Referring to government policies of which he disapproves--specifically, curtailments of public-sector "collective bargaining" privileges and funding for public universities--Leiter, a scholar of philosophy and law at the University of Chicago, wrote on his blog: "At some point these acts of brazen viciousness are going to lead to a renewed philosophical interest in the question of when acts of political violence are morally justified."
Leiter's not inciting anyone, natch, he's just asking questions, or at least proposing to. Leiter's intellectual parlor game set off Ann Althouse, who called Leiter's remarks "disgusting." Taranto takes a different view:
We find this amusing rather than menacing because it is so pathetically weak. Again, contrast [Frances Fox] Piven with Leiter. She came right out and called for "something like the strikes and riots that have spread across Greece"--a despicable sentiment, but one that at least has the virtue of clarity, in contrast with Leiter's coy insinuation that there may be challenging academic papers in the offing if his political foes aren't careful. Piven, a woman who will be 80 next year, is acting manlier than Leiter, decades younger and male.
Althouse does not profess to find Leiter's statement menacing either but "disgusting." (Nor does she urge that he be silenced.) If we read her correctly, her disgust is largely the product of what she, as an academic with integrity, sees as his abuse of his scholarly authority: "He's inclined to approve of the impulse toward violence on the left and willing to mobilize the discipline of philosophy to generate rhetoric to support its political goals. It's quite disgusting."
The reason we find Leiter's comments amusing rather than disgusting is that we, unlike Althouse, are not part of academia and thus have no personal investment in the ideal of disinterested and honest scholarship. Rather than offend our ideals, Leiter reinforces our stereotype of academia as being filled with fools and knaves. You can see why this would bother Althouse, a scholar who does not fit the disparaging stereotype.
I think this is 100% true. We are, often enough, most perturbed with those who share our profession, or our creed, who then pervert the station they have. I don't want to believe that knavery is rampant and ubiquitous, even though there's ample evidence to support that conclusion. What I personally try to remember is that knaves, in the end, inevitably reveal their knavery. And once the knaves are exposed, they lose their power. There's a lot more at the link and you should, as they say, read the whole thing.
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