Machiavelli and the Weather Underground

Posted on by under General announcements, liberty and the left, Palestine, political philosophy

Anyone in the vicinity of Niagara, New York this October is hereby invited to the 2024 Conference of the Peace and Justice Studies Association, where, if you manage to brave the somewhat aggressive registration fee, you’ll be able to take in a bit of Machiavelli and the Weather Underground, among other interesting things. The conference runs October 24-27, at Niagara University near Buffalo.

The Machiavelli stuff c’est moi, a short spin-off on the “Teaching Machiavelli in Palestine” material I’ve been “conferencing” over the past few years. This time I’ll be giving a sort of micro-analysis of Chapter 3 of Machiavelli’s Prince, a sinister little ditty with the rather bland title, “Of Mixed Monarchies.” It’s actually about conquering people, occupying them, and destroying their lives. According to Machiavelli, this is best achieved by coming to understand their culture and using its (perceived) defects against them. Not so bland in practice.

One of the keynotes will be given by Bill Ayers, formerly of the Weather Underground, but nowadays just a “Distinguished Professor of Education and Senior University Scholar at the University of Illinois at Chicago (retired).” I’m looking forward to meeting Ayers at last, and getting his autograph on my copy of Fugitive Days. Am also hoping to ask him for career advice. With any luck, Bernardine will show up, and we’ll party like it’s 1969. The good old days!

This is my second PJSA conference; my last one was in 2022. It’s not my usual gig, but the whole “peace and justice” thing has started to grow on me. There is, for one thing, always the interesting tension between the “peace” and “justice” factions within the conference–one faction content simply to stop the shooting, the other unwilling to settle for anything short of Utopia. Relatedly, there’s the tension between the talkers and the doers: talk our way to peace, or build a peace worth talking about?

And then, paradoxically enough, there’s the pragmatism and concreteness of the presentations, a welcome relief to the cloud gazing and nitpicking you sometimes get at philosophy conferences. Academic philosophers tend not to give papers on “The Power of Unarmed Civilian Accompaniment in Colombia,” or “How Ex-Combatants are Building a Feminist Peace in Colombia,” or “How to Become a Soldier in the Black Liberation Army,” or “Why We are Launching the Canadian Peace Museum,” or “Getting Government Files and Using them Against the System”–and tend not to care about such things, either.  But if “the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice,” it eventually has to touch down on hard earth, something you can’t see very clearly from Mt Olympus. So it’s nice to have an on-ground guide or two.

Hard to summarize it all, so take a look. You might find it growing on you, too.

9 thoughts on “Machiavelli and the Weather Underground”

      • Kind of ironic, by the way, that Ayn Rand derisively described Savio as “Son of Immanuel Kant” when he turns out to have been a Son of Aristotle. His academic specialty was Aristotelian syllogistic. He taught at some little college in California.

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            • I’ve only given it a cursory read. I need to print it out and read it more carefully. I hadn’t read it before. It’s very good. I just belatedly happened to read Lukianoff and Haidt’s much-hyped Coddling of the American Mind, and find it sad that L&H’s view of the university and political culture now prevails, rather than anything like what Rothbard describes here.

              I’m much more familiar with the civil rights part of this history than the rest. The one thing I would say is that I don’t think the civil rights movement was a part of either the Old or the New Left. It was an autonomous movement of its own with ties to both parts of the Left, but perhaps counter-intuitively, not part of the Left at all. It was a “single issue” movement. So I don’t agree with Rothbard that the civil rights movement somehow broke with the Old Left as regards the role of the State. For better or worse, it had (and has) a pragmatic view of the State: to be used if it favors the cause, to be opposed when it doesn’t.

              A friend of mine, Junius Williams, was an activist in Newark in the late 60s, an associate of Tom Hayden’s. His book Unfinished Agenda: Urban Politics in the Era of Black Power, is a perfect example of this pragmatist ethos straddling Old and New Left. The idea is unapologetically to use the State when expedient to amass the power needed to ameliorate the condition of black Americans–and oppose it when not. Another example of this attitude is Ernie Chambers, a remarkable person who started out as a New Left-like radical, but ended up as a firebrand politician in the Nebraska State Legislature:

              https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernie_Chambers#:~:text=Ernest%20William%20Chambers%20(born%20July,again%20from%202013%20to%202021.

              These are just two examples, but I think it’s a general phenomenon. For better or worse, the civil rights movement was marked by a kind of schizophrenia about state power. The reasons for finding state power threatening are obvious, but I think the civil rights movement was attached to the maxim of “fighting fire with fire”: you can’t fight state power except through the accumulation of like power. Whether rightly or wrongly, Reconstruction and the unambiguous successes of the mid-twentieth century civil rights movement (e.g., anti-lynching) seemed to confirm the truth of the maxim. But I don’t think there’s been any attempt to see how the failures and successes all add up.

              That said, I agree with Rothbard on the rest of the New Left, and regret to say how much of my own knowledge of the New Left came, for so long, from its critics. I was far too trusting of the accuracy of these critics’ accounts of New Left figures from Savio to Marcuse to Ayers, Rudd, Dohrn, and so on. In retrospect, it really is shocking how dishonest these criticisms were and are. We are fighting the same battles now as the New Left fought then, and facing the same enemies now that they faced then. Savio’s description of Clark Kerr could just as easily be a description of the presidents of Princeton, Penn, Columbia, Notre Dame, Felician, or just about anywhere in American higher education.

              The idea that American universities are controlled by the Left has got to be one of the biggest of Big Lies I’ve ever encountered in my life–and I’ve encountered some fucking doozies.

              https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/24/us/universities-campus-protests-rules.html

              They can’t divest from a genocide because it would jeopardize their carefully cultivated relationship with the Pentagon. They have to “tame” dissent in the name of the “Chicago Principles” because even though debate ought to make us “uncomfortable,” it has to be brought to an end when it makes the wrong people uncomfortable. Neutrality must be the guiding principle of academic life, except when it comes to the university’s investment portfolio, in which case nationalism is the guiding principle of academic life. I was too dumb when I graduated in 1991 to figure out how easily it would come to this, and then, before my eyes, it did.

              We need to go back to recover and process this history before it gets swallowed alive by the revisionist depredations of the Right.

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