Julie E. Cooper

Debating Accounting Principles and Policies: the Case of Goodwill, 1880-1921

Abstract Debate surrounding the publication of FRS 10 (ASB, 1997) in the UK displayed support for a variety of accounting policies for goodwill, advocated for a variety of practical and conceptual reasons. An analysis of papers written on goodwill between 1884 and 1921 explores whether this lack of unanimity is a recent phenomenon or not. The paper concludes that during this earlier period there were a number of areas of agreement regarding goodwill but, although a majority of authorities favoured a capitalise/amortise policy, there was a significant difference of opinion relating to its treatment once recorded in the accounts. Analysis also suggests that advocated policies were derived from a desire to promote and operationalise the principle of prudence.

Secular powers : humility in modern political thought

Secularism is usually thought to contain the project of self-deification, in which humans attack Gods authority in order to take his place. Julie E. Cooper overturns this conception through an incisive analysis of the early modern justifications for secular politics. While she agrees that secularism is a means of empowerment, she argues that we have misunderstood the sources of secular empowerment and the kinds of strength to which it aspires. Contemporary understandings of secularism, Cooper contends, have been shaped by a limited understanding of it as a shift from vulnerability to power. But the works of the foundational thinkers of secularism tell a different story. Analyzing the writings of Hobbes, Spinoza, and Rousseau at the moment of secularitys inception, she shows that all three understood that acknowledging ones limitations was a condition of successful self-rule. And while all three invited humans to collectively build and sustain a political world, their invitations did not amount to self-deification. Cooper establishes that secular politics as originally conceived does not require a choice between power and vulnerability. Rather, it challenges us - today as then - to reconcile them both as essential components of our humanity.

A Diasporic Critique of Diasporism The Question of Jewish Political Agency

As the prospects for a negotiated two-state solution to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict have dwindled, Jewish scholars in the United States have increasingly invoked the concept of diaspora to counter a purported Jewish consensus regarding Zionism. In this essay, I critique prominent exponents of this approach (Judith Butler, Jonathan and Daniel Boyarin) from a diasporic (i.e., non-Zionist) standpoint. My concern is not that Butler and the Boyarins attack Israel publicly, endorse a binational solution to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, and/or support the movement for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions—rather, it is that they lack a compelling vision for diasporic politics. Their visions prove wanting because they contest Zionism on the terrain of Jewish identity. To loosen Zionism’s hold, Butler and the Boyarins recover alternative approaches to the attainment or grounding of Jewish identity. Yet when framed as an ethic of particular identity, diasporic thinking can neither rebut Zionism’s political arguments, nor can it develop alternative models of Jewish self-rule. Instead of theorizing Jewish identity, I argue, diasporic thinkers should envision Jewish political solidarity beyond the confines of the nation-state.

Freedom of Speech and Philosophical Citizenship in Spinoza's Theologico-Political Treatise:

In this essay, I challenge genealogies that anoint Baruch Spinoza the founder of liberal democracy and liberal individualism. Spinozas departure from mainstream liberal individualism manifests most starkly in his argument for freedom of thought and expression–the argument invariably cited to prove Spinozas liberal credentials. When Spinoza defends freedom of speech, in The Theologico Political Treatise, he endorses a mode of democratic citizenship, and an ethos of public discourse, devoid of the heroic self-display endorsed by theorists like John Stuart Mill. According to Spinoza, philosophy and democracy are mutually reinforcing: philosophers can pursue challenging lines of inquiry in a democracy that grants freedom of speech, and the democracy that welcomes philosophy proves more resilient than a tyranny that polices opinion. Philosophy enhances democracy because philosophers comport themselves in ways that expand egalitarian community: specifically, philosophers observe anonymous protocol. According to Spinoza, democratic philosophers should aspire to the role of courteous friend–not the role of celebrity, martyr, or disciple. Spinozas argument for anonymity remains relevant for contemporary democratic theorists: Spinoza offers a compelling alternative to dominant modes of philosophical citizenship.

