First, for my “Crime and State in History” course, I’ve decided the readings will center on “the from below,” so to speak – women, pirates, natives, vagrants, proletarians, etc. It’s a third year course. For the introductory “theoretical” lectures I want to cover both “criticisms of populism” and “defenses of populism” from Left and Right perspectives (Le Bon, Pareto, Laclau, Ranciere, Zizek, etc). “Populism” is being used as an umbrella to capture groupings as diverse as mobs, crowds, people, the working class, the lumpenproletariat, and multitude. Suggestions are appreciated. It’s a third year course cross-listed to the legal studies and history departments.
Second, Barret successful defended his M.A. thesis yesterday on Carl Schmitt. Congratulations are in order.
Third, while reading Hegel last night, it occurred to me that Schmitt’s interest in Kierkegaard is precisely in relation to the inherently irrationality of the decision. A decision cannot be rational because reason dictates courses of action, even in the case of probabilities. (One is tempted to draw out the etymology of decision as the making of a cut, especially into flesh; i.e., a sacrifice.) The only case in which a true decision is possible in the context of probability is when the most probable is denied in favor of something; that is, against all reason. Any decision is, necessarily, a “leap of faith.” Adam Sitze, an assistant professor at Amherst, has kindly sent me a copy of a paper of his on Schmitt and Kierkegaard entitled “At the Mercy Of.” I look forward to reading it.
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I’m not sure exactly what you’re looking for in terms of course readings, but you might try sections from Jim Scott’s Seeing Like a State as a “defense of populism.”
I had actually considered Scott’s book, but decided to go with some readings from Christopher Hill and E.P. Thompson instead because they were talking about the same time period. Although I think the chapter in Scott’s book on forests would have worked.
There’s also Hobsbawm, of course. It’s been a long time since I’ve read “Moral Economy of the English Working Class” (I assume that’s the Thompson you’re talking about?) but I remember thinking that Hobsbawm is more accessible for an undergrad–or, of course, I could be completely misremembering.
Yes, I’ve put parts of Bandits and Primitive Rebels on the syllabus. And, yes, that’s the Thompson I’m talking about. I hope after about four or five weeks they’ll be ready for it. I’d be surprised if they weren’t: I’ve paired Agamben’s short essay, “What is a People?,” with Hill’s “The Poor and the People.”
Alice Becker Ho on slang, class and criminality? The biot of Theories of Surplus Value where he compares crime and strikes as contestations of property that impel “the development of machinery”?
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