Category: Intellectuals & academics

Prospect’s dubious list of top public intellectuals

~ Andrew Norton ~ 11 Comments

The trouble with letting survey respondents select themselves is that the results can be very odd. How likely is it, for example, that even though the Muslim world does not have a single university in the world’s top 500, it nevertheless produces all ten of the world’s top ten public intellectuals, according to the latest Prospect public intellectuals poll?

I must confess to not even having heard of seven of the ten. And what has Tariq Ramadan done in the last three years to push him up from 58 to 8?

If we ignore the campaign to get Muslims to vote and delete the top ten, we have the same situation as in 2005 with Noam Chomsky, who apart from his loyal band of leftist followers is not taken seriously outside linguistics, as number one. Al Gore is number two, perhaps reflecting the fashionability of his issue.

Another problem is that the starting point is Prospect‘s list, with half of the top 10 and 17 of the top 50 in 2008 seemingly not even worth considering in 2005.

There is no easy way to conduct polls like this, but perhaps voters having to write in names without a predetermined list would both include intellectuals Prospect missed, and minimise blog-driven campaigns for particular individuals.

Though this is a marketing gimmick for Prospect, even gimmicks need a certain level of credibility. A list of top universities that put, say, Cairo University above Princeton is not going to be taken seriously. Whatever the merits of Fethullah Gülen, he is not the world’s top public intellectual, and Prospect lacks an even semi-plausible public intellectual ranking.

Vote for your favourite public intellectuals

~ Andrew Norton ~ 11 Comments

Back in 2005, the British magazine Prospect, in a joint project with Foreign Policy, asked its readers to vote on the top 100 public intellectuals. It set off a wave of local public intellectual lists. Now Prospect is seeing how our public intellectual tastes have changed with another vote. (At least one change the editors have decided on already – Naomi Klein who came 11th last time isn’t even on the 100 person short list.) Anyone can vote for up to five of their favourite intellectuals, plus offer a suggestion as to who the short list misses, with the poll closing on 15 May.

There were about 20 names on the short list I’d consider voting for, but for quite different reasons so it is hard to rank them. But here are my choices and why: Continue reading “Vote for your favourite public intellectuals” →

My 2020 weekend

~ Andrew Norton ~ 44 Comments

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has been given a standing ovation by the 1002 delegates to the Australia 2020 Summit in Parliament House.

– The Age, 20 April 2008.

Make that 1001 delegates, at most. While I was in the room, needless to say I was not among those giving the PM a standing ovation. In the latest issue of Policy, I have reprinted an article by Owen Harries on intellectuals, in which he – following George Orwell – notes the propensity to power-worship among intellectuals. This was on embarrassing display yesterday afternoon. For nearly twelve years, this psychological need has gone unmet as the dreaded Howard occupied the Prime Ministerial suite. And now Australia’s progressive intelligentsia has someone as PM who, while carefully not signing up to immediate implementation of their ideas, takes them seriously and flatters their egos.

I was in the productivity stream. At that 100 person level – as opposed to the collective behaviour in the 1,000 person plenary sessions – there wasn’t a smothering consensus. But nor was there much debate. It was more a case of people trying to put their pet topics into the stream statement that was to be included in the summit initial report. By Sunday morning I was bored and disengaged.

What of the actual ideas? From my stream, the one that has received most attention was to let people reduce their HECS-HELP debt by doing community service. That one mysteriously appeared in our stream summary document on Sunday morning, despite never having been mentioned in the group the day before. Nobody I spoke to from other sub-streams within the major productivity stream had heard it before either (I was in the post-secondary sub-stream). Perhaps it came from community submissions.
Continue reading “My 2020 weekend” →

The right-wing blur

~ Andrew Norton ~ 21 Comments

For many commentators, the political right is just a blur. The various labels – conservative, neoliberal, neoconservative, New Right, economic rationalist – are thrown around according to fashion as much as meaning. Six years ago (pdf) I wrote an article on how ‘New Right’ was largely squeezed out by ‘economic rationalism’, which in turn was being challenged by ‘neoliberalism’, now the favourite. Despite the irrelevance of ‘neoconservatism’ to Australian politics, it is frequently used here as if it had some descriptive power. In the blogosphere we debate posts on what classical liberalism and conservatism have in common, but journalists don’t even know that there is a difference.

