In 2001, I read Mark Buchanan’s wonderful book “Ubiquity” and became introduced to the concept of “critical states universality” through the “sand pile” game devised by physicists Per Bak, Chao Tang and Kurt Weisenfeld. They created a computer game in which grains of sand fall slowly and in a single file, and as the pile grows and becomes unstable, a single grain of sand can set off an avalanche that causes the collapse of the mountain. The grain of sand that set off the avalanche is no different than the other grains already in the pile. Rather, it is the pile that has become hypersensitive and unstable; a peculiar self-organization that gets pushed away from equilibrium and becomes prone to sudden and cataclysmic changes; the “tipping point”. This state is called a “critical state” and seems to develop in the sand pile on its own through self-organization. ‘Self-organized criticality’ has been found to underlie events as disparate as earthquakes, forest fires, stock market crashes, and mass extinction of species.

I was thinking about the application of these universal laws to cancer, especially the parallels between self-organization in sand piles and the initiation of leukemias through self-organization in bone marrow cells when I received a call from a patient who wanted to consult me from London. His name was Per Bak. Per was suffering from the bone marrow disorder called myelodysplastic syndrome (MDS) which happens to be my specialty. Since he was too sick to be transferred to the US, over the next few weeks, I was able to get him connected with the right specialists in London, where he began his chemotherapy, eventually undergoing a bone marrow transplant. There were many days when Per would call me with his latest results or ask me to help interpret what the hematologists had told him, and after our professional consultation was over, we invariably ended up discussing the issues of critical states and power laws. Many things became clear to me for the first time during these trans-Atlantic conversations. Per was ever so gracious and kind while explaining some of the more complicated aspects of his work. Following interminable and depressing weeks in the hospital, I finally received the good news from Per’s wife Maya:

12/13/2001
Per is coming home today! His white count was over seven yesterday when the GCSF was stopped. We took a long walk in a nearby park. He is amazingly well.

I had been wondering why after spending almost $200 billion since 1971 on the war on cancer, 150,000+ experimental studies on mice and publication of ~1.5 million papers, we are still not sure about the roots of cancer. “A workable theory of cancer has to explain both why it is predominantly a disease of old age, and why we do not all die from it. A 70 year old is roughly 100 times as likely to be diagnosed with a malignancy as a 19 year old is. Yet most people make it to old age without getting cancer.” This is what W. Wayt Gibbs says in his excellent review “Untangling roots of cancer”. He summarized four prevailing views of how cells turn malignant. “For decades, the most widely accepted view of how cancer begins has been that mutations to a handful of special genes eliminate tumor suppressor proteins and activate oncoproteins. More recently, three alternative theories have gained currency. One modifies the standard paradigm by postulating a dramatic increase in the accumulation of random mutations throughout the genomes of pre-cancerous cells. Two other theories focus on the roles of aneuploidy: large scale aberrations in the chromosomes.”

Each possibility described by Gibbs traces the root of cancer to either the gene or the chromosomes within the nucleus. Because cancers universally begin in a single cell, explanations regarding origins naturally concentrate upon identifying an intracellular event as the initial cause. After reading about the phenomenon of self-organized criticality, I began to wonder about events preceding the intra-cellular gene-chromosome cataclysm which could bring about a malignant transformation.

Per was gaining strength after the transplant.

01/08/2002
Dear Dr. Raza,

I am writing to update you on how Per is doing. First, the good news: a bone marrow test at day 30 showed 100% donor cells, which were normal! His blood counts have also been fine: the most recent is platelet over 100, neutrophils 4.5, Hb has been up and down but he hasn’t required transfusions since discharge after the transplant. All the white counts are normal except for lymphocytes (0.18). I find the change almost miraculous! Also he doesn’t have GvHD, at least nothing that the doctors have mentioned.

