Table of Contents
This “digress.it project” blog is (as title implies) some of my random reflections on things I am reading or thinking about that relate to my interest in accountability, governance, ethics, political theory — and the wide range of things I teach. It serves two purposes — one is to get me to articulate some of the strange insights I get while reading (or writing about) “academic stuff”, and the other is to get some conversations going with anyone who might have an interest in so engaging….
This is my first entry on digress.it (and via transfer to accountabilitybloke), and I have decided to take it a bit slower than my approach to commentpress where I dove headlong -- for at least a week or so -- into trying to emulate McKenzie Wark's project with some material that had been sitting around for about a decade. What was I thinking? Between my being overwhelmed with the the amount of time and effort that kind of project takes -- and my growing awareness that commentpress's limit [...]
My current "nightstand" reading is John Gray's Two Faces of Liberalism, which I purchased after reading for first part of his Black Mass. Before picking up these books, Gray has been someone in the "background," part of the political noise coming from the literati that I have been trying to track and make sense of for years (I am a very slow learner). The label "public intellectual" comes to mind -- a high level "pundit" who wrote for the NYRB and that kind of publication, and who every so of [...]
In addition to my "nightstand" reading, I am constantly looking for material for my classes and relevant to my research. There are certain "go to" writers who often provide interesting books or articles that I immediately give a "look see." Two of the most notable on my list are Richard Posner and Cass Sunstein. Both are highly regarded "public intellectuals" as well as legal scholars with substantial identities in other fields: Posner (who happens to be a judge on the US 7th Circuit Court of Ap [...]
My research habits are rather chaotic, but that often bears fruit when I come across some interesting note or commentary that helps me better understand a more general work or issue. For example, I am always interested in reading the footnotes and marginalia in "definitive editions" of classic works. Thus, in reading the sub-sub-sub footnotes written by the editors of the Glasgow edition of Adam Smith's work I was made aware of a significant argument about accountability that he made in the fist [...]