“I cannot quite call them arguments” - and other classics
How glorious to return to the internet with one of the best things I’ve read lately - Martha Nussbaum’s devastating review of Harvey C. Mansfield’s book Manliness. Many thanks, Elizabeth, for the email!!
To Nussbaum,
it seems appalling that Mansfield has spent decades teaching great philosophical texts to undergraduates who cannot easily tell a careful reading from a careless one, or low standards from high ones — especially when the teacher keeps portraying himself as the bold defender of standards. Undergraduates typically take a while to learn to analyze the arguments in Plato logically and to care about things like validity, ambiguity, and contradiction. Many of them, then, will not notice how riddled with logical error and verbal ambiguity their teacher’s pronouncements are. That is the sort of thing that they are in class to learn. But surely other, older people know. How did someone whose every paragraph is a stake in Socrates’s heart come to be an exemplar of philosophical seriousness?Just read the whole thing - I read it and laughed, and then read it again, and laughed again… Poor Mansfield. One almost feels sorry for him.
Almost.
Nussbaum takes on the John Wayne nursery-school of thought to point out what feminism is about:
What feminists have sought above all is a society in which there are no sex-based hierarchies, in which the sheer luck of being born a female does not slot one into an inferior category for the purposes of basic political and social functioning.Read the whole thing, Nussbaum is her at her lucid, acerbic best.
Elizabeth links to Mansfield’s letter in reply, such as it is.
She also links to another classic - Said’s 2001 evisceration of Samuel Huntington.
And via the incomparable Arts and Letters Daily, I offer you yet another - Nussbaum on Judith Butler.
Enjoy!
Lovely. Isn’t it marvellous how writing scathing reviews of Mansfield’s book is becoming the favourite competitive sport of reviewers everywhere? I’m yet to read a single review of the book that doesn’t take him to the cleaners. Not that I’m complaining, of course.
Comment by Falstaff — August 24, 2006 @ 3:03 am
I agree, Falstaff. Your comment is very pertinent. It seems your are very familiar with the Mansfield’s books.
Comment by The Network Marketer — August 24, 2006 @ 7:54 am
I agree, Falstaff. Your comment is very pertinent. It seems your are very familiar with the Mansfield’s books.
Comment by The Network Marketer — August 24, 2006 @ 7:55 am
Uma,
Nussbaum’s takedown of Mansfield is very lucid — she even outlines the book he should have written! — but I’m not quite sure whether Edward Said’s “review” of Samuel Huntington can be quite considered an “evisceration”.
In my book, a good review — let’s take books — must have one thing beyond all others: it must be able to summarize the book’s main argument and that summary must be one the author of the book himself can admit to as a good approximation to the work. It is only after reaching that point that one can try and dismantle the author’s arguments; if you look at Nussbaum’s review, she does exactly that.
Said’s article is in a completely different vein, he cursorily summarizes Huntington’s thesis and then regurgitates the entire argument of Orientalism. There are valid points there, many of these points have been made before by others and by far the thing that comes through in Said’s article is his hostility. It is true that Huntington’s civilizations are complex things — a fact that he doesn’t quite get into — but another fact remains, in times of conflict, conflicts themselves can be *interpreted* along civilizational lines and that’s an important fact.
Let me explain. In the wake of the US invasion of Afghanistan, the late Dr Rafiq Zakaria wrote an op-ed for the Times of India. His point was that Islam needed to reform — which is in keeping with what he had been advocating all his life — but his reasons were that the West was undertaking a war on Islam and the only way for Islam to survive was to modernize. A Muslim friend of mine views the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq the same way — as a war by the West against Islam — and he hasn’t even heard of Samuel Huntington.
I have read Huntington’s book and it’s nothing like the hateful tome that it appears to be when one reads Said’s article. It’s true that in the second half of the book Huntington makes some wierd policy recommendations but what important in the first half of his book is a warning: that yes, liberal democracy may be the “end of history” but let’s not rejoice too soon, its going to take a long long time and tough times are ahead, a warning that maybe the Bush administration should have heeded before plunging into Iraq.
Comment by shreeharsh — September 16, 2006 @ 9:06 pm
Incidentally, here’s my favorite “takedown” of Huntington.
Comment by shreeharsh — September 16, 2006 @ 9:10 pm