C.S. Peirce, Darwinism, fallibilism, Hobbes, instrumentalism, John Dewey, judicial restraint, meliorism, Natural Law, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., pluralism, scientific method, The Common Law, Utilitarianism, William James
In America, American History, Arts & Letters, History, Humanities, Jurisprudence, Law, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Philosophy, Pragmatism, Scholarship, The Supreme Court on May 7, 2014 at 8:45 am
No summary could do justice to the wealth of literature about Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.’s relationship to C.S. Peirce, William James, and John Dewey, but a few points of commonality are worth mentioning. First, Holmes was akin to Peirce in the embrace of fallibilism and the scientific method. Holmes disliked natural law thinkers because they purported to know the truth about the law by way of reason or moral teaching. In contrast, Holmes believed that the common law gradually filtered out the most workable, although not necessarily the most moral, theories; in fact, he felt that it was not the province, expertise, or training of the judge to explore issues of morality. He also believed that truth was best determined by a community of inquiring minds rather than by a judge ruling in isolation or by a justice with only eight colleagues to help work through his or her analysis. Therefore, he adhered to the doctrine of judicial restraint and deferred to statutes enacted by legislatures, which consisted of representatives elected by and accountable to the people.
Second, his notion of truth was like James’s: fluid but ultimately associated with the conglomerate views of a majority that have been tested and corroborated by concrete evidence. Holmes did not share James’s optimism, but he did share his literary sparkle. He also shared James’s meliorism and pluralism. The Common Law is a testament to the melioristic nature of the common law system. Holmes’s judicial restraint and deference to local legislatures, moreover, attest to his recognition of diverse local communities and associations that enable social cooperation and legal growth.
Third, Holmes’s celebration of the instrumentalism of the common law smacks of Dewey’s instrumentalism and its Darwinian complements. Like Dewey, Holmes moved pragmatism away from the science, logic, and mathematics that intrigued Peirce, away from the moral psychology and religious vibrancy that intrigued James, and towards the social and political considerations that intrigued Dewey. Holmes and Dewey were, to some degree, consequentialists; they cannot be made out as pure utilitarians—far from it—but their analyses do tend to focus on the importance of outcomes to the evaluation of human action. Finally, Holmes and Dewey emphasized the value of experiment and were majoritarian in that they maintained faith in the ability of distinct communities to arrive at unique solutions to pressing social issues and to memorialize those solutions in official legislation.
These three pragmatist influences enabled Holmes to create a theory of the common law unique to him that both accounted for and distanced itself from the legal positivism of John Austin and Hobbes, who traditionally have been thought of as adversaries of common law theory.
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A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Adam Smith, Aristotle, Bartholomew Fayre, Ben Jonson, Benjamin Franklin, Bible, C.S. Lewis, Canon, Capitalism and Freedom, Cervantes, Chaucer, Cleanth Brooks, Confessions, Critique of Pure Reason, Dante, Descartes, Discourse on Method, Don Quixote, Edmund Burke, Ethics, For a New Liberty, Freud, Hayek, Hegel, Hobbes, Ideas Have Consequences, Individualism and Economic Order, James Burnham, Joseph Conrad, Joyce, Kant, Leviathan, Locke, Lolita, Lord Jim, Lyotard, Machiavelli, Meditations on First Philosophy, Michael Oakeshott, Milton, Milton Friedman, Mises, Murray Rothbard, Nabokov, New Testament, Nicomachean Ethics, Norman Mailer, Ohio, Old Testament, Plato, Politics, Pragmatism, Proust, Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays, Richard Weaver, Robert Nisbet, Russell Kirk, Saint Augustine, Shakespeare, Sherwood Anderson, Socialism, Spinoza, Suicide of the West, Summa Theologica, Swann’s Way, The Canterbury Tales, The Divine Comedy, The Interpretation of Dreams, The Moviegoer, The Naked and the Dead, The Phenomenology of Spirit, The Politics of Prudence, The Postmodern Condition, The Prince, The Quest for Community, The Republic, The Screwtape Letters, The Sound and the Fury, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, The Well Wrought Urn, Thomas Aquinas, Two Treatises of Government, Walker Percy, Western Canon, Western Civilization, William Faulkner, William James, Winesburg
In Arts & Letters, Books, Creativity, Fiction, History, Humanities, Law, Literature, Novels, Philosophy, Politics, Western Civilization, Western Philosophy, Writing on December 12, 2012 at 8:45 am
Editorial Note (April 15, 2013): At this point in the year, I have already discovered flaws in this list. For instance, I gave myself two weeks to read Augustine’s Confessions and one week to read Aquinas’s Summa Theologica. I should have done the reverse. Summa Theologica may have required more than two weeks to read, since I found myself rushing through it, and it is not a book through which one should rush. My schedule has forced me to speed read some texts in order to avoid taking shortcuts. Some of the texts on this list will therefore appear on my list for next year, so that they get the treatment and consideration they deserve.
