Books

Making Citizens: Rousseau's Political Theory of Culture (London: Routledge, 1993).

Rousseau's theory of the effect of culture on politics is central to his philosophical understanding of society. Making Citizens explores this connection, taking Rousseau's theory to be a model of how consideration of culture can be incorporated into a wider account of political life. But I also regard Rousseau's account as, finally, inadequate, and Making Citizens concludes with a critical evaluation of it.

I frame my discussion by drawing on techniques from the theory of collective action to devise a new interpretation of Rousseau's concept of the general will. My analysis identifies attitudes individuals can adopt that facilitate or impede social cooperation--attitudes Rousseau holds are culturally formed. I then take up Rousseau's account of the evolution of human psychology, arguing that for Rousseau there are two paths this evolution can take: toward the actual political failure of existing society, or toward the possible political success of an ideal society Rousseau imagines. The culture of existing society exacerbates individuals' self-interest, leading to failures in collective action. But the culture of ideal society instills civic virtue, which motivates individuals to cooperate with one another.

Making Citizens concludes by showing that Rousseau's cultural ideal conflicts with his account of legitimacy. For Rousseau, legitimacy requires that citizens have the cognitive skills needed to formulate the general will. But Rousseau's ideal cultural institutions do not develop cognitive abilities; instead they work solely to motivate citizens to obey the general will once it has been formulated. In the end, therefore, Rousseau's conception of the role culture plays in ideal society renders his political theory as a whole inconsistent.

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Book Chapters

'Legitimacy and Watershed Policy-making: the Role of Public Participation,’ in P. Sabatier, et.al., Swimming Upstream: Collaborative Approachs to Watershed Management (under contract with MIT Press), co-authored with Will Focht, Department of Political Science, OSU.

This chapter develops a set of criteria that can be applied to watershed decision-making processes to assess their legitimacy. It is particularly concerned with the question of how legitimacy can be enhanced by the participation of a wide range of stakeholders. The criteria address both the procedures by which decisions are made, and the actual impacts of watershed policy on the well-being of watershed residents and others. The criteria are based on a general conception of legitimacy that rests on the fundamental values of personal autonomy, welfare enhancement, and justice.

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'Subject and Citizen: Hobbes and Rousseau on Sovereignty and the Self,' in Rousseau and the Sources of the Self, ed. Timothy O'Hagan (Brookfield, VT: Avebury, 1997), pp. 85-105.

In framing his political ideal Rousseau imagines the self of the ideal citizen. Following Hobbes, Rousseau holds that this self must be strongly disposed to obey the law. Hobbes argued that the sovereign must have the power to control the opinions of his subjects, in order to be able to form their wills to absolute obedience. Rousseau takes up Hobbes's absolutist conception of sovereignty--with the crucial exception that for Rousseau sovereignty is borne democratically by the community as a whole. Thus, for Rousseau, in addition to being obedient, citizens must have the capacity to participate in the formulation of society's general will. However, while the institutions Rousseau proposes for forming citizens' selves would indeed make them obedient, they would form selves incapable of participating in the sovereign authority.

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Journal Articles

'Generality, Efficiency, and Neutrality: Must Laws Be General to Be Legitimate?’, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 82, no. 1 (2001), pp. 26-50.

In a recent book James Buchanan and Roger Congleton propose a constitutional generality constraint: all laws must have uniform impacts on all members of society. They argue that absent generality majorities will exploit minorities by forcing an unfair distribution of the costs and benefits associated with public goods. This is wrong in itself, and also because it promotes inefficiencies due to rent seeking. Their normative claims rest on a connection between the generality of laws and liberal neutrality: generality ensures that state power is not put to the service of one particular set of goals, but rather to create a framework in which individuals can pursue their own goals. Using the example of affirmative action, however, I argue that when we consider important social problems or contexts, it is never transparent what generality demands. Rather, the abstract ideal of generality must be interpreted in light of the specific features of the problem—and that competing interpretations can lead to alternative policies which have comparable claims to generality. The choice between such policies is thus not made on the basis of generality as such, but rather on the substantive values that inform the interpretations. Thus, I conclude, the connection between generality and neutrality is misleading, and the appeal to neutrality does not provide a satisfactory moral basis for a generality constraint.

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'Rousseau’s Platonic Rejection of Politics,' Pensée Libre, no. 8 (Proceedings of the Duke Symposium, June, 1999) (2001), pp. 182-97.

Superficially, it appears that Plato and Rousseau have very different political commitments--Plato is famously an opponent of democracy, while Rousseau is perhaps democracy's most famous advocate. However, I shall argue, there is a strikingly Platonic element in Rousseau's thought, which we may identify as realism with respect to the common good. That is, for Rousseau as much as for Plato, there is a given "correct" answer to the question, what is the best thing for society to do? For the Plato of the Republic, that question is answered by the "philosopher king"--the person trained to grasp the form of the good. For Rousseau that question is answered by the citizenry, which if uncorrupted is capable of identifying the general will through majority rule voting. However, despite his apparent commitment to democracy, Rousseau's Platonism commits him to a distrust of robustly democratic political processes. This distrust may be seen in his support for political institutions which limit the actions of democratic assemblies to the ratification of legislation drafted by political elites, as well as in his suspicion of eloquence in political debate. Following Sheldon Wolin, I conclude that, like Plato, Rousseau has a vision of the political that seeks to eliminate politics.

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'Scientists and Stakeholders: Evaluating the Legitimacy of the Illinois River Basin Management Protocol,’ Oklahoma Politics, vol. 10, no. 2 (2001), pp. 33-44.

