Foreign Affairs Best of Print in 2012

At the thumbnail is the cover shot of the January/February issue, which will feature the first cover photo in the history of Foreign Affairs (via Garance Franke-Ruta on Twitter).

And from the editor, "Foreign Affairs' New Look":

To our readers:

These days, Foreign Affairs publishes a broad range of content on a wide variety of platforms. Our innovations are increasingly coming in the digital realm, and this year alone we've released an iPad app, put out two eBooks, digitized our full archives, and ramped up online editorial content, from text to video to infographics. But our flagship print edition is also thriving, reaching its highest ever paid circulation and gaining more influence and buzz than ever before. So we decided that after a generation with our current print design, and nine decades with a nearly blank or text-based cover, it was time to put our classic wine in a beautiful new bottle.

There were several reasons for the makeover, among them...

Continue reading.

And here's the feature highlighted at the post title above, "The Best of Print in 2012."

Among the selections is Kenneth Waltz's, "Why Iran Should Get the Bomb: Nuclear Balancing Would Mean Stability" (which I mentioned here).

And my favorite among the picks is Bjørn Lomborg's, "Environmental Alarmism, Then and Now."

Greg Gutfeld Calls Out Professor Adolph Reed, Jr.

Professor Reed's essay is indeed a caricature of the worst of leftist political correctness. It's that bad: "The Puzzle of Black Republicans."

I read Professor Reed's book back in the day, "Stirrings In The Jug: Black Politics In The Post-Segregation Era." And I'm sure he gained tenure long ago, so a little correction to Gutfeld's snark. He sure does love that "Adolph" comparison, though. Heh.

More at Legal Insurrection, "I would never be so insulting as to accuse the NY Times of tokenism."

First Rule of Defeating Leftists: Don't Call Them 'Liberals'

I'm 41 posted an excellent entry the other day, "The Blogger’s Rules For Defeating Liberals."

However, I cringed with all the references to "liberals." These goons are not "liberal." They're progressive collectivists (as the most hardened of them self-identify) or, frankly, simply radical leftists.

Zilla has more:

I can’t stand to see them called “liberals” because there is nothing “liberal” about them. Words matter, as they say. Call ‘em what they really are: LEFTISTS. The edit to the [blog] title is from me, because I don’t want to see the freaks called by their preferred misnomer at any place that I have editorial control over.

When referring to "liberals," the proper meaning makes reference to those early thinkers evoking the ideology of individual liberty and limited government, most importantly John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, and Adam Smith. The Democrat Party until roughly John F. Kennedy espoused a form of "modern liberalism" that by default drew on America's constitutional foundations in liberty but increasingly sought an expanded role for the state in promoting economic equality and social welfare. Yet, the left today is almost completely unrecognizable from the Cold War liberalism of Kennedy and Harry Truman. Today's left is a quasi-Marxist, state-collectivist ideological apparatus, intent to delegitimize private property and wealth accumulation and to elevate extreme ethnic tribalism as the blunt cudgel of radical redistributionist class warfare. President Obama is the chief class warrior and national divider in this mode, the perfect vessel of the vengeful fever swamp ghouls of the Democrat Party.

Zilla might not even be this charitable, although that's the pretty well-understood ideological bastardization of "liberalism" over the last couple of generations. Today's leftists are the Orwellian zombies who spout tolerance but practice extreme racism, anti-Semitism and viewpoint intolerance. These ghouls preach "peace" and "respect" as the highest principles but instead practice union thuggery and anti-speech bullying and lawfare as standard operating procedures. And more than ever, the left phantasmagorically operates under a false consciousness of objective lies as progressive truth. The "tent trutherism" coming out of Lansing is just the latest manifestation, but President Obama's 2012 campaign will perhaps be remembered by traditional historians as the most dishonest (and morally reprobate) in post-modern history, marked especially by a media empire in service to state power, with journalists effectively functioning as party apparatchiks for the endlessly voracious tax-and-spend regime of the soul-crushing collectivist machine.

That's why people should simply refuse to call these people "liberals." They are precisely the opposite of the great classical liberals, and are indeed the very kinds of tyrants for which the latter developed theories to frustrate, prevent, and destroy.