2013 will be a good year for reading. I’ve made a list of the books I’m going to undertake, and I hope you’ll consider reading along with me. As you can see, I’ll be enjoying many canonical works of Western Civilization. Some I’ve read before; some I haven’t. My goal is to reacquaint myself with the great works I fell in love with years ago and to read some of the great works that I’ve always wanted to read but haven’t. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that everybody ought to read these works, but I do think that by reading them, a person will gain a fundamental understanding of the essential questions and problems that have faced humans for generations.
Some works are conspicuous in their absence; the list betrays my preferences. Notably missing are the works of Shakespeare and the canonical texts that make up the Old and New Testament. There’s a reason for that. I’ve developed a morning habit of reading the scriptures as well as Shakespeare before I go to work. If I’m reading these already, there’s no need to add them to the list, which is designed to establish a healthy routine. What’s more, the list comes with tight deadlines, and I’m inclined to relish rather than rush through the Bible or Shakespeare.
Lists provide order and clarity; we make them to reduce options or enumerate measurable, targeted goals. Lists rescue us from what has been called the “tyranny of choice.” Benjamin Franklin made a list of the 13 virtues he wished to live by. What motivated him is perhaps what’s motivating me: a sense of purpose and direction and edification.
At first I wanted to assign myself a book a week, but realizing that some works are longer or more challenging than others, that as a matter of obligation I will have other books to read and review, that I have a doctoral dissertation to write, that the legal profession is time consuming, and that unforeseen circumstances could arise, I decided that I might need more time than a week per book depending on the complexity of the particular selection or the busyness of the season. Although I hope to stick to schedule, I own that I might have to permit myself flexibility. We’ll see.
For variety—and respite—I have chosen to alternate between a pre-20th century text and a 20th century text. In other words, one week I might read Milton, the next Heidegger. For the pre-20th century texts, I will advance more or less chronologically; there is no method or sequence for the 20th century texts, which I listed as they came to mind (“oh, I’ve always wanted to read more Oakeshott—I should add him. And isn’t my knowledge of Proust severely limited?—I’ll add him as well.”). It’s too early to say what lasting and significant effects these latter texts will have, so I hesitate to number them among the demonstrably great pre-20th century texts, but a general consensus has, I think, established these 20th century texts as at least among the candidates for canonicity.
I have dated some of the texts in the list below. Not all dates are known with certainty, by me or anyone else. Some texts were revised multiple times after their initial publication; others were written in installments. Therefore, I have noted the time span for those works produced over the course of many years.
One would be justified in wondering why I’ve selected these texts over others. The answer, I suppose, pertains to something Harold Bloom once said: that there are many books but only one lifetime, so why not read the best and most enduring? I paraphrase because I can’t remember precisely what he said or where he said it, but the point is clear enough: read the most important books before you run out of time.
Making this list, I learned that one can read only so many great works by picking them off one week at a time. The initial disheartenment I felt at this realization quickly gave way to motivation: if I want to understand the human condition as the most talented and creative of our predecessors understood it, I will have to make a new list every year, and I will have to squeeze in time for additional texts whenever possible. I am shocked at the number of books that I wanted to include in this list, but that didn’t make it in. I ran out of weeks. What a shame.
Here is my list. I hope you enjoy. Read the rest of this entry »
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"Of the Standard of Taste", Allen Tate, Austrian Economics, Austrian Economics and Literature, Berkeley, Bloomsbury, Boris Eikhenbaum, Boris Tomashevsky, Cleanth Brooks, David Hume, De Quincey, Diderot, Dwight Macdonald, E. Phillips Oppenheim, e.e. cummings, Economics in One Lesson, Ezra Pound, Foucault, Fredric Jameson, George Santayana, Gertrude Stein, H. L. Mencken, Harlem Renaissance, Harold Bloom, Henry Hazlitt, Hobbes, Hume, I.A. Richards, Irving Babbitt, James Joyce, Jeffrey Tucker, John Crowe Ransom, Kenneth Burke, Landor, Lenin, Lionel Trilling, Marianne Moore, Martin Heidegger, Marxists, Monroe Beardsley, New Criticism, New Humanists, Northrop Frye, On Being Creative, Paul Elmer More, Plato, Robert Frost, Roman Jakobson, Russell Kirk, Russian Formalism, Sartre, Schopenhauer, Shakespeare, T.S. Eliot, Temple Bailey, Terry Eagleton, The American Mercury, The Anatomy of Criticism, The Great Idea, The Nation, Time Will Run Back, Viktor Shklovsky, Vladimir Propp, Voltaire, Wallace Stevens, William Butler Yeats, William Carlos Williams, William Empson, William Hazlitt, William James, William K. Wimsatt, Wittgenstein, Yuri Tynyanov
In American History, Arts & Letters, Austrian Economics, Book Reviews, Creative Writing, Creativity, Economics, Essays, Ethics, Fiction, History, Humane Economy, Humanities, Liberalism, Libertarianism, Literary Theory & Criticism, Literature, Philosophy, Politics, Western Civilization, Western Philosophy, Writing on March 20, 2012 at 9:05 am
The following appeared here at Prometheus Unbound and here at Mises.org.
