Taking no prisoners - what passes for American discourse

We are indeed a pathetic species - congregating apparently in "bubbles" and "echo chambers" of like-minded groups. I have a "bolshie" side to me - expressed in rather juvenile gestures like refusing in the 1950s to stand for the national anthem played then in cinemas (!) - or to wear what became in the late 80s the obligatory poppy around the Armistice celebrations....
My contrarian gesture these days is to expose myself to a few journals which express a very different world-view from that of my normal reading. I realise that my recent list of preferred journals runs the risk of my being "pigeon-holed" - although I would readily agree with any accusations of being "humanist" or "sceptical". Such epithets, hopefully, indicate an openness of mind - a willingness to take seriously an alternative view
The careful reader will notice a few surprises amongst the typical favourites of a Guardian reader viz "Spiked", "The Critic" and "Quillette" - the first and last being libertarian and the middle a new journal which expresses a certain spirit of old-fashioned English nationalism.......I read these to test my own views - not for nothing do I like the phrase mugwump

And it was while reading the latest version of Quillette that I encountered "The Challenge of Marxism" which I want to explore as an example of the "take no prisoners" style which seems to have become modern American discourse

A mere 30 years later, Marxism is back, and making an astonishingly successful bid to seize control of the most important American media companies, universities and schools, major corporations and philanthropic organizations, and even the courts, the government bureaucracy, and some churches.

As American cities succumb to rioting, arson, and looting, it appears as though the liberal custodians of many of these institutions—from the New York Times to Princeton University—have despaired of regaining control of them, and are instead adopting a policy of accommodation. That is, they are attempting to appease their Marxist employees by giving in to some of their demands in the hope of not being swept away entirely.
Meanwhile, others will continue to work in the mainstream media, universities, tech companies, philanthropies, and government bureaucracy, learning to keep their liberalism to themselves and to let their colleagues believe that they too are Marxists—just as many conservatives learned long ago how to keep their conservatism to themselves and let their colleagues believe they are liberals. This is the new reality that is emerging.

There is blood in the water and the new Marxists will not rest content with their recent victories. In America, they will press their advantage and try to seize the Democratic Party. They will seek to reduce the Republican Party to a weak imitation of their own new ideology, or to ban it outright as a racist organization. And in other democratic countries, they will attempt to imitate their successes in America. No free nation will be spared this trial. So let us not avert our eyes and tell ourselves that this curse isn’t coming for us. Because it is coming for us.

The article is written by one Yoram Hazony who is apparently Director of the Herzl Institute of Jerusalem - and goes on to make the point that Marx's basic insight was the recognition that the world was divided between those with wealth and power and those without; and that there would be conflict between the two.
He then, astonishingly, concedes that Marx was correct in this insight - as well as in his further argument that liberalism is a rationalisation of the privileged life led by the upper class.....
But the article insists relentlessly on lumping under the label of "Marxists" all who object to the damage done to public life by the worship of greed - and who refuse to accept that the market can do no wrong.

I, for example, have never called myself a Marxist - although I certainly recognise (as do all serious  social scientists) that he was one of the 19th century's greatest thinkers. I have seen myself variously as a Social Democrat or, occasionally, as an ecologist

If these is any sense to this article, it seems to be a manichean call to arms to all those who consider themselves privileged - for them to understand that any thought of coalition with other forces is nothing short of treachery.

A paean of praise (almost 2000 comments - mostly positive) has greeted the article in the week since it's publication) I thought it needed at least one note of dissent and made the following comment .

I am staggered that Quillette considers such a Manichean view of the world is worthy of inclusion in the journal. It is also “all over the place” starting with a purported summary of 2 arguments of the German gentleman which are then quickly conceded - followed by a further concession that liberals have never dealt satisfactorily with the argument that liberalism is a rationalisation of privilege

I am a British social democrat who has never called myself a Marxist - but this author dares to call me - and the millions of others who take issue with the greed ideology - a Marxist.This tactic is one of the most divisive I have come across.- with the bottom line that you are either for privilege or against us. No coalitions or prisoners!!

What a dreadful creed!

