Microsoft Word - 3 Kochin.docx [Expositions 12.2 (2018) 27–38] Expositions (online) ISSN: 1747–5376 The Cultures of Academic Philosophy MICHAEL S. KOCHIN Tel Aviv University Bryan Van Norden’s Taking Back Philosophy1 is a polemic, literally an extended op-ed, arguing that American philosophy departments should allocate more resources and especially teaching positions to “less commonly taught philosophies,” especially those from outside the Anglo-European world. Let me say three things at the beginning: First, I have no objection to Van Norden’s goal. Second, I do not have enough familiarity with American philosophy departments to make informed objections. Since getting my Ph.D. in political science I have taught for precisely one year in the United States, in political science and Directed Studies at Yale. I spent a sabbatical year in Princeton’s alternative philosophy department, the University Center for Human Values, at the wrong end of Rockefeller Hall. While I studied philosophy and with professors of philosophy, in college, graduate school, and after, and I have published in philosophy journals, I am not within the discipline of philosophy. I have worked with and taught, and even published a little bit, on some of Norden’s “less commonly taught philosophies.”2 Nonetheless, I am cut off from full engagement with Chinese philosophy by knowing no Chinese, and with Arabic philosophy by knowing no Arabic. Though I agree that philosophic texts of all cultures should be included in the philosophy curriculum, I certainly do not share Van Norden’s vision that “in an ideal world, philosophy departments should make their own decisions about their curricula internally” (31). I think this would only be reasonable if the ideal philosophy department were entirely and completely self- supporting and had no interest in preparing its late adolescent undergraduate students for professional study or nonacademic employment. Unlike Van Norden, I think that in these curricular matters the opinions of the outsiders who pay the professors’ salaries and hire their students should count for something, and my opinion no less than that of the average welder, politician, or professor of surgery. I do not know enough about American philosophy departments, or any philosophy departments anywhere, to know if they offer or require the right amount of any “less commonly taught philosophy.” So neither my agreement nor my disagreement on this point is worth more or less than that of any other colleague or taxpayer. The Cultures of Academic Philosophy 28 Third, for reasons I will explain later, I am worried about a potential toxic interaction between multiculturalism in philosophy teaching (which I favor) and identity politics.3 I think that Van Norden is too soft on identity politics, partly because he is deliberately obtuse about the danger that identity politics poses to scholarly standards and fair administrative procedures. I write this as somebody whose professional success has benefitted as much or perhaps more from the preference for “less commonly taught philosophies” and from identity politics than it has been harmed by them. There are two reasons why we might read a book: because we think it might help us achieve our purposes, or because it might help us clarify our purposes. We might hope for such clarification because the book holds out the promise of showing us new goals or purposes, or because it seems to present concepts that might be alternatives to those in which we have formulated our purposes to ourselves. To read a text philosophically is to read with a view to challenging or clarifying our purposes. Van Norden claims that “philosophy still reads classic texts with that is known as ‘a hermeneutic of faith.’” He goes on to explain that “those who use a hermeneutic of faith read texts in the hope of discovering truth, goodness, and beauty” (139). I would say, rather, that what is distinctive about a philosophic text is that its author aims to get his or her reader to interrogate and assess the meaning and worth of concepts such as truth, goodness, and beauty. Any text can be read philosophically, as part of a conscious and deliberate inquiry into our purposes and their worth, but some texts are philosophic texts, that is, texts whose authors themselves intend to make the reader question his or her purposes or concepts In some ways this book by Van Norden appears an unpromising occasion for thinking about how to read and especially how to read philosophically. Van Norden mostly seems to take for granted the disciplinary purposes of American academic philosophers, and this book, Van Norden tells us, is deliberately pitched at a less scholarly level than Van Norden’s usual attempts in his writing and teaching (xxiii). It often seems careless in expression and thought. Does “any Christian,” even those who read their Greek Bible in Greek, or Tagalog, know that “2 Corinthians” is to be read “Second Corinthians”? (97) And what are to make of Van Norden quoting Monty Python’s John Cleese as an authority for the claim that “among dictatorships philosophers have always been among the first people to be silenced” (137)? Heidegger and his (albeit non-Pharisaical) students flourished under Nazism. There