Reevaluating Spinoza’s Legacy for Jewish Political Thought

Jewish thinkers have long sought to dignify their projects by claiming Spinoza as a progenitor. In recent years, scholars have revived Spinoza’s critique of theocracy as a counter to Judaism’s supposed “antipolitical” tendencies. In this article, I contest lineages that trace admonitions against theocratic “antipolitics” back to Spinoza. When accounting for the resilience of the Hebrew theocracy, Spinoza accords political standing to communities organized on principles other than absolute sovereignty, and he evaluates them in political terms. With this interpretation, I challenge the political conclusions that scholars of Jewish thought have derived from Spinoza. Specifically, I demonstrate that the embrace of sovereignty as a precondition for agency is neither the only political conclusion that one can draw from the critique of theocracy, nor is it the most compelling conclusion for scholars of Jewish politics. I claim an alternative Spinozist legacy to reinvigorate debate about sovereignty’s importance for Jewish political agency.

The Wisdom of the Ghetto Mentality

I pledged allegiance to the flag of our homeland every morning at school. I sang of its marvels with my classmates at assembly programs. I eagerly observed its national holidays, and without giving a second thought to my affinity for the Fourth of July fireworks or the Thanksgiving turkey or the Decoration Day double-header. Our homeland was America. Then the Republicans nominated Lindbergh and everything changed.

Confronting A Neglected Rationalism

and Deleuze. The tradition and problematic established so thoroughly in the first three chapters is obliged to do a great deal of work, given the audacious arguments Peden makes in these later chapters. Althusser’s thinking is driven by an apparently irresistible internal dialectic rooted in Spinoza. Marx can give it a particular vocabulary, but the shape, the relation of concepts, is Spinozist and as though predetermined. This rigorous Spinozist exposition, Peden suggests, ultimately shattered the Marxist theory it was supposed to be working out. If Althusser’s thinking seems involuted, repetitive, almost futile, Deleuze ramifies concepts in a dizzying, although perhaps no less futile manner. The synthesis of Heidegger and Spinoza that Peden charts out in Deleuze’s writings appears – or at least to me appeared – as in no way necessary, rather, a gratuitous act of creation, possible only through Deleuze’s extraordinary intelligence and facility. For Peden, Althusser and Deleuze show in their own ways that one cannot (rationally) get from ontology to politics. Philosophy is thus insufficient. This ‘ought not to turn us toward other otherworldly experiences beyond philosophy’s reach ... but toward the world, this world, the only world there is’ (263–264). Spinozist rationalism, then, navigates between the merely literary and the theological, between individual experience and experience beyond individuality. Peden, in charting out this course, has made a great contribution to the intellectual history of twentieth-century France and at the same time laid down a methodological challenge for future historians interested in these problems.

Leo Strauss and Emmanuel Levinas: Philosophy and the Politics of Revelation

Leo Strauss and Emmanuel Levinas: Philosophy and the Politics of Revelation. By Leora Batnitzky. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 304p.

Vainglory, Modesty, and Political Agency in the Political Theory of Thomas Hobbes

80.00. In recent years, Leo Strauss has achieved a posthumous success de scandal as the (purported) philosophical architect of neoconservatism. Strausss works have been scrutinized by detractors and partisans to determine whether he bears responsibility for the Bush administrations foreign policy. Amidst the clamor, however, more measured assessments are starting to emerge. Today, the most provocative appraisals of his work come from scholars in Jewish studies, as Leora Batnitzkys fascinating book attests. In Leo Strauss and Emmanuel Levinas, Batnitzky seeks to establish Strausss contribution to modern Jewish thought, but her argument for his importance as a Jewish thinker also reframes the vexed question of his legacy for American politics. She offers a nonpolemical, non-Straussian defense of Leo Strauss. In many ways, her portrait of Strauss as a philosophical skeptic and political moderate resonates with that of Steven B. Smith, in Reading Leo Strauss: Politics, Philosophy, Judaism (2006). However, Batnitzky departs from Smith (and, indeed, from most readers of Strauss) when she hails Strauss as the most ardent philosophical defender of Jewish revelation in the modern period.