Clueless Caroline Loves Her Some Uruguayan Homosexuals

Professor Caroline Heldman tweeted on the vote of Uruguay's lower house for homosexual marriage. I'm thinking BFD, right? So I tweeted her, and she tweets back calling U.S. marriage traditionalists "knuckledraggers":

@ampowerblog Knuckle draggers in the states indeed!
— Caroline Heldman (@carolineheldman) December 12, 2012

Not so sure about this lady's intelligence. I was being facetious. And Uruguay is hardly the model of progressive politics. But that's lame-brain leftism for you.

And recall from 2009: "Professor Caroline Heldman Clueless on Politics of Town Halls."

CARTOON CREDIT: Legal Insurrection.

Five Years and Four Million Visitors

This blog's 5th anniversary came on October 7th.

I actually forgot about it at the time, although I was planning to write something to mark the occasion. It's not that big a deal, frankly. Folks like Jeff Goldstein have been blogging over ten years (and it's not getting any easier over there, it turns out). But longevity in the blogosphere is worth noting, since so many come and go. And "AmPower" also recorded 4 million visitors on Sitemeter a week or so back, so that's another milestone. But again, compared to Althouse, it's still a tiny number of hits.

Yesterday I was excited to get home from work so I could do some blogging, and tonight I'll be excited to post my thoughts on the presidential debate. So I guess that's the best sign that it's been worthwhile: I still haven't burned out, and that's after years of leftist attempts to shut me down.

I could do a huge roundup of thanks to all the big bloggers who've helped me, but I've been there done that. Instead, folks should check out Swedish Meatballs Confidential (pNSFW)." The guy was one of the first dudes to actually read my blog and provide feedback.

In any case, here's to another five years, and by then I will have said far more of moral significance than political scientist Daniel Drezner, who just posted his 10th anniversary post in the most anodyne iteration one could imagine. It's so nice not to worry about the academic prestige hierarchy of the political science profession. Most of those folks bore the hell out of me, but there's still a few good souls left in the field, so I'll stick around a little longer.

Constitution Day: Long Beach City College

Here's the announcement: "Constitution Day Panel Discussion."

Constitution Day is September 17th, but the college scheduled the panel for the 20th (for scheduling convenience, one assumes). I was a reluctant participant. Also on the panel was my highly esteemed colleague, Dr. Julian Delgaudio. He's a communist. A nice fellow, actually, I just can't stand his arrogance, hypocrisy, and ideological bankruptcy. The original invitation asked presenters to prepare a two-minute introduction. That's my department chair Professor Gene Goss who introduces the panelists. Professor Delgaudio spoke first. I thought he was defending a dissertation or something. He was droning on and on about how terrible ---- terrible! ---- is the U.S. Constitution. Professor Goss had to ask him to wrap up his comments at least three times. Talk about a bloviator. I had a student who flagged me down on campus last week asking, "Who was that guy who spoke first?" And even one of the part-time faculty members had questions. He obviously left an impression, and it wasn't a great one. And frankly, Professor Delgaudio was not well versed in how the Constitution actually works. It wasn't designed to prevent wealth accumulation. Delgaudio conflates wealth with power, and thus the Constitution "failed" since enormous wealth has been concentrated at the top of the social hierarchy historically. Whatever. All the other panelists did a wonderful job. I just don't like communists, and I don't think people like this are doing LBCC students any favors.

Crooked Timber's Chris Bertram is 'Very Sad' That Communist Historian Eric Hobsbawm Has Died

Chris Bertram is professor of philosophy at University of Bristol, in Southwest England. He's an expert on Rousseau, apparently, and, from what I gather, a fan of Karl Marx as well, or some variation of Marxism. Most interestingly, he's a defender of Joseph Stalin, or at least the Stalinist model of Soviet Communism, from what appears in the comments at his post at Crooked Timber, "Eric Hobsbawm is dead."

Perhaps he's just being playful, but Bertram's sense of humor is rather Stalinist as well:

Jonathan, ajay …

Annoying as our commenters often are, I’m not persuaded that it would less bad to murder them if there were more people around.

But especially interesting is Bertram's response to A.N. Wilson indictment of Hobsbawm at London's Daily Mail, "He hated Britain and excused Stalin's genocide. But was hero of the BBC and the Guardian, Eric Hobsbawm a TRAITOR too?"

Read that, and then Bertram's comment here:

That Daily Mail piece is truly marvellous. One of the upsides of the death of someone like Hobsbawm is that all the real arseholes are given an opportunity to remind us all what arseholes they are, and A.N. Wilson is no exception. The DM, of course, was rather partial to the Third Reich.