was good philosophy at Moscow State under Stalin. Croce was persecuted by Mussolini, but Gentile flourished until he was murdered by self-described “anti-fascists,” and after a period of exile Ortega y Gasset 29 Kochin returned in 1948 to head an Institute of Philosophy in Franco’s Spain. Arendt’s claims about the affinity of philosophers for tyranny seem more plausible,4 and perhaps Van Norden would agree, since he teaches not just at Vassar but at Wuhan in the PRC and NUS-Yale in authoritarian Singapore, instead of giving his full energies to educating students in democratic or “mob-ruled” America (see 4). To treat Van Norden’s polemic as an occasion for thought, and in particular, for thinking about how and what to read, it might be helpful to attend to certain binary oppositions that come up without being deconstructed or even handled especially deftly. The most important, and a recurrent problematic in comparative philosophy, is the binary wisdom/philosophy: the contrast, if there is one, between the sage and the philosopher (see 30). Philosophy, as we all know, means “love of wisdom,” and Plato’s Socrates is guided by the wise priestess Diotima in the Symposium to the claim that we love only that which we lack. If philosophers love wisdom (and not merely, as Nietzsche cracked, their own wisdom), they must be distinct from those who do not long for wisdom because they already have it. Garfield in his preface to Taking Back Philosophy attacks Nicholas Tambio’s version of the alleged distinction between philosophy and wisdom, but Garfield is more interested in scoring debaters’ points than in reconstructing (if only to deconstruct) the most defensible form of such a distinction.5 Van Norden in the main text seems blithely unaware of it.6 The brings us to the binary religion/philosophy: Garfield writes in the preface that “we don’t have departments of wisdom traditions because we don’t value what we take them to be” (xvii). Notwithstanding Garfield’s remarkably intemperate and ill-informed remark, American universities do have departments of wisdom traditions—they are called departments of religion, faculties of theology, and schools of divinity (Van Norden acknowledges their existence on page 5.) Van Norden calls Confucianism and Taoism part of “a robust and diverse native spiritual tradition” in China (17). Yet Van Norden nowhere provides reasons for why Confucianism and Taoism belong to the Anglo-European category of “philosophy” more than they do to the Anglo-European category of “religion.” Van Norden’s notion of philosophy involves a stark binary division between natural science and philosophy. Natural sciences, Van Norden writes, “are successful precisely because they limit their inquiry to particular aspects of reality using particular methods” (135).7 In their original editorial (quoted in full at 9–10), Garfield and Van Norden assert that whereas “Non- European philosophical traditions offer distinctive solutions to problems discussed within European and American philosophy, raise or frame problems not addressed in the American The Cultures of Academic Philosophy 30 and European tradition, or emphasize and discuss more deeply philosophical problems that are marginalized in Anglo-European philosophy,” yet “There are no comparable differences in how mathematics or physics are practiced in other contemporary cultures.” Sharon Traweek claimed the opposite in her study of particle physicists in the United States and Japan, that significant differences exist in how experimental particle physics was pursued in 1970s American and Japan, and that these differences reflected deep differences between American and Japanese societies.8 Van Norden does not mention Traweek or any other sociologist of science or philosophy, though he has an index entry for Alex Trebek. In Taking Back Philosophy Van Norden does not assert (though he may well believe) that contemporary Chinese philosophy is understudied in America. Thus the more relevant question for what the book does claim is whether there is something important for contemporary science or mathematics that can be learned from the non-Anglo-European scientific and mathematical traditions whether contemporary or not. I have argued that Aristotle’s logic offers an analysis of assertions superior to that of modern symbolic logic.9 It would not surprise me if there is something relevant or challenging to say, contemporary observational astronomy, that an American astronomer can learn, or learn most easily, from scholarship on the Chinese or Indian observational traditions. One also needs to consider the binary philosophic texts vs. nonphilosophic texts. I agree that there is no substitute for reading a text philosophically (5), but at least as an application site for Austinian speech-act theory, one can read any text philosophically. I would not contend that my philosophical reading of Demosthenes’ oration De Corona makes that speech into a philosophical text.10 Surely philosophical interpretation of Confucius is as legitimate as philosophical interpretation of Shakespeare, but is Confucius a philosopher? And if so, what are the criteria by which Confucius or the author of the Analects are philosophers and Shakespeare is