Dan’s still ill so you’re stuck with me for Day Two. Here’s some links:
- Via The Monkey Cage (I’m not stealing, I’m curating) comes this link to an Inside Higher Ed article about the five-year humanities Ph.D..
- Identity, legacy, institutions, and Indiana basketball
- One of the things that grabs me about IR scholarship is that (to my knowledge) churches are not among the IOs or NGOs that we study on their own terms. But consider the Anglican communion. (Please correct me, don’t flame me, in the comments–and remember that Dan isn’t writing this.)
- Or, of course: habemus twitter.
- Despite what some prominent IR scholars claim, there’s a place for studying quantitative methodology in its own right
And, to fill space, here’s my favorite Amazon book purchases over the past 12 months (I’m not Tyler Cowen, I don’t read enough to do a “best books of 2012 list,” but I can do a “best books I’ve read in 2012” list):
- China Mountain Zhang by Maureen McHugh
- The Art of Not Being Governed by James C. Scott
- A Contest for Supremacy by Aaron L. Friedberg
- Batman: Gotham Noir
- No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations by Mark Mazower
- Darwinia by Robert Charles Wilson
If you ever get a chance to meet Maureen McHugh in person, do so. She’s a seemingly endless source of fascinating stories, perhaps the most entertaining conversationalist I’ve ever encountered.
Is the Mazower’s book much different from the Governing the World?
That one struck me as a particularly ignorant of the existing IR
scholarship on intl institutions
It’s not ignorant, it’s dismissive. There’s a difference!
Enchanted palace is dismissive while Governing is ignorant – do I get it right?
Why two books in the same year on the same topic?
I think enchanted palace was written in 2009. As for “why two books on similar topics”–yes, I’ve never seen that happen before :)
OK, if Enchanted palace was written in 2009, then I stand corrected and wonder no more :)
Of the books listed at the end, the only one I’ve read is ‘No Enchanted Palace’. I wrote a blogpost a while back about aspects of it (mostly the Smuts angle). (Link to follow fwiw.) Mazower is not esp. interested in or conversant with the IR lit (he has a v. snarky footnote in ‘Palace’ about IR theory), but I wouldn’t call ‘Palace’ dismissive, exactly, of the UN. The book is about his take on the UN’s origins; it doesn’t really argue the UN is unimportant, IIRC, though it may be insufficiently appreciative of some things the UN does today. Been a while since I read the bk so my memory cd be wrong.
I note btw that PM apparently is that somewhat rare (though not unheard-of) quantoid who reads bks written by historians.
I should have been more specific: Governing the World is forthrightly dismissive :)
And I should have read the comment thread more carefully before posting. No one here had said he was dismissive (forthrightly or otherwise) of the UN itself, as opposed to the IR literature about it, so I was answering something that no one had asserted. My bad. :(
‘Governing the World’ may very well be dismissive of *both* the UN and the IR literature (and/or ignorant of the latter), but I haven’t read it. Now that everything is crystal clear… :)
Link (Mazower post):
https://howlatpluto.blogspot.com/2010/10/rhetorics-of-empire.html