He doesn't dispute the facts in evidence regarding the Communist Hobsbawm. He simply, rather childishly, calls Wilson an asshole and the Daily Mail a Nazi organ.

Of course, this is Crooked Timber, an extreme left-wing academic blog, with contributors such as the socialist crank political scientist Henry Farrell, who I've blogged about many times. (Farrell got all butt-hurt when Glenn Beck singled out violent socialist Frances Fox Piven in his broadcasts a couple of years back.)

In any case, recall the comments from Bret Stephens' essay previously, "Eric Hobsbawm and the Details of History."

Contemporary leftists embrace their extremists and totalitarians, from the Occupy Movement to dictators like Fidel Castro. And for some, even Joseph Stalin wasn't too extreme. You simply cannot find comparable affinity to far-right extremism among today's conservatives in American politics. And it says something that it's the right that the mainstream press has attacked remorselessly this last few years as essentially white supremacists and Klansmen, while we have a president who was trained by Communist Party members and who palled around with Weather Underground terrorists in the radical leftist marination of Chicago's community organizing thug politics. All of these points are facts. The left has no problem with socialism and Communist Party politics --- for progressives and Democrat Party hacks, there are no enemies on the left, as I've long argued at this blog. Indeed, one of the lasting implications of the Obama interregnum will be the degree to which the extreme left ideological fringe has been mainstreamed in current political life.

Tim's Light Reading (11/05/2010)

I offer the following as a break from our (excellent!) long posts reflecting on conference matters:

1 (of 5). The Problem of Political Philosophy: Only Links to Offer

Bookforum's excellent Omnivore blog held forth on "The Problem of Political Philosophy" in a post a few days ago. If you're not familiar with Omnivore, its posts are constructed as carnivalesque clouds of links on specific themes. Each link is usually a full story, opinion piece, or book review. My favorite link in this post is to a paper by Francesca Pasquali that brings together political theory, political philosophy, and public philosophy. The last has been a concern to me for some time because it links the work of Walter Lippmann and Mortimer J. Adler. Here's a provocative excerpt from Pasquali's abstract (bolds mine):

Public philosophy detects the shared values grounding political practices and employs them to develop criteria for guiding policy decisions. It is attentive to empirical data and constraints and it provides solutions that are effective in political terms. Political philosophy takes its distance from congiuntural facts and practically subscribed principles. While sensitive to practical problems, it does not aim at elaborating practically viable solutions: it is rather concerned with the theoretical adequacy of its principles. Public philosophy seems better equipped for developing proposals serviceable during hard times, when effective political responses are in need.

2. A Poll: "The Best Quality Journals in the History of Philosophy"

University of Chicago Law School professor (and philosopher) Brian Leiter, who runs Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog, recently conducted a poll that should be interest to all intellectual historians. Using CIVS (Condercet Internet Voting Service), he asked readers to rank the best journals, of a list of seventeen, for publication on the history of philosophy. Here are his Top 11:

1. Journal of the History of Philosophy
2. Philosophical Review
3. Philosophy & Phenomenological Research
4. British Journal for the History of Philosophy
5. Archiv fur Geschichte der Philosophie
6. History of Philosophy Quarterly
7. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society
8. European Journal of Philosophy
9. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly
10. Canadian Journal of Philosophy
11. Journal of the History of Ideas

See the rest of his results here.

3. Teaching The Big, Hard Ideas---Online

Writing for the National Association of Scholars (a rather conservative group that advocates "working to foster intellectual freedom and to sustain the tradition of reasoned scholarship and civil debate in America’s colleges"), David Clemens offers a rather pessimistic assessment of the ability of online courses to relay the essence of the humanities online. Here is a sampling of his reflections (bolds mine):

I recall a college administrator who while cutting literature classes spoke passionately about more “student access to higher education.” I said, “Access doesn’t do them any good if there’s no higher education when they get here. What you are cutting is higher education.”

Between dumbing down and advocacy teaching, peer editing and “student-centered” classrooms, Theory and CorporateU., PowerPoint presentations and courses on Buffy— higher education in the traditional sense has been smothered. ...Instead of seriously examining such eternal questions of the meaning of life, the liberal arts and humanities wither away in favor of pragmatic but less formative pursuits. What do these words have in common: American, leisure, postcolonial, liberal, gender, disability, queer, environmental, animal? Answer: followed by the word, “studies,” all are degree-granting college majors. ...