not? Van Norden argues at length, and rightly, that something that should be called philosophy existed in ancient China. Yet he is cagey or equivocal about when philosophy appears in China, and whether Confucius and Laozi are philosophers. They are not, according to Van Norden, “plainly philosophers” and are apparently not the best place to begin teaching Chinese texts if your goal is to bring out to students “what is philosophically important about them” (29). Van Norden does not discuss systematically, even to condemn, the thesis that what Confucius and Laozi offer is something possibly better than philosophy, namely, wisdom. I am not a philosophy professor in an American department, or in a position to dispute Van Norden’s scholarship on Chinese texts. I therefore want to add a more personal and 31 Kochin autobiographical response to Van Norden’s theses on reading and teaching philosophy, from someone whose career has been worked out at the edges of Anglo-European academia and American academic philosophy with occasional forays into what Van Norden calls “less commonly taught philosophies.” My education gave me a different understanding of how to read philosophic texts, from any culture, than Van Norden seems to presume. I grew up and began my undergraduate career in the Far West of the United States, at the University of Washington in Seattle, that North Pacific portion of America from which East Asia was west—and in some ways was closer than the U.S. East. Unlike Van Norden, apart from two grandfathers who served in the U.S. Army in World War II, I have no deep family ties to American history. My mother is the child of immigrants and my father mostly the grandchild. Culturally they are both Lithuanian Jews, Litvaks, my father’s family mostly more assimilated and less observant of Jewish law than my mother’s. I had a somewhat fragmented traditional Jewish education, from age three to age twenty, combined with secular studies in Jewish schools and out of them. For me, a particular wisdom tradition, the Torah as interpreted by those whom Van Norden (perhaps following his Rabbi, Jesus) calls the Pharisees (123), was manifestly relevant. Other wisdom traditions, and the Western philosophical tradition, were not so plainly relevant or worth exploring. In Seattle I grew up to some extent with Asian-American children of varying origins and degrees of acculturation, though in those years, the 1970s and early to mid-1980s, my Chinese- American acquaintances were immigrants or the children of immigrants from Taiwan, Hong Kong, or the children of “overseas Chinese” from the Chinese diaspora in Malaysia or the Philippines: very few or none had any direct experience of Communist China. When in 1986 I came to Harvard as a sophomore transfer student at 16, I was quite astonished to discover the blatant racism against Asian Americans expressed by some of the administrators. On the other hand, at Harvard those were the days of what Harvard’s Ezra Vogel saw as “Japan as Number One”: we, students and faculty alike, were impressed, fascinated, and even obsessed with the rising wealth and power of Japan, and as a senior I was one of almost 500 students to take a course on sixteenth-century Japanese history with the new white Australian professor Harold Bolitho. My teaching assistant in Samuel Huntington’s comparative democracies course was an exiled Chinese dissident and labor leader. Nonetheless, prior to the Tiananmen Square Massacre, which happened a few days before my graduation, I, like my fellow undergraduates, gave little thought to China. At Harvard I mainly studied mathematics, partly in the Philosophy Department, and political philosophy. My teachers of political philosophy were Harvey Mansfield, who encouraged the The Cultures of Academic Philosophy 32 study of Arabic philosophy, and Muhsin Mahdi, the preeminent modern scholar thereof.11 In the Philosophy Department in Emerson Hall I took a course on “the philosophy of life” with Robert Nozick (who made occasional references to Indian philosophy) and one on the metaphysics of possible worlds. I studied mathematics in Emerson Hall too, with the philosophy professors Hilary Putnam (my B.A. thesis advisor) and Warren Goldfarb (who examined me on my B.A. thesis). Goldfarb, who knew that I planned to leave mathematics for the study of political philosophy, offered me admission into the philosophy Ph.D. program, which I refused. My refusal was partly out of ignorance: even though I was personally close to a Stanley Cavell student, and had heard Cavell speak as respondent to Allan Bloom’s “Fellow elitists” lecture,12 I had no idea who Cavell was or what kind of things he did. But I did know that the approach to philosophic texts that I had learned from Mansfield and Mahdi was not pursued in the philosophy department at Harvard, or really anywhere in major American philosophy departments. In interpreting a philosophic work, I was taught by Mansfield and Mahdi to address the arguments in the context of the work as a whole and its intention. The goal of reading was to listen, Mahdi and Mansfield taught, to open oneself to the voice of a thinker from another time and place, not to quarry the texts for arguments that might be useful for