 Welcome to the Read That Book Club. Great that everyone could come along today. We're here to discuss Martin Pre-Year's new book, which is called Fiddler Sells Big Ideals in the World. Did you bring a copy with you? Hold on. Copies of that book are available at the Cops Bookshop. If anyone's inspired to read it, we'll look at the hearings discussion. We have three very eminent professors here to talk about the book today. We of course have Martin Pre-Year himself. We have Professor Malcolm Feely and we have Professor John Braithwaite. And I thought what I'd do is just briefly introduce them and then we can move on to the discussion. So Martin is the Gordon Samuels Professor of Law in the Social Period of UN Excelsior. He's also the co-director of the Disciplinary Studies of Law. And he's also an adjunct professor here at Read That. Martin's undergraduate degrees were in Politics, Philosophy and Law and his doctorate was in the History of Ideas and his work since then spans all those areas. He's visited a lecture in a number of universities overseas and here. His first book, I think, was in 1979. Is that right? I've heard Eugene Kemenko about the concept of bureaucracy. He's had many, many publications since then and the culminating in the book we're here to discuss today which I understand is the first, I think, treatment of soul snakes in the years. Professor Malcolm Feely is the Claire Sanders Clemens Dean's Chair, Professor Flaw at Berkeley University. Before Berkeley, he was a fellow at Young Law School and he taught at New York University and the University of Wisconsin and he's also been a visiting professor at Hebrew University, Covey University and Princeton University. Like Martin, Malcolm has written extensively about all sorts of things including criminal justice process, federalism, crime history, prison privatisation and he's currently in Australia as the 2012 Fulbright Flanders University Distinguished Chair for five months to undertake research into privatisation in the criminal justice system in Australia as part of a comparative study he's undertaken. Professor John Brathwaite, who will be well known to write a review here, he's a distinguished professor here at Regnet. He's the founder of Regnet and he's also currently on the second day of C Federation Fellowship. X. X. It's obvious. My information is down here. I don't have the wonderful titles of these guys. I can't even call myself the Jeffrey Brannan Professor. The boy also. You're the John Brathwaite. John Brathwaite. John's main areas of interest are the millions that he covers have been technology, business regulation and peace studies. And he doesn't do things like ours. He's currently undertaking a 20-year comparative project into peace building and care with colleagues from Regnet and I think his last fieldwork trip to the Congo, which is not something most of us can say. So the way we're going to do this is that Martin has selected to speak last. He's going to set us off, speak for that for a few minutes, then John for that, and then we should have ample time for some discussion. About this time, 42 years ago, I moved from the Midwest of the United States to New York. And two or three days later, I found myself in a car being driven to the wedding of a friend in Brooklyn. We're driving along and I look up and I notice a street sign and it says Flatbush. Now Peter Grabowski at least will know about Flatbush if none of you, no one else does. Flatbush is the area where Ebbett's Field, the great Brooklyn Dodgers baseball team played and I was so excited. I thought that Flatbush was a state of mind and all of a sudden I found myself on and in Flatbush. Well, this is the same feeling I had when I walked into this building or the building next door, the Regnett building because I've always thought of Regnett as a state of mind. It has just permeated the world. It has this mythical quality and to actually be here is really exciting and it conjures up that memory of being driving by old Ebbett's Field on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn. So thank you, thank you so much. It's fantastic. And I guess we're, I guess we have a little, we're Regnett East in Berkeley with their, I mean there's a lot of flowing back and forth. I see Neil Gunningham pops in our building every now and then to surprise me. So anyway, it's fantastic, thank you. So that's my way of thank you and I've had several of you have been wonderful, wonderful hosts that have entered into this to Canberra in the last few days. Secondly, by way of, if he doesn't say it, I will say it, Mia Culpa. Martin wrote this book because I badgered him mercilessly for some period of time because I thought that Phillip Selznick deserved a book-length treatment and I thought that Martin, who is, you know, you think he's part of Regnett, you know, people in Sydney, he thinks he's there. We in Berkeley think he's part of us. So he's in Berkeley alone. So but I thought he was the perfect person and indeed my instincts have proven absolutely right. This is a tough-minded, not syrupy treatment, not of Phillip's biography. We learned a bit about Phillip, enough to know how his ideas were framed and then were launched into one more history or not even history of ideas, but examination of three sets of interrelated ideas. I think of this book as a textbook in the best tradition of British textbooks and when I've been in Dylans in London and looked up, I mean years ago and even now, I see really smart textbooks where they take an idea, a person, a concept and they just interrogate it in a systematic way that is illuminating to the reader. And that's a tradition that I don't find in the United States and I don't know whether it exists here in Australia, but it exists in England. I'm thinking of David Garland's punishment society. He views that as a text and I think it is a smart and some of Roger Cotterell's works among many, many others. Anyway, it's in that tradition. It's really smart and I mean this as high praise because those books are really, really important. So what I'd like to do is to spend a couple of minutes laying out, since I'm going first, laying out the structure of the book. It's very simple and straightforward and then turn to two of the three topics that he addresses at some length. The first section of the book or really the introduction before he gets to the sections is a treatment of Phillip Selznick in New York City as one of the Trotskyites in a cell on the Upper West Side at City College in the 1930s. I think modern American sociology was born there. His supporters and his adversaries included Alvin Goldner, Nathan Glazer, Seymour Morton Lipset, Irving Crystal, Irving Howe, and on and on and on. They were dividing and subdividing like Amoeba with respect to the purity of ideas. Selznick was always too smart to be wholly captivated by any of the various Marxists including the Trotskists of which he was a part. There's a reserve in Phillip that never allows him to covet anything. Partly because he's skeptically smart and he was his own person. But he was always attracted. He was like a moth to a flame that wanted to get there but was smarter than most moths and knew when to come back. So at any rate, this is the milieu in which all these, this whole generation of immediate post-war sociologists came of age and it's really important because I think it's important because all of them ask the big questions in the way that you guys still do at Regnet but away a lot of the hyper-professionalized social scientists don't. They break things down until they can measure more precisely. They're asking the big question. They read Hobbes and they're wondering why does society come here? What holds it together? What's the problem of order? The problem of power? The problem of good versus evil? Partly this is their response to the twin evils of communism and Nazism and trying to reconcile the growth of modernity and large-scale organizations and mass organizations and how do you control those to allow