Remembered mostly for his contributions to economics, including his pithy and still-timely classic Economics in One Lesson (1946), Henry Hazlitt was a man who wore many hats. He was a public intellectual and the author or editor of some 28 books, one of which was a novel, The Great Idea (1961) — published in Britain and later republished in the United States as Time Will Run Back (1966) — and another of which, The Anatomy of Criticism (1933), was a trialogue on literary criticism. (Hazlitt’s book came out 24 years before Northrop Frye published a book of criticism under the same title.) Great-great-grandnephew to British essayist William Hazlitt, the boy Henry wanted to become like the eminent pragmatist and philosopher-psychologist William James, who was known for his charming turns of phrase and literary sparkle. Relative poverty would prevent Hazlitt’s becoming the next James. But the man Hazlitt forged his own path, one that established his reputation as an influential man of letters.
In part because of his longstanding support for free-market economics, scholars of literature have overlooked Hazlitt’s literary criticism; and Austrian economists — perhaps for lack of interest, perhaps for other reasons — have done little to restore Hazlitt’s place among the pantheon of 20th century literary critics. Yet Hazlitt deserves that honor.
He may not have been a Viktor Shklovsky, Roman Jakobson, Cleanth Brooks, William K. Wimsatt, John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Lionel Trilling, Dwight Macdonald, or Kenneth Burke, but Hazlitt’s criticism is valuable in negative terms: he offers a corrective to much that is wrong with literary criticism, both then and now. His positive contributions to literary criticism seem slight when compared to those of the figures named in the previous sentence. But Hazlitt is striking in his ability to anticipate problems with contemporary criticism, especially the tendency to judge authors by their identity. Hazlitt’s contributions to literary criticism were not many, but they were entertaining and erudite, rivaling as they did the literary fashions of the day and packing as much material into a few works as other critics packed into their entire oeuvres. Read the rest of this entry »
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Academic Questions, Adam Smith, Albert Venn Dicey, Alliance Defense Fund, Aquinas, Baudrillard, Blackstone, C.S. Peirce, Camille Paglia, Carl Schmitt, Carol Iannone, Charles E. Rounds, Chaucer, Chief Justice John Roberts, Daniel J. Kornstein, David F. Forte, David French, Derrida, Emerson, Eve Sedgwick, Foucault, Freud, George W. Dent, Grotius, Hayek, Hobbes, Hudson Institute, James Kent, Jeremy Bentham, John Austin, John Dewey, Jr., Judith Butler, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Kafka, Kant, Law School, Legal Education, Lino A. Graglia, Locke, Louis Menand, Machiavelli, Marx, Mel Bradford, Michael I. Krauss, Milton, National Association of Scholars, Nietzsche, originalism, Richard Hooker, Richard Weaver, Robert H. Bork, Shakespeare, Stanley Fish, William James
In Arts & Letters, Humanities, Law, Legal Education & Pedagogy, Pedagogy, Teaching, Writing on July 27, 2011 at 2:23 pm
The latest issue of Academic Questions (Summer 2011: Vol. 24, No. 2) devotes most of its content to legal education. Published by the National Association of Scholars, Academic Questions often features theme issues and invites scholars from across the disciplines to comment on particular concerns about the professoriate. (Full disclosure: I am a member of the NAS.) Carol Iannone, editor at large, titles her introduction to the issue “Law School and Other Tyrannies,” and writes that “[w]hat is happening in the law schools has everything to do with the damage and depredation that we see in the legal system at large.” She adds that the contributors to this issue “may not agree on all particulars, but they tell us that all is not well, that law school education is outrageously expensive, heavily politicized, and utterly saturated with ‘diversity’ mania.” What’s more, Iannone submits, law school “fails to provide any grounding in sound legal doctrine, or any moral or ethical basis from which to understand principles of law in debate today.” These are strong words. But are they accurate? I would say yes and no.
Law school education is too expensive, but its costs seem to have risen alongside the costs of university education in general. Whether any university or postgraduate education should cost what it costs today is another matter altogether.
There is little doubt that law schools are “heavily politicized,” as even a cursory glance at the articles in “specialized” law journals would suggest. These journals address anything from gender and race to transnational law and human rights.
But how can law be taught without politicizing? Unlike literature, which does not always immediately implicate politics, law bears a direct relation to politics, or at least to political choices. The problem is not the political topics of legal scholarship and pedagogy so much as it is the lack of sophistication with which these topics are addressed. The problem is that many law professors lack a broad historical perspective and are unable to contextualize their interests within the wider university curriculum or against the subtle trends of intellectual history.
In law journals devoted to gender and feminism, or law journals considered left-wing, you will rarely find articles written by individuals with the intelligence or learning of Judith Butler, Camille Paglia, or Eve Sedgwick. Say what you will about them, these figures are well-read and historically informed. Their writings and theories go far beyond infantile movement politics and everyday partisan advocacy. Read the rest of this entry »
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The Literary Lawyer: A Forum for the Legal and Literary Communities 