I was reminded of this twice over the last few days, first in this George Megalogenis piece and again when I read Monday’s Crikey. According to the radical leftist Jeff Sparrow,

Remember Katherine Betts’ The Great Divide? Paul Sheehan’s Among the Barbarians? Michael Thompson’s Labor Without Class? Mark Latham’s From the Suburbs? The decades worth of columns in The Australian; the reports churning out from the Institute of Public Affairs and the Centre for Independent Studies?

The narrative was always the same. A chasm separated ordinary, decent Howard-voting Australians from an arrogant tertiary-educated, intellectual elite: a clutch of sneering know-it-alls who wanted to overrun the country with immigrants, make everyone guilty about Aborigines and brainwash the youth with Parisian post-modernist mumbo-jumbo.

Certainly there is a populist conservative strain in right-of-centre Australia. But this is not universal. Continue reading “The right-wing blur” →

Don proves his point

~ Andrew Norton ~ 13 Comments

Part of what keeps a new progressive alliance from forming is that people mistake differences in ideas about how the world works for differences in moral principles. Left-leaning liberals look at the policies classical liberals support and assume that the motivation is to redistribute income from the poor to the rich. And classical liberals look at left liberals and assume that they are motivated by an envious desire to punish the rich even if it means making everyone worse off.

– Don Arthur at Club Troppo, 6 April. Italics added.

If it turns out that liberty really is more important than giving rich people back their money, tormenting welfare recipients and smashing unions, then perhaps classical liberals might consider breaking their alliance with conservatives and forming an alliance with other liberals — the kind of people Andrew sometimes calls ‘social liberals.’

– Don Arthur at Club Troppo, 2 April. Italics added.

This is one reason why ‘progressive fusionism’ is so unlikely in practice, whatever its attractions in theory. Though Don has read more by classical liberals than most classical liberals have, his intuition still says that it is ideological window-dressing for attacks on the poor. And classical liberals believe that whatever theoretical support for liberty exists in ‘progressive’ circles, their desire to reshape society according to their conception of ‘justice’ will lead to excessive state control.

The intellectual uses of ‘liberty’ and ‘equality’

~ Andrew Norton ~ 19 Comments

In response to my implied criticism of Andrew Leigh for assuming that increases in inequality are bad and decreases good, but never specifying for what level of inequality would satisfy him, commenter Leopold responds:

one could turn the criticism around. Liberals believe in liberty – but how much liberty, exactly?

Leopold’s argument (I am paraphrasing here) is that preferences for greater equality or greater liberty are rules of thumb to be applied to specific circumstances, but there are cases where social democrats could accept less equality and liberals accept less liberty. We can’t always precisely calculate the final overall result of all these complex trade-offs to say what is the exactly right amount of equality or liberty. But this doesn’t invalidate the initial assumption that, all other things being equal, more equality or more liberty (depending on your philosophical position) is desirable.

I think Leopold’s point is reasonable. For example, I say that there should be less tax, and while I have clear pet hates among government spending programmes (eg FTB) that I think should be cut to reduce general tax rates, I never say exactly how much tax I think should be levied or what tax rates I would be happy with.

High-level political abstractions gives us intellectual tools that help organise our understanding of the world, but they don’t necessarily provide answers for specific problems. That requires far more detailed analysis.
Continue reading “The intellectual uses of ‘liberty’ and ‘equality’” →

‘Progressive fusionism’ and classical liberalism

~ Andrew Norton ~ 24 Comments

According to Don Arthur, classical liberals don’t really belong with conservatives. Australian conservatives are ‘market friendly’, but they don’t rate individual liberty that highly so they aren’t really liberals. What keeps classical liberals with conservatives is less ideology than

social networks and personal loyalties. Most of Australia’s classical liberals are woven into organisations and social groups that bind them to conservatives. … As a result, realignment probably won’t happen until this generation of middle-aged classical liberals shuffles off the public stage and makes room for the next generation.

