Posted 4:54 PM by Chris Bertram: Roussseau book now available in North America!
My book Rousseau and the Social Contract is now available from amazon in North America. (Would-be readers in the UK should still click on the image below).

Posted 11:15 AM by Chris Bertram: My Rousseau book now out!
My Rousseau book is now out (well, almost, the publication date is tomorrow). You can buy it from amazon.co.uk by clicking on the cover image below.

Publication in North America will be in about 2 months time, so I'll post an amazon.com link when that happens.

UPDATE: Amazon have now removed the absurd £1.99 "hard to obtain" surcharge they'd imposed.

Posted 7:35 AM by Chris Bertram: Crooked Timber
Most of my blogging for the forseeable will be over at a new group blog called Crooked Timber that I'm running together with Kieran Healy, the Farrells, Brian Weatherson and a bunch of others. Enjoy.

Posted 8:43 AM by Chris Bertram: Pay in universities
If you read one thing .... Brad DeLong has a brilliant discussion of academic pay, centred around the complaints of a US college professor in 1909 (then earning 4 times annual average earnings). Brad has some great observations about shame and the middle-class lifestyle of the time. I'm not entirely without sympathy for the professor, though. For instance, he complains "We are constantly going into our pockets for small items which the university will not or cannot furnish without unbearable delay." That's familiar.

Posted 7:58 AM by Chris Bertram: The Spanish gulag
I posted a few weeks back about the brutality of the Franco regime in Spain, in response to some revisionist comments elsewhere in the blogosphere. Now the Financial Times has a piece on the Spanish gulag and the chilling effects its memory still has on Spanish politics and society:

The civil war had left half a million people dead and sent a quarter of a million Spaniards into exile. To that, Franco added 280,000 political prisoners - so many, that inmates were forced to build their own jails, such as Carabanchel in the south of Madrid, and concentration camps such as Merinales in Andalusia.

Because of an acute labour shortage - between 1939 and 1945, Professor Bernal estimates 10 per cent of Spain's male labour force was in jail - the regime began to catalogue prisoners according to their professional skills. By 1941, Franco's bureaucrats had files on 103,369 prisoners, including 10,000 women, grouped into 24 industries and 602 trades or professions. This allowed the regime to direct labour where it was needed, be it down coal shafts or into cement and steel plants. The regime also began to supply the needs of private sector employers who could not find qualified labour in the free market.

Those in search of "balance" will also find it in the FT, which has a piece by Simon Sebag Montefiore previewing a new book where he studies the relics and descendants of Stalin's inner circle: the Yagodas, Zhdanovs and Berias.

Posted 7:35 AM by Chris Bertram: Rawls and the Democrats
Alan Wolfe pleads for the US Democrats not to respond to the extreme partisanship of the Republicans with a narrow partisan reaction of their own (and invokes John Rawls in his support) in the Boston Globe.

Posted 7:30 AM by Chris Bertram: VoxPolitics
James Crabtree of VoxPolitics is organising a discussion of blogging and politics at the House of Commons:

BLOG RULE
Can Weblogs Change Politics?

A VoxPolitics Seminar
14th July, 5:30 - 7.00pm
Portcullis House, Houses of Parliament (room tbc)
Drinks and Food Provided

Speakers
Steven Clift, e-democracy expert
Stephen Pollard, Blogging Journalist,
Pernille Rudlin, Mobile expert
Tom Watson MP, Blogging MP
James Crabtree , Chair

Weblogs (‘blogs’) and associated ‘social software’ tools have been this year’s big news online. But can they be used politically, and if so, how and to what end?

In America, blogging politicians are becoming common. Presidential Candidate Howard Dean, the emerging poster-boy of e-Democracy, is pioneering the use of new technologies to raise money, organise supporters, and get his message out. The forthcoming presidential election will be the first election blogged in real time, both by politicians and observers. In other ways bloggers have begun to affect the mainstream of American politics, with a hand in the resignation of Trent Lott, the sacking of Jason Blair, and the prosecution of the war on Iraq.

A couple of British MPs have also started weblogs, along with a handful of councillors and other activists. But will these new tools, and those who use them, make any difference to mainstream politics? Can they be a useful way for elected representatives to communicate to their constituents and supporters? And can citizens use them to be political, either by running campaigns or scrutinising those in power?

This Voxpolitics seminar will examine these issues, and ensure a lively discussion.
RSVP to blogrule@voxpolitics.com

Posted 11:53 AM by Chris Bertram: New blog
I've been working together with a number of others (some experienced bloggers, some neophytes) on a project for a Movable Type-based group blog. We should be launching early next week. The site will be called Crooked Timber (url to be posted in due course). I'm not sure, yet, exactly how I'll divide things between the new project and Junius. Keep checking back for more details.

Posted 6:51 PM by Chris Bertram: Bristol and Burke
Mick Fealty of Slugger O'Toole has been good enough to link to a brief piece I wrote on Bristol and Burke a while back. I've now tidied it up a bit an added a brief erratum note.

