My Harvard non-course is set for 13 Fridays from 2 to 4 PM starting in early February. I am really pumped.
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A Commentary on the Passing Scene by Robert Paul Wolff rwolff@afroam.umass.edu
My Stuff
https://umass-my.sharepoint.com/:f:/g/personal/rwolff_umass_edu/EkxJV79tnlBDol82i7bXs7gBAUHadkylrmLgWbXv2nYq_A?e=UcbbW0
Coming Soon:
The following books by Robert Paul Wolff are available on Amazon.com as e-books: KANT'S THEORY OF MENTAL ACTIVITY, THE AUTONOMY OF REASON, UNDERSTANDING MARX, UNDERSTANDING RAWLS, THE POVERTY OF LIBERALISM, A LIFE IN THE ACADEMY, MONEYBAGS MUST BE SO LUCKY, AN INTRODUCTION TO THE USE OF FORMAL METHODS IN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY.
Now Available: Volumes I, II, III, and IV of the Collected Published and Unpublished Papers.
Now Available: Volumes I, II, III, and IV of the Collected Published and Unpublished Papers.
NOW AVAILABLE ON YOUTUBE: LECTURES ON KANT'S CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON. To view the lectures, go to YouTube and search for "Robert Paul Wolff Kant." There they will be.
NOW AVAILABLE ON YOUTUBE: LECTURES ON THE THOUGHT OF KARL MARX. To view the lectures, go to YouTube and search for Robert Paul Wolff Marx."
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About Me
- Robert Paul Wolff
- As I observed in one of my books, in politics I am an anarchist, in religion I am an atheist, and in economics I am a Marxist. I am also, rather more importantly, a husband, a father, a grandfather, and a violist.
24 comments:
Congrats, Prof. Wolff. I hope it goes well!
26 hours of intense explicating....wow, seems like a lot; is that a normal load? Probably something that you could do just about off the top of your head, but still!
In spite of your physical ailments, looks like the old noggin is fit as a...err...viola!
Great news for you and for all of us who are well over the normal retirement age and see you as a model for what one can achieve intellectually at an advanced age.
On November 6th, Marc Susselman filed a lawsuit in favor of the right to fly a Pride Flag in northern Detroit. Read a PDF copy of the complaint in #10 of Marc Susselman's correspondences.
"michael.www2.50megs.com"
"http://michael.www2.50megs.com"
The invaluable Juan Cole has published a devastating take-down of the US Congress's censure of Rashida Tlaib for her defense of Palestinian rights and criticism of Israeli destruction of Gaza:
https://www.juancole.com/2023/11/resolution-delusional-falsehoods.html
David Zimmerman,
It's very sinister when the right of freedom of speech of a member of congress is censured.
That goes for leftwing and rightwing members of congress, for Zionist and pro-Palestinian ones too.
Thanks, D. Z., for that pointer to Juan Cole's point by point take down of the censure motion. I imagine the bitter sense of outrage that seems to me to pervade Cole's criticisms is something many people feel. I know I do.
Still, I guess one should be glad that the Democratic Party is a weak party rather than a strong one as is the case elsewhere. In the UK, for example, critics of the official Labour Party line on Palestine are being expelled into the political margins while they're being "investigated" or else ousted. (In passing, it's of interest to me that the Trumpian Republican Party is transmogrifying into a strong party, albeit one where expulsion simply follows from not going along with 'the leadership principle.')
I’m aware that Mearsheimer isn’t a favorite of some who come to this blog. (My own misgivings with him centre on the fact that—as do many international relations scholars, I think—while ostensibly presenting an objective analysis he nevertheless cannot avoid talking about “we,” “us.” It’s rather as if physicists were to talk as if they too were one among the colliding atoms instead of taking an outsider view of the behaviour of atoms. To be sure, that may be taken to be a fundamental difficulty faced by all social scientists. Still, it’s a bit disconcerting to have objectivity and subjectivity so evidently juxtaposed to each other in i. r. discourse. Anyway, it’s pretty clear Mearsheimer wants the US to remain the weightiest great power in the world; hence his despair that it is on the path to ruin, and he can see no way of getting on another—to him, the correct—path.) Here it is. It’s title reveals that he’s talking about two matters that have generated a lot of vigorous discussion on this blog over the past weeks and year.
https://www.cis.org.au/commentary/video/israel-hamas-ukraine-russia-and-china-john-mearsheimer-on-why-the-us-is-in-serious-trouble/
Giving a lecture series at Harvard seems somehow much more emotionally and intellectually healthy, even when it will be about matters that ought to be equally troubling.
James Wilson,
I like Mearsheimer myself.