individuals and institutions to flourish? And this preoccupies Philip throughout his life and I think it has its roots in Alcove C or B or whatever it was there in the basement of City College where these guys debated it. So he lays this out. Now, this leads him through, unlike me and I think probably I suspect most of us, through a really coherent set of projects, not a single one, but set of projects that each sort of emerges from the previous one. His first concern and the first big section of the book is with Philip and organization theory. The second big section deals with Philip and his particular take on the sociology of law and the last one deals with Philip and even more general with his theory, social philosophy, normative philosophy on communitarian society and the communitarian theory. Martin is smart in interrogating each one of these things in pointing out the strengths, pointing out the weaknesses and showing how there are certain consistent threads that tie them together, not just for the purpose of tying together but to show how they really enrich. There's a cumulative enrichment of the enterprise. Now, here's the challenge for Philip and here's maybe my first criticism of Philip. I should say that Philip was my colleague for many, many years indeed. The day I was appointed at Berkeley I was told that I was a replacement for Philip Selznick and I said I never wanted to hear that again. No one replaced but indeed it was his retirement that occasioned the opportunity for me to get there and he had retired but remained active in retirement for close to 30 years after 25 years. John, you have you? So, here's what I think Philip wanted to do. He was attracted to Marxism, communism, to the revolution in the 30s because it was an effort to blaze a brave new world but he had his feet on the ground. He had read Roberto Michel about the iron law of oligarchy. He had read He had read He had read He had read He had read Weber. He had read Dewey, the good pragmatist and I think I always thought of Philip as something of a priest and indeed one of our religious figure and one of his most one of the people that was most influential in his life was Reinhold Niebuhr. And I don't think you mentioned the title of Niebuhr's book in here but it captures Philip's concern and that is the quest for approximate solutions to insoluble problems. It seems to me that captures exactly what Philip was trying to do. I don't think he had a particularly tragic view in life or a cynical view of it, not at all, but nevertheless he knew that one of the features of modernity maybe one of the features of social life more generally is the power of evil and the evil consequences of mass organization. So anyway, he wants to harness energy for collective purpose. For good and he looks to two institutions in succession to do that and I think it's really a continuation of it. The first institution that he looks at is organization and he's the founder of modern organization there. I think he's first to really sort of think about and theorize in sustained way about organizations and then the next one is law. These are both two of the institutions that are used to try to harness energy for collective purpose, harness energy in a way that allows the power of the collective to move forward and accomplish things but constrains it so that it doesn't get off terribly of course or destroy or wreak evil. Now one of the things that strikes me and I think Sheldon Wollin points us out in his criticism is that these two institutions, both organization and law are, I don't want to say apolitical but if someone were going to do a political analysis of modern social life and mass movements and social control and change and harnessing energies to do good, one would think that there would be a stronger appreciation for politics and maybe political parties and I think maybe his and this may be doing something that need not be done maybe Philip recoiled at party politics because he had had too much with communist party politics and the variety of factions within it. Whatever the case, both in his organization analysis and his law analysis there is a curious, a curious absence of appreciation for politics. It's not lost entirely but it's not there. To the extent that you could, and you sort of talk around that Morton but to the extent that you could sort of address that in the remarks I would love to hear and if tell me I'm wrong I would love to be correct. Okay, so let me look first at organization theory. Here he wrote three big books, really big books. TVA and the grassroots is the earth text for organization theory and it's a study of the TVA going in to do all sorts of good but at the same time the Tennessee Valley Authority which was going to electrify all of the southeast it was a big New Deal project and powerful smart leaders go in to organize this and they quickly adapt to local political social conditions and end up maintaining the organization but at the price of its central goals. So this is the great, this is the origin of goal displacement in organization theory and so one sees it there. Now I don't know whether, I don't think Michelle won in this. There's no iron law of oligarchy so much as the reverse of the iron law of fritter and the way power in order to preserve a variety of interests and as a result the institution survives at the expense of its mission. Now the next two books seem to respond to what went wrong in TVA and the next one is a case study and incidentally almost all of his three organizations followed the same pattern. It's a case study in which he explores in depth with ethnography and interviews and all sorts of things and then he wants to generalize very broadly from it. So he looks at a microscope at one moment and a telescope on the next goes back and forth and it seems to me it's a great model for good research and it seems to me that that's what a lot of rec net studies do in one way. Certainly my colleague Bob Hagan's rec net inspired one. Okay the next book is a book of successful leadership but it's a study of the communist party. It's called the organizational weapon. This is an institution and organization namely the communist party that doesn't have the problems that the TVA did because the leaders are adept at maintaining their followers commitment to the mission and disciplining them such that they follow pretty well. So you have two case studies of organizations. One that's unsuccessful, the great democratic experiment in the United States and the other successful which is the communist party experiment of discipline membership to pursue goals. At any rate that's sort of an irony and in the next book Philip wants to marry those two things together and tries to say what are the lessons of leadership that can be used for good rather than for bad and that's his last book and I'm blocking on the name of the these were not inspired titles he had. Leadership in administration. Leadership in administration and so there he does it. Now here's the problem I've always had this. I've always had this and now I have an opportunity to put it to Martin in front of an audience. He's on record. Philip's commitment to turning organizations into institutions. That is vital organizations that have a sense of a mission that animate their followers has to some significant effect. I think some sort of mystical or quasi-mystical and religious quality. That is the successful leader is the religious leader. I once sort of ribbed Philip and said you should have been a rabbi and he said no a priest and I think that probably right. Rabbis don't get lots of respect or enough respect but priests maybe not recently but historically they've gotten quite a bit so maybe he was right. But I think that's right. And I think this goes back to I'll just circle back to the point I made a moment ago. Sheldon Wollin, another of an old colleague of sorts at Berkeley, criticized Philip's work for not having a politics and for eliding sociology and politics together and in a sense