Michael S. Kochin

When is buying votes wrong

In modern liberal democracies, offering individual voters in political elections money for their votes is wrong and illegal; offering groups of voters particular benefits in exchange for their votes is constitutionally protected. Voters do not sell their votes; instead, voters assign their votes to legislative representatives who sell or trade for them.Examining the role of coalition costs in political and corporate elections, we argue that these rules protect voters from themselves, from being compelled to approve proposals that leave them individually worse off. Simultaneously, these rules allow voters to seek particular benefits through collective organization and legislative representation.

Postmetaphysical Literature: Reflections on J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace

novel by J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace, is, it would seem, a book about endings: the end of rape, the end of morality, and the end of humanity—that is to say, the end of a deep distinction between human possibilities and animal possibilities.1 David Lurie, formerly a professor of modern languages in Capetown, is serving out his time teaching “communication skills” and “one special-field course a year, irrespective of enrollment,” now that his university has been “rationalized.” Lurie tries to spice up this weary existence and propitiate the god Eros by having an affair with a young Coloured theater student, Melanie Isaacs. In Disgrace, we see the dregs of the old South Africa, where white racial supremacy has been overthrown and replaced by a tribalism whose only vestige of universal morality is in the justified self-condemnation of the remaining whites. As Lurie discovers, the old prohibition on racial miscegenation is replaced with a new prohibition on intergenerational sex, at least when not properly paid for. Melanie’s boyfriend intervenes so as to break off the affair, and he and Melanie’s father see to it that Lurie is brought up on disciplinary charges that result in his dismissal. Lurie then flees to his daughter Lucy’s farm in the Eastern Cape, where he takes refuge from the bleak fact that he has outlived his sexual attractiveness. Lucy boards dogs, and Lurie finds his own niche in the country by helping euthanize unwanted animals and by seeing that their bodies are burned in the hospital incinerator: his urban sensibilities about a proper death are applied with a rural awareness of the continuity between human and animal existences. Finally, we see the end of rape, because, as Coetzee shows, we have lost the metaphysical beliefs in the soul and in freedom of the will from which we constitute rape as a moral and social category. Lucy is attacked by two men and a boy, the latter the brother of her Xhosa neighbor Petrus’s second wife. The attack, Lurie comes to realize, is capitalized on, if not instigated, by Petrus to humble Lucy and to force her to accept Petrus’s protection and yield control of her remaining land to him. Lucy cannot prosecute or even admit what the three men have done to her, because in “this place,” South Africa, she can find her place, she says, only by renouncing all claims to rights, whether over her person or her property. In Disgrace, we see not only the end of romance but also the apparent end of all distinctively human possibilities of a life worth living, as racial inequality is overcome by tribal entropy. In the face of the brutal reality of the South African past, nostalgia for civilization and its values is untenable— the only solace that Lurie holds out to the reader is the possibility of redemption through an art that accompanies the memorial traces of longing, like the soft trio of instrumentalists on cello, flute, and bassoon accompanying the singer in Lurie’s unfinished opera on Byron’s last mistress Teresa. In an artistic sense, Disgrace is the ruin of a plaatsroman, the subgenre of the South African farm novel, which in White Writing Coetzee has successfully cleared for his very own critical plantation.2 Yet that art can only redeem us if its value is recognized by a human future, whose probability Lurie presents as highly questionable. Disgrace is therefore a highly disturbing novel because it seems to present a world dying without hope. The academy is portrayed as deprived of grace by its failure to reproduce the cultural heritage that was placed in its keeping. Here, the insecurities of the Eurocentric intellectual in South Africa, Lurie in Disgrace, Helen in Age of Iron, or Coetzee himself, can be taken as emblematic of the insecurities of Western culture. Whatever is fertile comes from a genuine encounter with the human problems of our postcolonial world, a world that is neither culturally multiple or even A

Plato's Eleatic and Athenian Sciences of Politics

Platos Statesman and Laws are usually linked together as Platos later political theory. Yet these dialogues offer contradictory descriptions of the relation between law and reason and thus between political science and philosophy. In particular, the Eleatic Stranger of the Statesman presents an account of the second-best regime that differs from that of the Athenian Stranger in the Laws. The Eleatic Strangers account of the second-best is wrong; his error follows from his view that politics is insignificant for genuinely human purposes. By comparing human statesmanship to animal herding and explicating its nature through the paradigm of weaving, the Eleatic Stranger contends that the true philosopher is too concerned with individual human natures to care for human collectivities. From his perspective, Socratic or Athenian political philosophy is but sophistry.

How Joseph De Maistre Read Plato’s Laws

Maistre’s Soirees de Saint-Petersbourg is modeled on Plato’s Laws. Plato and Maistre both demand the political control of natural inquiry, and implement these controls through theodictic conversation. Maistre, following the lead of Plato’s legislator, publishes an exemplary conversation about providence between a young man tempted by an atheistic Enlightenment and two older, wiser, and more learned men of affairs. Maistre defends providentialism from materialist interpretations of natural science even as Plato defended it from ancient materialism.

The Constitution Viewed from Without

The drive for constitutional reform in the 1780’s was largely motivated by the perception that until the Federal government was strengthened the United States would not be able to meet its foreign and security policy challenges. Once I put the foreign and security policy difficulties of the 1780’s on the table, I will address two questions: First, why does The Federalist argue for the foreign and security policy need for the Union, when nobody who opposes the 1787 Constitution argues against the “perpetual Union” created by the Articles? Second, what is the pressing “crisis” in foreign and security matters that, in Publius’s view, should persuade the remaining states to ratify the constitution hastily?

Academic Politics between Democracy and Aristocracy

The Republic’s account of the relation between talking about politics and doing politics illuminates the nature of political action. Plato’s Socrates argues that those who ought to govern are those who know about politics and who know what politics is about, since political things are images of ideas. Socrates’ alternative to democracy is thus an academic rather than an aristocratic elite—an elite of those who know. Yet the academic elite Plato imagined does not dispute the right of the people to decide between it, the aristocrats, and the men of the people.

The Law Most Beautiful and Best: Medical Argument and Magical Rhetoric in Plato's Laws and A Journey into Platonic Politics: Plato's Laws

The Law Most Beautiful and Best: Medical Argument and Magical Rhetoric in Platos Laws . By Randall Baldwin Clark. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2003. 192p.

Gender and rhetoric in Plato's political thought

55.00. A Journey into Platonic Politics: Platos Laws . By Albert Keith Whitaker. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2004. 254p.

Five Chapters on Rhetoric: Character, Action, Things, Nothing, and Art

39.00. Platos Laws, his longest and most comprehensive work on politics, is a conversation about the purposes and limits of legislation among three old men: an Athenian Stranger, Megillus, a Spartan, and Kleinias, a Cretan. The three speak while ascending to the cave-shrine of Zeus where Kleinias hopes to receive the blessing of the god for his appointed task of drawing up a law code to govern a new colony. Until recently, the Laws was very little read, and there is still relatively little useful secondary literature on it, especially when compared to the ocean of scholarly treatments available on the far better known Republic.