The Big Question is whether the imperatives of current educational models make widespread embrace of online classes inevitable. It may be a situation of hug or die. ...Conversely, online is ideal for what I call “boutique” courses, classes people take because they are interested in the subject, not because they “need” them. ...That’s online’s proper role—to supplement face-to-face classes for students in special circumstances (pregnant, remote, homebound) and as a lab for exploration of niche topics. Will that prevail? I doubt it.

To bring this home, Clemens piece makes me skeptical that intellectual history courses can be effectively taught---or at least effectively absorbed by students---in an online teaching environment.

4. Defining American's Knowledge of Religion

About a month ago, before the elections heated up, the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life’s "U.S. Religious Knowledge Survey" was all over the news. Like other "shocking" surveys that make an impression, this one was about how ignorant Americans are. These are usually about history (or those are the ones I remember), but this one covered comparative religion. Because it asked respondents their religious affiliation, it was also able to break down responses by sect. Here's an excerpt from the survey's Executive Summary (to catalyze your memory):

On average, Americans correctly answer 16 of the 32 religious knowledge questions on the survey. ...Atheists and agnostics average 20.9 correct answers. Jews and Mormons do about as well, averaging 20.5 and 20.3 correct answers, respectively. Protestants as a whole average 16 correct answers; Catholics as a whole, 14.7. Atheists and agnostics, Jews and Mormons perform better than other groups on the survey even after controlling for differing levels of education.

I'm bringing this to your attention not to replay the results, but to draw your attention to this excellent set of scholarly replies posted at The Immanent Frame, a blog hosted by the Social Science Research Council. Here is a sampling of the first reply by Richard Amesbury, Associate Professor of Ethics, Claremont School of Theology; Associate Professor of Religion, Claremont Graduate University (bolds mine):

Insofar as it aims to grade Americans on their “religious knowledge,” the new Pew survey contains a strongly normative subtext: that there are certain things that every American ought to know about religion. ...In an earlier piece, I suggested an alternative interpretation: that the things social scientists take to be important about “religion”—--in this case, a range of externally available facts about “the tenets, practices, history and leading figures of major faith traditions”—--aren’t all that important to many Americans. This need not imply that Americans are insincere or incapable of successfully orienting themselves in a culturally diverse environment; rather, it suggests that the conceptual maps they use to do this don’t always conform to the expectations of demographers.

Instead of concluding that Americans lack “religious knowledge” because they don’t know what social scientists think they should, we might want to ask what, if anything, the study reveals about lived religion.

Amesbury suggests the very thing I pointed out to a few friends in a debate about the results: We study epistemology because there are different ways of knowing. And in this case, the creators of the Pew survey did not address practical knowledge in relation to religion---or the kinds of knowledge (i.e. ethics, or how-to navigational skills) that practitioners seek from their chosen faiths. I hope that historians of American religion make these distinctions when they assess how religion operates? And this topic also matters to those assessing how religion fits into the Culture Wars in the United States.

5. A New Journal: History of the Present

Andrew Hartman alerted me to this via his FB page, but History of the Present: A Journal of Critical History should be of interest to U.S. intellectual historians. It relays its avowed purpose as follows:

Its aim is twofold: to create a space in which scholars can reflect on the role history plays in establishing categories of contemporary debate by making them appear inevitable, natural or culturally necessary; and to publish work that calls into question certainties about the relationship between past and present that are taken for granted by the majority of practicing historians. Its editors want to encourage the critical examination of both history’s influence on politics and the politics of the discipline of history itself. The journal’s object is to showcase articles that exemplify the practice of what might be called theorized empirical history.