to promote managerialism rather than more robust politics. And I think that's right. If you look in the index to take one example and look under labor unions, if you look under L there is nothing about labor unions in your index. Nor and that doesn't reflect you. That reflects him I think to a large extent. And similarly there's not a whole lot about political parties. So it's a curious, he has been accused and Martin had defends him I think okay. He has been accused of being in the tradition of sociology, a consensus sociologist rather than a conflict sociologist. And if you think about it, organizations are organized around central missions and quests and law is also organized around central themes. So perhaps there is, thank you very much, perhaps there is something to those criticism. And those are the issues I'd like you to elaborate on, Martin. Let me turn to his sociology of law and the remaining couple of minutes here and I'll be briefer. Here he has two big books and one incendiary article. And so let me say something about this. Philip turned his attention to law in the 1950s and then it kept developing and it created the institutions of which I'm a part. Now Berkeley and some of you have visited and so on. And sociology of law is a natural extension of these interests in organization theory. Law is another way to turn energy into an institution that has values, that has a commitment, that has a mission, that has a normative component to it. That again is constrained exercise of power just as a good organization would be constrained effort at exercising power. And again it's another lawful regime as another way of countering tyranny while at the same time organizing and restraining power at the same time it is to engage in collective action. So he sees the same features and the same sort of characteristics or benefits he sees from organizations as institutions. It's an important addition to turn an organization into an institution he sees in this. By this he's saying both organizations and law are imminent institutions. That is you can only understand them by understanding not their teleology but by understanding their mission, their aspiration. So in a sense the hole is larger than the sum of its parts. Now incidentally I have to say the philosopher of science that told me this is not a good way for social scientists to think about was none other than Mae Broadbeck who was Philip's sister. And my philosophy of social science instructor at the University of Minnesota in 1966. So I asked Philip if he ever talked to his sister because they were diametrically imposed in there in the ways they thought about social science. In fact as they had been separated as kids and they really didn't talk to each other very much over their old lives. But at any rate he has this view that says you cannot understand a law or an institution or a family or a university without understanding its mission. You have to understand what is in people's heads. You can't simply understand the behavior. Now he got into a lot of trouble like for saying this in I think purposefully incendiary form in his argument on sociology and natural law. Because he didn't have to say any of those things at all to make the same point since it's not a distinct point to him. But he turned this into the study of normative institutions like law. He says is close to the study of natural law. You have to appreciate natural law. No later he did in fact embrace some natural law like things. But he wanted to understand the compelling nature of a normative system that sought to restrain power. And he looks at that in two books. The first one is Law Society and Industrial Justice. One of the big sort of big book that set the scene for the Berkeley sociology of law project that continues today. And then a book sometime later with our colleague Phillip Nonay Law and Society in Transition. In Law Society and Industrial Justice he celebrates law and the imposition of the importing of law into industrial organizations. It's a good book. You can't argue, at least I can't argue with very much of it. But I must say that when I read it, I wonder where labor unions are. He celebrates law and the consensual nature of law. After all, this is where you find coming up to the robust nature of union politics. I once was at a meeting where Phillip and Lawn Fuller were the two people on the panel. It was wonderful. I remember going up afterwards and asking the same question of both of them and I got quite different answers. I asked Phillip why the sociologist sounded like a philosopher. And I asked the philosopher why the philosopher sounded like a sociologist. And Fuller said I'm really a sociologist and Phillip was a little perplexed to me. But he does seem to talk like every speak and write sometimes write like the ordinary. Law is good and more law is better. And Fuller, as you know, was always interested in how far law could go before it overextended itself and couldn't solve the problems it set out to solve or where it impoverished relations. So Fuller was always looking at the boundaries of law and Phillip saw no boundaries so far as I could see. Tell me what I'm wrong on that too. And then in Law and Society and Transition, this is his last big book on law is where he argues he and Phillip try to stand back and come to grips with law in its larger historical suite. And here he really does develop I guess a natural law, certainly an evolutionary scheme that is like everything he says. Phillip says one thing, one time, and then he modifies it the next. So Phillip was anything but doctrinaire and he recognized the variability of social life. In fact, he urged us all to go study that variation. But he does construct an idea, a legal system, that's something like a sense of the mind, at least sort of the pre-physiologist, a sense of the mind, of stages of development, say the moral development of Piaget or Colberg and so on. And so they developed a theory of a three-stage set of law from repressive law. The first order of any legal system is to create stability and order. The next stage internal to that is to tame repression by separating law from politics and insisting on procedure that will limit power that's called autonomous law. And then a third one that he goes back and says it's a bit like repressive law, but it's for good, not for bad. It's really regnet. It's responsive regulation and restorative justice and it's to use law for a better one. Now in a review I wrote many years ago after which I said I'll never get a job at Berkeley, I criticized them for saying that law was too protein and had too many dimensions, too many facets. A criminal law has contracts and it has states and trusts and it has property and everything else and they can be moving in different directions. I think here, Phillip, I think they lacked, it's hard to say these guys are giants, but I do think they lacked either sufficient historical and comparative perspective here. I think they were responding too much to the chaos of the 1960s and on Berkeley campus there was a lot of it and also to the Warren Court, the great judicial activism of the Warren. In fact when they're talking about law, almost all their examples are constitutional law. I mean there are particular types of laws, not real law, constitutional law is something else. And so I think they failed to appreciate the great variety of laws. More generally I think they, and again they're preoccupied with law limiting power and I think a more historical perspective or a broader take would have been to explore the facilitative effects. So they do that and that is responsive law as opposed to a point. But again with all their examples, almost all of them come from constitutional law. There's nothing about ordinary law. Let me give one example. Even as the Warren Court was expanding the notion of equality, what was it doing in criminal procedure? Insisting that the T's be crossed and the I's be dotted. They wanted autonomous law in one area and they wanted