The Trickle-Down War

The history of the European nation-state, wrote political sociologist Charles Tilly, is inextricably bound up with the history of warfare. To oversimplify Tilly’s nuanced and complex arguments, the story goes something like this: As power-holders (originally bandits and local strongmen) sought to expand their power, they needed capital to pay for weapons, soldiers and supplies. The need for capital and new recruits drove the creation of taxation systems and census mechanisms, and the need for more effective systems of taxation and recruitment necessitated better roads, better communications and better record keeping. This in turn enabled the creation of larger and more technologically sophisticated armies. The complexity and expense of maintaining more professionalized standing armies made it increasingly difficult for non-state groups to compete with states, giving centralized states a war-making advantage and enabling them to increasingly monopolize the means of large-scale violence. But the need to recruit, train and sustain ever-larger and more sophisticated armies also put pressure on these states to provide basic services, improving nutrition, education, and so on. Ultimately, we arrive at the late 20th century European welfare state, with its particular trade-offs between the state and its subjects

Restrictive ID policies: implications for health equity

We wish to thank Synod Community Services for their critical work to develop, support, and implement a local government-issued ID in Washtenaw County, MI. We also thank Yousef Rabhi of the Michigan House of Representatives and Janelle Fa'aola of the Washtenaw ID Task Force, Lawrence Kestenbaum of the Washtenaw County Clerk's Office, Sherriff Jerry Clayton of the Washtenaw County Sherriff's Office, and the Washtenaw ID Task Force for their tireless commitment to developing and supporting the successful implementation of the Washtenaw ID. Additionally, we thank Vicenta Vargas and Skye Hillier for their contributions to the Washtenaw ID evaluation. We thank the Curtis Center for Research and Evaluation at the University of Michigan School of Social Work, the National Center for Institutional Diversity at the University of Michigan, and the University of California-Irvine Department of Chicano/Latino Studies and Program in Public Health for their support of the Washtenaw ID community-academic research partnership. Finally, we thank the reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this manuscript. (Curtis Center for Research and Evaluation at the University of Michigan School of Social Work; National Center for Institutional Diversity at the University of Michigan; University of California-Irvine Department of Chicano/Latino Studies; Program in Public Health)https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s10903-017-0579-3.pdfPublished versio

No Reason to Believe: Radical Skepticism, Emergency Power, and Constitutional Constraint

This essay reviews Eric Posner and Adrian Vermeule’s Terror in the Balance: Security, Liberty, and the Courts, which I consider the most serious, sustained, and thoughtful effort to defend the Bush administration’s aggressive tactics in the war on terror yet written. That the book is ultimately deeply flawed only underscores the failure of the Bush administration’s approach. Where most historians view with regret the excesses of past security crises, from the criminalization of speech during World War I to the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, Posner and Vermeule advance the contrarian view that the system worked exactly as it should have, because in each instance, executive officials took aggressive action in response to perceived security threats, and courts and Congress deferred to or approved of the executive’s initiatives. In Posner and Vermeule’s view, there is no reason to believe that government officials will overreact during times of crisis, and no basis for judging what executive officials have done, because they have the expertise and access to information that the rest of us lack. I argue that Posner and Vermeule’s argument for deference to the executive is misguided for three reasons. First, their assumption that there is a necessary and “straightforward tradeoff between liberty and security” is far too simplistic. Executives often sacrifice liberty without achieving an increase in security. Security may be advanced in a variety of ways without infringing on liberty. There is no reason to assume that sacrificing liberty is necessary to further security or that such sacrifices are warranted simply because the executive chooses to make them. Second, Posner and Vermeule’s account of the political dynamics of emergency periods fails to take into account significant factors that predictably contribute to overreaching by the executive, infringement of human rights, selective targeting of disempowered minority groups, and institutionalization of authorities that last well beyond the emergency itself. Once these factors are properly considered, there are strong reasons not to defer to executive power, especially in emergencies. Third, the authors’ argument that the executive is best situated to balance liberty and security in emergencies fails to consider the full range of qualities that one might want in an agency tasked to strike such a balance. Precisely because we rely so heavily on the executive to maintain our security, we should be skeptical of its ability to give sufficient weight to the liberty side of the balance. Judicial review plays an essential role in achieving an appropriate balance; deference to the executive undermines that role