I can definitely see some of our regular USIH contributors and commenters taking an interest in getting into this periodical. It seems like this endeavor borders on investigative journalism---which reminds me of a quip I recently heard, relayed by Bill Moyers: "The difference between a journalist and an historian is that the historian knows the difference." Humor aside, it looks like History of the Present will be a place for historians to act in the Laschian tradition of social criticism. - TL

Tim's Light Reading (11/05/2010)

I offer the following as a break from our (excellent!) long posts reflecting on conference matters:

1 (of 5). The Problem of Political Philosophy: Only Links to Offer

Bookforum's excellent Omnivore blog held forth on "The Problem of Political Philosophy" in a post a few days ago. If you're not familiar with Omnivore, its posts are constructed as carnivalesque clouds of links on specific themes. Each link is usually a full story, opinion piece, or book review. My favorite link in this post is to a paper by Francesca Pasquali that brings together political theory, political philosophy, and public philosophy. The last has been a concern to me for some time because it links the work of Walter Lippmann and Mortimer J. Adler. Here's a provocative excerpt from Pasquali's abstract (bolds mine):

Public philosophy detects the shared values grounding political practices and employs them to develop criteria for guiding policy decisions. It is attentive to empirical data and constraints and it provides solutions that are effective in political terms. Political philosophy takes its distance from congiuntural facts and practically subscribed principles. While sensitive to practical problems, it does not aim at elaborating practically viable solutions: it is rather concerned with the theoretical adequacy of its principles. Public philosophy seems better equipped for developing proposals serviceable during hard times, when effective political responses are in need.

2. A Poll: "The Best Quality Journals in the History of Philosophy"

University of Chicago Law School professor (and philosopher) Brian Leiter, who runs Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog, recently conducted a poll that should be interest to all intellectual historians. Using CIVS (Condercet Internet Voting Service), he asked readers to rank the best journals, of a list of seventeen, for publication on the history of philosophy. Here are his Top 11:

1. Journal of the History of Philosophy
2. Philosophical Review
3. Philosophy & Phenomenological Research
4. British Journal for the History of Philosophy
5. Archiv fur Geschichte der Philosophie
6. History of Philosophy Quarterly
7. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society
8. European Journal of Philosophy
9. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly
10. Canadian Journal of Philosophy
11. Journal of the History of Ideas

See the rest of his results here.

3. Teaching The Big, Hard Ideas---Online

Writing for the National Association of Scholars (a rather conservative group that advocates "working to foster intellectual freedom and to sustain the tradition of reasoned scholarship and civil debate in America’s colleges"), David Clemens offers a rather pessimistic assessment of the ability of online courses to relay the essence of the humanities online. Here is a sampling of his reflections (bolds mine):

I recall a college administrator who while cutting literature classes spoke passionately about more “student access to higher education.” I said, “Access doesn’t do them any good if there’s no higher education when they get here. What you are cutting is higher education.”

Between dumbing down and advocacy teaching, peer editing and “student-centered” classrooms, Theory and CorporateU., PowerPoint presentations and courses on Buffy— higher education in the traditional sense has been smothered. ...Instead of seriously examining such eternal questions of the meaning of life, the liberal arts and humanities wither away in favor of pragmatic but less formative pursuits. What do these words have in common: American, leisure, postcolonial, liberal, gender, disability, queer, environmental, animal? Answer: followed by the word, “studies,” all are degree-granting college majors. ...

The Big Question is whether the imperatives of current educational models make widespread embrace of online classes inevitable. It may be a situation of hug or die. ...Conversely, online is ideal for what I call “boutique” courses, classes people take because they are interested in the subject, not because they “need” them. ...That’s online’s proper role—to supplement face-to-face classes for students in special circumstances (pregnant, remote, homebound) and as a lab for exploration of niche topics. Will that prevail? I doubt it.

To bring this home, Clemens piece makes me skeptical that intellectual history courses can be effectively taught---or at least effectively absorbed by students---in an online teaching environment.

4. Defining American's Knowledge of Religion

About a month ago, before the elections heated up, the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life’s "U.S. Religious Knowledge Survey" was all over the news. Like other "shocking" surveys that make an impression, this one was about how ignorant Americans are. These are usually about history (or those are the ones I remember), but this one covered comparative religion. Because it asked respondents their religious affiliation, it was also able to break down responses by sect. Here's an excerpt from the survey's Executive Summary (to catalyze your memory):

On average, Americans correctly answer 16 of the 32 religious knowledge questions on the survey. ...Atheists and agnostics average 20.9 correct answers. Jews and Mormons do about as well, averaging 20.5 and 20.3 correct answers, respectively. Protestants as a whole average 16 correct answers; Catholics as a whole, 14.7. Atheists and agnostics, Jews and Mormons perform better than other groups on the survey even after controlling for differing levels of education.