responsive law in another. But even more generally by equating law with constitutional law they ignore a variety of other things. Think of the greatest expansive form of responsive law I can think of in at least modern history is the common law in the 19th century. They're silent on that. I mean there was a complete revolution, judge made law in the 19th century that creates law that takes feudal law and transforms it from status to contract so that modern institutions can exist. Silent on that. And so this isn't some peculiar product of late modernity as a really responsive law as they seem to do. Secondly it seems to me they may have been tied up and here I'm going to gore your ox. It seems to me that they, like Martin, are tied to a very conventional notion of the rule of law. Sort of a Dorkinian notion of the rule of law that says that the rule of law requires officials to operate under a pre-existing set of rules or principles that they have to interpret to apply their job. Now I don't think courts have ever done that and I certainly don't think administrative agencies do that. Modern courts, both constitutional and non-constitutional, are like administrative agencies. They take various rules not to interpret them and apply them and be constrained by them, but rather they take them as grants of jurisdiction. Modern law and certainly administrative agencies do that. There's a problem and here are the components of it. You go tell us what the solution is to it and then enforce it. So it's a grant, but I think courts have done that. I finished a big book a few years ago with my colleague Ed Rubin on prison conditions litigation. The courts, the American Federal Trial Courts, took the Eighth Amendment's prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. And they didn't interpret that. There had been no interpretation. And if they were trying to interpret anything they would have to run up against the Thirteenth Amendment that says in part that convicted felons can be slaves. That is not everyone was freed after the Civil War. The court just ignored that. They took the prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment as a grant of jurisdiction to make policy. Simply to make policy, not constrained by the rule of law. And I think that happens again and again and again. And I think Philip's concern with law being used to restrain power doesn't allow him to appreciate just how much law or legal institutions, maybe they're acting illegally or extra legally, in fact are bound and constrained not by rules of law but rather by social conventions. The reason that the court could reconstruct a prison overnight is because there was a model of what a good prison was and because by the time they got around to thinking about prisoners they said people in the military have rights, black people have rights, students have rights, why shouldn't prisoners have rights? So those were the constraints on the court. The constraints were not, let us say were the social constraints, institutional constraints, not the constraints of the rule of law. And I think Philip has, and Philippe in this book, failed to appreciate just how protean that law was. I'm going to shut up. I've gone way over my time. Thank you very much, Julie. And I hope I've conveyed two things. That this is a fantastic book. It's a book that could be read as a text. You ought to have your students read it with great profit. And it's done by a master craftsman in the name of Martin Krieger. If there are a few shortcomings here and there, part of those are Phillips and part of them, well, we'll see. Well, Martin's done a great service to Philip Selznick with the rich texture of the exegesis in this book. One of the admirable things about Selznick is that he's always been an unfashionable scholar. His work didn't fit snugly in one box. And so contemporary scholars don't read him very much because they see themselves as setting it in one or the other fields in which he worked. His deeper importance is as an interdisciplinary scholar who traverses the fields in which he worked as a thinker. As a thinker about the fate of values in the world. What are virtuous values and what threatens and sustains them politically, legally, institutionally. It's a good idea for all of us who work in the fields in which we work to read the moral Commonwealth, in particular that book. But it's a big book. A strength of his work is how multi-layered it is. Some of that book is undisciplined and there are too many layers. There could have been some ruthless editing and therefore my advice to people now would be to read Martin's book rather than to read the original. Because he really has cut through all the unnecessarily messy bits and not only captured the essence of that great book, but all the other books and some other interesting bits of intellectual biography about Trotskyism, etc. Martin and Selznick both had the virtue of intellectuals who roam freely across multiple fields. Martin quotes Max Weber saying, I am not a donkey, I don't have a field. Which made me think of another donkey story. Actually Martin suggested I edit out a couple of my donkey stories. So I'll just do one more donkey story which is of an Afghan proverb of a wise old man who is riding his donkey in a beautiful green springtime valley as the snows are melting down into the Afghan valley. And a child says to him, wise old man, where are you going? And he serenely looks about the beautiful countryside and says, I don't know, ask the donkey. But yes, I'll cut the next donkey narrative which is actually slightly more relevant than that one. But not nearly as good. There's a lot of tolerance of ambiguity in Selznick's scholarship. His communitarian critique of liberalism as pathologically atomistic, while being a liberal himself, his commitment to taking rights seriously, while being a critic of rights discourse as, to quote Martin's elegant way of putting it, rights discourse as allowing too much of a good thing to trump other good things. His commitment to checks and balances and to power taming power. His responsive law is more problem-centered than rule-centered, more persuasive than coercive. So the influence of Selznick here is not just on things like responsive regulation and on Barak and Kagan's work on going by the book. It's also on problem-oriented policing and a lot more. His commitment to civility and piety. Piety, very unfashionable. Martin says civility governs diversity, protects autonomy and upholds toleration. Piety expresses devotion and demands integration. Martin, he's such a great writer. He writes of Selznick's civility. In these words, civility is not one of those ideals that quickens the pulse. It might, however, steady it. Another rich vein that I like very much is the way that both Martin and Selznick defend conservatism. Though I don't think even Selznick is as unfashionable as Martin in using conservative as a descriptor of one aspect of their scholarship. Martin says existing values, cultures, traditions, institutions, practices help us make our way in a world so complex and fraught with risk uncertainty that we need all the help we can get. The conservative critique, for example, is deftly deployed by both Martin and Selznick to critique Foucault as unable to distinguish between, quote, discipline that gives coherence to life and sustains autonomous projects distinguished from techniques of control that regiment denude degrade. I admire the integration of normative and explanatory theory in Selznick and the way Martin's prose captures it better than Selznick's. This is Selznick's engagement with American philosophical pragmatism. He shared thinking with Dewey about the integration of means and ends and about learning through experience how to discover paths to normative value. Now my main theoretical critique of Selznick to balance these many and great virtues, some of which I'll come back, Martin agrees with me and with Malcolm, I think, that the evolutionary aspects of Selznick's theory that he holds