Individual Traditions Research Articles

The Right to Development as a Human Right?

This article examines efforts to strengthen human rights, especially at the Bangkok Conference of 1993, and discusses the conflict between traditional Western views of human rights as individual rights, as opposed to the idea of collective rights. In this context, the author analyzes the debate over the right to development vigorously espoused at Bangkok and the concern of some Western governments that this might undermine the concept of individual human rights. He argues that an interpretation of the right to development as a collective right is compatible with the individualist tradition of human rights and urges further dialogue so as to recognize different views on what constitutes a dignified life.

Structures in the Stream: Water, Science, and the Rise of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers

As the Mississippi and other midwestern rivers inundated town after town during the summer of 1993, concerned and often angry citizens questioned whether the very technologies and structures intended to tame the rivers did not, in fact, increase the severity of the floods. Much of the controversy swirled around the apparent culpability of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the designer and builder of many of the flood control systems that failed. In this book, Todd Shallat probes the origins of the United States' oldest and largest water management agency and explores how the Corps' emphasis on scientific planning cut against the grain of a nation deeply committed to private enterprise and community rights. Combining extensive research with a lively, engaging style, Shallat follows the technological elite of the army from European antecedents through the boom years of river building after the Civil War. He tells the story of monumental construction and engineering fiascoes, public service and public corruption, and the rise of science and the army expert as agents of the state. Information on engineering during the Civil War, the influence of women and family on the political and organizational philosophy of the Corps, and numerous historical illustrations add interesting highlights to the story. Much more than an institutional history, Structures in the Stream offers significant insights into American society, which has alternately supported the massive public works projects that are a legacy of our French heritage and opposed them based on the democratic, individualist tradition inherited from Britain. It will provide important reading for a wide audience in environmental andmilitary history, the history of science and technology, policy studies, and American cultural history.

The individualistic imagination and natural resource policy

Abstract Natural resource policy in this country is analyzed, with special reference to national forest management. Past and present public forest management are tied to the individualistic tradition of liberal thought stemming from the Enlightenment. The individualism of the liberal tradition has generated difficulties in natural resource management that affect the major policy approaches of today. Particular attention is given to the individual and the role of the state in contradistinction to mediating communal institutions. The case history presented suggests the value of more holistic, communal policy alternatives.

Levels of selection: An alternative to individualism in biology and the human sciences

Biology and many branches of the human sciences are dominated by an individualistic tradition that treat groups and communities as collections of organisms without themselves having the properties implicit in the word organism. In biology, the individualistic tradition achieves generality only by defining self-interest as “anything that evolves by natural selection”. A more meaningful definition of self-interest shows that natural selection operates on a hierarchy of units from genetic elements to multi-species communities, and that a unit becomes organismic to the degree that natural selection operates at the level of that unit. I review levels-of-selection theory in biology and sketch a parallel argument for the human sciences.

Marxism and methodological individualism

“Analytical” or “rational choice” Marxism explicitly proposes to synthesize non-Marxist methods and Marxist theory. It is therefore in-appropriate to attack it solely by demonstrating that the methods advocated were not Marx's: this is, after all, acknowledged at the outset. (For this reason I have tried to show that both the assumption of MI and the process of reduction are problematic on their own empiricist or positivist terms, and have therefore largely been discarded as viable projects by philosophers of science.) Any attempt to synthesize two such distinct research traditions nonetheless demands some consideration of the metatheoretical problems that one might expect it to encounter, and this is particularly so if Marxist theory is to be recast on the basis of the positivist and empiricist assumptions explicitly rejected by Marx. Curiously, however, the analytical Marxist literature does not address such problems: indeed, metatheoretical considerations are notably absent. Discussions focus instead on particular “tools of analysis,” e.g., rational choice theory and game theory, as if these were neutral with respect to the underlying philosophical commitments of the two traditions. In fact, of course, these methods do reflect such commitments; after all, the justification for rational choice Marxism, infusing Marxian analyses with “scientific” rigor, reflects the rejection of the conception of science embodied in the Marxist tradition. By way of a conclusion I therefore briefly discuss the uneasy relationship between rational choice Marxism and classical Marxist theory. I argue that this relationship cannot be one of synthesis because the empiricist assumptions of rational choice Marxism violate the “hard-core” of the Marxist research tradition in at least three important ways: 1) most generally, its atomistic ontology directly contradicts the relational ontology of Marxist theory; 2) the empiricist conception of science undermines the Marxist conception of social science as critique; and 3) more specifically, rational choice and game theory mark a retreat from the social and relational philosophical anthropology of Marx back to the liberal individualist tradition initiated by Hobbes.