That’s all,

Maya

The precursors of blood cells exist in the bone marrow as “stem cells”. At any given time, only a small number of bone marrow stem cells are actively cycling to produce blood cells, the rest are in a quiescent state. The activities of the stem cells are controlled by cells of the bone marrow microenvironment or “stromal cells”. The dose of the signal stem cells receive is critical, and depends on the distance between the two cells. This distance can be perturbed as we age. In a healthy adult, roughly half the marrow is occupied by cells while the other half is fat. With increasing age, this fat:cell ratio increases so that it is not unusual to find the cellular compartment reduced to 30% in a 70 year old individual. The spatial re-organization may be sufficient to disturb the normal physiologically graded cell-cell signaling in the marrow. Even a very slight resulting proliferative advantage in a given stem cell distanced from its controlling stromal cell would gradually lead to an unchecked expansion of its clone. If this abnormal situation continues, then the marrow can eventually become predominantly “monoclonal” or populated by the daughters of one cell. As the number of monoclonal cells grow, the system may begin to move away from equilibrium, and towards self-organization and a “critical state”. Obviously, monoclonality does not by itself mean that a malignant transformation in one of the daughter cells is inevitable. Rather, monoclonality may predispose to the development of malignancy. Once a critical state has been achieved, the system is now prone to sudden and cataclysmic changes. This is the order of events:

• Aging frees up more space in the marrow
• Decrease in inhibitory signals (distance) that keep normal “stem cells” from continuous proliferation
• Increase in clonal expansion of a stem cell
• Monoclonal state
• Self-organization and recession from a state of Equilibrium
• Critical State Universality
• System now predisposed to sudden and violent change
• Accumulation of events such as single gene mutations or aneuploidy during cell division may be sufficient to “tip” the system towards a malignant transformation
• Cancer

Support for this hypothesis comes from several observations. For example, practically every malignant cell in patients with chronic myeloid leukemia is marked by a translocation between chromosomes 9 and 22 which is known as the Philadelphia chromosome in honor of the city where the discovery was made. Some years ago, it was demonstrated that clonal expansion and a monoclonal state preceded the appearance of the Philadelphia chromosome (Fialkow). The incidence of monoclonality increases in direct proportion to advancing age; as many as 40% females over age 60 show monoclonal born marrow function (Gilliland). Interestingly, not only are almost all cancers monoclonal, but their precursor states called dysplasias are also monoclonal. Thus, dysplastic states affecting the bone marrow (MDS), cervix, liver, esophagus and stomach are all monoclonal. MDS is what Per had started with; a dysplastic state of the marrow which can evolve to acute leukemia or prove fatal by itself through an increasing profundity of the lowered blood counts. One of the saddest conversations I had with Per was several months after his bone marrow transplant. Just when everything appeared to be stabilizing, he developed one of the known and dreaded complications of the transplant procedure; severe pulmonary damage. After many rounds of therapies, some bordering on the heroic, Per finally knew that he was not going to make it. In that last telephone conversation I had with him, he talked about his young child and beloved wife. He did not want to be a pulmonary cripple and burden them any further.

Once a system follows critical state universality, it is impossible to predict the course it is going to have. The very diagnosis of cancer represents the end of a complex chain of events, where nature (stem cell) interacted with nurture (environmental influences) at multiple steps in unpredictable and often accidental ways. What are the therapeutic consequences of this hypothesis? Targeting the cancer cell alone may only be palliative rather than curative. The microenvironment which predisposes towards self-organization of any residual clonal cells needs to be targeted as well if a cure is to be achieved.

09/12/2002
Dear Dr. Raza,

I am writing with some sad news. Per has been in Copenhagen since April, and the last three months confined to hospital. His lung function has been worsening and he has been having ongoing infections, as well as sometimes bleeding in his gut. A few days ago he decided to stop all treatment except palliative like oxygen and morphine, and is not expected to live very long. Even though his oxygen requirement is low (2 liters) he feels very incapacitated and cannot get out of bed without enormous strain.

I am going to Copenhagen now to be with him through this sad time.