political or scholarly purposes. One attempted to think with Plato or Hobbes or Maimonides or Alfarabi by trying to take into account what these authors themselves presented as worth thinking about. The way to do that, Mansfield and Mahdi taught, was by reading their works as wholes.13 By suspending one’s own judgment—not just about what was true but also about what mattered—in order to understand the author’s, every aspect of one’s own values and purposes was put into question, whether one had opened the Republic, Leviathan, Guide of the Perplexed, or The Attainment of Happiness for the first time or the fifteenth. At that time, the late 1980s, the only admissible approach within leading philosophy departments, especially in regard to the ancient Greek texts that interested me most, was to extract the arguments from the texts and analyze them as if they had appeared in the latest issue of Mind or the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society and as if the authors of those texts had the same purposes and the same understanding of philosophy as American philosophy professors in top-ranked departments. Van Norden still acknowledges and in a way respects the prejudice for arguments as opposed to drama, metaphors, or myths as the test of whether a work or an author is truly philosophical (144–148). I have little doubt, though, that had I chosen to study in the Philosophy Department in Emerson Hall I would not have been barred from completing a Ph.D. on any philosophic text within or outside the Western canon. 33 Kochin After Harvard I spent a year in Israel, nominally enrolled at Hebrew University, but mainly studying in a Talmudical college or yeshiva. While the students in my yeshiva were American, English, or Australian college graduates or college bound, the study of Jewish philosophical texts had no formal place in the curriculum. The curriculum consisted almost exclusively of Talmud and Jewish law, with a little Hebrew Bible on the side. While two of the teachers had Ph.D.s, those were in Semitic philology and linguistics, not philosophy. From within the perspective and purposes of the yeshiva, philosophy was not only marginal but questionably worthwhile. Jewish philosophy books were on the shelves in the study hall, but we were not taught them or encouraged to read them. The one practical thing I learned in Israel was that to maximize my chances for an academic post in Israel, my best bet was to go abroad again and take a Ph.D. in something that was not Israeli or Jewish. So in the Fall of 1990 I went to the Political Science Department at The University of Chicago. At Chicago I studied a lot of Plato and Aristotle, and some Alfarabi, Averroes, and Maimonides, Hegel, Nietzsche and Heidegger; Greek, but no Arabic and not much German. In political science at Chicago, as elsewhere, Chinese and Indian politics were taught as a matter of course (I TA’d for Dali Yang and wrote my master’s thesis on the collectivization and decollectivization of agriculture in China and the Soviet Union with the Indian politics specialist Susanne Hoeber Rudolph and the sociologist of China William Parish—though I know neither Chinese nor Russian).14 I also took a great many courses in the Committee on Social Thought. I studied Arabic philosophy there with Ralph Lerner, Hillel Fradkin, and Joel Kraemer (none of whom were philosophy professors), and German philosophy with Robert Pippin. The Committee also taught nonwestern literature (despite the legacy there of Saul Bellow and Allan Bloom, both of whom ridiculed the notion of a “Shakespeare among the Zulus”), though I didn’t study it, or much postclassical Western literature either. I spent a little time with the philosophy professors who taught Greek and even Jewish texts, but I did not find their approach to reading congenial. I got more out of reading Plato with the classicists Arthur Adkins and Elizabeth Asmis, and, though I was pretty thickheaded, from a course on feminist philosophy with Candace Vogler. I wrote my Ph.D. dissertation on gender and politics in Plato: the feminist scholars from reading whom I learned the most were the philosophers Luce Irigaray and Michèle Le Dœuff, and the legal scholar and advocate Catherine MacKinnon. In any case my education at Chicago avoided the narrowness and concern with pedigree of American academic philosophy that Van Norden both condemns and exemplifies. My education was also, except in the courses with Robert Pippin and Candace Vogler, lacking in The Cultures of Academic Philosophy 34 rigor or (it seemed to me at the time) any real feel for philosophic problems. As an undergraduate and graduate student, I read philosophy but not, mostly, with philosophy professors, and I learned to read (which was what was most important to me) but I did not learn much philosophy. I left Chicago for Tel Aviv University in 1995, and after a year there as an instructor spent two years at the University of Toronto as a postdoctoral student. My experience studying political philosophy with Clifford Orwin and Thomas Pangle and Canadian political thought with Donald Forbes recapitulated the strengths and weaknesses of my Chicago education. More important for my subsequent development was reading Josiah