The Read: Danielle Charette and William Selinger, "The Political Prophet Harvard Didn't Want"
Friday's Child Is Loving and Giving
This is a short column, basically just an appreciation, for this essay published in the Chronicle of Higher Education.
The title is wildly misleading: I thought it was going to turn out to be some sort of news item about a new controversy at Harvard. While I’m always down to read about Harvard screwing up again, it turns out that the Harvard screw-up in question is twenty years old, a relatively minor part of the essay and a pretty familiar kind of Harvard-ish mistake, namely, missing the boat on hiring or retaining a really interesting scholar. (Though it’s the story the authors lead with.)
The essay is about István Hont, a political theorist and intellectual historian who is “having a moment”, as Charette and Selinger put it, with many people discovering his usefully contrarian analysis of Enlightenment political thought and its relationship to modern economic doctrine.
I’ll be honest: I’d only heard of Hont once or twice before and never in a way that compelled me to take a strong interest. That changed after I read this essay. They describe Hont arguing that rather than understanding liberal economic doctrine as driving the outcomes of interstate relations, globalization, and national formation (with the old idea that the state is only the manager or organizer of those outcomes—the “steering committee” of capitalist power—that liberal ideas about markets and trade that followed on Adam Smith were really more about political competition between states. In their view, Hont argues that “politics determines economic policy”, and that liberal and neoliberal policies in a globalizing world intensify and express interstate rivalries and inequities rather than resolving them.
I recommend the article: it’s a good introduction to Hont and it’s certainly inspired me to go track his work down and read it as soon as I can manage. A future column, perhaps.