Comments on: Of Rawls and Self-Improvement

By: Paul

Paul — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 17:54:18 +0000

One difference is that Marx and Engels sought out a publisher and failed. Their willingness to settle for the criticism of mice over men stemmed not from their desire never to have the work published, but from their contentment with having worked out the ideas for themselves (or so they say).

Then again, when I imagine the publication of Rawls’s thesis (say) 200 years hence, I have less problem with it. Perhaps this just shows that there is a statute of limitations on a dead man’s wishes.

By: DC

DC — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 16:50:37 +0000

I would tend to agree with the negativity here, but then I think of Marx – some of his private letters, including juvenalia, are published in selcted works volumes (e.g. Robert Tucker’s one). Sure, they contain a fair bit of comment on his carbuncles and money problems, but there’s also some good stuff too.

Or think of “The German Ideology”, which Marx famously abandoned to “the gnawing criticism of the mice” but which, when published (well into the 20th century), became a basis for major reinterpretation of his entire work.

By: Chris

Chris — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 22:58:26 +0000

I dunno. Perhaps he didn’t publish it because he didn’t get around to it. Perhaps he wouldn’t have wanted it published. As I said, I didn’t think it was so hot. On the other hand, I’m sure it is 10,000 times better than Rawls’ juvenalia.

By: Paul

Paul — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 22:14:14 +0000

The DFW case seems to turn mostly on the form that the publication has taken (one sentence per page, as you say), as opposed to publication itself. After all, if you give a commencement address, you gotta expect it’ll end up in the public domain, no? Maybe the issue turns also on someone else’s making a profit on it.

In the Rawls case, I can’t imagine he ever conceived of the possibility that it would be published, out there for all to read. I really can’t see any reason to make it more widely available than it would have been (for historians, etc.) in the Harvard archives. In the end, there will be just more wasted intellectual energies spent analyzing this surely unimportant work.

But now I’m sliding into a different critique, one that I am ill suited to take up, given that my phd derived from just that sort of energy-wasting.

By: Chris

Chris — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 22:05:03 +0000

Huh. I'm with you on not reading that one. Speaking of dubious posthumous publications, the other day I saw that they've published a commencement speech by David Foster Wallace as a book. There are a few problems with this. For one thing, it's not that good (sort of trite, mostly). For another, they've bulked it up into a book by printing only a sentence or two per page, which I doubt is how DFW would have wanted it published. Actually, I'm not sure DFW would have wanted it published in any form. But once someone dies, I suppose there's a lot of pressure to crank out anything to satisfy people.