Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism

This is a review of Collected Works of John Tate. Parts I, II, edited by Barry Mazur and Jean-Pierre Serre. American Mathematical Society, Providence, Rhode Island, 2016. For several decades it has been clear to the friends and colleagues of John Tate that a “Collected Works” was merited. The award of the Abel Prize to Tate in 2010 added impetus, and finally, in Tate’s ninety-second year we have these two magnificent volumes, edited by Barry Mazur and Jean-Pierre Serre. Beyond Tate’s published articles, they include five unpublished articles and a selection of his letters, most accompanied by Tate’s comments, and a collection of photographs of Tate. For an overview of Tate’s work, the editors refer the reader to [4]. Before discussing the volumes, I describe some of Tate’s work. 1. Hecke L-series and Tate’s thesis Like many budding number theorists, Tate’s favorite theorem when young was Gauss’s law of quadratic reciprocity. When he arrived at Princeton as a graduate student in 1946, he was fortunate to find there the person, Emil Artin, who had discovered the most general reciprocity law, so solving Hilbert’s ninth problem. By 1920, the German school of algebraic number theorists (Hilbert, Weber, . . .) together with its brilliant student Takagi had succeeded in classifying the abelian extensions of a number field K: to each group I of ideal classes in K, there is attached an extension L of K (the class field of I); the group I determines the arithmetic of the extension L/K, and the Galois group of L/K is isomorphic to I. Artin’s contribution was to prove (in 1927) that there is a natural isomorphism from I to the Galois group of L/K. When the base field contains an appropriate root of 1, Artin’s isomorphism gives a reciprocity law, and all possible reciprocity laws arise this way. In the 1930s, Chevalley reworked abelian class field theory. In particular, he replaced “ideals” with his “idèles” which greatly clarified the relation between the local and global aspects of the theory. For his thesis, Artin suggested that Tate do the same for Hecke L-series. When Hecke proved that the abelian L-functions of number fields (generalizations of Dirichlet’s L-functions) have an analytic continuation throughout the plane with a functional equation of the expected type, he saw that his methods applied even to a new kind of L-function, now named after him. Once Tate had developed his harmonic analysis of local fields and of the idèle group, he was able prove analytic continuation and functional equations for all the relevant L-series without Hecke’s complicated theta-formulas. Received by the editors September 5, 2016. 2010 Mathematics Subject Classification. Primary 01A75, 11-06, 14-06. c ©2017 American Mathematical Society

The collected works

Scholars of culture, humanities and social sciences have increasingly come to an appreciation of the importance of the legal domain in social life, while critically engaged socio-legal scholars around the world have taken up the task of understanding "Law's Empire" in all of its cultural, political, and economic dimensions. The questions arising from these intersections, and addressing imperialisms past and present forms the subject matter of a special symposium issue of Social Identities under the editorship of Griffith University's Rob McQueen, and UBC's Wes Pue and with contributions from McQueen, Ian Duncanson, Renisa Mawani, David Williams, Emma Cunliffe, Chidi Oguamanam, W. Wesley Pue, Fatou Camara, and Dianne Kirkby. This paper introduces the volume, forthcoming in late 2007. The central problematique of this issue has previously been explored through the 2005 Law's Empire conference, an informal but vibrant postcolonial legal studies network.

Law's Empire

Taking Rights Seriously.

New democracies around the world have adopted constitutional courts to oversee the operation of democratic politics. Where does judicial power come from, how does it develop in the early stages of democratic liberalization, and what political conditions support its expansion? This book answers these questions through an examination of three constitutional courts in Asia: Taiwan, Korea, and Mongolia. In a region that has traditionally viewed law as a tool of authoritarian rulers, constitutional courts in these three societies are becoming a real constraint on government. In contrast with conventional culturalist accounts, this book argues that the design and functioning of constitutional review are largely a function of politics and interests. Judicial review - the power of judges to rule an act of a legislature or national leader unconstitutional - is a solution to the problem of uncertainty in constitutional design. By providing 'insurance' to prospective electoral losers, judicial review can facilitate democracy.

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Judicial Review in New Democracies: Constitutional Courts in Asian Cases

Ten years from now, what kinds of issues of interest to politics will dominate the agenda of the United States Supreme Court? Will a dominant approach to constitutional interpretation emerge to guide the justices in their handling of these significant cases?Keith E. Whittington is professor of politics at Princeton University and visiting professor of law at the University of Texas, Austin (kwhittington@law.utexas.edu).

You Say You'll Change the Constitution?

President Barack Obama has been criticized for questioning the Supreme Court's campaign finance decision in his State of the Union address, leading Chief Justice John Roberts to complain that the State of the Union had degenerated into a "political pep rally." This essay puts Obama's remarks into a broader context, and argues that the State of the Union has long been a political pep rally, that presidents often criticize the courts and judges, and that the particular venue in which they choose to do so is a matter of strategic calculation rather than decorum.

