RESPONSE: Steve Teles: James Q. Wilson, Sam Huntington, Ned Banfield, & Harvey Mansfield Do too Have VAR as Political Scientists
My re-response? I concede with respect to Wilson & his Bureaucracy & quite possibly more. I anticipate conceding with respect to early-period (not late-period!) Huntington, but want to read The Soldier & the State & re-read Political Order in Changing Societies before I raise the white flag. On Banfield I reserve judgment until I read City Politics. And as for Mansfield—god no; a fungus, like Althusser and Derrida, who is not a guide to other authors but turns them into his sock-puppets, or quite possibly worse because I see him as inheriting the imperial, authoritarian, fascist leanings of his Straussian teachers…
I will anticipatorily concede that I should have acknowledged the case for James Q. Wilson—his Bureaucracy is really great, but its existence had somehow slipped my aging mind. Moreover, as Steve has pointed out, to blame Wilson for mass incarceration in any form is highly unfair: Wilson was very strong that criminal punishments should be near-certain but not life-destroying.
And I anticipate that after I read The Soldier and the State and reread Political Order in Changing Societies I may well concede with respect to early-period Huntington (but not late-period Huntington!). Moreover, the lurkers in email are definitely not supporting me on Banfield, even though I did not think much of The Moral Basis of a Backward Society—move those guys from Sicily to Milan or Turin or Zurich or New York, and they are no longer part of a backward society, but act normal. A backward society does not have a moral but rather a network or a game-theoretic or an institutional basis, with any divide between “amoral familialism” and “diffuse coöperative sociability” only one more marginal pressure. (But it is a pressure. Cf.: Joseph Henrich.) And…
But here is Steve:
Before getting to the meat of Brad’s argument, I’d like to stipulate…that I asked for it. As in, I literally sent the piece to Brad and asked for his thoughts. And I got them! So this response is inherently a bit churlish, akin to someone who asked their spouse to make an involved dish and then complained that it was too spicy.
That said, I think Brad’s dish is a bit too spicy.
I could go into a great bit of detail, but Brad’s argument boils down to the following syllogism: a) I say that there were great conservatives in the Harvard government department in the 70s, and that was good for the department; b) Actually those conservatives weren’t that great, in the specific sense that they didn’t add value over replacement and thus; c) Even if we did add conservatives of the caliber of those that we had back then, they wouldn’t add value over replacement and thus; d) actually we probably shouldn’t bother, even if their addition might have some diversification value, because their VAR is so low.
I could address any of a number of steps in the syllogism, but I’ll just stick to the critical step, which is (b). I think if we are sticking to the VAR framework, we have to try to stay as close to objective measurement as possible, as opposed to the “Brad DeLong’s idiosyncratic judgment based on when he read these guys in the 80s” standard. I’ll go through the five relevant people, in order. This is not a literature review, so I’ll try to keep it to a very short paragraph each. And this is not an assessment of whether their influence on American society was good or malign. It’s whether as social scientists they added to the eminence of the department, as compared to their colleagues. I also don’t have time to do a full citation count versus the others in the department at the time. But I think the following will suffice to show that Brad’s assessment is, at best, a bit uncharitable.
Sam Huntington. I find this one impossible to get my head around. He made major, field-defining interventions in each of the four subfields in political science. Political Order in Developing Societies is one of the handful of critical books in the field of comparative politics (23,000 citations!!!). The Soldier and the State is the book that really defined the field of civil-military relations, and is still worth reading. American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony, is more popular among some people than it is with me, but it’s been hugely influential. And his 1957 “Conservatism as an Ideology” is still really worth reading, even if it’s not as widely discussed nowadays in political theory as it should be. I was never a fan of The Clash of Civilizations, but that came pretty late in his life and I think this question should be judged by the best things they did. And Huntington’s are huge.
James Q. Wilson. Also, I don’t see how you can judge him as being below replacement level. Bureaucracy defined the field, and is still taught today. I teach it! Varieties of Police Behavior is a little quirky, but I wouldn’t want to think about police without having his insights as part of my toolkit. Political Organizations was a fundamental intervention in the field of interest groups, and organizational behavior more generally. I could add a number of other really major works but I can’t believe Brad would want to even defend this one. And I think his actual writings on criminal justice were misunderstood. He repeatedly made the argument that the optimal punishment policy was high certainty and low severity. Which is…not what we did. Glenn Loury wrote what he did about Wilson, but now completely disavows that, and he should have because what he wrote was wrong. Like all these guys, you can totally disagree with each of the things he wrote. But he was well about replacement value on any objective measure.
Martha Derthick. I am adding her to the list for Harvard, because she was there (technically at Radcliffe, but I don’t think Brad would want to exclude her on account of patriarchy!) from 64-70. And she was definitely conservative. When I was at Harvard in 1995 as a post-doc (Harvey Mansfield’s postdoc!!!) I emailed her, saying that it must have been amazing to be in Cambridge in the 60s with all her fellow neo-conservatives. She wrote me a stern reply that she had never been a neo-con, she was always just a conservative, and her girlhood hero was Robert Taft! Anyone who studies public policy would place her The Politics of Deregulation and Policymaking for Social Security as two of the most important books in the study of public policymaking. I also personally think that The Influence of Federal Grants is one of the most important books in the history of inter-governmental relations, and New Towns In Town a fundamental work in the study of implementation. And that just scratches the surface. She was also my advisor, so if Brad argues this one I’ll demand a duel at 20 paces.