With warm regards,
Maya

And after a few more increasingly painful e-mail exchanges, this:

10-01-2002 Subject: Valediction
My Dear Maya,

I was deeply disturbed to read your note. While it was good to know that Per is still alive, it is also very sad that he is essentially waiting to die. The emotional burden on all concerned is of an unspeakable nature. I should know as I just lived through a very similar situation. My best advice under the circumstances is to make him as comfortable as possible, and that is all. This may sound a bit heartless to you, but given the irreversible nature of his current problems, I think the decision made by his physicians for only providing comfort care is the right one. I hope you are not upset that I agree. This does not mean you and the rest of the family should not try to give him as good a quality of life as possible within these confines. Spending time with him, talking to him and making him feel loved are all natural parts of that.

Please keep me informed and give him my best regards,
Dr. Raza

10/04/2002
Dear Dr. Raza,

I was saddened to hear that you had also lost your husband in this slow and deliberate way. After thinking about what you wrote, and talking some more with his doctors I am eventually coming around to going along with the plan that Per has made to die, even though it seems, as you wrote, heartless. I have always tried to give Per hope and encouragement in what were some desperate situations, so it is hard to know when to stop. I had some doubts because there are people who can live reasonably fulfilling lives, even when they are on oxygen support. But it seems clear that for Per that situation was unacceptable.

He has been resting peacefully and sleeping more and more.

With warm regards,
Maya

Shortly thereafter, a highly creative mind was laid to rest forever, and it reminded me of Alexander Pope’s moving eight lines where he looks poignantly towards death, and back to the arduous years of creating his rhyme:

Years following years, steal something everyday,
At last they steal us from ourselves away;
In our own Frolicks, one Amusements end,
In one a Mistress drops, in one a Friend:
This subtle Thief of Life, this paltry Time,
What will it leave me, if it snatches my Rhime?
If ev’ry Wheel of that unweary’d Mill
That turn’d ten thousand Verses, now stands still.

[Note: The article as written was approved by Dr. Maya Paczuski, and her emails are used with her permission.]

Suggested Reading:

• Mark Buchanan. Ubiquity: Why catastrophes happen. Three Rivers Press, New York. 2000.
• W. Wayt Gibbs. Untangling the roots of cancer. Scientific American. Vol 289 (1): 2003.
• Per Bak. How Nature works. Oxford University Press, 1996.
• Gary D. Gilliland. Nonrandom X-inactivation patterns in normal females: lyonization ratios vary with age. Blood.88(1):59-65, 1996.
• Azra Raza. Consilence across evolving dysplasias affecting myeloid, cervical, esophageal, gastric and liver cells: Common themes and emerging patterns. Leukemia Research 24(1):63-72, 2000.

A few weeks ago, astronomers announced they had found a new planet in orbit around a dim red star 28,000 light years away. Called OGLE-2005-BLG-390Lb, the extrasolar world was not only the latest to be uncovered by planet-hunters, it was also the smallest to be detected around a normal star—only five and a half times as massive as Earth.

The new world was detected using a trick of Einsteinian physics called “gravitational microlensing,” whereby warped spacetime around a star acts like a lens to bend and focus light from a distant star directly behind it.

This lensing effect magnifies the distant star’s light, making it appear brighter than it normally would. If the lensing star is also host to a planet, the distant star’s light becomes brighter still. Here’s a flash animation of how gravitational microlensing works.

Astronomers use this increase in brightness to calculate the ratio between the lensing star’s mass and the mass of its planet. They can also calculate the distance between the two objects.

OGLE-2005 was only the third planet—and the first rocky one—to be found with the microlensing technique. The other two were giant gas-planets that were several times larger than Jupiter.

The rest of the more than 150 planets discovered so far were found using two other techniques. One of them is variously referred to as the radial velocity or Doppler or “wobble” technique. The other is called the transit technique.

My editor often has to remind me that the general public is usually more interested in what a finding is than in the technical details behind a finding. Most of the time, my editor is right. In this case, however, I think the techniques employed by planet-hunters are pretty cool so the following is a brief primer on how the techniques work and the pros and cons of each:

Transit technique:

If the orbit of a planet around its star just happens to be edge-on, then once during every revolution, it will pass in front of the star. If astronomers have their telescopes trained on the star when this happens, they can detect a dip in the star’s brightness.