The State of the Union is a Presidential Pep Rally

television show The Leftovers as a generative representation of life in the (non-)shadow of the loss of God. Martel sums up by writing that “without the colonizations and interpellations that archism foists on us, we would occupy our own anarchic selves in utterly different ways. Without the burden of finding out who we ‘really are’ or having to follow a moral law that is really just, as Lacan notes, a form of sadism, we have the distinct pleasure of ‘becoming who we are,’ as Nietzsche beautifully put it” (p. 255). Martel’s conclusion gestures in various ways towards post-archism, and how our political vocabulary might have to transform should we finally acknowledge that all authority is, as he puts it, “inherently collective, and actually anarchist” (p. 262). These range from the banal and symbolic, like renaming buildings dedicated to archists, to more substantive, if elusive, movements like reconstructing social space democratically through “anarchitecture” (p. 288). The reader leaves with the sense that the aim is not so much concrete political transformation as the wholesale reordering of our conceptual and hence political lives; as Martel is wont to say, after all, “life and anarchism ... amount to the same thing” (p. 46). Such an (archist?) totalizing sense is at once what makes this book at times so exciting and at times so frustrating, and even, yes, disappointing (in the common sense signification). Its vision is so broad that, a few concrete examples notwithstanding, it remains difficult to see how onemight even begin, before a conceptual revolution, that is, to attack the archism it addresses. Part of the problemmay be its expansive notion of anarchism; indeed, it is not clear why the language of “anarchism” rules here rather than that of, say, “freedom” or “democracy,” both of which might also capture much of what Anarchist Prophets intends. It therefore suffers, on the one hand, from an affliction that affects much anarchist thought, namely the refusal to distinguish between better and worse real world political regimes, a blindness that in real life surely matters more than conceptual questions about archism tout court. On the other hand, while I take this work’s aim to be different than most other “anarchist” works, it would have still been helpful to see some wrestling with the anti-statist tradition for the purpose of drawing a clearer bead on how archism might be undermined. Thus although David Graeber and Murray Bookchin make cameo appearances, we hear nothing of the anti-archist prospects of federalism (Proudhon), collectivism (Bakunin), communism (Kropotkin, Goldman), or syndicalism (Rocker, Malatesta), for example, or Bookchin’s searing indictment of “lifestyle anarchism,” which—with the appropriate squint —could seem consonant with Martel’s own pan-critical vision, let alone, say, the “postanarchism” of Saul Newman or the abolitionist Black anarchism of William C. Anderson. Grappling with real anarchists rather than their notional prophets might have given this work more practical political purchase. These critical observations should not be taken, however, to impugn the fruitful brilliance of Anarchist Prophets, a work that deserves a place in the pantheon of anarchist writings, for it incisively and inventively expresses the central critique of the domineering, dominant, and often self-obscure sovereign aspiration at the heart of the vast majority of Western political thought.

Religious Liberty and the American Founding: Natural Rights and the Original Meanings of the First Amendment Religion Clauses. By Vincent Phillip Muñoz. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022. 344p. $95.00 cloth, $30.00 paper.

Normative theorizing about judicial review often proceeds with minimal attention to the overall record of how the U.S. Supreme Court has actually exercised the power of judicial review. This article assesses how well the historical record of the Court’s invalidation of federal policies can be justified using only a minimalist theory of judicial review. Although some of the Court’s cases can be justified in this way, most of the Court’s work would require a more substantively thick and necessarily controversial theory in order to justify it.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/SSRN_ID2807259_code117569.pdf?abstractid=2807259&mirid=1&type=2

Sober Second Thoughts: Evaluating the History of Horizontal Judicial Review by the U.S. Supreme Court

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act ignited a political firestorm and raised intriguing new questions of constitutional law. Cutting a path between the liberals and conservatives on the US Supreme Court, Chief Justice John Roberts made small adjustments in established constitutional law to uphold key features of the act. In doing so, he not only upheld the statute but also left the landscape of constitutional law much as he had found it. He did, however, suggest that the federal courts should take a more active role in monitoring how Congress uses its constitutional powers and should not shy away from making specific determinations of whether Congress had abused its power in particular cases.

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Keith E. Whittington

Papers

You Say You'll Change the Constitution?

The State of the Union is a Presidential Pep Rally

Religious Liberty and the American Founding: Natural Rights and the Original Meanings of the First Amendment Religion Clauses. By Vincent Phillip Muñoz. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022. 344p. $95.00 cloth, $30.00 paper.

Sober Second Thoughts: Evaluating the History of Horizontal Judicial Review by the U.S. Supreme Court

"Our own limited role in policing those boundaries": taking small steps on health care.