very dear are implausible. A natural evolution from repressive to autonomous to responsive law is so unconvincing. Selznick doesn't discuss societies that had restorative and responsive institutions of indigenous law that worked well for them, that was then replaced by autonomous law at the moment of transition to independence to be then replaced by coercive law as coups and dictators corrupted autonomous law. Exactly the opposite of evolution to that posited by Selznick is common in human history. His historical engagement with those processes is thin and myopically western. You certainly need to solve the Hobbesian problem before you can have Lockean liberalism. But that doesn't mean, as Selznick argues, that you have to have a phase of coercive law in history before you can have autonomous law. And here I think Martin is a bit charitable to Selznick. And as evidence of that, I would cite the book club that we had last year, which Martin was one of the contributors, the Wilt Mason Collection on War in Afghanistan, which I could read as being an argument for why the bits of Afghanistan, the resorting to responsive forms of law are doing a better job at the rule of law than those bits of it that are relying upon coercive law. So I think there's a tension between that project, and Wilt Mason was one of Martin's PhD students, that project that you're involved in, and this one, and I would have imported a bit more of that in here. So let me make the point by just telling a story, which is not a story from that collection. But when I was in Afghanistan, there was an incident in Taha province where a night raid had assassinated an Uzbek mullah and two women who were seen to be his followers. The belief of this province is largely Uzbek, more Uzbeks than anyone else, and lots of Tajiks as well, but the Tajiks control the power structure. The government is a Tajik, the police commander is a Tajik. And the Uzbek community believed that these folk were assassinated because he was a threat to the Tajik power structure. So the Tajik police commissioner had given this intelligence to the NATO forces to go in and kill these guys to eliminate the political opposition, something that happens quite a bit in Afghanistan. There was an Uzbek riot in response, it wasn't a Taliban riot. The young German soldiers who had been trained in counter-terrorism but not in riot control panicked, opened fire on the mob. 75 were wounded and 12 were killed. Then there was another hasty response because the security situation deteriorated so quickly. The Taliban used it to argue that the two women, then the Taliban did come in after the riot and argued that the two women were raped by American forces with the NATO forces. That was not true, but that whipped up the security situation to become even worse. Then so they hastily in response convened a high-level peace conference. Taliban managed to harness the resentment to get one of the delegates to the peace conference to take a bomb in. A bomb was ignited in the conference, killed General Dowd, the northern police commander for all of Afghanistan, a couple of German soldiers, the hated Tajik police commander, some other police commanders and the northern NATO commander, a German general, was also very badly wounded in the incident because the Tajik leaders were then killed. Then a further bad escalation of the security situation in the province. So I was there at a meeting with the number two UN guy with the Provincial Peace Council and on which there were representatives of the Taliban, of the Uzbek elders and of the Tajik elders of the province. And the Uzbek leaders are saying, look, these people and our people are particularly upset about the innocent women. The UN leader says, we believe our intelligence, the NATO intelligence was right. This mosque was a base for insurgency and these two women were sowing vests for suicide bombers to which the Uzbek leader responded, well, I don't think you're right on that. I think you've just been sold a line by the Tajik leadership of the province who are here and can speak for themselves on this matter. But let's assume for a moment you are right. Is the rule of law that you are bringing to our province one where an appropriate response to the allegation of sowing women sowing suicide vests, is there assassination without trial? And that was a kind of a hard question for him to answer. And as you were struggling to deal with it, you said, wouldn't a better response have been for you to come to our local Shura where we deal with allegations of this kind and where Uzbeks and Tajiks can come together and argue these things through? That is to say a responsive, restorative and responsive legal framework might have prevented this whole deterioration. Now, I think you would agree with, you know, they're in the book that I'm referring to, there's more systematic treatment of many stories of that kind. So the best solution to the Hobbesian problem is generally a responsive one, not a coercive one. And I think that's a very dangerous argument that needs to be focused on as a priority. Okay. And Selznick's naturalism also goes too far. While individual organisms grow mature, there's no such imminent tendency for organisations to do so. There's no naturalness in the evolutionary growth of organisations and institutions. We can identify the biological mechanisms that cause an acorn to grow into an oak tree. Markets is one interesting candidate of a mechanism of that kind paradoxically through creative destruction of organisations. There's an argument that markets cause surviving organisations to mature and develop and as a liberal, Selznick does buy into that kind of argument. And that might seem to the eyes of a hopeful liberal like Selznick to mimic natural evolution. Selznick concedes that markets are regularly corrupted, but markets being corrupted is not the big problem. Markets being markets is the really big problem, I want to argue. The very forces that promote what Selznick sees as evolutionary growth in institutions also drive regressive institutions. Just as markets drive the more efficient production of goods, they also drive the more efficient production of bads. Markets in heroin, tobacco, fatty foods, gambling all deliver the more efficient production of dangerous and unnatural addictions. So my own work on markets in vice markets in virtue could be read as a critique of this evolutionary aspect of Selznick's theory. Markets in financial engineering in particular pose a deep threat to the very liberal communitarian capitalism that Selznick values as a virtuous responsive kind of capitalist evolution. We see on the streets of Greece today the voices of fascist and communist immoderation that Selznick so learned to fear in his lifetime. Those voices were given breath by markets in vice, by Lehman Brothers financial engineering to conceal the Greek national debt, by misguided quantitative modelling of risk management as pioneered by one of Merton's other progeny. Selznick was a student of Merton, his noble laureate in economic son Robert Merton. So for mine there's no evolutionary eminence toward natural institutional growth or for our discoverable natural law. Peter Drahosh's work shows well how autonomous and responsive intellectual property law has become a vehicle of one of the greatest tyrannies of redistribution from the poor to the rich in the world system. Markets in vice will always be a threat to our survival. Today the market for selling drones is delivering new waves of assassinations of political leaders that will pose a threat of nuclear war when India or Pakistan first uses a drone to assassinate the president of the other or when Russia first fires a health fire missile into the Oval Office. It's in the nature of capitalism that just as markets in goods gain new ascendancies, so do markets in bads. Particular kinds of markets in bads, markets in new forms of violence delivery, new forms of environmental destruction and markets in new technologies that the rich