Two New Essays for Isonomia

I have two new essay out for Isonomia. The first, “On Whether Various Economic Schemes Can Improve Citizens’ Political Capabilities,” reflects on the different strategies liberal theorists employ to ensure democratic citizens have the capabilities necessary to participate effectively. I argue that all these strategies fall short, because there is a reluctance on the part of liberal theorists to grapple with the cost of creating citizens who really can perform the necessary political work. It was a ton of fun to write, and you can read it here:

On Whether Various Economic Schemes Can Improve Citizens’ Political Capabilities

The second, “Federations and Foreign Policy: The Quest for Koinon,” explores why political federations like the United States stop expanding. Instead of continuing to incorporate more states as co-members, these federations begin building military bases in foreign states and compelling those states to become clients. I argue that federations have historically been based rather heavily around security and this has made it difficult to use them to reform the global economic system. While elites are willing to pay the cost of integrating territory when this is necessary for their own survival, they become more resistant when this integration is no longer strictly necessary. You can read it here:

Federations and Foreign Policy: The Quest for Koinon

Are We Trying to Make Everyone an Aristocrat or a Peasant?

On the left, we care a lot about equality. But we really, really don’t agree on what that means. Some of us want everyone to be an aristocrat. Some of us want everyone to be a peasant. Some of us want everyone to be a worker. Some of us want everyone to be middle class. Some of us want everyone to spend some time doing all of these things. We don’t talk about this difference very much, but it seems kind of important, because these proposals are not at all the same thing.

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The Supreme Court is Gripped by an Unsustainable Conception of Individual Freedom

Today the Supreme Court voted, 5-4, to enable public sector workers to unilaterally withhold contributions from their unions. Justices Roberts, Alito, Gorsuch, Thomas, and Kennedy were in the majority, with Kagan, Ginsberg, Sotomayor, and Breyer in dissent. The principle guiding the majority’s decision is simple and intuitively appealing. When workers pay unions dues, those unions use that money to fund political speech. Individual workers may not agree with the union’s speech acts, and therefore compelling them to pay dues ties their employment to their willingness to espouse a particular kind of political speech with their wallets. The court argues that requiring workers to make certain kinds of political speech acts with their wallets to retain employment violates their free speech rights. The argument is internally valid–it makes sense, given a particular conception of individual freedom. The trouble is that this conception of individual freedom is destabilising the labour market in a politically dangerous way, and in consistently choosing to interpret this principle in this way the court is threatening the legitimacy of the state.

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The British Academic Strike is a Crucial Struggle that Must Be Won: Part I, Pensions

The University and College Union (UCU)–Britain’s trade union for academics–has gone on strike. The strike is about the University Superannuation Scheme (USS)’s decision to switch academics from “defined benefit” pension plans to “defined contribution” plans. As a PhD student at Cambridge I write this piece at home, having skipped a couple events I really wanted to go to today, because this strike is so important, both to academia and to the cause of working people more generally. My hope is that I can explain the strike to those who don’t know much about it and defend it to any who doubt its necessity. Continue reading “The British Academic Strike is a Crucial Struggle that Must Be Won: Part I, Pensions” →

An American Class Divide: The Aristocrats v. The Professionals

In the United States we usually don’t like to think about ourselves as members of economic classes. Most of us, when asked, identify as middle or upper-middle class. But of course there are class differences, and in recent years we’ve started to talk about them a little more. People like Thomas Frank have drawn attention to “the professional class” as distinct from “the working class”. The professionals go to college and get degrees in things like engineering, medicine, law, finance, business, or computer science. They get access to those prized STEM and management careers, to the jobs in the court rooms, on Wall Street, and in Silicon Valley. In contrast, members of the working class often don’t go to college. In recent years they sometimes get uneconomical degrees and end up underemployed with lots of debt. But while the professional/working distinction is important and needs to be drawn more often, I’d like to take some time today to draw another distinction, between the professional class and what I’d like to call the “aristocrats”.

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