Ethical foundations of the left

Justin Schwartz jkschw at hotmail.com
Thu Jul 26 13:37:46 PDT 2001


Whatever. I think Posner's pretty damn good, maybe the best. He's done a lot more than L&E lately. He's also become a leading public intellectual. Not being a conservative Republican myself, I don't always agree with him, needless to say. If you're not impressed, you're not impressed, what can I say. De gustibus.

--jks


>
>I take a phrase like "he's the leading legal theorist in America" to be a
>quasi-performative. If I were to say, for example, "Pierre Bourdieu is the
>leading social theorist in France," I would be inviting you to read
>Bourdieu and see for yourself how great he is, not staking out a position
>that no one could make a case for, say, Raymond Boudon. Which do you mean
>here, Justin? That if I read Posner I'll see for myself that he's pretty
>damned good, maybe even the best? Or that no one else is a contender for
>the crown?
>
>I'll grant that Posner has branched out from his home base in the Law &
>Economics crowd, but it seems to me that L&E is still his principal claim
>to fame. Last term, when I was teaching "Alternatives to Global
>Capitalism", I assigned Joe Stiglitz's "Whither Socialism?" as the text
>designed to make my students wonder whether any kind of socialism was
>possible, market or no. It didn't work so well for that purpose; John
>Roemer was right that it really only works against the Lange-Lerner version
>of damned-little-market socialism. But it did thoroughly discredit the L&E
>stuff, in my eyes. U of C law profs, with no particular expertise in
>economics, choosing to believe what the econ faculty told them about
>efficient markets, seems to be the genesis of this school. Socialism
>aside, if you think that the future of economics lies with studies of
>imperfect markets a la Stiglitz and quasi-rational actors a la Thaler, then
>the L&E school, a fortiori Posner, have hitched their wagon !
>to a sinking star.
>
>(Can we send this into the New Yorker's block that metaphor department?)
>
>Michael McIntyre
>
> >>> jkschw at hotmail.com 07/26/01 10:30 AM >>>
>
>He's contrarian and likes to take shocking positions. I think he's usually
>a
>very good judge, and he's the leadig legal theorist in America. It's hard
>for me to see how anyone could defend Bush v. Gore, which I regard as
>worse,
>legally speaking, than Dred Scott v. Sanford, but if anyone can make it
>sedem less than disgraceful, it would be Posner. He is definitely worth
>reading. he is cultivated, literate, interesting, a fine stylist with a
>lively mind, and always provocative. I don't think he's dishonest, but he
>_is_ a Republican. --jks

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