I'm bringing this to your attention not to replay the results, but to draw your attention to this excellent set of scholarly replies posted at The Immanent Frame, a blog hosted by the Social Science Research Council. Here is a sampling of the first reply by Richard Amesbury, Associate Professor of Ethics, Claremont School of Theology; Associate Professor of Religion, Claremont Graduate University (bolds mine):

Insofar as it aims to grade Americans on their “religious knowledge,” the new Pew survey contains a strongly normative subtext: that there are certain things that every American ought to know about religion. ...In an earlier piece, I suggested an alternative interpretation: that the things social scientists take to be important about “religion”—--in this case, a range of externally available facts about “the tenets, practices, history and leading figures of major faith traditions”—--aren’t all that important to many Americans. This need not imply that Americans are insincere or incapable of successfully orienting themselves in a culturally diverse environment; rather, it suggests that the conceptual maps they use to do this don’t always conform to the expectations of demographers.

Instead of concluding that Americans lack “religious knowledge” because they don’t know what social scientists think they should, we might want to ask what, if anything, the study reveals about lived religion.

Amesbury suggests the very thing I pointed out to a few friends in a debate about the results: We study epistemology because there are different ways of knowing. And in this case, the creators of the Pew survey did not address practical knowledge in relation to religion---or the kinds of knowledge (i.e. ethics, or how-to navigational skills) that practitioners seek from their chosen faiths. I hope that historians of American religion make these distinctions when they assess how religion operates? And this topic also matters to those assessing how religion fits into the Culture Wars in the United States.

5. A New Journal: History of the Present

Andrew Hartman alerted me to this via his FB page, but History of the Present: A Journal of Critical History should be of interest to U.S. intellectual historians. It relays its avowed purpose as follows:

Its aim is twofold: to create a space in which scholars can reflect on the role history plays in establishing categories of contemporary debate by making them appear inevitable, natural or culturally necessary; and to publish work that calls into question certainties about the relationship between past and present that are taken for granted by the majority of practicing historians. Its editors want to encourage the critical examination of both history’s influence on politics and the politics of the discipline of history itself. The journal’s object is to showcase articles that exemplify the practice of what might be called theorized empirical history.

I can definitely see some of our regular USIH contributors and commenters taking an interest in getting into this periodical. It seems like this endeavor borders on investigative journalism---which reminds me of a quip I recently heard, relayed by Bill Moyers: "The difference between a journalist and an historian is that the historian knows the difference." Humor aside, it looks like History of the Present will be a place for historians to act in the Laschian tradition of social criticism. - TL

Zombie Ideas In U.S. Intellectual History: An Etymological And Epistemological Study

I first ran across the phrase "zombie ideas" in Paul Krugman's writings, either here or here---probably the latter. In the first post from November 2007, Krugman refers to this document from the Health Policy Institute, titled "Lies, Damned Lies, and Health Care Zombies: Discredited Ideas That Will Not Die." That study introduces the following phrase in its text: "These false ideas (or “zombies”) carry with them implicit policy recommendations bearing on some aspect of health care financing" (p. 6). The HPI piece was written in 1998.

Although I have found several other instances, beyond HPI and Krugman, where the phrase appears, the year 1998 seems to mark the first public appearance of the phrase "zombie ideas" in thoughtful public discourse. So much for etymology. Perhaps one of our readers---a historian with a penchant for lexicography and a fetish for the undead (hah!)---can add to this story?

But what does the phrase mean? And what is its epistemology? Addressing the former question, Krugman called them "false stories that refuse to die, and just keep coming back." The 1998 HPI study correspondingly says they are ideas with a "tendency to re-emerge." It then indirectly expands the definition of the phrase in several ways:

Yet in the United States the idea that consumer co-payments make good economic (and perhaps moral) sense steadfastly resists permanent burial. Why? The interest in user charges bears the familiar hallmarks of a zombie. First, in spite of its popularity, it is intellectually dead, and second, its overwhelming appeal is a product both of its public resonance, and of the efforts of powerful interest groups to keep it on the agenda (p. 24).

Teasing my concerns from the context of the HPI excerpt, it appears that zombie ideas are (in order of importance):

(1) intellectually dead, or are between death and life currently (hence they arise from the grave);
(2) bad (or evil);
(3) scary (people tremble at the emotional encounter);
(4) kept alive by interest groups (political or otherwise); and
(5) primarily political (or at least zombie ideas recur in this context the most).

