you please if you have been one of the regular
commenters simply to withhold your comments for one week. No cute little
remarks with a self-deprecating apology for breaking silence or any nonsense
like that. Just knock it off for one week and give other people a chance.
Now it is entirely possible that when this quiet empty space
appears in the comments section, none of those folks who have up till now not
commented will seize the opportunity. They may be quite content to read what is
on the blog without nodding in. So be it. We shall see for one week whether
there are folks out there who have been wanting to speak up but have been put
off by the flood of comments from those who appear so often.
I shall continue to blog of course. I mean, it is my blog
after all so the timeout does not apply to me. I am counting on the rest of you
to respect my wishes.
I have read all of your books and follow your blog regularly. I am a Lecturer of General Education and Philosophy in East Asia. My AOS is Chinese philosophy (Zhuangzi and Zhuangzi commentary). I am also interested in Marx and Marxism.
ReplyDeletehttps://myweb.cuhk.edu.cn/jrwilliams/Home/Index
Welcome! Good to hear from you. We are in East Asia are you teaching? I am not sure I have read all of my books :-)
ReplyDeleteWell, you know me; a regular commenter, posting an aperçu every 22 days.
ReplyDeleteI visit your blog a few times a week. I am a design faculty (interior design and architecture), interested in social and historical questions, and contemporary politics. I find your analyses very insightful. Thank you for your work.
ReplyDeleteThank you for nodding in. It is good to know you are out there reading the blog from time to time.
ReplyDeleteI've been reading, or at least looking at, your blog for 7-8 years. I check it several times per week, and my most typical reaction is to marvel at your wisdom. I just skim the comments, and I don't think I've ever read through even one of the longish comments (something about life being too short), although I've learned from and enjoyed a great many of the shorter ones. The occasional contentious tone of the comments is a drag, but as you know there are countless far worse things in life.
ReplyDeleteThank you for for dropping by. I hope I can continue to contribute a little bit to your day.
ReplyDeleteI teach in the PRC. I plan to incorporate The Poverty of Liberalism in my intro to philo course next semester, and if I get to teach American philo in the future, I hope to incorporate Autobiography of an Ex-White Man.
ReplyDeleteWow! That is exciting. Where in China do you teach? Are these all Chinese students who are fluent in English?Many thanks for checking in.
ReplyDeleteJ. Bogart
ReplyDeleteTaught philosophy at research universities, then practiced law (mostly private antitrust litigation). Taught adjunct in law schools (jurisprudence and complex civil litigation courses). Retired in Italy. Read the blog regularly. Occasional comments as anonymous because logging in is a pain.
Very interesting. My younger son, Tobias, teaches complex litigation among other things. I knew he was right for the law when he would call me from law school and go on with great excitement about his civil procedure course. :-)
ReplyDeleteI'm one of your former students, now a philosophy professor who uses and refers to your work pretty regularly in courses with students. You may have already read these books, but I've recently read Mariana Mazzucato's *The Value of Everything* and Ruth Ben-Ghiat's *Strongmen: From Mussolini to the Present*, thought they were both brilliant and compatible with Wolffian views of the economy and autocrats. If you haven't read them yet, I think you'd like them both.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the recommendations. I will get hold of them and take a look. I do not suppose you could give me a hint as to when or where you were my student. God I feel like Mr. Chips.
ReplyDeleteSure! I'm an old UMie, from the immediately post-AT days. I was part of a group of grad students you kindly chauffeured to one of the big protests at the state capital when the Leg was cutting funding to UMASS. (The protest resulted in a restoration of funds, but we were all chided for trampling the cherished flowers outside the building.)
ReplyDeleteI have been reading your blog since Brian Leiter first noted its existence on his own blog. I visit three or four times a week. I am a staff lawyer for an appellate court in Canada, although my first love is philosophy not law. I did graduate studies in England in legal philosophy but did not finish the doctoral program. Anyway, and as you are not doubt aware, your book on anarchism was widely discussed by philosophers who think about whether (and how) political authority can be justified. So I knew something of your work before I ever read the blog. Since then I have read some of your work on Kant (difficult for a dilettante like me) and Autobiography of an Ex-White Man.