can purchase to redistribute wealth from the poor to the rich such as new forms of financial engineering around regulatory and redistributive laws. And of course markets in vote buying, markets in lobbying that see the prize go to the firm that can pay the biggest lobbyist fees. These corrupt democracy in ways that mean that Wall Street is favored over Main Street as the Americans say. Far from evolutionary hopefulness about the imminence of natural law and development, the forces of ruling class tyranny are structurally more likely to be in the ascendancy most of the time. And Martin does warn us about this, the remedy in various ways. The remedy is continuous struggle against those dominating forces for a more struggle for a more equal society, a less violent society, a more environmentally responsive society. Otherwise we social democrats will allow the liberals and the libertarians to pander to the potentialities for liberalism to destroy itself at the hands of markets in bad. Markets in virtue have less capacity to save us than markets in vice have to destroy us so the factory can produce goods for us that were not available in previous centuries. But factory farming also allows the ruling species to tyrannize animals in ways that were not possible in pre-modern times. It allowed the factories of murder that we saw in the Holocaust. It allows factories of slavery of human beings pressed by institutions of debt into their factories' slavery. If there is an imminence about the development of human institutions, these factories are its face. Shall I finish there or go for another two minutes? Well I should tell you that in the next two minutes Selznick gets compared unfavorably with Neil Gunningham. I thought I should make, well both great but Gunningham a bit greater. This gives a sense of the plausibility of the enterprise. Well thank you both. I can only think of one thing that could compare with listening to respected colleagues speak warmly about a book that's occupied a lot of your life and that would be listening to the eulogies at your funerals. So people say such nice things on such occasions and I'm grateful for the ones being said here and I look forward to the ones there. But at the moment I'll just start at the other end. In February I was in Oxford and I was to give a paper on, funnily enough, Philip Selznick and I was reading the proofs of this book on February the 9th. And it's a significant day for me. And I discovered that there was a sentence missing from the last page of the book and I wrote quickly to the copy editor and asked could it possibly be saved and reinstated. And she said she'd try but it was going to be hard, it was late in the day and I said look I understand all that. But you've got to understand that if this sentence doesn't get in the whole book is finished and it's my birthday. And she said she'd do what she said in America. She said you play very hard ball and at midnight, literally at midnight I got an email from the printer saying happy birthday. But if you have any otherwise suggestions keep them for the second edition. That was a hopeful remark. But the sentence which I should reveal is the one that John quoted from Mugs Weber that he's not a donkey and he doesn't have a field. And it came in the course of a sort of mild polemic at the end of my book where I consider the eugenic. I ask whether a Selznick or something like him is a likely product of modern universities and I can suggest it is not. And partly I attribute that to the eugenic effects of trends in the modern hyper-professionalised, hyper-specialised, hyper-detecticised university. And before this sentence which I use just to lighten the discourse, I've quoted Weber's famous lament that the world might be filled with these sensualists without spirits, specialists without heart. This nullity imagines that it's attained a level of civilisation unknown before. And I thought well having hit them with that I should bring this thing up. But now of course Weber and Selznick did have fields. They had many fields but they were very suspicious of boundary crossing and sorry, of boundary protectors. And they would cross them freely driven in both cases by the character of the problem that they were engaged in rather than the discipline we had that they wore. Both of them felt very strongly that they came from disciplines but they were systematically and in Selznick's case perhaps evangelical committed to ecumenical views as he put it of his work. And this following where the problem leads was a problem for me because when I suggested the book to the press it was to be a little book on his sociology of law. And then as I got into him I came to believe very quickly that everything connects with everything else in Selznick and that you had to do everything. So this is everything. But it's everything also in a different sense. Philippe Nonnet is one's disciple said that those who come to Philip's work seeking a contribution to sociology of organisations, industrial sociology, sociology of law, social philosophy will find something. In fact they'll find a lot but they'll miss everything that matters. Philippe has a tendency to exaggerate more than I do because racial, ethnic difference. And I think they'll just miss lots that matter. And I was very quickly, I came to believe that I realised that this is what it drawn me to. I had no interest in the TVA, no interest in American industrial relations. I had a great deal of interest in Trotskyism and communist strategy but these were sidelines in the major game. What I was won by were features of his cast of mind, his mind, his cast of mind and also a particular sensibility. And I spend a lot of time trying. I try, they're within the particulars and they spill over from the particulars and I try faithfully, loyally I hope to convey the particulars and given that he moved from field to field in roughly chronological order so does the book. But my main ambition is to try to convey this cast of mind and sensibility which has many aspects. One of them is what he used to call his generalising impulse. Apart from his sociology text, he wrote the best-selling sociology text in America for over 30 years. And apart from that and the moral commonwealth, all his books were focused on a particular subject, TVA, communist strategy, industrial relations, American industrial relations. But very quickly you get the feeling that this is a book to be read many times for many things that has always it's laid. And there are always this, the empirical research where he did it was done for larger, with larger ambitions that are on larger scale. And of course those ambitions which have been spoken about in varying tones of praise and blame in the last few minutes. His central co-hearing problem, I suspect he didn't know it as a problem when he began. But looking back on his work he saw that this is what connected the very many various and distinct in other people's works, bodies or disciplines and subjects. The thing that connected it was a concern to explore the fate of values in the light of, in the course of social processes. And that led him to, led him inexorably, but it wouldn't lead everybody inexorably, to develop this ecumenical view of what he was about. If you're interested in the fate of values you have to know something more than sociologists typically did about values. That would lead you to moral philosophy. What are moral philosophers know about the world? We're told they live in it but they very rarely do anything which shows any systematic or direct or considered acquaintance with it. So you have to bolster that by looking at the fate of values. This is not an airy phrase, it sounds airy the way we're talking about it until you get to the nitty-gritty. The fate of values in the world means particular values, in particular places, in particular institutions. The famous article that Malcolm mentioned, sociology and natural law, I think he didn't quite capture part of the central argument there, which was