Sure, no problem. Just sent along some scans of the original, as well as a typed-up version that should be more useful for extracting text.

Hey Shawn,

Concerning other items in addition to what you've got -- do you have a copy of the Philly Social Science Club's A CATECHISM OF ANARCHY (1902)? If not, I'd be happy to send you a copy.

One of my pet theories is actually that the growing use of nonviolent civil disobedience, boycotts, labor strikes and tax resistance tactics, during the First Intifada, were the primary reason that the Israeli government effectively brought the PLO back in from exile in order to serve as counterpart for the Oslo accords and to manage the PA: when put to it, they needed a conventionally political and paramilitary organization that they could make treaties with, manage and control as necessary; whereas the leaderless resistance and the use of non-compliance and economic tactics, in the occupied territories was rapidly spinning out into something fundamentally unmanageable. The presence of a traditional political entity was necessary to co-opt it, and thus ultimately make it possible to manage and contain it.

(Here's a pretty good article that came out several years ago on the weird demands set by the old USDA regulations: http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2003/01/unhappy-meals . See in particular the stuff about the surplus buy-up program and about the perverse incentives the system creates for menu planning. Of course it's Mother Jones, so they think the way to fix this is to reform the rules while keeping the corporate subsidy program in place, which is kind of like having government set a fire in your house, and then -- responsible reform! -- run to the kitchen and grab a pot full of water to douse it with, in the hopes that will put it out. But probably it would have a better idea, and certainly less damaging for all concerned, just not to set the fire in the first place.)

I'm sure it is an example of federal overreach but it's hard for me to see how it represents an increase in federal overreach compared to the status quo ante. The contents of meals in the school lunch program have always been closely regulated and mandated by USDA; previously, the main intent of the regulation was to require that meals would include certain portions of each "food group" (with each "group" representing a different agribusiness lobby: dairy farmers, cereal growers, produce growers, and then cattlemen and the meat industry). The ratios were rigged to ensure that dairy and meat got an artificially big cut, because USDA is committed to buying up a certain amount in surplus per year as a price support to agribusiness. Now the administration is pushing to put through a different set of regulations, which alter the mandated ratios, supposedly in the interest of better nutrition. (But then, the old four-food-groups ratios were also supposedly set in the interest of nutrition; it's just that government nutritional guidelines have a curiously strong tendency to reflect whatever the balance of power between the different agribusiness interests happens to be at the moment.)

The results are probably not going to be any better in the end than the results of the old system. But the old system was also a micromanaging government monopoly, so it's hard for me to see how they are worse, either. Really there is no way to solve the problem at all except to get political control out of school lunches entirely. But you can't get that by reverting to the old rules; you can only get it by dropping the USDA surplus buy-up program. There's no right way for the federal government to manage a subsidy.

Well, if it helps, the book is also available for free on the Internet ....

Thanks Shawn!

Incidentally, when you've got the book, here's a fun exercise you can do at home: take the excerpts from General Idea of the Revolution in our book, and then take the excerpts in Iaian's big new reader, and put them next to each other, so you can see how often the bits that Iaian chose to omit are the parts that we chose to include, and how often the parts we chose to include are parts that Iaian chose to omit. Of course, in both cases we have the excuse that it is but one piece in a much larger collection, and at least in our case we had the the overarching task of trying to select and present some specific threads in Proudhon's writing -- not the whole tapestry -- and in particular those threads that were especially prominent in the conversation that the book is intended to introduce. But, the comparison is fun and probably instructive nevertheless.

(* When we prepared the excerpt, we explicitly set about making an excerpt that would try to present something like "the individualists' Proudhon," i.e., something representative of the thread in Proudhon's thought that Tucker and his correspondents most sympathized with and drew the most from; hence the explicit disclaimer in the Introduction about what's in the excerpt and what's not in the excerpt.)

Anyway I have no sympathy at all for beholder-relativism (about aesthetics or ethics; I think that these views are not only false but actually moral vices). But I do wonder what someone who defends the view would say in response to this sort of worry. Presumably they can either (a) reject the Simonidean conception of justice, in favor of some different conception (certainly there are a lot of alternatives considered in the Republic; and others you could come up with to try). Or else (b) they can try to spell out the idea of what's "due" in terms that don't refer to an extra-personal reality, but rather to some standard of fitness or appropriateness internal to the beholder herself. (*) Presumably if they are willing to make this kind of move in respect to terms like "good," "right" and "beautiful," they're probably also willing to do it in respect of terms like "due" or "ought." Anyway, I wonder what you think would be the more promising (or threatening) move for the beholder-relativist to try to make -- simply to reject the Simonidean account of justice, or to try and drill down to give a relativist version of the terms that Simonides uses? Or might they try some other option besides (a) and (b) that I've left out?

* * *

(* You might worry: but you already have your reactions; and now you're supposed to see if they're appropriate. But if the only standard of appropriateness is an internal standard, how could it possibly fail to be, when it's your own reaction to start with? But that's only the case if the criteria on which the reaction was made are identical to the criteria that are used to judge the fitness of the reaction as a reaction. I don't know if that needs to be so. Certainly we not only have desires about things, but also desires about our desires -- I may not want to listen to opera, say, but I may want to learn to want that. And the reason for that may be either external or internal to me -- because of something especially meritorious about opera-loving; OR because I want to be a certain sort of person, or to have a certain sort of self-image, or to have a set of likes and dislikes that are noticeably coherent or eclectic or bizarrely juxtaposed, or ... It's not obvious that these sort of internal considerations have to bottom out in some extra-personal bedrock ... at least, you can get higher-order considerations, accepting or rejecting reactions as more or less fitting, without stepping outside of the beholder's head.)

Hey David,

Glad to see that the comments form here seems to be up and running again. So, here:

I definitely agree with you that beauty is something objective -- that the "eye of the beholder" is there to see something that's there, not to make it. And I think you're onto something in seeing how weird a beholder-relativist theory really makes our personal and social practices of praising -- as if the point of saying "That was a beautiful concerto!" were just to report back "Hey, I liked that concerto!" -- not to say anything about the concerto, or to tell me anything about my relationship to it, just something about yours. (Unless the expectation is that I ought to be sharing your preferences just because they are yours, if you bash me over the head with enough of them. But then that hardly seems like the kind of tolerant interpersonal understanding that relativists want to claim their views call for....) I think focusing on the ways in which this makes hash out of everyday practice in relation to beauty (or ethics, or ...) does a nice job of taking on the relativist where they think that they are strongest -- but where their case really is the weirdest and the weakest.

Anyway, on to some questions and concerns.

You write: "Justice is to “render to each his due” according to Plato..."

Is that Plato's definition? In the Republic the phrase appears as a quote from Simonides. But the quote is quoted by Polemarchus, not by Socrates, and Socrates argues that it's inadequate -- or at least that Polemarchus does an inadequate job of spelling it out. (Polemarchus thinks that the definition entails harming your enemies. But Socrates argues that justice as such cannot harm anyone.)

The Boy Who Could Not Shiver And Shake is great, but it does involve some fairly intense ghostly things towards the end of the story. On the other hand, the main way that Our Hero wins out in the end is indeed by managing to be completely insensitive to absolutely any horror the supernatural can throw at him. If there is aesthetic work being done, Our Hero's great virtue is apparently supposed to be that he is completely unworked-upon by it.

It's a weird story.