It's to his credit, I believe, that he talks about "us" rather than feign impartiality or the view from nowhere. In general, Mearsheimer impresses me as being a bit more honest about where he's coming from than the majority of academics in the social sciences.
I refer to "academics in the social sciences" rather than "international relations scholars" as you do, simply because I'm not at all familiar with the field of international relations in general.
And it's not only academics in the social sciences, most people feign impartiality when they're not at all impartial. In many cases, they may be deceiving themselves, but
Mearsheimer's general authenticity is refreshing. Which does not mean that I agree with him on everything.
I started to leave a comment on this earlier today but had to leave it unposted for various reasons. And now I only have time for a relatively quick one.
I'm familiar with the academic field of intl relations. (In the U.S. it is generally a subfield of political science, but my program was labeled IR.) Suffice it to say there are a large variety of IR scholars doing a variety of things. No one person is representative of them all, certainly not Mearsheimer, who these days is mostly speaking to a broader public rather than his fellow academics. He talks about "us" in these contexts prob partly bc he was not addressing an academic seminar (I watched a bit of the video) but an audience gathered by in this case an Australian think tank or policy outfit -- and he was talking about what the U.S. should do in his opinion, hence "us" was a shorthand of sorts, I think, an implicit acknowledgment that he is a U.S. citizen (former member of the U.S. military also) who teaches at a U.S. university. I wd never use "us" myself in this way in a talk, but to each his own. (And since I'm not being inundated w invitations to give talks, it's sort of a moot point.)
P.s. I think Mearsheimer is less self-reflective, if I can put it that way, than some IR scholars (and social scientists, historians etc.) in general are. That's either part of his problem or part of his appeal, depending on whom you ask, I suppose. He exudes self-confidence, more than is warranted I think, and displays little of the usual tendency of many intellectuals to pile caveats and qualifications around statements. That help makes him an effective speaker, but it has drawbacks too.
Typo: s/b "helps make him..."
There's a much bigger problem with Mearsheimer's analysis than his framing things in terms of what "we" in the US should do. It's his notions (1) that it's a disaster that the US is losing hegemony and (2) that China should be regarded as a threat/enemy. It's that kind of neocon thinking, which has zombified all of Washington & the US foreign policy establishment, that risks creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Why does the US have to be the top power? Why can't we have a community of equals, trying to work cooperatively to solve common problems (eg climate)?
Just the other day, Obama, speaking on behalf of the ruling class, gave an address on economics in which he claimed that "the market-based economic system we commonly know as capitalism has been the greatest generator of wealth and innovation that the world has ever seen."
If we in the US have the greatest political system ever and the greatest economic system ever, why do we have to put up such an effort bullying other countries to follow our lead and to make them do what we want them to do? We spend a trillion dollars annually on the military, more than the next 9 countries combined, maintain hundreds of military bases all around the world, and are constantly at war, overtly or covertly. Why are we still maintaining an economic blockade on tiny Cuba, with its population the size of North Carolina's?
How many military bases does China have outside its mainland? How many wars has China fought in the past 40 years? How many foreign governments has China sponsored coups in?
China woos countries by helping them build infrastructure. We overthrow governments that don't cooperate with us (ie with our corporate interests). China's approach seems to be "win-win," while the US's is "our way or else."
Three weeks ago we were discussing the horrible possibility that Israel had deliberately fired on a hospital in Gaza. Several commenters said that it was unbelievable that the Israelis would do such a thing.
https://robertpaulwolff.blogspot.com/2023/10/rolling-my-tub.html
Can there still be any doubt that Israel is deliberately targeting hospitals, schools, mosques, and churches? And that they are being given cover by Joe Biden?
"Israel has claimed the hospital is used by Hamas as a command centre, which both the al-Shifa staff and the armed group have denied.
The area around al-Shifa has been bombed at least five times since Thursday, according to Gaza health officials, while Israeli forces have also struck al-Nasr Medical Centre, al-Quds Hospital and al-Rantisi Hospital.
The WHO has confirmed that half of Gaza’s 36 hospitals are not functioning and two-thirds of its primary care facilities are out of commission amid the fighting."
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/11/11/israeli-forces-close-in-on-al-shifa-hospital-trapping-thousands
DemocracyNow ran this piece 4 years ago.
It's important because they are discussing how Israel responded to largely peaceful demonstrations by Palestinians who were protesting the Gaza wall & blockade. (Largely peaceful. At the worst, some of the Palestinians were armed with rocks, Molotov cocktails, or burning kites.)