an attempt to soften up sociological opposition to take philosophical problems and questions seriously, or moral ones in any case. He said later at some stage that our best minds, our keenest minds in the social sciences didn't know what to do with an ideal except handle it gingerly and view it with alarm. And he said this was a mistake because in the standard operating stuff of sociology you would find you were constantly confronted with the need to explore and understand what he called normative practices. Fatherhood and parenthood is a normative practice, law is a normative practice. These are social practice which are not adequately described without taking account of their tendency to evaluation. Their socialization can be thought of in sociology as a neutral term but we know that there is dysfunctional socialization. There is good socialization, or at least we talk in that language, and Selznick wanted to take seriously and deepen our ability to come to recognize and to speak to the fate of values in the world. There matters a sensibility at a general level too, I've called one his Hobzian idealism, that is the constant and systematically connected attention to things that endanger and things which might allow flourishing of values in the world. That's an enterprise which is terribly easy to say but people don't do it, it's temperamentally hard. You have Hobzians and you have idealists, it's rare to have Hobzian idealists and he was one in I think an exemplary and attractive manner. And then I talk also about, it's true that he was coherent and if you read him the way that he can be read since he lived so long, this was very bad for his career. An agent could have told him that this was a mistake and it clearly was a mistake. He had popped off at the age of 50, leaving TVA, leadership and administration etc. His fame would have lasted but he kept going on, he kept writing, till he was 89, his last book was published then. This is a terrible career move and I apologize on his behalf. But the coherence that you see that you can find, you can find this coherence quickly but it's not a simple coherence, it's a developing one, that is he has fundamental problems, big problems. He keeps coming back to them, he modifies his views, he asks different questions about them so this combination of coherence and development seems to me admirable and important. And finally the integrity which he manifested, which I have something to say about in the book and which I'll have you take on faith. Now to a couple of criticisms. I would have liked some more engagement with that larger level because I think that these books, many of them are apt for criticism. They're particular books on particular subjects, that's true and on some of them, particularly the old ones, they've had a lot of time for people to think different thoughts. But let me, since I'm not sure that I'm here, in what persona I'm here, whether I'm here as Krieger or Selsnik, let me be Selsnik a little, just to at least defend or comment on some of them. Malcolm talks about the absence of politics in some sustained way in his work and I think that's ultimately true. I think it is ultimately true and I say something about it in the book in response to Wollin. It wasn't always true, he was after all not just a Trotskyist in New York City but a leader and a union organizer, the Joe Hill unit in New York City. He was a polemicist, he once went for a debate and he thought it was Irving Howe and he could cream him but it turned out to be Max Shackman who was the oratorical genius leader of his faction when he was splitting from Trotskyism, he was a bit paled by that. He did have strong political commitments all his life and he had strong political thinking at the beginning of his intellectually active life and the book that you mentioned which no one reads, it's a wonderful book, The Organizational Weapon, is a deeply politically informed book, politically wise but also politically canny. He knows a great deal about organizational strategy of revolutionary parties and he displays it. But it's true that the books which got academic acclaim were in a way that Sheldon Wollin in a celebrated and brilliant critique in his book Politics and Vision captured. Wollin takes Selsnik to represent the sort of culmination of a world historical trend in Europe which has emptied our understanding of politics. Politics is the concern with the general values of the community, the general concerns of the community has been de-centred, dissipated, diffused so there's nothing of it left. And Selsnik with his concern not only for administrative organizations at that time but with the argument that within those administrative organizations there are real politics is de-centering, taking politics from its rehome and then dissipating it throughout the society. Selsnik replies intelligently to the critique but he never does say why he doesn't come back to what he knows is there after all, central political activity. I think partly it is that he is a pluralist. It may not come through strongly enough in the book because I'm not one of these. But he always saw himself as sociology incarnate, the discipline incarnate. He wanted, he didn't like the way things were going, he wanted to suggest different ways in which sociology and ecumenical sociology could be redirected. But sociology, this notion that society was the center of the action was fundamental for him. And he spent much of his life when he's talking about organizations, he's an organizational political pluralist. That is you find politics wherever you look. The leader of an organization is a statesman he says. The leader, not the manager, not the guy who gets things to tick over. There's wonderfully resonant passages about universities which could be, you know, when a university can tick over in all sorts of ways but if it doesn't know what it's about. Or if you don't know what a university is about, if you haven't recognized and nurtured the latent values, the implicit, imminent values of this institution, then something fundamental is lost. But the leader, as he understands, the particular role of a leader concerned with infusing values into an institution, this is a person who's involved in many of the fundamental tasks of politics. So it's not so much that he ignores politics but he does displace it partly intentionally. The religious is interesting. He always told me he was not religiously musical. I think that's true. He was not religiously musical to any particular faith. He read a lot of religious and theological texts in many religions. His story about that was that he was looking for people who had pondered significant problems of the human condition and religions had done that. But not because he had, as he called it, God-hunger. He claimed he never had that. But there was increasingly in later life something which I never understood and I was never long enough there to try to make sense of it, because for me it would need making sense. It was a kind of prophetic part of his scholarly ambition. That is, I'll say something in a moment about the evolutionary character of some of his claims, but often you felt, as you felt with many of the great prophets, that whatever you were talking about, you're at the penultimate stage. Marx was in capitalism and he had certainty that there would be the ultimate stage. Selznick was much more nuanced than this. None of it, and there should have been, I think we've overdone his commitment to evolution. He has a great deal to say about history takes its course. It's all sorts of things that can throw you off. What's he doing with evolution? If you look from the very beginning, when he was a Trotskyist, I'm not sure if there is any coherence in this. I felt, as I was waiting, when I drove down I was listening to rugby league commentary and people kept saying this team has set plays, but they only use their set plays every now and again. In a sense, as I was listening to these comments, I thought, well, I'm not going to