> Also, thanks to Sean for hipping me to Cass Sunstein.
You're welcome. Don't take him at face value. He's a wiley two-faced intellect who seems to have garnered most of his understanding of Marxism from rational choice people like Cohen and Elster. One of his favorite "regulatory paradoxes" is the neo-lib commonplace that raising the minimum wage is obviously bad for workers because it obviously means fewer of them will be able to work. He repeats this often in his work, basing it solely on one set of studies.
Since I know you're also into the tekkie stuff, his two books on comunication in the internet age are likely interesting (or infuriating) to you--infotopia and republic (and republic 2.0). This is where he expresses his general disdain for democracy and seems more inclined to adopt some Hayekian model of "market = democracy." Basically what this amounts to is blaming any failures of human interaction (whatever the actual circumstances) on belief in a rational democracy and finding any successes to be evidence of a Hayekian market in action. In either case, the successes and failures are in no way related to cultural norms, trained reactions to social circumstances, or institutional ideologies: they are the result of some ingrained, maybe even genetic, predisposition to certain kinds of interaction over others (he bases a good deal of his argument in Infotopia on a handful of psychological studies carried out in the US on group decision making.) At his most edgy, he might admit that it is some combination of the all of the above--and he's usually willing to go off on a tangent of technological determinism in either direction since his ostensible topic is the relation of the internet to society.
The frustrating thing about him is that he seems incredibly smart and well read and I don't usually get the sense that he has a really strict ideological agenda. I'm sure it's all just affected, but often his basic ignorance of some of the major arguments about ideology, culture and even historical materialism just seems like a lacunae rather than something he's willfully trying not to think about. He just seems to believe there is nothing there to gain (having learned all he needs to know from Elster, whose book--I forget which one--he cites often.) It is striking because it seems like if someone just sat him down and just gave him a few primers (wanna volunteer?) he'd come around. That's obviously incredibly naive of me, but it also makes me give him a bit of leeway when he spouts the tired old talking points of the law and econ people he has to deal with every day at U. of Chicago.
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