Scientists compare this to watching a mosquito fly in front of a very large flashlight from two-hundred miles away and trying to figure out how much dimming has occurred. To get an idea of the size-relationships involved, here’s a picture (credit: David Cortner) of Venus transiting our Sun:

As this picture shows, the transit technique works best for big planets. Another disadvantage of the the transit technique is that only a small percentage of planets are configured this way around their stars.

Doppler (aka “wobble”) technique:

By sheer virtue of its mass, a star will affect the movement of the planet orbiting around it. This is easy to understand. Something that may be more difficult to wrap your head around (at least for me) is the fact that planets, by virtue of their mass, can cause their host stars to move in small counter-orbits.

Astronomers can detect this tiny “wobble” in the star’s movements, and use it to determine the size and mass of an orbiting planet.

The wobble technique has been the most successful so far in finding extrasolar planets. It was this technique that found the first extrasolar planet around a normal star in 1995, called 51 Pegasi.

Because the perturbations that a planet induces in its star is so small, the wobble technique can only detect very massive gas planets or planets very close to their stars. This requirement rules out the possibility of finding rocky, Earth-like planets that lie within a star’s habitable zone, the space around a star where liquid water can exist on a planet’s surface.

Also, the wobble technique can only detect stars that are within about 160 light years of Earth and it can be slow. Astronomers must watch a planet make one complete orbit before they can be sure that what they’re seeing is the effect of a planet on its star. For small planets close to their stars, this isn’t too big a deal, but for big gas giants that are quite a distance away, orbit times can take many years.

Gravitational microlensing:

Like the other two techniques, gravitational microlensing has its strengths and weaknesses.

Currently, microlensing is the only planet-finding technique capable of detecting low-mass, rocky planets within a star’s habitable zone. It can also find planets that are very far away. Whereas the transit and wobble technique can only find planets that are hundreds or thousands of light years from Earth, respectively, microlensing can find stars that are tens of thousands of light years away.

Microlensing is also the only one of the three techniques that can find planets around small, dim stars like red dwarfs. That’s because unlike the wobble or transit technique, microlensing doesn’t rely on the detection of light from a planet’s host star.

As for its cons, microlensing yields very little information about a planet  compared to the other  two techniques. With the transit technique, astronomers can not only glean information about a planet’s size and its distance from its star, they can also take measurements of its atmosphere. And in the wobble technique, scientists know how long a planet takes to orbit its star.

A planet-detection made with microlensing, in contrast, yields only two types of information: the mass ratio between the star and the planet and the distance between the two objects. Critics point out that determining a star’s mass is very difficult, so if that’s off, calculations about the planet’s mass will be off too.

Another common criticism of microlensing is that it relies on a precise  alignment between a distant star, a planet-hosting lensing star and observers on Earth. This type of alignment occurs only once in all of cosmological history for any two stars. A microlensing experiment can therefore never be repeated or verified by other scientists at a later date. 

Many astronomers view this as an acceptable trade-off, however, because of microlensing’s speed (OGLE-2005 was confirmed in a day) and the type of information it can provide.

Microlensing is the shot-gun approach to planet-hunting. It’s a quick and dirty way for astronomers to take a galactic planet census to see what types of planets exist in our Milky Way and determine how common each type is.

Astronomers also point out that what a microlensing experiment lacks in repeatability, it makes up for in simultaneous verifications made with numerous telescopes scattered around the globe. The detection of OGLE-2005, for example, involved 73 researchers and 32 institutions worldwide.

The next generation of planet-finding tools:

The holy grail for planet-hunters, of course, is to find a habitable Earth-like planet, but many scientists don’t expect this to happen until the next generation of space telescopes are deployed, which won’t be for nearly another decade at least. Two projects that have received a lot of attention are NASA’s Terrestrial Planet Finder (TPF), set for launch in 2014, and the European Space Agency’s Darwin, also expected to launch sometime around the same time.