Ober, who presented a radical rethinking of ancient and therefore of modern democracy, and Toronto’s own Deborah Black, who argued that the medieval Arab Aristotelians had seen rhetoric and poetics as parts of logic.15 Influenced by Black and Ober I moved from political philosophy to the logical and ontological analysis of rhetorical concepts like character, vividness, and proof by example. My philosophical education began again in 1999 when I had my first encounter with Irad Kimhi, the greatest teacher of philosophy I have ever known. Through years of auditing classes and talking with Irad, as we call him, I finally gained a grasp of the basic development of philosophy from Descartes and Spinoza to Wittgenstein and Heidegger. I learned notions and methods that I could use to work out the analysis of rhetorical concepts that I had already begun. Irad also got me to read François Jullien, the French scholar of Chinese thought and philosophy. It is unfortunate that Van Norden doesn’t mention Jullien either in this book or in the bibliography on Chinese philosophy on his webpage, for Jullien brings Chinese thinkers to bear on fundamental questions of ontology, society, and politics. Jullien thus also helps us to get a better handle on both Chinese and non-Chinese alternatives to what Van Norden calls “individualistic metaphysics” (39).16 Having been at the margins of economics, philosophy, and rhetorical studies my work since 2008 has moved to the margins of American history. I am still trying to develop the ontological analysis of concepts and structures, but this time applied to international relations concepts like the balance of power, empire, and world order, and to the administrative and bureaucratic apparatus of foreign policy decision-making. It would therefore be unfair for me to blame my failure to discipline myself on the narrowness or other weaknesses of the discipline of philosophy in which Van Norden has pursued his career. Who are “we?” Van Norden writes that “we are doing philosophy when we engage in dialogue about problems that are important in our culture” (142). Yet Van Norden ever explains who 35 Kochin “we” are or what “our culture” is, or whether university and university philosophy departments have or should have some role in transmitting or preserving it. Van Norden contends against Allan Bloom that one can take one’s bearings from the books of another culture than the one into which one was born, that there is nothing existentially significant for the individual about that culture that happens to be one’s own. Can “we” really furnish “our” soul out of any weighty book whatsoever? One possibility is that we might reject our tradition but fail to be fully initiated into another, and confuse professional attainments in a discipline—demonstrated by a long c.v.—with a well-furnished soul. To avoid that substitution of professionalization for personality, it might help to get clear on the similarities and differences between the use of the word “philosopher” in Plato’s Republic and the use in the Leiter Reports and the APA’s Jobs for Philosophers. There is also the issue of quality, which Van Norden addresses, but I think in an evasive and bloodless way, partly because that touches on the “third rail” of affirmative action, and partly because he wants more jobs for scholars of “less commonly taught philosophies” but doesn’t want to soil his nonacademic readers with the dirt on the hiring process. I can tell you from twenty years as permanent faculty in a political science department that anytime you decide that covering a subfield is important, that means that you are going to prioritize hiring somebody in that subfield over hiring somebody with the best work or the best credentials. That applies when the subfield that is to be covered is perceived as central as well as when it is to be covered in the name of “diversity.” But since that problem applies across all subfields I think it is not so sticky or ominous. More seriously, when we are talking about how much to teach “less commonly taught philosophies” the discussion often gets conflated with the question of who should teach them (see Van Norden 34). Do Chinese scholars have some unique authority in Chinese philosophy? Do Jewish scholars have some unique authority in Jewish thought? A paper of mine on Jewish political thought was accepted without peer review in a general journal of intellectual history because gentile scholars refused to evaluate it and thus intervene in what they saw as the province of their Jewish colleagues. The problem is not so much affirmative action in faculty hiring as identity politics in scholarly assessment. This is something from which every scholar, including myself, who has written on less commonly taught philosophies has benefited in one way or another, though we have also suffered from the narrow-mindedness that Van Norden condemns. In assessing Van Norden’s argument, we must keep in mind that diversity is sometimes purchased at the expense of other aspects of scholarly quality, or even at the expense of procedural fairness. Moreover, we do our colleagues no favors by assuming they accept the The Cultures of Academic Philosophy 36 worth—much less the conclusions—of the