Fiddling while Rome is Burning

Bear with me while I try to get to the heart of my unease with the quality of the non-fiction writing with which we are flooded every day - week in and week out.
I've previously suggested that a common fault of the books which should be helping us understand the nature of the problems which confront us - be it globalisation, corruption, unemployment, migration, populism or identity - is partiality, bad-writing or over-specialisation.

The discipline of Economics has rightly taken a drubbing since 2008 - with the world waking up at last to the inanity of the assumptions it brings to to the task of anticipating future events.
But, despite this, economists remain, after epidimiologists, the first "go-to experts" for the media.  So their poisonous message continues to seep into our minds

We expect political scientists, by virtue simply of the first word in their title, to be different. But they have, in the past half-century, allowed the second word to dominate their thinking. They have "penis-envy"; and have tended as a result to produce boring quantitative stuff - with a few honourable exceptions noted below

Intellectuals of the mid-century - such as JK Galbraith, Raymond Aron and Tony Crosland - could communicate about Big Issues. Three features in particular stood out in their writing -
- They had read widely - not just in the narrow sub-disciplines of today's academia;
- had broad experience of life - beyond the ivory tower
- they were not afraid to demonstrate their moral principles

We are, these days in desperate need of their ilk. I'm hard pressed to find books which contain these qualities. Too many EITHER set up simplified goodies and baddies OR confuse us with the over-complexity of their analyses
Two authors who have the necessary breadth are Romania's Alina Mungiu-Pippidi who, since 2007, has been Professor of Democratic Studies at the prestigious Hertie School of Governance in Berlin and an activist in her home country....Graduating originally in medicine, she has a doctorate in social psychology and has even written plays. Not surprisingly corruption has been a central focus of her work;  and her latest book is a great read - Europe's Burden - promoting good governance across borders (2020) which I hope to be studying next week....The excerpts which Amazon offers demonstrate a strong sense of country histories which are generally missing in most technocratic works.

Graham P Maxton was, until 2018, Secretary of The Club of Rome and I came across his superbly-written little book Change - why we need a radical turnaround (2018) earlier in the year. This is one of the best statements I know of about global warming and why we need urgent change
In 2011 he produced the equally readable "The End of Progress - how modern economics has failed us" . There is an interview here; and a presentation here

Some Critiques of social and political science relevance
- Bent Flyvbjerg’s Making Social Science Matter (2001),
- Stephen Toulmin’s Return to Reason (2003),
- Sanford Schram and Brian Caterino’s Making Political Science Matter (2006) and
- Gerry Stoker and B, Guy Peters The Relevance of Political Science (2013)  

Expectations

Expectations are at the root of unhappiness
Zen Buddhists have it right
My mother's commonplace book of sayings
contained a prayer
attributed to Reinhold Niebuhr

"God grant me

the strength to change 

what needs to be changed

the serenity to accept 

what cannot be changed and

the wisdom to know the difference" 

even the economists understand.
with their demand and supply curves,
that it's better to reduce demand!
For Keynes, expectations were...
too "exuberant" 

Le Trahison des Clercs?

This phrase - the title of a famous little French book which was published in 1927 - still reverbates almost a hundred years on. "Clercs" can be translated literally as "scribblers" with the english title "Betrayal of the Intellectuals" giving its true sense. Its basic argument was that the increasing nationalist tone of French intellectuals was a betrayal of the Enlightenment project.

This polemical essay argued that European intellectuals in the 19th and 20th century had often lost the ability to reason dispassionately about political and military matters, instead becoming apologists for crass nationalism, warmongering and racism. Benda reserved his harshest criticisms for his fellow Frenchmen Charles Maurras and Maurice Barrès. Benda defended the measured and dispassionate outlook of classical civilization, and the internationalism of traditional Christianity.Human aspirations, specifically after power, would become the sole end of society.

French intellectuals have, of course, been a more numerous and vociferous bunch than their anglo-saxon counterparts - with Bertrand Russell, John Dewey, William James and Walter Lippmann being amongst the few of the latter at the time. And the French tradition of challenge to power is clearly longer and stronger - stretching  recently from Zola's famous J'Accuse campaign through the French resistance to American culture and La Pensee Unique to Stephane Hessel's Indignez-Vous .