The TPF will consist of two observatories. One will carry an ultra-sharp optical lens that will be at least 10 times more precise than the Hubble Space Telescope. This could potentially allow astronomers to directly detect an extrasolar planet for the first time.

The other TPF observatory will carry an infrared interferometer that will allow it to detect dim planets despite the bright glare of their parent stars. The interferometer will also be capable of analyzing the reflected starlight from a planet to detect the presence of gases like carbon dioxide, water vapor, ozone and methane. If scientists know the relative amounts of each gas that a planet contains, they may be able determine whether a planet is suitable for life—or if life already exists there.

Darwin is expected to carry an interferometer that works in a similar way to the TPF’s. NASA and the ESA are also considering combining the two projects into a joint collaboration that they would launch and operate together.

Lahore is perhaps the most underappreciated city in the world.  The widespread ignorance of the charms of such a beautiful, complicated, and historically important city is sad, though unsurprising, given Western conceptions of the Muslim world – India has droves of tourists, while Pakistan has virtually none.  Most of its natives, and most Pakistanis generally, rightly regard it as their country’s most  cultured metropolis, but even this acclaim does not go far enough.  Lahore is the conservatory of a lost world whose traces have been largely erased from more touristic destinations, like Delhi and Agra – I will come to the reasons for this below.  The world in general has few cities that interweave so seamlessly a great vitality today (the city is about the twenty-fifth largest on the globe) with an unbroken and luxurious history (spanning the last two millennia).  Only in Lahore do you find the sepulcher of the legendary Anarkali, the star-crossed dancing girl buried alive for her love of the young prince Selim (the film Mughal-e-Azam is a version), inside the dusty Archives of the Punjab Secretariat, which was a mosque that the British whitewashed, and is now decorated with portraits of British colonial governors.  Layers and layers: it’s that kind of place.

Beyond its Mughal grandeur, landscaped gardens, and Sufi shrines, beyond its dense bazaars, colonial museums and Parisian boulevards, beyond its kebabs, nihari (shank stew) and sarson ka saag with makai ke roti (mustard greens with cornbread roti), beyond the G.T. road, the insane rickshaw driving and Kipling’s cannon Zamzama, there is a part of Lahore that I believe is one of the most culturally important districts in Asia: the Walled City.  To cross the threshold of any of the gates of its unbreached walls is to cross into a truly unique zone.  There is simply no other city anywhere that has preserved the mixture of influences that produced the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries’ great cultural flowering in this part of the world.  In Fatepur Sikri (near Agra), you can see an abandoned capital that records the intermingling of Muslim, Hindu, mystical, secular, imperial and local influences that were synthesized during the reign of Akbar, the greatest Mughal.  In Lahore, you can see what that intermingling actually looked like, rather than merely its reflection in elevated architecture.  Traverse the walled city from one gate to another, get lost, and find your way back out.  It’s an experience of incredible density and richness.

There are also moments of great solitude to be found amidst the clamor.  Wazir Khan’s Masjid might be the most beautiful mosque in the world (Wazir Khan was a friend and trusted ally of the emperor Shah Jahan, and shared his love of building – the hamaam, or baths, he built on the palace grounds are also worth a look).  To find it isn’t so easy: you must notice an unmarked little stone gateway off to the side of a cacophonous street full of utensil bazaars and giant steaming woks of milk for tea.  To enter the mosque of Wazir Khan after that fray is to enter a heterotopia, an “other space” as moving as there is.  The noise dies away and a thousand pigeons flocking from side to side of the courtyard animate some sixteenth-century spirit.  It’s a haunted, benevolent place.  Then back out towards children clinging five to a Vespa, their dads weaving desperately between knife sellers and kebab wallahs, dodging donkeys and low-hanging arches.