be able to use too many of the set plays, so we'll just see where it goes. But when he was a Trotskyist, he came on to a book which had enormous influence on him for much of his life at different levels, and that was Robert Michel's Political Parties. Incidentally, if you looked up Political Parties in the index, you would have got Parties there. Michel's famously argued that there was an iron law of oligarchy which would corrupt any organisation, even the most democratic. It was an imminent law. It was a law of imminent development. This was a shock among Marxists who had no laws of imminent development of organisations. They had class development, etc. Everything was outside, inside organisations. They had no story. And Selznick picked up Michel and used it first as his major as a critical Marxist to criticise the kind of unfounded, ungrounded, unserious for him, idealism of people who wouldn't take seriously the organisational and institutional challenges to the achievement of their ambitions. So when he was looking to do a doctorate, he came across statements by the head of the TVA that this would solve the Michel's problem because while the government would be in the federal centre, administration would be put down to the grassroots. Selznick's book is called TVA and the Grassroots. When he came into this, he's a young smart ass, as he said to me. He said, well, I know that's wrong. All the power will go to the top. And he went out to Tennessee and he found, as Malcolm said, the opposite of what he expected. That is that in trying to co-opt locals for this federally directed institution, the leaders of the TVA had given away the farm. So in that way, it's the opposite of Michel's. But at a larger level, that imminent developments have to be taken account of and care of by anybody who wants to be serious about the institutionalisation of ideals, that's a fundamental lesson that he never left. And what it got him doing, and he never had any meta-reflection about this, but it's fundamental to understanding some of the things that you criticise him in your review and today, that his shtick, his special talent and focus was often on what's going on within the institutions I'm focusing on. What are some of the imminent potentials, developmental potentials there? And when he talks that language, he's not talking about a series of lockstep progressions which he always disavowed. I mean, you're right about the spirit of it. You do get a sense that responsive law is something you'd like to have and it's the next on the agenda. But there are all sorts of disclaimers and in his more detailed focus on imminent developments, whether it's in organisations or whether it's in the development of, for example, in law society and industrial justice, why is it that he thinks there is the possibility of bringing legal constraint or law-like constraints on industrial operations, on corporations? Well, first of all, a lot of the law, state law which has dealt with this, has failed. Again, most of our lives are lived in organisations. It would be a good thing if we were shielded from arbitrary power. But that's just, you can't dictate the history, he had that with Marx, to say, as he seeks to say in law society, industrial justice, that there is the possibility of generating a frame of rules, not state rules, but rules within the organisations which can constrain the power of, the arbitrary power of leaders. Why do you think that's possible? Because you've found, or he claims to have found, insipid developments in that direction, insipid demand, both developments, certain things, salutary is coming up, also complaints develop against, because of change in the circumstances of the world, complaints also develop so people are demanding something new. And so if we talk about the development which is essayed in this book, it's big in ideas, but it's tiny. When I did my chapter, I did a talk at Berkeley on law and society transition, and Jonathan Simon said, look, this is all very well, but your chapter is longer than the book. It's a very short book, which has a great deal to say, and where he talks about repressive autonomous and responsive law, constantly he's saying, repressive law has certain, you need some repression, not you need it, he's not advocating. Why is it that European, and it's true, it was a Western constrained conception, and particularly ultimately American constrained, European law was often very repressive in the early ages. Why is that? Well, they didn't have much, state buildings are hard business, and state builders don't have many resources. They have to farm out, they need help, they need help from other increasingly powerful institutions. This is a sort of version of Weber's idea. But those increasingly powerful bourgeois and other forces demand a bit of the pie, and that might, in proper circumstances, in salutary or congenial circumstances, generate a demand for some legal autonomy. Why do you think that an autonomy has certain virtues, a constraint of power? But now we have all this fuss in the 60s and the 70s, critique of autonomous law, demand for a change to more substantive material law, which a lot of people complained about, Hayek complained about, a lot of other people complained about, they seek, in this book, to identify why these demands are occurring, what might be expected from responsive law, but they agonise in the book over the dangers which might come from responsive law, and over even the chance that responsive law might be incarnated. So I think there has been, I might stop being self-nick in a moment, but I think, and anyway I've got to stop in any way in a moment, but I think that it's a mistake to see this developmental scheme which he believed in as being one which pretended that history works that way. What did he mean by evolution? What he meant was, he did, and I say in the book as you say later today, that he runs too easily between organic and institutional analogies, but what he believed he could identify retrospectively, if you look at developments within institution, why was there a pressure for autonomous law in the 17th and 18th century? Was it because the guys at the top thought this was a good idea? No, it's because a number of, there were a lot of forces which were powerful, which had led support to the centre which were now making demands, and the various other reasons. Why is responsive law a possibility? Because of developments in administration, developments in complexity of society, etc. Is this going to happen? He doesn't say that. He never says that. In fact, he says the opposite, he agonised whether it, it caught or, I don't want to oversell him because in the book that's one of the bases on which I criticise him. And I do think that there is some misaliance between his analytic and explanatory intelligence and his prophetic ambitions. That's true of a lot of large thinkers, it's true of him. The moral commonwealth is a magnum opus which nobody who liked any of the early books likes, except me, I like them all, but it's an extraordinary work of erudition, and it's got an extraordinary large scope which is to try to foresee the sources of moral competence and wellbeing in modern society. So it deploys, I think, a masterly account of modernity and then asks, well what does it take to be a morally competent actor, individual, institution, community? These aren't small questions. They were always in the back of everything he did in a way that they weren't in the foreground. And that's not a book marred by his prophetic ambitions, though it's an attempt to justify a moral conception. But I can understand, and I don't want to seem defensive, I can understand people who are working in real political science and social science being frustrated about a lot of particulars about him. But I just want to end, I just think, there are a lot of boring people in universities, there are a lot of small games being played. He is an interesting person playing a big game and that's why you should buy the book.