Edward Banfield. Ok, here we get to the difficult ones. There are people who like The Unheavenly City more than I do, and those who like it less. But I don’t think the case for Banfield rises or falls on that basis, any more than the case for Huntington depends on The Clash of Civilizations. The combination of the criminally under-read Government Project (reissued with an introduction by Kevin Kosar) and the very widely read The Moral Basis of a Backward Society do the trick, for the analysis of the rule of cultural in political development. If you think that Robert Putnam is about average VAR, well… the core argument of Putnam’s most important work basically confirmed Banfield’s argument. Which Putnam acknowledges. I’d add Banfield’s City Politics, which he co-authored with Wilson, which was in its time an absolutely core work in the field. I also really like some of Banfield’s essays, including the delightful “Policy Science as Metaphysical Madness,” which had a big influence on me. I think the assessment of Banfield can really be thrown off by The Unheavenly City, which I do think was not particularly fantastic (something I believed when I read it in a great class with Jeffrey Henig in the 1980s—a liberal who happily assigned conservatives!!). But I think he was definitely above replacement value, but I accept that this one is sorta YMMV.
Harvey Mansfield. Here is where you really, really get into matters of judgment. I think Taming the Prince is brilliant, even if I have a few issues with it. Same for his first book, [Statesmanship and Party Government] on Burke and Bolingbroke. I’m a fan of his work on Machiavelli (although I’m no authority!), and I love his translation of and introductory essay on The Prince. He’s also got a number of really wonderful essays. But a lot depends on what you think of Strauss, because Mansfield was among Strauss’s foremost students (even though he didn’t actually study directly with Strauss). I’m not going to get into a fight with Brad about Strauss, because honestly neither of our opinions on the matter are really worth much. I’ve found some of Strauss really influential to me, but I’ve never been a full on Straussian, in part because I think Strauss’s critique of social science is overdone (although I think Strauss’s critique, at the time it was made, was much more right than wrong). And I should stipulate that I was not a fan of Manliness. But I don’t think the case for Mansfield depends on that book, or his occasional tendency to troll liberals in ways that I wish he wouldn’’t. I’ll the question of VAR for Harvey simply at “you’ll like this if this is the kind of thing you like.
So I think my argument that conservatives added to Harvard’s government department on a VAR basis, essentially unarguable. And I should also make sure to note that the conservatism of these professors was not an accidental part of what made the works that I identified above great. Policymaking for Social Security was driven by a deep sense that liberals had been, essentially, sneaky. The book was an effort to make the process that had led to its growth transparent. Almost every bit of Huntington’s work was driven by a deeply hierarchical worldview—just read his paean to the beauty of West Point at the end of The Soldier and the State! I could go on.
That said, I should also stipulate that I love Brad! The point of academic argument is that our motivated cognition can provide a motivation for correcting the errors of our colleagues. Which is, itself, one of the reasons why I think greater ideological diversity in the academy is important.
On my reading in the 1980s, I did not much like Political Order in Changing Societies (early-period Huntington), Taming the Prince (Mansfield), or The Moral Basis of a Backward Society (Banfield). I don’t think my life is long enough to read Machiavelli’s Virtue (Mansfield) or Statesmanship and Party Government (Mansfield)—from my perspective, Mansfield has struck out.
Teles is simply not going to persuade me about Mansfield: the fascist crap about presidents being above the law to one side, the turning more-complicated authors into sock puppets is a mortal sin for an academic, and the “shut your door: if you don’t undergraduates may come in” and “grade inflation is the fault of the Blacks” are rotten icing on the cake. Plus there is the fact that Mansfield’s teacher and guru Strauss was very much an Althusser-Derrida figure: ruining the minds of a lot of graduate students, some of whom went on to become professors and ruin more minds in turn.
True, Strauss’s Persecution and the Art of Writing is less bad than the rest, which are 100% a constant turning of more-complicated authors into sock puppets for Strauss’s particular hobbyhorses, which are either (a) wrong, or (b) weird. Persecution and the Art of Writing is only half of that.
Teles similarly will have a hard time persuading me about Banfield. No one seems to like The Unheavenly City. And as I said, the problem with Moral Basis is that when you move the same guys from Sicily to Milan or Turin or Zurich or Boston’s North End, they are no longer part of a “backward society” even though they still have the same “moral basis”. But I need to read City Politics.
Teles has much more of a chance, I think, with Wilson or with (early) Huntington—with the problem that if he convinces me too much, I will start going “No True Scotsman” on him.
I will then assimilate them to Moynihan—who was certainly No True Conservative and, I think, also No True Neoconservative. I see Moynihan as having major differences with full-blooded neoconservatives proper. He was never willing to kowtow to rich Republicans to flatter their prejudices. And, when Moynihan looked at ghetto youth, he saw not strange, alien, incomprehensible, frightening, and threatening creatures. He rather himself thirty years earlier—the fatherless kid running around with the gang in Hells Kitchen.
But I suppose that I do now have seven more books to read: Soldier and the State (early-period Huntington), Varieties of Police Behavior (Wilson), Political Organizations (Wilson), City Politics (Banfield and Wilson), Policymaking for Social Security (Dethrick) and The Politics of Deregulation (Dethrick) and reread Political Order in Changing Societies (early-period Huntington).
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