Another religio-cultural influence that Lahore possesses in greater quantities than any other city is that of Sufism.  The mystical sect of Islam is commemorated with hundreds, maybe thousands, of shrines to Sufi saints, many of which are difficult to find.  One nestles just outside the colonial-era King Edward Medical College, which resembles a sort of hot-weather Hogwarts.  These shrines, in any case, are fascinating to see if one’s experience of Muslim culture is limited.  They are a proof of the mutiplicities of Islam and a rebuke to the repulsiveness of any orthodoxy that wishes to curb their crazily blissful peacefulness.  The Sufi, of course, are also responsible for qawwali music, and Lahore is full of qawwali performances.  Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, the famous Pakistani vocalist, was a Punjabi, and at the shrines you imbibe something of the flavor of the intoxicating gentleness that defined him.

The capital of Punjab, Lahore was strategically important for many of India’s rulers, becoming under the Mughals an imperial city and gateway to Afghanistan and the frontier.  The most lasting mark of Mughal rule is the imposing Badshai Masjid, an enormous mosque built by Auranzeb (the son and imprisoner of Shah Jahan, builder of the Taj Mahal) with an adjoining fort and extensive gardens.  There is also a Sikh temple sitting next door – the sight of Sikhs openly coming to and from a place of worship inside Pakistan is a heartening one.  You can eat the aforementioned Punjabi mustard greens and cornbread roti from little shacks right outside the Shahi Qila’s walls. And I highly recommend that you do.  Here you’ll also find Coocoo’s, a famous old restaurant decorated with portraits of the women who ply these streets at night.  It never seems to be serving food, but eating in Lahore is a humbler thing anyway.  The nihari shops at the walled city gates are worth braving (disregard cowardly gastroenterologists): shank meat buried in embers, simmered overnight and topped with fresh ginger, chilies, coriander and lime juice is about as good as eating can get.  The chicken karhais of Lahore, cooked to order with pieces of stringy, tasty chicken and served with the best naan, are also, for me, a pinnacle of gastronomy, expressing Punjabi zest directly and eloquently.  These are, after all, the people who invented bhangra.

Funnily enough, the reason for the unique preservation of Lahore’s walled city is largely luck.  Certainly equivalent districts existed in other cultural capitals of North India, most notably in Delhi and Lucknow, the two centers of the high culture of Urdu poetry.  Sadly, both cities’ inner districts were razed completely in 1857, as payback for the Revolt against British rule.  Lahore remained untouched.  What the British did by burning down those cities but leaving the great Mughal structures was something roughly like destroying London except for the Tower and St. Paul’s: the trademark “high” points of the city survived but none of the textures of its lived reality, the influences that suffuse a city’s culture, its streets.  In Lahore, by contrast, you can see what tourists can only imagine at the Red Fort or the Taj Mahal: the dense, complex, and still vital operations of an inner city bursting with markets, shrines, mosques, food, dancing girls, riotous children.  That’s what makes Lahore different: its history is sometimes worn on its sleeve and sometimes hidden within, but never is it advertised or reified.  It’s lived.

Dispatches:

On Michael Haneke (Directors)
Divisions of Labor III (NYU Strike)
Divisions of Labor II ( NYU Strike)
Divisions of Labor (NYU Strike)
The Thing Itself (Coffee)
Local Catch (Fishes)
Where I’m Coming From (JFK)
Optimism of the Will (Edward Said)
Vince Vaughan…Eve Sedgwick (Homosocial Comedies)
The Other Sweet Science (Tennis)
Rain in November (Downtown for Democracy)
Disaster! (Movies)
On Ethnic Food and People of Color (Worcestershire Sauce)
Aesthetics of Impermanence (Street Art)

I recently completed Raymond Geuss’ Outside Ethics, a collection of essays from various talks on contemporary Western political and moral philosophy. I’ve been a fan of Geuss’ work ever since reading his very thin but insightful book The Idea of a Critical Theory, which Ram once described as lacking an unnecessary word, and after taking his course on continental political thought in my first year of graduate school. For the most part, Geuss’ concerns have been on continental philosophy and continental thinkers, to which he brings an (for lack of a better phrase) Anglo-American analytic clarity.

