Stanford University Press Blog

Stanford Profile on René Girard

The Stanford Report  recently profiled Rene Girard, the university’s Andrew B. Hammond Professor of French Language, Literature, and Civilization. The article highlights Girard’s global influence, his thoughts on war and human nature, and his prolific writing, which has not slowed even as his 85th birthday nears.

Recently, he has published Mimesis and Theory: Essays on Literature and Criticism, 195 3-2005 (2008) and will publish the forthcoming English translation of Achever Clausewitz (Michigan State University Press). Girard is currently working on a book on St. Paul.

A foundation called Imitatio has been launched in order to promote his ideas worldwide, much to the joy of his scholarly fans (dubbed “Girardians”). Imitatio is sponsoring 2008’s Colloquium on Violence and Religion conference “Catastrophe and Conversion: Political Thinking for the New Millenium” where Girard will be a keynote speaker, along with Jack Miles, W.J.T. Mitchell, Gianni Vattimo, and Stanford’s Jean-Pierre Dupuy. The conference will take place at the University of California, Riverside from June 18-22.

Isaac Martin Discusses Prop 13 on KQED

June 6th was the 30 year anniversary of California's Proposition 13, a bill that reduced state tax rates; limited tax increases to no more than 2 percent a year; required a 2/3 vote to increase taxes; and made taxes based on purchase price rather than market value, which created a common tax rate and inflation cap for homeowners and rolled property values back to their 1975 level. Every year since the bill passed, amendments or modifications have been proposed in Sacramento, to little success.

Isaac Martin, author of The Permanent Tax Revolt: How the Property Tax Transformed American Politics (2008), joined host Michael Krasny, and fellow guests Jonathan Coupal, president of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, Mark DiCamillo, senior vice president for the Field Research Corporation, and Peter Schrag, author of California: America's High-Stakes Experiment on KQED's Forum to discuss Prop 13's history and legacy.

Martin argues that the backlash against rising property taxes and property values in the 1970s was not a conservative backlash against the government. Rather, it was a move to seek government protection from an out of control housing market.

The author points out that historically Prop 13 became a nationwide symbol of tax revolt, prompting politicians in other states to take their cue from California when creating or modifying their own tax plans.

Martin also no longer considers Prop 13 a "movement," stating that it has become institutionalized and that there is an established voting bloc in place to defend it.  According to data by guest Mark DiCamillo, a recent poll shows that 57% of California residents polled would vote to pass Prop 13 if it were presented today.

To listen to the full program, click here.

Agnotology: The Study of Ignorance

Early last week Mike Allen of Politico.com broke the news of Scott McClellan’s forthcoming book, What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception. In it, McClellan confesses to have knowingly kept the public in the dark on many important issues. Public ignorance of government affairs is not a new development, but the kinds of egregious abuses of information-withholding McClellan claims in his book warrant another look at how ignorance is created and promulgated. What don't we know, and why don't we know it? What keeps ignorance alive and allows it to be used as a political instrument?

These questions are addressed in Agnotology (May 2008), an introduction to the study of how ignorance is produced and maintained. Through a collection of essays, Proctor and Schiebinger present a new and much-needed perspective for scholars across all research fields (most of whom have spent their careers learning what is already known). They also provide a theoretical framework for non-academics who can recognize ignorance as more than a void.

The essays assembled in Agnotology strive to prove just that – that ignorance is often much more than a void of knowledge; it is the outcome of cultural and political struggles. Arguing that ignorance has a history and a political geography all its own, the authors outline why there are more than a handful of things people don't want you to know ("Doubt is our product" is the tobacco industry slogan).

The authors acknowledge that the causes of ignorance are multiple and diverse; ignorance can be “brought about by neglect, forgetfulness, myopia, extinction, secrecy, or suppression.” But to facilitate discussion, Proctor and Schiebinger divide ignorance into three broad categories: ignorance as native state, ignorance as lost realm, and ignorance as a deliberately engineered and strategic ploy. By defining and discussing the different qualities of each category, the authors demonstrate that ignorance can be the result of pure innocence, pure deceit, and everything in between.

Why do so few people know that the biggest building in the world is a facility built to produce explosive uranium-235 near a nondescript town in southern Ohio? Why did epidemiologists miss the high levels of vitamin deficiency diseases among early-twentieth-century African Americans? How did the first probes into the effects of alcohol on fetuses become “scientifically uninteresting”? Proctor and Schiebinger give such questions serious reflection and provide examples from many subject areas: from global climate change to military secrecy; from the female orgasm to Native American paleontology.

According to Proctor, Schiebinger, and the collection of essays in Agnotology, there is a lot to know about what we don’t know. Ignorance may seem like nothing but it is, in fact, a myriad of things: “It’s no excuse, it’s what can’t hurt you, it’s bliss.”