But the massive academic expansion of the past 50 years means that academics and journalists are so numerous these days that we tend to trip over them as they vie for our attention.  The question I want to pursue here is whether this new breed doesn't also deserve to be accused of a massive betrayal of public trust - this time by virtue not of political passion or ideology but of its absence!!

The last post concluded with a suggestion that most of the products of political and social science is of little use to us as citizens.  A spate of books in the past decade about populism and democracy such as Runciman's "How Democracy Ends?" (2018) about which I wrote very positively earlier this year  ; and Yascha Mounk's "The People v Democracy – why our freedom is in danger and how to save it"  (2018) would suggest I may have been a tad critical.  And the list of books at the end of the next post seems to indicate that there has been a reasonably healthy ongoing debate about the reinvigoration of the discipline and a more explicit connection between political science and contemporary politics and public debate.

But the social sciences have, in the past half-century of explosive university expansion , been thoroughly professionalised - with a concomitant increase in their aspirations to scientism. Matt Flinders has a useful discussion about this in his article "The Tyranny of Relevance and the act of translation" which argues that academics do feel incrrasingly under pressure to justify their existence and relevance to those in power - both in the private and public sectors. Indeed such links have attracted occasional criticism - particularly in such sectors as armaments and energy
But what about their sense of duty to the wider public of citizens? How many academics take the trouble to try to communicate with the wider public on issues of public concern? 

Younger academics certainly cannot afford to engage in anything that might smack of popularisation - let alone of politics. Which leaves it up to their older colleagues with tenure to engage in the important but neglected task of communicating with the wider public.
Although there is certainly a welcome increase of popular writing by academics, it is still a tiny percentage of the millions of such staff - and the motives in all too many cases have more to do with reputation than with edification! And consist too often of rehashed dissertations. The thousands of titles on capitalism are a good example - full, as Shakespeare so nicely puts it, "of sound and fury" but offering little to the wider public that bis actionable......
Chomsky is perhaps the most famous of the intellectuals prepared to comment on worldly affairs and demonstrates the risks involved - of being both pigeon-holed and vilified. Here is one of Chomsky's classic statement on the role of the public intellectual - from 1967!

The post is proving more complicated than I had realised - so will be continued........

Why is Political Science so.....irrelevant?

The last 5 posts were sparked off by some articles in "The Political Quarterly" conducting a preliminary post-mortem on government performance during the Covid pandemic - and what that said about the strength (and weaknesses) of the UK, Swedish and New Zealand government systems and/or leadership. The posts wandered a bit - covering such issues as
- the role and scope of individual action
- and "character",
- the role of the state,
- intellectual fashions,
- blunders in government and
- the meaning of the word "governance".
I thought therefore it would be useful to try to tie things together more coherently in this post

British and American political scientists have had from the 1970s a consistent (if intermittent) interest in the issue of what they have variously labelled as government "overload", "disasters" or "blunders" - as you will see from the long bibliography of the Comparing Blunders in government (2016) article

To the extent that they have had anything to say about government per se, it has generally been to suggest that globalisation and other supranational forces have been undermining the significance of that particular system of ultimate authority. 
American political scientists, notoriously, have in recent decades been plagued by a form of penis-envy - namely "economist envy" and have become fixated on quantitative/statistical treatment (of elections etc).

British political science may like to think it's different but a cursory look at any of the flagship political science journals would demonstrate that they don't deal with "big" or important political issues. Political scientists have, for example, been generally missing from discussions about the location of power in the UK. Indeed this has been the subject of some provocative addresses in recent years eg Matt Flinder's "The Future of Political Science" (2016)
And just look at the titles of some of the books in the reading list at the end.... 
This article "Covid19 and the policy sciences" by well-known policy analysts Paul Cairney, Diana Stone et al gives a good sense of how various strands in that related field are dealing with the issue

But it's taken a Professor of Military Strategy to produce the first definitive study (50pp) of the performance of the British Government during the initial 4 months of the pandemic - Strategy for a Pandemic - the UK and Covid19  by Lawrence Freedman
And it takes a rare and brave soul to offer anything about government strategy-making which might be found useful by practitioners - but one of those rarities is Creating Public Value in Practice – advancing the common good in a ….noone in charge world ; ed J Bryson et al (2015),  an update of their fantastic book for 20 years earlier Leadership for the Common Good which can be accessed in full by clicking the title.
Such books tend to be written by those with detailed experience of the management of government policies and practice who will tend to come from the less-highly regarded field of public administration and.or management.