Libertarianism: some conceptual problems

Perhaps the most remarkable event in social thought of the last twenty years has been the resurgence of various strands of individualism as political doctrines. The term ‘individualism’ is a kind of general rubric that encompasses elements of nineteenth century classical liberalism, laissez-faire economics, the theory of the minimal state, and an extreme mutation out of this intellectual gene pool, anarcho-capitalism. The term libertarianism itself is applied indiscriminately to all of those doctrines. It has no precise meaning, except that in a general sort of way libertarianism describes a more rigorous commitment to moral and economic individualism and a more ideological approach to social affairs than conventional liberalism. I suspect that its current usage largely reflects the fact that the word with the better historical pedigree, liberalism, has been associated, in America especially, with economic doctrines that are alien to the individualist tradition.

Civic education in a democracy

As we come to the end of the 20th century, Americans find themselves increasingly perplexed by the political climate in the United States and abroad. Terrorism, political espionage, and irresponsible and immoral corporate acts that affect millions of people are matched by self-serving acts of local, state, and national public officials whose attitude toward the public is this: The public be damned! Reflecting and refracting this perplexity, educators and journalists convey a general sense of civic and educational malaise to a distraught American public. While the problems of civic life today-homeless people on heating grates, a staggering national debt, the AIDS epidemic, teenage suicide, a weakened dollar abroad, nuclear testing and disarmament, racism, and a neglected underclass-may be nothing more than a shattered mirror of a larger social picture, an awareness is developing that these problems must be confronted. There are signs of a fundamental change in the nation's political and social climate-a philosophical mood shift like those that seem to occur in America every generation or so. Political candidates and citizens are talking more and more about the need for compassion, more democratic approaches to deep-rooted social problems, and a new sense of community values. In this social pause, people are recognizing that the individualist tradition that was formerly so useful has created many of today's problems, and that new images are needed for the changing moral ecology of American life. The change demands a

Some Thoughts on Affirmative Action Here and in India: Galanter's Competing Equalities

During the time that the British Empire included much of India, Canada, and the United States, Lord Mansfield declared that slavery was abhorrent to the common law and, with a stroke of his quill, freed several thousand black slaves in England.' Mansfield's decision in Sommersett's case was in the eighteenth-century tradition that recognized individual rights against state power. It helped to usher in a world where slavery and subordination were no longer normal. That individualist tradition took deepest root in America, where we established a system of individual equality but simultaneously created inferior classes by establishing slavery and subordinating, in different ways, women and native Americans. We have struggled for more than half our history to rid ourselves of these shadows. In the last quarter century, we have come to recognize that the principle of individual equality is a necessary but inadequate response to social conditions generated by slavery and subordination. We have begun an effort to raise the status of subordinated groups. These activities parallel efforts in India and Canada to improve the substantive conditions of members of subordinated groups. In India, Canada, and the United States today, these postMansfield questions are being addressed in ways that conform to national customs and perceptions yet are understandable as emanations of the common law tradition.

Libertarian Motivations on the Vinson Court

Justice Frankfurter is fond of quoting an old English saying that “the devil himself knoweth not the mind of men.” The mind of a man who happens to be a judge is the center of many contending impulses when he is making it up, and an external reconstruction of the process is quite impossible. However, the rules of the game require that judges supply clues to their thought processes in the form of written opinions. In every major case decided by the Supreme Court, one or more of its members provide a written justification for the decision announced. The individualistic tradition of Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence, moreover, permits justices who do not agree with the views of their brethren to say so, and to give their reasons for dissenting. Thus the Supreme Court on decision day takes on the aspect of a small legislature in which votes are cast pro and con on significant issues of public policy, with accompanying explanations much more coherent and systematic and better-reasoned than are customarily available in explanation of votes cast, say, in the United States Senate.While it has not been usual to do so, these judicial votes can be subjected to the same kinds of analysis as have been traditionally employed for the study of legislative voting behavior.