Posted 10:34 AM by Chris Bertram: The perils of expertise: Kenneth Pollack and the Iraq war Steven Lukes - openDemocracy
In the build-up to the invasion of Iraq, one regular correspondent in particular urged on me the virtues of Ken Pollack and his case for war. Political theorist Steven Lukes received much the same advice. Now, in an article for openDemocracy he looks back at his experience of the pre-war debate and of reading Pollack in the light of some Pollack's recent remarks in an interview:

Steve Inskeep: On another point, which is the most crucial point to you, about nuclear weapons. You told us last November when you came on this program that you believed there was a consensus among American, British, French, German and Israeli intelligence that Saddam Hussein had everything he needed to develop nuclear weapons. I suppose some people would question now whether all of the components for a nuclear program could really be hidden that well, whether they could have disappeared.

Kenneth Pollack: Yeah, I mean, you’re now getting beyond my area of expertise, Steven. I try very hard not to talk about things I don’t know. I mean, the point that I made on your show was a true point. That was the consensus of opinion among the intelligence community. It was hearing things like that that brought me to the conclusion that, you know, ‘Boy, if this is the case, we’ve got to do something about this guy.’ I think, you know, that is exactly the kind of thing that we’re going to need to go back and look hard at the evidence that we were getting and those various intelligence services who were making those claims, I think, are going to need to go back and re-examine the methods they used. As I said, that was not me making that claim; that was me parroting the claims of so-called experts.”

As Lukes summarizes:

So there we have it. What about all the measured prose, historical background, analysis of options and scholarly footnotes? Sorry, folks, I was wrong, ‘off-base’. Don’t blame me – who said I was an expert anyway?

Posted 10:15 AM by Chris Bertram: Gallowglass
Henry Farrell has more on Alasdair Gray, including a reproduction of of the Leviathan-like cover to the first-edition of Lanark. (Scroll down, and Henry has the goods on Silvio Berlusconi's outburst in the European Parliament.)

Posted 10:04 AM by Chris Bertram: Ken Bates's successor
I've never liked Chelsea. Flash, shallow - a football club without substance or tradition. Their chairman, Ken Bates, who originally bought them for £1, is a man who has inspired little in the way of affection, and a lot in the way of its opposite. Now they've been bought be a Russian "oligarch" who, as James Meek observes in the Guardian will thereby be taking a largish sum of money out of a poor country and putting it into a rich part of a rich one. How did he get to be worth billions? Not through hard work. Not even through inventing something brilliant or writing the Russian equivalent of the Harry Potter books. Rather, like all the "oligarchs", but exploiting political contacts and lax rules to legally plunder the Russian people of assets that were theirs just over a decade ago. Chelsea fans probably won't care where Roman Abramovich's wealth came from, so long as it is used to buy players who can win them trophies. Of course, Abramovich isn't the first rich businessman to buy a football club: Jack Walker, Mohammed el Fayed, Silvio Berlusconi and Alan Sugar come to mind (and I mustn't forget the Moores family). But Jack Walker was at least a man who both cared deeply about something particular and local that he'd felt an attachment to since boyhood: he wanted to restore Blackburn Rovers to the success that he was too young too remember. The oligarch bought Chelsea, but he might just as well have bought any of a number of clubs, and he'll be loved by Chelsea fans whilst the alcoholics of Chukotka - the province of which he's king - freeze in the gutter.

Posted 7:15 PM by Chris Bertram: Microsoft Word bytes Tony Blair in the butt
Microsoft Word bytes Tony Blair in the butt: a rather interesting analysis of how the technological ignorance of British government officials helped critics of the "dodgy dossier" (found via Stephen Pollard).

Posted 6:54 PM by Chris Bertram: Houellebecq
Michel Houellebecq is the subject of an essay by Julian Barnes in the New Yorker. Barnes's evaluation of Houellebecq's novels is quite similar to my own - though he is a bit more persistent. I thought Les Particules Elementaires (Atomised in England/The Elementary Particles in the US) utterly brilliant - and perhaps the best novel I read in the past year - despite the tendency of its characters to speechify. Houellebecq managed simultaneously to write a novel of ideas, a true-to-life portrait of France both in the 1970s and since, and to express the feelings of estrangement and ageing of his leading characters. Platform, its successor, I never managed to finish.

Posted 3:36 PM by Chris Bertram: A present
I've just bought myself a present: Alasdair Gray's The Book of Prefaces, which I have coveted for a while. It is a fantastic, nay a fantasticall, compendium of prefaces to books written in English or its antecedents from 675 to 1920. Everyone is there: Chaucer, Tyndal, Burke, Jane Austen, Burton and Peirce, Whitman, Hobbes, Pope. It is set and illustrated in Gray's characteristic and idiosyncratic fashion. Gray is a unique figure: illustrator, novelist, antiquary.... His 1982 Janine (highly recommended) - about the sexual fantasies of an alcholic security-systems inspector has just been reissued with an introduction by Will Self, his Lanark will have to wait for a holiday.

(I see from one of the Amazon reviews of Prefaces that he once had an erratum slip inserted with the legend "This erratum slip was inserted by mistake." Nice. )