texts with which their upbringing or education has made them familiar. As I have shown, I am too much an outsider to the American philosophy profession to present or even to assess detailed recommendations such as Van Norden offers about what philosophy departments should do. I have three suggestions, though. First, teach your students enough Aristotelian logic (from the Arab Aristotelians’ “expanded Organon” that includes not only the Prior and Posterior Analytics but also the Topics and the Rhetoric) to understand that, while some truths are demonstrable, any claim worth making in politics is disputable. Second, make sure all future faculty hires are people who understand that since “ethics, political philosophy, and philosophical theology” are “inherently controversial” (Van Norden 135), no matter how well-refuted is some political or religious belief, there is almost certainly a fellow academic philosopher who is smarter, better informed, and with stronger professional qualifications who thinks that anybody who disputes that belief is wildly mistaken, not to say an idiot or a charlatan. Third, make sure anybody who passes their doctoral qualifying exam has been humbled by their encounters with philosophical scholarship both within and beyond what is commonly taught. Nobody should take pride in what they haven’t read.17 Notes 1. Bryan Van Norden, Taking Back Philosophy: A Multicultural Manifesto, with a foreword by Jay L. Garfield (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017). 2. See inter alia Kochin, “Weeds: Cultivating the Imagination in Medieval Arabic Political Philosophy,” Journal of the History of Ideas 60 (July 1999): 399–416; “Morality, Nature, and Esotericism in Leo Strauss’ ‘Persecution and the Art of Writing,’” The Review of Politics 64 (Spring 2002): 261–283; reprinted (in Chinese) as the commentary to the Chinese translation of “Persecution and the Art of Writing” in The Collected Writings of Leo Strauss (Beijing: Huaxia Publishing House, 2012). 3. See Daniel Bonevac’s prophetic “Manifestations of Illiberalism in Philosophy,” Academic Questions 12.1 (1998–1999):14–22. 37 Kochin 4. Hannah Arendt, “Martin Heidegger at Eighty,” trans. Albert Hofstadter, in Heidegger and Modern Philosophy, ed. Michael Murray (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), 301–303. 5. For an attempt to apply the wisdom/philosophy distinction systematically to exclude from philosophy a wide variety of what Van Norden would consider to be philosophic texts, see George Anastaplo, But Not Philosophy: Seven Introductions to Non-Western Thought (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2002). Anastaplo’s formulations are tougher to explode than Tambio’s. 6. See, e.g., Van Norden’s use of “philosopher” and “sage” on 30. 7. The strictly Kuhnian picture of natural science that Van Norden offers is deconstructed by Steve Fuller, Thomas Kuhn: A Philosophical History for Our Times (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). 8. Sharon Traweek, Beamtimes and Lifetimes: The World of High Energy Physics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988). 9. Kochin, “From Argument to Assertion,” Argumentation 23 (2009):387–396. 10. Kochin, “Time and Judgement in Demosthenes’ De Corona,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 35 (2002):77–89. 11. Mansfield and Mahdi taught me to think in terms of “Arabic philosophy” rather than Van Norden’s preferred “Islamic philosophy” or “Jewish philosophy,” because the latter terms beg the question as to whether the philosopher under discussion was a faithful Muslim or Jew. 12. That lecture offers a somewhat different vision of multiculturalism in philosophic education, one that is still worth considering; Allan Bloom, “Western Civ—and Me,” Commentary (August 1990), https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/western- civ-and-me/. A slightly different version is collected as “Western Civ” in Bloom, Giants and Dwarfs (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990). 13. Those who have read all of Leviathan, for example, know that Hobbes, like Confucius, thinks that social order rests not just on self-interested avoidance of punishment but on widespread acceptance of the proper teachings regarding the virtues and the sacred; The Cultures of Academic Philosophy 38 contrast Van Norden 52 ff. with my Tel Aviv colleague Julie Cooper’s presentation of Hobbes on humility in Secular Powers: Humility in Modern Political Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). 14. The revised version of that thesis: Kochin, “Decollectivization of Agriculture and the Planned Economy,” American Journal of Political Science 40 (August 1996): 717–739. 15. Josiah Ober, Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens: Rhetoric, Ideology, and the Power of the People (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991); Deborah Black, Logic and Aristotle’s “Rhetoric” and “Poetics” in Medieval Arabic Philosophy (Leiden: Brill, 1990). 16. I would recommend beginning with Jullien, The Propensity of Things: Toward a History of Efficacy in China, trans. Janet Lloyd (London: Zone, 1999). 17. Thanks to John-Paul Spiro, Daniel Doneson, and Anna Kochin for suggestions and corrections.