In this paper, I discuss a persistent problem in the legitimation of environmental policy: the proper interaction between scientific expertise and stakeholder autonomy. I refer my discussion to an ongoing project by a team of researchers, of which I am a member, from the University of Oklahoma (OU) and Oklahoma State University (OSU), to develop a management protocol for the Illinois River in northeastern Oklahoma. I first review briefly the circumstances of the Illinois River watershed and summarize the OU/OSU protocol. I then discuss the increasing use in recent years of stakeholder processes in the environmental policy arena. Next, I present a scheme that represents the ways that both scientific assessment and stakeholder processes factor into policy legitimation. Finally, I use this scheme to illuminate the roles assigned to scientific experts and stakeholders in the OU/OSU protocol and to explore the broader question of the complex relation between those roles in general.

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'Theater as an Economic Institution: An Aspect of Rousseau's Rhetoric in the Lettre à d'Alembert', Pensée Libre, no. 6 (Proceedings of the Wabash Symposium, June, 1995) (1998), pp. 131-40.

Rousseau's Letter to d'Alembert reaches two apparantly contradictory conclusions: that theater does, and does not, effect a society's moeurs. These divergent results can be explained by Rousseau's argumentative strategy: he looks at theater from the perspective of "content," i.e. the stories plays present to the audience, and he also looks at it as an institutional presence in society. It is in this latter sense that theater has its most deleterious effects. In particular, Rousseau highlights the economic damage having an ongoing theatrical enterprise will cause in Geneva. He argues that because rich and poor alike will want to attend plays, but that the cost of tickets is proportionally higher for the poor than for the rich, the presence of a theater will widen the gap between rich and poor. As a result the poor will become alienated from the state, and the rich will become contemptuous of the government, threatening Geneva's democratic constitution. Rousseau's argument, we should notice, reveals his conception of his audience, the Genevan middle class. On the belief they are unable to grasp purely moral reasons, he appeals to their self-interested "commercial spirit." But in conceiving of his Genevan public as motivated by self-interest, Rousseau is conced-ing a gap between the city as he finds it and his own political ideal: he acknowledges, in effect, that his countrymen may not be suited to the role he scripts for them.

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'Good Neighbors Make Good Fences: Frost's "Mending Wall"', Philosophy and Literature, vol. 21 (1997), pp. 114-22.

Robert Frost's poem 'Mending Wall' can be read as a confrontation between liberal and communitarian attitudes toward property. The poem brings together two neighbors, who meet each Spring to repair the wall between their farms. One of the two interprets this activity with the famous line "good fences make good neighbors;" this sentiment expresses the liberal view that property rights establish protected spheres within which individuals can pursue their respective ends. But the other character, the poem's narrator, understands their annual chore as something that is like an outdoor game: a pleasant occasion for the two to work together toward a common end. Thus, he points toward a communitarian vision of property, in which communal attachments underlie and give force to individual property rights--so that, in fact, it is good neighbors who make good fences.

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'The Takings Clause and the Meanings of Land', Philosophy and Geography, vol. 1 (1997), pp. 63-90.

The takings problem can be conceived as a matter of distributive justice, specifically, as concerning how the various "sticks" in the "bundle" of rights associated with land ownership should be distributed between title-holders and the public. Following Walzer, we might look to the meanings of land to settle questions of distributive justice. But there are three sorts of meanings we can associate with land, each of which supports a different distribution. In our society land is conceived, in Margaret Radin's term, as fungible property; while rights over it vest with owners, they can easily be transferred to the public by eminent domain. But land also has, in Radin's term, an intensely personal meaning, according to which rights vest in title-holders and are strongly protected from taking by the public. Finally, however, land has a communal meaning, suggested by Leopold's Land Ethic, which supports public control, under the police power, over any land-use rights that threaten public harm. None of these three meanings is preeminent, hence it is impossible to appeal to a single meaning to determine the single just distribution of rights. Rather, we must accept that the takings problem has a tragic dimension: however we resolve it we are forced to sacrifice values we ought to hold dear.

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'Justice and the Takings Clause: Respecting the Plural Meanings of Land', Southwest Philosophy Review, vol. 12, no. 1 (Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting) (1996), pp. 217-223.

It is currently argued that insofar as certain laws designed to protect the environment diminish the value of privately owned land, they constitute a taking of property. Hence, under the Fifth Amendment, such laws must provide for pay-ments to affected owners. In my view the rigid protection of property rights countenanced by this argument would be unjust. I consider Michael Walzer's conception that different goods occupy different "spheres" of social meaning, and that injustice results when the criteria for distributing a good from one sphere are invoked to justify a distribution of the good from another sphere. But Walzer's theory faces the difficulty that a single underlying item--here, land--might support competing goods. I conclude that the enforcement of property rights would be unjust if it had the effect of enforcing distributions of a preponderance of other goods contrary to their proper meanings.

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'Rousseau's Critique of Catharsis', Pensée Libre, no. 5 (Proceedings of the Trent Symposium, May, 1993) (1995), pp. 195-204.

As part of his attack on theater in the 'Letter to d'Alembert', Rousseau rebuts the defense that playgoers experience a catharsis of dangerous emotions, denying that theater actually purges passions from the spectators. Rather than working to stimulate emotions which are then purged, Rousseau holds, theater simply makes people more susceptible to emotions. Building on his analysis of spectatorship, Rousseau indicts theater for causing "moral catharsis": the purging of spectators' sense of moral responsibility.

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