Why I got into this game

Upcoming interview with Ian Shapiro: June 2nd, 9AM Eastern

Once, at a dive bar in Dallas, I saw a guy who had on a shirt that said

WAYLON

G.D.

JENNINGS

THAT’S WHO

Well, that’s how I feel about my next interviewee.

On June 2nd, I’ll be talking with Ian Shapiro, Sterling Professor of Political Science and Global Affairs at Yale University. We’ll be discussing his new book, After the Fall: From the End of History to the Crisis of Democracy, How Politicians Broke Our World, which is a bracing critique of neoliberal “triangulation,” the Global War on Terror, and other major trends in post-Cold War Western politics. The book expands on Ian’s brilliant DeVane Lectures, which you can (and indeed must) watch for free on YouTube.

I’m also hoping to ask Ian about his oeuvre more broadly, especially:

• Moral Foundations of Politics

• Death by 1000 Cuts (on the estate tax)

• Containment (a critique of the Bush Doctrine)

• Wolf at the Door (on insecurity & inequality)

• Responsible Parties

And—of course—I’ll ask for his thoughts on events since he finished the book, such as the Iran War and Trump’s actions in Venezuela.

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To give you a flavor of what to expect, let me share a few Shapiro passages I love. If there’s a theme here, it’s that politics is hard, and the human condition is one of precarity and ignorance. (Emphases added.)

1. On methodology

The specialization that has divided political philosophy from the rest of political science has been aided and abetted by the separation of normative from empirical political theory, with political philosophers declaring a monopoly over the former while abandoning the enterprise of “positive” political theory to other political scientists. This seems to me to have been bad for both ventures. It has produced normative theory that is no longer informed, in the ways that the great theorists of the tradition took it for granted that political theory should be informed, by the state of empirical knowledge of politics. A result is that normative theorists spend too much time commenting on one another, as if they were themselves the appropriate objects of study. This separation has also fed the tendency for empirical political theory to become banal and method driven—detached from the great questions of the day and focused instead on what seems methodologically most tractable. Both types of theory have evolved close to the point where they are of scant interest to anyone other than their practitioners. This might bump up citation indexes and bamboozle tenure committees in the desired ways, but it scarcely does much for the advancement of knowledge about what is or ought to be the case in politics.

—“Problems, Methods, and Theories in the Study of Politics, or What’s Wrong with Political Science and What to Do about It,” p. 597

2. On politics and the human condition

People often know more about what is inadequate than what would be adequate. During the 1980s, many who lived in Soviet bloc countries could detail the fine contours of their oppression, as could victims of apartheid in South Africa. Yet they could supply only haziest accounts of what their worlds would be like without communism or apartheid, and why they would be better. Comparable stories could be told about those who have opposed fascism and other forms of subjugation. The inability to depict the details of a viable alternative was not a failing on their part. It reflected the reactive character of the human condition. People reject what is painful and oppressive in the hope that something better can be created, even though the destination and path forward are often, perhaps congenitally, shrouded in fog.

—Politics Against Domination, Ch. 1

3. On domination and imagination

Modern democratic movements emerged to oppose domination, sometimes by centralizing monarchs, sometimes by imperial overseers, sometimes by exclusionary elites. This needs emphasis because too many theorists of democracy are ignorant of this rationale or lose sight of it. This leads them to focus on contrived problems and mount spurious attacks on democracy. Efforts to combat domination by democratic means always have mixed results and sometimes spawn new kinds of domination. Life has more imagination than us. But no political institutions yet devised have done better, so that fostering, defending, and improving democracy remain central to resisting domination.

—Uncommon Sense, p. 4

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Do you have any questions for Ian? If so, leave a comment!

Thanks for reading, and I hope you’re having a good summer. (I’m in Berlin through mid-July, by the way. Don’t ask me how many Ian Shapiro books I had stuffed inside my suitcase.)