In recent years, his books have been occupied with liberalism and what he clearly sees to be liberalism’s confusions and self-delusions—specifically, with what he sees as its inconsistent and unreflective understanding of public and private, and of rights. Although, he does not approach these ostensible limits in the standard ways that intellectual descendants of Nietzsche or Marxists in the tradition of the old Frankfurt School do (though there are very strong elements of both, and others, such as those of Hobbes), which is what makes his books rather unique and worth a read.

The recent collection opens with two essays that critique the work of the great American political philosopher John Rawls. Rawls’ project was of course to provide a rigorous reformulation of liberalism. That reformulation initially began with an attempt to construct universal principals through a thought-experiment that yields a “reflective equilibrium”, a political equivalent of a purely normative perspective that generates an analog of the categorical imperative, a principle that one wills to be universal and, by virtue of which, holds oneself. The project describes itself as Kantian.

The traditional liberalism of the nineteenth century, as Geuss sees it, consisted of a commitment to toleration, voluntary and consensual human interaction, individualism, and a feasibly minimized coercive power.

This historical struggle against theocracy, absolutism, and dogmatism has left behind in liberalism a thick deposit and skepticism not only vis-à-vis all-encompassing worldviews, but also vis-à-vis universalist political theories of any kind. On this point [Benjamin] Constant, [Isaiah] Berlin, [Karl] Popper, and [Richard] Rorty (and also, of course, [Edmund] Burke) are of one accord. Classical liberalism did not wish to be an all-encompassing, universal worldview but merely a political program aimed at eliminating specific social and political evils.

In its origins, liberalism had no ambitions to be universal either in the sense of claiming to be valid for everyone and every human society or in the sense of purporting to give an answer to the all important questions of human life. There is no clearly developed single epistemology for classical liberalism, but it would seem that a liberal would have to believe that liberal views are easily accessible to humans who have no special expertise or epistemically privileged position. The ideal of liberalism is a practically engaged political philosophy that is both epistemically and morally highly abstemious. That is, at best, a very difficult and possibly a completely hopeless project. It is therefore not surprising that liberals succumb again and again to the temptation to go beyond the limits they would ideally set themselves and try to make of liberalism a complete philosophy of life. For complicated historical reasons, in the middle of the twentieth century, Kantianism presented itself as a “philosophical foundation” for a version of liberalism, and liberals at that time were sufficiently weak and self-deceived (or strong and opportunistic) to accept the offer. (Outside Ethics, pp. 24-25)

I’ve also been a fan of Rawls’ Theory of Justice and Political Liberalism, though there’s plenty in them to disagree with. But one thing that struck me in Geuss’ essay and made me think of Rawls in a new light was the claim that the move away from a broad, easily accessible and understandable skepticism of the sort found in nineteenth-century liberalism to the deeply grounded and seemingly Kantian certitude of many contemporary formulations of liberalism has gone hand in hand with a “muscular” American foreign policy. It is as much a criticism of Rawls’ spirit as it is of the content of his work. (The ostensibly Kantian Democratic Peace Theory has been invoked as a justification the Iraq war. In addition to Geuss, Perry Anderson recently made such a claim, and he too suggests that Rawls’ work, for all its seeming egalitarianism, is an expression—or is it celebration—of American hegemony. Anderson, though, seems really uncharitable in his readings.)

(The other thing that struck me had less to do with political philosophy than with political science and the social sciences generally; specifically, I was struck by the shifts in attitude in the social sciences, which appear to have moved away from seeing themselves as some form of craft knowledge that uses insights into social mechanisms that in conjunction with a rich familiarity with our world allows us to intervene in it without the illusion of certitude. As I read it, Mark was, among other things, describing one source of that illusion last week.)

The debates around the war have seen a realignment of sentiments. Some thinkers who’ve preserved the skepticism of the old liberalism such as Fukuyama have been designated to be “paleocons”. And certitude certainly seems to be the order of the day of the idealism of the neo-conservatives. The odd thought is that the Kantian turn in liberalism was less an attempt at making liberalism viable by making its acceptance easier than a reworking of liberalism into project it has historically been suspicious of. But the loss of the skepticism that one associated with an anti-utopian and pragmatic liberalism of old is palpable.