Yoshie wrote:
<< I'm not as pessimistic as you sound here, but I agree that postmodernists
have no political need to engage our contemporary Marxist thinkers such as
Wood & Geras, so their critiques go unread and do not generate debates.
If you aren't as pessimistic as I was there, I'd like to know why not. I need reasons for optimism myself.
>Speaking of new Marxist books, I just picked up Sean Sayers' _Marxism and
Human Nature_ (reviewed positively by Martha Gimenez in Monthly Review,
negatively by Terry Eagleton in New Left Review). It's a concise
exposition of a Hegelian-Marxist view of "human nature," but I can't say
it's exciting. Have you read it?
No, but I suppose I'll have to. I find Sayers unilluminating generally. There wasa Sayers-Norman debate about dialectics a decade or so ago: I thought Norma had it all over Sayers.
>What are you reading nowadays, besides
Richard Posner, that is? (I'm gonna take a look at _Economic Analysis of
Law_, since several people here mentioned it.) >>
I wouldn't start there with Posner. Why not read his Law and Literature, my favorite book of his, which is more up your alley anyway? The EAL is in fact a rather technical book that you probably need some legal education to get your teeth into anyway. I don't think it would make much sense to someone who didn't have at least first year of law school under her belt. Also accessible to a general audience is his wonderful collection of essays, Overcoming Law. I recently read his lovely little new book on Clinton/Lewinsky, An Affair of State, which is a blast.
What am I reading--you mean that would be of interest to anyone? I just finished a paper on Rawls, so I worked through A Theory of Justice again, in the new (1999) edition, and I've been reading a bunch of general legal theory--Hart, Dworkin, Jeremy Waldron, Posner, Scalia and Easterbrook, for a paper on law and democracy I'm working on. In connection with that I also read Ingo Mueller's book on Hitler's Justice, about the misbehavior of lawyers and judges under the Nazis's and Robert Cover's Justice Accused, about the jurisprudence of slavery and abolition in antebellum America. I read a book on Leo Strauss and the American Right by a prof at U Calgary, Shadia Drury, what was pretty interesting.
I've been reading Leo Katz's Ill-Gotten Gains, about the moral puzzles involved in the evasion/avoidance games lawyers play, what's wrong with blackmail, and the like. It's very provocative and gave me an idea for a paper on why liberals may be committed to amoralsim or moral relativsim in international ethics and maybe in politics period. I started Tim Scalon's What We Owe to One Another,. which is quite good but dense, slow going.
This last summer I read Dan Brudney's brilliant Marx's Attempt to Escape Philosophy, which is the best new thing about Marx that has been published in many a year. I started John Roemer's book on justice, but didn't have the patuence for it; I will have to get back to it.
I'm reading Pascal's Pensees, War and Peace, and Peter Straub novels for bedtime reading and a cyberpunk writer named Neal Stephenson on the train.
--Justin
--Justin