And it is one such author's book which has just come to my attention "Strategies for Governing - reinventing public administration for a dangerous century"  (2019)

In the United States, the field of public administration was launched almost a century ago by people with bold aspirations. They were not interested only in the efficiency of government offices; they wanted a thorough overhaul of the creaking American state so that it could manage the pressures of modern-day life.

Unfortunately, this expansive view of the field’s purpose has been lost. Over the last four decades in particular, the focus within the field has been mainly on smaller problems of management within the public sector. This narrowing of focus might have made sense in the United States and a few other advanced democracies in the waning decades of the twentieth century, but it does not make sense today.
As we shall see, many people have recently protested this shrinking of ambitions.

It is time for a change of direction. We need to recover an expansive view of the field, and I propose a way to do so. We must recover the capacity to talk about the fundamentals of government, because the fundamentals matter immensely.

Right now, there are billions of people on this planet who suffer terribly because governments cannot perform basic functions properly. People live in fear because governments cannot protect their homes from war and crime. They live in poverty because governments cannot create the conditions for trade and commerce to thrive. They live in pain because governments cannot stop the spread of disease. And they live in ignorance because governments do not provide opportunities for education. The expectations that we hold of our leaders can be stated simply: They should protect us from foreign enemies, maintain internal order, increase prosperity, improve well-being, and provide justice.
Even in the twenty-first century, most governments on this planet fail to do this.

I've ordered the book and will let you know whether it lives up to expectations

Conclusion; I had assumed that this post would wrap up the mini-series of the past week but realise that it does not even begin to answer the question of why political science is so irrelevant.....

Studies Critical of Political Science  
Defending Politics - Democracy in the 21st Century; Matt Flinders (2012)
The Political Imagination – a rallying call to university professors of politics (Flinders 2014)
Bridging the Relevance Gap ; Matthew Wood (2014)
Human Wellbeing and the lost relevance of political science ; Bo Rothstein (2014)
The relevance of political science ; Stoker, Pierre and Peters (2015)
Why Politics Matters – making democracy work; Gerry Stoker  (2004; 2016)
Why We Hate Politics ; Colin Hay (2007)

"Governance" as New Kids on the Block

New words do not always indicate a new condition. One of my favourite cartoons is the Jules Feiffer one of a small kid rehearsing the various words which have been used to describe the condition of those like him -

“I used to think I was poor. Then they told me I wasn't poor, I was needy. Then they told me it was self-defeating to think of myself as needy, I was deprived...then underprivileged. Then they told me underprivileged was overused. I was disadvantaged. I still don't have a dime. But I have a great vocabulary”.

Although I hated the word "governance" when it started to appear in the 1990s, I did understand why some academics felt a new word was needed. A whole new architecture of institutions - Agencies, regulators of privatised public utilities, legally superior (EU/NATO/WTO) and inferior (devolved) bodies; not to mention public procurement and consultation procedures - means that a Government is no longer Master of it's Domain. There are other kids on the block with whom it has to share power

I am aware, however, that there are other, more ideological, reasons for using the term. Recent posts have referred to the role of bodies such as the World Bank and American Think Tanks in weakening the role and power of the State - and the use of the word "governance" has undoubtedly been one the weapons they have used. Take, for example, the famous injunction of the 1991 "Reinventing Government" book to "row - rather than steer"
But I concede that the new institutional complexity does justify the new word. Somewhat reluctantly, therefore, I have accepted that the word is a legitimate one - even if I still shiver when people use it wrongly, when they should have said "government"