I do not mean this list to be exhaustive; consider it a beginning. BTW: In a more humorous vein, it seems the HPI study is THE starting point for understanding zombiology in the realm of ideas.

As for epistemology, what of the science or study of this phenomenon (zombiosis, if you prefer) in the world of ideas? How does this process happen? Perhaps only the specialized historical study of interest groups will reveal changes over time: the peculiar phases, duration, and, most importantly, how zombie ideas are killed once and for all (or are they!)? It seems clear that politicians would benefit from an exhaustive study of these ideas.

I am most curious, speaking somewhat more seriously, of what ideas the historians of U.S. intellectual life feel are zombies? What ideas have recurred the most, or are the most relevant, in the history of the United States? Of course an answer to this question might indict the historians themselves. For the question could be phrased: What ideas have historians resurrected over and over to explain change in U.S. history, particular with regard to its intellectual life? So this could digress into an ad hominem thread that beats up on particular historians. That's not my goal. Besides, a comparable taxonomy has already been constructed once before by David Hackett Fisher.

What say you? What are the most important, most cited, or most over-used ideas in U.S. intellectual history? Or what have I missed in defining the meaning of zombie ideas? - TL

Zombie Ideas In U.S. Intellectual History: An Etymological And Epistemological Study

I first ran across the phrase "zombie ideas" in Paul Krugman's writings, either here or here---probably the latter. In the first post from November 2007, Krugman refers to this document from the Health Policy Institute, titled "Lies, Damned Lies, and Health Care Zombies: Discredited Ideas That Will Not Die." That study introduces the following phrase in its text: "These false ideas (or “zombies”) carry with them implicit policy recommendations bearing on some aspect of health care financing" (p. 6). The HPI piece was written in 1998.

Although I have found several other instances, beyond HPI and Krugman, where the phrase appears, the year 1998 seems to mark the first public appearance of the phrase "zombie ideas" in thoughtful public discourse. So much for etymology. Perhaps one of our readers---a historian with a penchant for lexicography and a fetish for the undead (hah!)---can add to this story?

But what does the phrase mean? And what is its epistemology? Addressing the former question, Krugman called them "false stories that refuse to die, and just keep coming back." The 1998 HPI study correspondingly says they are ideas with a "tendency to re-emerge." It then indirectly expands the definition of the phrase in several ways:

Yet in the United States the idea that consumer co-payments make good economic (and perhaps moral) sense steadfastly resists permanent burial. Why? The interest in user charges bears the familiar hallmarks of a zombie. First, in spite of its popularity, it is intellectually dead, and second, its overwhelming appeal is a product both of its public resonance, and of the efforts of powerful interest groups to keep it on the agenda (p. 24).

Teasing my concerns from the context of the HPI excerpt, it appears that zombie ideas are (in order of importance):

(1) intellectually dead, or are between death and life currently (hence they arise from the grave);
(2) bad (or evil);
(3) scary (people tremble at the emotional encounter);
(4) kept alive by interest groups (political or otherwise); and
(5) primarily political (or at least zombie ideas recur in this context the most).

I do not mean this list to be exhaustive; consider it a beginning. BTW: In a more humorous vein, it seems the HPI study is THE starting point for understanding zombiology in the realm of ideas.

As for epistemology, what of the science or study of this phenomenon (zombiosis, if you prefer) in the world of ideas? How does this process happen? Perhaps only the specialized historical study of interest groups will reveal changes over time: the peculiar phases, duration, and, most importantly, how zombie ideas are killed once and for all (or are they!)? It seems clear that politicians would benefit from an exhaustive study of these ideas.

I am most curious, speaking somewhat more seriously, of what ideas the historians of U.S. intellectual life feel are zombies? What ideas have recurred the most, or are the most relevant, in the history of the United States? Of course an answer to this question might indict the historians themselves. For the question could be phrased: What ideas have historians resurrected over and over to explain change in U.S. history, particular with regard to its intellectual life? So this could digress into an ad hominem thread that beats up on particular historians. That's not my goal. Besides, a comparable taxonomy has already been constructed once before by David Hackett Fisher.

What say you? What are the most important, most cited, or most over-used ideas in U.S. intellectual history? Or what have I missed in defining the meaning of zombie ideas? - TL