Dysfunctions of highly parallel real-time machines as 'developmental disorders': Security concerns and a Caveat Emptor

A cognitive paradigm for gene expression in developmental biology that is based on rigorous application of the asymptotic limit theorems of information theory can be adapted to highly parallel real-time computing. The coming Brave New World of massively parallel 'autonomic' and 'Self-X' machines driven by the explosion of multiple core and molecular computing technologies will not be spared patterns of canonical and idiosyncratic failure analogous to the developmental disorders affecting organisms that have had the relentless benefit of a billion years of evolutionary pruning. This paper provides a warning both to potential users of these machines and, given that many such disorders can be induced by external agents, to those concerned with larger scale matters of homeland security

Empire, Spectacle and the Patriot King: British Responses to Eighteenth-Century Russian Empire

The article was submitted on 11.05.2016.Обращаясь к описаниям представлений, устраиваемых русскими царями, в трудах британских путешественников, автор показывает противоречивый характер британского взгляда на Российскую империю XVIII в. Россия традиционно изображалась как «чужая» империя, а приверженность Британии свободе и разуму противопоставлялась духу несвободы самодержавного государства и иррациональной тяге русского народа к традициям. Однако британские авторы рассказывали в своих отзывах о русских царях, таких как Петр I и его последователи, изображая их как просвещенных монархов. Впечатления британцев о зрелищах, устраиваемых царями, с одной стороны, акцентируют внимание на личностях русских монархов и их реформах и, с другой, иллюстрируют ограниченность народа и его неспособность рассуждать здраво и бороться за свободу. Автор утверждает, что это противоречие сформировалось в представлении британцев о России под влиянием идей Болингброка о царе-реформаторе и России как стране, занимающей промежуточное положение между Востоком и Западом.The author uses examples of British travellers’ responses to Russian tsars’ spectacles to argue that the British view of the Russian Empire in the eighteenth century fosters a contradiction. Traditionally Russia was depicted as an imperial Other in which British liberty and its attachment to reason is contrasted with Russian servility within the autocratic state and Russian citizens’ irrational attachment to tradition. Yet British writers complicate this depiction with Peter the Great, and later tsars, who are depicted frequently as enlightened reformers. Indeed, British travellers’ depictions of tsars’ spectacles at once foreground the tsar’s enlightened reforms and the tsar’s person, but also are characterized as limiting the spectators’ capacity to reason and to pursue liberty. The author maintains that this contradiction is accommodated in the British thought by Bolingbroke’s notion of a reform-minded patriot king and Russia’s often-portrayed middle position between East and West

The New England Narrative

Though equally successful, noteworthy, inspiring, and crucial as the contributions to American Independence made by New England women patriots, the contributions made by North Carolinian women patriots are excluded from the history of America’s founding as a direct result of sectional nationalism

George Orwell: The English dissident as Tory anarchist

This is the author's accepted manuscript. The final published article is available from the link below. Copyright @ 2012 The Author.This article examines the nature of George Orwell's Tory anarchism, a term that he used to describe himself until his experiences in Spain in 1936. The argument developed here says that the qualities that Orwell felt made him a Tory anarchist remained with him throughout his life, even after his commitment to democratic socialism. In fact, many of those qualities (fear of an all-powerful state, respect for privacy, support for common sense and decency, patriotism) connect the two aspects of his character. The article explains what the idea of a Tory anarchist means, describing it as a practice rather than a coherent political ideology, and moves on to examine the relationship between Eric Blair, the Tory anarchist, and George Orwell, the democratic socialist. It makes the case for his Tory anarchism by drawing out recurring themes in his work that connect him to other Tory anarchist figures such as his contemporary Evelyn Waugh. Thus Tory anarchism is presented as a conservative moral critique of the modern world that can connect figures who hold quite radically different political beliefs