Social networks and personal loyalties do create ‘stickiness’ on both sides of politics. But within non-party politics, it’s still not clear to me that even on ideological grounds Australian classical liberals aren’t more likely to fit with Australian conservatives than Australian ‘progessive fusionists’; pro-market, socially liberal, social democrats.

Though some Labor governments could be described as ‘progressive fusionist’, party positions rarely map neatly onto intellectual life. ‘Progressive fusionism’ does not seem to me to be widely represented in intellectual circles (Andrew Leigh?, Nick Gruen?, Fred Argy?), because most progressives are either anti-market or economically illiterate (or indeed both). There are no progessive fusionist think-tanks or institutions. From a liberal perspective, progressives tend to have the same problem Don attributes to the conservative right, of missing out half of liberalism.
Continue reading “‘Progressive fusionism’ and classical liberalism” →

Changing minds

~ Andrew Norton ~ 30 Comments

As other bloggers said last week, I survived the cull of middle-aged men living in Melbourne, Sydney and Canberra to be selected for the 2020 talkfest. I’m in the stream called ‘productivity agenda – education, skills, training, science and innovation’.

According to the invitation letter I received today, I have to wait for a password before I know how this will all actually work. In the meantime, they are asking all participants to answer two questions in 100 words or less:

1. If you could do one thing in your stream area, what would it be? What is is that you think would make the most difference?

2. What issue have you changed your mind about in the last ten years? What changed your mind? (that’s a paraphrase).

Except for the word limit, the answer to the first question will be easy: higher education themes very familiar to readers of this blog.

The second one is much harder, for me and many other participants I expect. Issues usually involve normative elements, and these tend to be more stable than the facts and evidence that might cause arguments to be modified. On the issues likely to be discussed in this stream, I don’t think I have changed my basic position in the last ten years.

And if most participants are like me, will the 2020 discussions have any chance of reaching consensus?

Win trip to Tokyo, meet Nobel Prize winner

~ Andrew Norton ~ 7 Comments

As Jason has already informed Catallaxy readers, the 2008 Mont Pelerin Society Essay Competition is on. The prizes are pretty good – trips to the Mont Pelerin Society meeting in Tokyo over September 7-12 this year, plus US$2,500 for first prize, $1,500 for second prize, and $1,000 for third prize.

Speakers at the conference include luminaries such as Gary Becker, James Heckman, and Vaclav Klaus. He’s not so famous, but I am also looking forward to hearing the prolific but consistently interesting Edward Glaeser (and of course I am also looking forward to my first trip to Japan).

To get there, you have be less than 35 years old and to write in 5,000 words maximum by 30 April your answer to:

In The Constitution of Liberty Hayek says that “we are probably only at the threshold of an age in which the technological possibilities of mind control are likely to grow rapidly and what may appear at first as innocuous or beneficial powers over the personality of the individual will be at the disposal of government. The greatest threats to human freedom probably still lie in the future.”

Has Hayek’s gloomy warning been borne out by events, or has technology become more a force for liberating people from government?

The not-always-reliable Oxford Companion to Australian Politics

~ Andrew Norton ~ 25 Comments

For the last few days, I have been dipping into The Oxford Companion to Australian Politics, edited by Brian Galligan and Winsome Roberts. It contains over 400 entries on a wide range of Australian political topics. Many of the contributors are good choices: Ian Hancock on the Liberal Party, Murray Goot on public opinion, Galligan himself on federalism, Peter Coleman on political cartoons, Ian Marsh on think-tanks, and Judy Brett on political culture, just to name a few.

But the trouble is that Galligan and Roberts have also chosen as contributors people who are as much activists as academics on their Companion subject. A hardline lesbian feminist like Sheila Jeffreys is not the kind of person you’d ask to give a even-handed account of pornography or prostitution. But at least Jeffreys can tell the difference between fact and opinion, which is more than you can say for some other authors.

Take the ANU’s museum-piece Marxist, Rick Kuhn, who is given the entry for ‘class’. While unlike Clive Hamilton he probably isn’t ignorant of the sociological research on class in Australia, he does ignore it in favour of a straight Marxist account, right down to implicitly predicting revolution:

Continue reading “The not-always-reliable Oxford Companion to Australian Politics” →