"A United Nations inquiry has found Israeli forces may have committed war crimes and crimes against humanity by targeting unarmed children, journalists and the disabled in Gaza. The report, released by the U.N. Human Rights Council on Thursday, looked at Israel’s bloody response to weekly Great March of Return demonstrations, launched by Palestinians in Gaza nearly a year ago, targeting Israel’s heavily militarized separation barrier.... The dead included 35 children. Twenty-three thousand people were injured, including over 6,000 shot by live ammunition."
https://www.democracynow.org/2019/3/4/un_finds_israel_intentionally_shot_children
I remember watching DemocracyNow broadcasts in 2018 as the Great March of Return was underway. They interviewed non-combatants (journalists and a medic) who were shot at by Israeli snipers, despite their wearing indicia that clearly indicated their roles.
"For more we go to Gaza, where we are joined by the Canadian doctor Tarek Loubani. On Monday Israeli forces shot him in his left leg and right knee while he was treating gunshot wound patients in Gaza."
https://www.democracynow.org/2018/5/17/meet_tarek_loubani_the_canadian_doctor
I was actually trying to indicate, Eric, that I take Mearsheimer to be a proponent of Keeping America the Greatest. I generally take the (American) realist idiom to be a way of pretending to be objective. No doubt other "realists" elsewhere do the same sort of thing. Still, I think I prefer it to the pseudo-morality of the "humanitarian interventionists"--it is, so far as I'm concerned, a bit less nauseating. Cheers.
James Wilson,
You said it better than I could. The "humanitarian interventionists" are so sickening that Mearsheimer's frankness is refreshing.
Mearsheimer is not Chomsky (my favorite analyst of these things and one of my intellectual favorites in general), but honesty is a virtue and pseudo-moralistic bull-shit is not.
In fact, one of the things which most attracts me to Chomsky is his honesty. I believe him and in him.
Mearsheimer's worldview has two components: an analysis of how he thinks states (countries) actually behave and a view of how he thinks they should behave. The first aspect is pretty much driving the second.
M. believes, as other 'realists' do, that in an intl environment with no supranational authority powerful enough to make most countries (i.e. regimes, govts) do what they don't want to do or order them around effectively (what IR 'discourse' calls, misleadingly, an "anarchic" world), every state has to be the ultimate guarantor of its own survival. M. thinks that the best way for 'great powers' (the main focus of his major book) to survive in such a world is to maximize their power, but he believes that in practice the most any great power can do is 1) achieve hegemony in it's region, and 2) prevent any other great power
Sorry posted too soon by mistake. Typo: "it's" s/b "its" ( stupid phone autocorrect).
Continuation:
2) prevent any other great power from achieving hegemony in *its* region. This second thing is why he's so concerned about China. The analytical weak point in M's position is that, since he thinks no great power can under most circumstances achieve global hegemony, it's not clear why China's achieving hegemony in its region would pose such a danger to the U.S. The answer seems to be that China would then be more able to "cause trouble" for the U.S. in its own "backyard" (the Western hemisphere) but the nature of the trouble it might cause is left somewhat unclear.
M. is not a neocon. Doesn't care about democracy promotion etc. Opposed the Iraq war.
The majority of IR scholars (certainly the majority of IR scholars in the Anglophone world) are not, by self-identification, realists, so they wd cone at things from a different angle than M.
Last note: 'realism' in whatever version does not dictate a specific foreign policy or strategic posture beyond general maxims such as, in M"s case, "don't let another great power become hegemonic in its region".
One other thing. I don't think M. fully appreciates the likelihood that there will never be another war like WW1 or esp WW2 - i.e. a years-long global war between great powers. If there is a WW3, it will likely escalate to nuclear and be over w/in days or a week, having killed prob hundreds of millions of people and w.o any discernible 'winner'.
I fail to see, LFC, why you assert what you do about Mearsheimer's views on what a contemporary war between the world's greatest powers would look like. Do you have a specific reference indicating that he is not contemplating that it might very well be a very short, massively, mutually devastating--indeed a humanity devastating--conflict?
Which is irrelevant to the instant case which turned on the photographic evidence. The corrupt/fanatical nut cases that run the Israeli government are clearly capable of all sorts of bad acts and accidents do happen in battles but photographs are photographs.
"Even before the Crusades, many Jews had converted to Christianity or Islam and others had emigrated as merchants to Europe."
Cole replaces the bad history of the censure resolution with his own bad history.
Anonymous @2:14 pm
Started to reply to you and then lost the comment.
Short version: I shd have put my pt more carefully. What I meant was that parts of M's analytical framework seem to me to presuppose a world in which great powers are actively interested in conquering substantial amts of land. W the possible exception of Putin's Russia, that does not seem to be the case now, however, and one reason it doesn't seem to be the case is the presence of nuclear weapons. (Will come back later when computer is on.)
Please record the course and upload it on YouTube like the previous one professor
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