A Turn to the Right?

Peter Berkowitz, a friend and former teacher to some of us here, has just released a fascinating and funny essay in the form of intellectual memoir entitled The Longer Way. It appears in a forthcoming collection, Why I Turned Right: Leading Baby Boom Conservatives Chronicle Their Political Journeys, ed. Mary Eberstadt (Simon and Schuster, 2007). In the essay, Peter acknowledges that he is regularly regarded with suspicion from lefties (he has criticized the critics of Bush v. Gore, among other things) and conservatives, who apparently don't think Peter hates liberalism enough. But in this essay, Peter gives a flavor of why I still (naively?) read his work as a non-conservative, even though Peter now publishes almost exclusively in conservative-affiliated publications, such as the Weekly Standard or Policy Review (which is surprisingly more multivocal since it left the Heritage Foundation and came to the Hoover Institution). For those who have read this essay: am I wrong?

One question, and then two stories from the essay to share after the jump. First, as a young man, Peter described himself as "captivated" by Roberto Unger's Knowledge and Politics, but he observes that the book has been "greeted with a deafening silence by the academy when it was first published in 1975, and since has been largely ignored or derided by professors of philosophy, political science, and law." Is this true? My sense is that Unger's work has meant a great deal to a variety of law professors, even though by the time I was at HLS in the late 1990's, it seemed like his influence had waned. I just did a quick JLR search on Westlaw and found 522 citations to Unger's book and 1500 citations to Unger himself. Since Westlaw's database doesn't even go back that far for many journals, I have to say: that's the kind of obscurity I could envy. To be fair, Peter also mentions derision of Unger's work, but again, my quick eyeballing suggests that Unger's work is probably acclaimed as much as it is derided, though perhaps his stature has waxed and waned over time. What kind of Unger moment do we live in now?

[As is often my practice, I showed this to Peter before posting and he helpfully replied: "My recollection (I'm in Herzliya reporting on national security and the Middle East and haven't got the opportunity at the moment to check) is that Stephen Holmes (in TNR), Don Herzog (University of Michigan Law Review(?)), and Ian Shapiro speaking in effect for liberal political theory, and William Ewald (in the Yale Law Journal) speaking for Oxford analytic moral philosophy, excoriated Unger's work and suggested that there was next to nothing to learn from Knowledge and Politics. It should also be said that Tony Kronman did write an early and illuminating review (including a revealing published exchange of letters between the two). I'm guessing that many of the references you found to Unger come in the 1980s from CLS scholars who for a time embraced Unger as one of their own (around 1983 Unger published a Harvard Law Review article called, if I remember correctly, "The Critical Legal Studies Movement" that did intersect with CLS but went far beyond it both in philosophical depth and political radicalness). Perhaps I should have said that professors of philosophy, political theory and jurisprudence largely ignored or derided Knowledge and Politics. Other than Kronman, can you think of significant exceptions to that proposition??" I don't know enough about Unger's reception history, so I invite others to weigh in on Unger's legacy in law schools today.]

Putting the Hunger for Unger issue aside, the essay has some gems. At one point, Peter describes his unusual experience as a young man in Israel after college, when he was shuttling between providing tennis instruction on a secular kibbutz in the desert and studying at a "English- language yeshiva where I would sit in on two hours of classes on Midrash and Talmud and then gobble down a quick, old- fashioned, Eastern European lunch of boiled chicken and rice, whereupon, to the consternation of classmates and teachers, I’d race out... I sensed that I was living a double life, and that it would be wise to keep it to myself. Eventually, I confirmed as much by casually letting a curious kibbutz friend know how I spent my mornings, and followed up that painful experiment by offhandedly mentioning to an inquisitive rabbi at the yeshiva where it was that I was living. My friend’s face and the rabbi’s contorted in identical fashion, as if I had nonchalantly disclosed my membership in a gang of child molesters."

Later, Peter describes how he ended up teaching at Harvard in the Government Department when he still had another year to finish at law school, which he started after his PhD.

"The offer I received required that I begin promptly. So I agreed to spend the fall semester of my third year in law school teaching political philosophy at Harvard. This was made possible by the best and most dangerous elements of a Yale Law School education. In a meeting in his office during the spring of my second year, the dean casually waived the reasonable law school requirement that students enrolled in courses be in residence in New Haven and attend classes. And why shouldn’t he have? On the one hand, he trusted Yale law students to use their freedom well. On the other hand, he supposed—as the faculty and administration drummed into our heads—that we members of the Yale Law School community were above the law, for if we weren’t, how would we be able to use it to do the right thing?" (emphasis added).