ReplyDeleteI have not commented on this blog. That's mainly because I find I don't have enough time to think about your substantive posts on philosophy, economics, sociology etc to add anything useful to the conversation. But I do love reading them.
Anonymous -- I asked if anyone had an opinion on Mariana Mazzucato a few blog posts ago that I think was drowned out in the contentious comments. Glad to hear someone reading this is aware of her existence.
ReplyDelete-- Jim
Prof. Wolff
ReplyDeleteThe well-known 'Wolf Street ' blog has a commenting guide, at
https://wolfstreet.com/2017/10/07/finally-my-guidelines-for-commenting/
which you might find useful.
They look good to me, but OTOH I don't write a blog.
I am an architect trained in urban theory and work in the research department of a national orgnaization that promotes (unsuccessfully) urban equity. As you can imagine Marx looms large over our thinking even if we urban theorists do not admit it.
ReplyDeleteI first encountered your Marx lectures on youtube and started following your channel from the second lecture onwards. I introduced your lectures to students at the Univ. of Chicago as reference material in my guest lectures on urban planning.
I've posted as anonymous before because I usually read blogs when I'm travelling or access the Internet using unsecured public networks.
--Dave F.
Thank you, Dave F. I am delighted to hear that you told the University of Chicago students about my lectures. It is almost 60 years since I taught there and I would like to think that it is still a lively place full of students who confront you and challenge you at every turn. I used to say that when a University of Chicago student came in to a lecture late, as she was walking to her seat she would raise her hand and say "I do not agree." A unique place to teach.
ReplyDeleteHello Professor Wolff,
ReplyDeleteI am a philosopher of law at Carleton University, Canada. And I am a fan of your work, especially on anarchy. Indeed, I may request a Zoom lecture for my grad seminar over the winter if things do work out in terms of schedule.
All Best,
Rueban B.
Hello Professor Wolff,
ReplyDeleteI am a philosopher of law at Carleton University, Canada. And I am a fan of your work, especially on anarchy. Indeed, I may request a Zoom lecture for my grad seminar over the winter if things do work out in terms of schedule.
All Best,
Rueban B.
Dear Professor Wolff,
ReplyDeleteThanks for responding (in a post above) with your fond memories of teaching at Univ. of Chicago sixty years ago. My connection to that greatness came from inheriting the largest wooden desk ever made. Apparently it was custom built for the late great Charles Edward Merriam (Columbia, 1900). He would have passed away the decade before you came to Hyde Park but Merriam's reputation persists to this day.
When they were looking for an office space for me in Hyde Park, they found an old corner office in an old building that no one liked. I accepted as I had no choice. Later I found out it was Merriam's office with his custom desk. When you were recalling your encounter with Bertrand Russell, I was thinking of a similar conversation I'd have had with Merriam's ghost.
I enjoy all your anecdotes.
--Dave F.
I teach at CUHK in Shenzhen. The students all speak and read English with high proficiency. The coursework is all in English except for texts originally written in Chinese.
ReplyDeleteGood morning, Bob. I've been reading your blog since the very beginning. I read it first thing in the morning and it helps set my contemplative mood for the day and brings me back to the Tuesday evening philosophy of science dinners we shared at Boston University. thank you, Steve Gerrard, Williams College
ReplyDeleteHi Steve, lovely to hear from you. Those dinners with a high point of my week back in the day. The wonderful thing about the colloquium sessions was that no matter how arcane the subject, somehow the one expert on the subject always turned up. I remember an obscure talk on Aztec practices that elicited in the audience a comment by someone who said he was a descendent of the Aztecs. Those were good times. I enjoyed the course I taught at Williams College as a visitor back in 85 or 86 (1985 that is of course.)
ReplyDelete