But why - as I indicated in the last post - did academics stop using the term some 5-6 years ago? Are they no longer interested? Have other topics become sexier?
Have they exhausted all that can be said on the topic? If so, it would be useful if someone could do a post-mortem article to tell us that was usefully learned from this 25-year episode of scribbling...
Or perhaps this Chinese article - Governance and Good Governance (2018) was that article?
- although I have to say I prefer this 2014 article Making sense of governance

Masochists who really need an answer to such questions are directed to the two definitive Handbooks which were published just as the fashion for the subject was spluttering to an inglorious end. The excerpts give an excellent sense of the field
The Sage Handbook of Governance ; ed M Bevir (2011) 600 pp
The Oxford Handbook of Governance ; ed  David Levi-Faur (2014) 800 pp

Whatever Happened to Governance?

Most people are confused by the word "governance" which crept into our language  some 30 years ago - and which indeed tends now to be used interchangeably with "government".
There is, however, a huge difference in meaning between the 2 words - with "governance" being a dangerous and slippery concept which, significantly perhaps, has now totally disappeared from academic discourse. For me, such sudden academic silences often offer important clues about our political culture - so bear with me while I muse.

An American political scientist by the name of Harlan Cleveland was apparently the first to use the term - as an alternative to the phrase "public administration" - although it was the late 80s before the word came into intensive use. In the mid-1970s, he suggested that:

“What the people want is less government and more governance” (1972).

What he meant by governance was the following cluster of concepts.

“The organizations that get things done will no longer be hierarchical pyramids with most of the real control at the top. They will be systems—interlaced webs of tension in which control is loose, power diffused, and centers of decision plural. 

“Decision-making” will become an increasingly intricate process of multilateral brokerage both inside and outside the organization which thinks it has the responsibility for making, or at least announcing, the decision. Because organizations will be horizontal, the way they are governed is likely to be more collegial, consensual, and consultative. The bigger the problems to be tackled, the more real power is diffused and the larger the number of persons who can exercise it—if they work at it” (p. 13). 

He was, in other words, anticipating the "network" approach which I discussed last year in a review of Niall Fergusson's "The Tower and the Square"

It was, however, only in the 1980s that academic began to notice not just privatisation but the increased tendency of governments to "hive off" decision-making to technocratic "agencies" which were given vast managerial authority. These may still have been state bodies but were run increasingly like private companies.
"Partnerships" - with both private companies and other state bodies - were another device in which power came increasingly to appear "shared"

It was such developments that encouraged academics (and the World Bank) to invent the new term "governance" - not just as a neutral term for a new structure but as a celebration of a new concept of "networking" which, in principle, offered greater pluralism of thinking about an issue.....
Indeed, in typically helpful academic fashion, they added an adjective "multi-level" to most discussions to give us the acronym MLG
In a famous phrase, RAW Rhodes called the result "hollowed-out government" - with one of the consequences being that Governments were able to disown unpopular decisions (not least  of the EU) and Governance and Public Administration (2000) sets out that academic's argument
"Whatever happened to Public Administration? - governance, governance everywhere" was a useful paper which tried to explore (in 2004) what lay behind the word's sudden appearance. 

That's the background.
I now have two questions 
- did the new term actually serve any useful purpose?
- why has the term disappeared from academic discourse?

Recommended Reading
Rethinking governance – the centrality of the state in modern society; S Bell and A Hindmoor (2009) A good overview of the concept - putting it firmly in its place

Matt Flinders gave us an excellent short article in 1999 with an excellent overview of the word

Peter Drucker's 6 sins of PA - a post with a very comprehensive annotated bib on the key readings
Time to Reclaim public services - an update
Governance in the 21st Century (OECD 2001) an interesting book whose summary suggests first that "old forms of governance in both the public and private sectors are becoming increasingly ineffective. Second, the new forms of governance that are likely to be needed over the next few decades will involve a much broader range of active players eg active citizens. Third, and perhaps most importantly, two of the primary attributes of today’s governance systems – the usually fixed and permanent allocations of power that are engraved in the structures and constitutions of many organisations; and, the tendency to vest initiative exclusively in the hands of those in senior positions in the hierarchy – look set to undergo fundamental changes"